by Viola Rivard
He was wearing clothes, his pelt folded and placed on a chair on the other side of the room. Shifting back into his human form had been difficult. Shan sensed that the wolf had only ceded because he needed him to communicate with the shifters of Tower Hill and ensure that Harper got the medical attention that she needed. Once she'd been settled into bed, his skin had immediately tried rebinding to his flesh, heedless of the fact that they were inside of a cavern that was too small to accommodate his wolf form.
In spite of what he'd told Harper, Shan still didn't know whether he was his wolf, or if his wolf was a separate entity. His parents had been of two minds on the issue. His mother had believed her wolf to be the manifestation of her true nature, while his father had been firm in his stance that the wolf was a higher being inhabiting his body. He tended towards his mother's interpretation, but in this case, that would mean that at his core, he loathed himself.
“I don't remember coming here,” Harper said, her blue eyes flitting around the room.
“You were asleep,” he told her.
Passed out, feverish, and unresponsive.
To Ginger, he said, “When you're finished, bring her something to eat.”
Ginger had already tied off and clipped the last of the stitches, and was wrapping Harper's arm in treated gauze. Shan was glad to see the wounds disappear beneath the filmy fabric.
“Not hungry,” Harper said, her eyes drifting shut again. “I just want to sleep. I'll take some of that tea, though, if you have it.”
It took him a second to realize she was talking about the tea he'd given her, to help her sleep peacefully. He hadn't known then that the dreams she'd been trying to block out were of her wolf. The possibility had seemed so remote as to barely cross his mind. He had toyed with the idea, but it had seemed more fantasy than possibility. What were the odds that when he'd finally given up hope for a mate of his own kind, the first human he decided to court would be like him?
“Bring her something to sleep,” Shan instructed.
Later, there would be time to coax her wolf out. Tonight, she needed proper rest in order to recover.
As soon as Ginger departed, Harper cracked her eyes open and frowned.
“Is she really my healer? She looks like she's ten.”
“Twelve, actually,” he said. “And you were seen by a proper healer earlier. Ginger was sent in to do your stitching. She is something of a savant.”
With what looked like great effort, Harper turned her head to look at her arm. It was wrapped from her shoulder, down to the joints of her wrist. She wiggled her slender fingers, and then winced.
“I guess so. I barely felt her stitching me up. Just promise that if I get real bad, you'll take me to a human doctor.”
“You're going to be fine.”
She closed her eyes, her body sagging with her exhalation. “It doesn't feel like anything is going to be fine ever again.”
Shan wasn't about to ask her what she meant by that, nor was he willing to make assumptions. They couldn't afford another fight, not now.
He stood and said something to the effect that he would return later. He grabbed his pelt on the way out, not waiting for a response.
He had folded the pelt in such a way that his hands held only the outer fur. Had the skin-lined underside made contact with his flesh, he knew it would be trying to latch itself to him. The wolf didn't want to leave his mate, not even for a moment. Shan, however, was in dire need of some distance between the two of them.
The Tower Hill den was old, belonging to what had formerly been known as the Nipawset pack. A century ago, the native pack had been almost entirely wiped out by warfare with a new, insurgent pack from the east. The fight had been not for land, but for the alpha's daughter. Their bloodline largely undiluted by humans, they'd still been capable of producing offspring.
Such conflicts had been common at the turn of the former century, when infertility had begun ravaging their kind. Had the alpha of Nipawset been able to mate his daughter off to a male with a similarly pure bloodline, their daughters may have gone on to produce offspring as well. Instead, a young, upstart alpha had overthrown the Nipawset alpha and claimed the young female for himself, passing on his mother's human genes to their pups. It was just a small example of what had been happening on a global scale, and another phase in the prolonged downfall of their kind.
Shan ran his hand along the flat walls of the hallway, his fingertips catching on the tribal engravings. He passed several rooms, all of them furnished, but presently empty. The alpha of the den, Tag, had ordered the upper layer to be cleared out upon Shan's arrival, perhaps to give him privacy, or perhaps because he'd been concerned for the safety of his pack mates. Shan had not been in the best mood when he'd arrived.
The air grew cooler as he descended the carved stairway and entered the lower quarters. The scent of cooked pheasant reminded him that he hadn't eaten in over a day, and hunger clawed at his stomach. He followed the sound of whispered voices until he arrived at a common area. Ginger was inside, bent over a cook pot, her older sister crouched beside her.
He listened to them gossip for a moment, feeling a strange sense that he was intruding, in spite of the fact that he was the topic of their conversation. Ginger was trying to convince her skeptical sister that he and Harper were going to be mates. As Shan listened to them, it occurred to him that his core pack would also be rife with speculation about his relationship with Harper, and he wondered what he would tell them.
“She will be my mate,” Shan said, startling the girls as he stepped into the room. “So take good care of her.”
Blushing furiously, Ginger sputtered several apologies and reassurances. As she scuttled from the room, Shan addressed her sister, asking her to bring him ink and paper.
