Mia’s mind was rushing through the information; Jack was right that the symptoms she was having—at least the more manageable ones—were wolf-like in nature. Her heightened senses—the particular senses that had been improved were ones that wolves were naturally stronger at than humans. But then, her negative symptoms, the ones she could manage least, were not—to the best of Mia’s knowledge—anything like a wolf. The pain in her birthmark, the pain throughout her body; wolves couldn’t possibly be in that much pain all the time. Mia shook her head in disbelief. How could she be half a werewolf? She thought of her mother; it couldn’t have come from her mother—Mia would have known. Her mother had passed away a few years earlier, but Mia was certain that if her mother had been a werewolf, there would have been no hiding it. And anyway, in the course of her life it would have been something that her mother would have told her if she had known; it wouldn’t be the shock she was experiencing right now. That left her father; the man she had never met. Mia had known from a young age that she had been the product of a one-night stand. Her mother had discovered herself pregnant several weeks after sleeping with the man who had impregnated her, having never known more than his first name. They had had arguments about it over the years, when Mia had longed for some knowledge of where she had come from.
But even knowing that she was the child of a one-night stand didn’t make it any easier for her to believe that she could possibly be a werewolf—or rather a half-werewolf, she corrected herself irrelevantly. Maybe, she thought, almost deliriously, her mom had simply failed to meet the man during the full moon. Everything she knew about werewolves came from popular culture. She looked at Jack, expecting him to start laughing and say that it was all a joke. But his dark, soulful eyes were serious. He smiled slightly—not as if he was enjoying a joke, but as if he understood her situation. “It’s a lot to take in,” he said, reaching out and clapping her on the shoulder. Mia didn’