Once he was alone, he settled down in the fur-lined chair nearest to the fire. For a few minutes, he refused to think about anything. He let his mind go blank. Anytime a thought threatened to disturb his peace, he dismissed it before it could take root.
The tumultuous emotions of the past few days fell away as he centered himself. Only once his mind was still and his body was perfectly at ease was he able to objectively consider what he'd learned about Harper.
She was like him.
It made sense, now.
It had baffled him, how attracted he'd been to her, right from the start. Yes, she was beautiful and intelligent, but she was also more immature than the types of females he was typically drawn to. She also hadn't come seeking a mate, and under normal circumstances, he would have respected that.
But nothing about his attraction to her had been normal. Within three nights, he'd shrugged off all his reservations about taking a mate and had decided to court her. In spite of his conviction that he should take things slowly with her, they'd slept together the following night. From the moment he'd first been inside of her, he'd known that he wouldn't settle for any other female. From then on, he'd stopped imagining a future that didn't have her in it.
Now that he knew what she was, he could discern the differences in her scent. He'd been so absorbed in the appeal of her scent that he'd failed to notice the subtle undertones that were distinctly inhuman.
And they were becoming more pronounced.
After they'd slept together, he'd noticed that her scent had changed, but he'd assumed it was just some trace of his own scent rubbing off on her. Now, he wondered if it was her wolf coming closer to the surface. It would make sense, given how his own wolf had become more insistent since he'd met her. Was it possible that they were calling to one another?
Thirteen years.
Harper's nightmares had begun when she was thirteen, which meant that her wolf had been repressed for thirteen years. Having spent so much time in darkness and isolation, what would she be like when she finally emerged?
Shan had no way of knowing. He had shifted within two months of having his first nightmare. Aside from the first tumultuous year and the past week, he and his wolf had alway
s had a symbiotic relationship and a mutual respect.
For his father, it had been the same. Hannes and his wolf lived in something close to harmony. In spite of his assertion that the wolf was separate from him, they had been so in tune with one another, that Hannes seldom needed to shift. He let his wolf out at least once a month to stretch its legs. The rest of the time, his wolf was content to allow his human to guide them.
For his mother Shara, it was quite the opposite. She'd been twenty when she'd completed her first shift, and had promptly snapped, killing her pack and the male who had been her mate. In the years that followed, even after Hannes had helped to temper her violent nature, she'd still been quick to shift whenever she felt threatened. Shan could still remember his father preemptively hiding her pelt before arguments. For all her pride in what she was, his mother's wolf was just another force that sought to take charge of her.
He wondered now if her lack of unity with her wolf form was due to the years spent repressing it, or if the instability was a result of the trauma she'd endured in her youth. Now more than ever, he wished he had a better understanding of his kind.
As his thoughts on the matter grew unproductive, he redirected his focus back to Harper.
Or was it Snow?
Just like her scent, now that he knew who she was, he felt foolish for not realizing it sooner. He was well acquainted with the Halcyon wolves. He saw them almost every year, towards the middle of the circuit. It had been just this past September that he'd last seen Alder, the male she claimed was her father. Shan still had a tough time coming to terms with that, given that Alder was barely two years older than him. It was difficult to compare their scents without having Alder close by, but it was easy enough to pull up an image of the Halcyon alpha and there was a resemblance between he and Snow, particularly in the eyes.
She should have told him what she was. Wanting to hide her identity from her friends was no excuse. They'd had ample time alone together when she could have told him the truth. He'd known she'd had secrets, but these were the sort that could have affected his pack. While Halcyon were his allies, her brother's pack was anything but. Had he not gotten to her before they'd taken her, she could have easily disseminated sensitive information to one of his last remaining rivals.
Under any other circumstances her deception would have been grounds for removal from his pack. Instead, she was now indispensable to him.
Shan was not one to indulge in superstition or a cosmic order to things, but he didn't know how else to explain Harper's appearance into his life.
All he knew for certain was that he had to make her shift, and soon.
Harper woke to find herself alone in bed, her arm throbbing and her head feeling as if it'd gain five pounds. With some effort she managed to sit up, the bed linens falling down onto her lap. Her torso was bare, and a peek under the blankets revealed that she'd been completely stripped.
The room was lit by the light of a single candle. She vaguely remembered waking earlier with Shan at her side, but there had also been a kindergartener tending to her wounds, so she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn't been dreaming.
There was a bowl of some sort of stew at her bedside. It sat on a tree stump that had been fashioned into a nightstand, beside a neatly folded outfit. She regarded the food and the clothes with equal indifference.
Something about being back in a den had revived her aversion to clothes. Over the years spent among humans, she'd become rather fashion forward, in spite of spending her childhood primarily in the nude. Around the age of twelve, she'd developed something of a resentment for clothes as Sarah had begun insisting she wear them whenever she wasn't in her room. This rule seemed to apply only to her, and only because she was developing much more quickly than even her older cousins.
She played with the idea of walking around naked, but ultimately put the clothes on. In spite of her upbringing, she didn't think she'd be able to resist covering her nude breasts in front of strangers.
She noticed that her ankle had been bound and remembered injuring it when she fell from the tree, so she was careful not to put her full weight onto it when she stood. It was good that she hadn't, because even moving at a hobbling gait from the bed to the door was grueling. She hovered in the doorway for a moment, debating whether or not to return to bed. Hoping that the pain would lessen with some use, she pressed on, feeling her way down the corridor.
Harper had been five when her pack mates had realized that she lacked a shifter's nocturnal vision. Up until then, they'd just assumed she was clumsy and overly attached to her adopted mother Sarah. While she had been very fond of Sarah, it had been the light she'd been drawn to. Although they changed dens frequently and often went without even the most basic necessities in those early years, her uncle had always made certain to keep light in his mate's life.
As with all of her limitations, her cousins had instantly sought to exploit it. Sable had waited until the night of the new moon, and then taken Harper out to play just before sunset. As soon as night had fallen, they were accosted by a rival wolf pack. Harper had spent a solid hour hiding in a hollowed tree trunk and listening to Sable being slowly tortured and killed. Then, the wolf had turned its attention to Harper, chasing her from one side of the tree trunk to the other while she screamed and cried. The nightmare had come to an end when Caim had found them and revealed her “attacker” to be her other cousin, Lotus.
Caim couldn't always be there for her, and so she'd had to learn tricks to compensate for her lack of sight, particularly in the dark and sometimes perilous passageways of a cavernous den. She paid close attention to the air currents, knowing that if she walked against them, she'd be led to an opening. When she wasn't running her hands along the wall, she could clap her hands or whistle to find the boundaries of the cavern. Most important, she always made sure one foot was on solid ground before lifting the next.
With a combination of all of her tricks, she made her way down to the more illuminated lower level. She could tell that the den had been inhabited for a long time because the walls and floors were free of rough edges and someone had taken the time to craft stairs in between the levels of the den. By the time she reached the bottom, sweat had broken out over her skin, mostly from the pain of walking on her ankle.
She found Shan almost immediately, and just as quickly wished that she hadn't. He was in a wide open room that looked to be some sort of hybrid lounge area and dining room. There were several long, unoccupied tables and a separate area with two large chairs beside a fireplace. It struck Harper how odd it was to see a den that was so thoroughly furnished, but the awareness was secondary to the sight of Shan leaning back in one of the chairs, a half-naked female on either side of him.
A redheaded female sat near to Shan's feet, forcing a smile as she watched the other female, a dark haired twenty-something, engage Shan in conversation. Her breasts were at eye-level with Shan and her hand alternated between the armrest of the chair and the side of Shan's bicep as she spoke.
In that moment, Harper came to a terrible realization.
Shan is...hot.
Of course, she knew he was sexy as fuck. It was quite literally the first thing she'd noticed about him. But, he was also scary. Between his staggering size, his tattoos, and the natural arch of his brows that made him looked perpetually angry, Harper had kind of assumed that most women would find him intimidating to the point of unapproachability. After all, there had been no females fawning over him back when they were with his pack, at least not that she'd seen.
In the ten seconds before they noticed her, Harper saw the female touch Shan exactly four times. Her thoughts zipped around in a fucked up loop as she struggled to process a sudden influx of possessive fury.
Shan wasn't Harper's mate. But he wanted to be her mate. But she had told him that he wouldn't be her mate. But now this female was touching him, and she should know better, because Shan belonged to Harper. Except, he didn't. Shan wasn't her mate. But he wanted to be her mate.
So why the fuck was he letting this bitch touch him?
Harper must have been throwing off some major heat, because at the sight of her the female's hand dropped and she took a full step back from Shan, their conversation abruptly halting.
Shan must have known she was there from the start, but he took his time in shifting his attention. Once he did look at her, he appeared more annoyed than pleased by her arrival. He stood and walked to her, his eyes narrowed.
“You shouldn't be walking.”
He placed a hand on the side of her face, and in spite of her upset, she leaned into his touch.
“I'm all right,” she said, though she doubted he'd be fooled. “Where are we at?”
“Tower Hill, remember?”
Harper did recall something like that. As she nodded, she put a hand on his arm, partly for balance and partly so that she was touching him.
She made a show of looking around the room, her eyes drifting past the two females. “Where are Viper and the others?”
She remembered seeing them at the river, closing in on her and her brother, but after Caim's departure Shan had dismissed them. Everything that happened following them leaving the river was a blur and she didn't recall seeing Shan's pack mates again.
“We took a different route than them,” Shan said. “They're still on their way to The Steppes.”
He began to lead her towards the chair, but when he took note of her limp he grabbed her beneath her rear and lifted her into his arms, carrying her the rest of the way. As he sat her down, she saw that his pelt was draped over the back of the chair. She wasted no time in pulling it over herself, enjoying its preternatural warmth and the implication it sent to the other females in the room.
Shan introduced them, but Harper refused to give the names any space in her head. Then he mentioned that one of them, the redhead, was going to be taking her measurements. Apparently, he was going to have them sent ahead to The Steppes so that she'd have clothes waiting for her when they arrived.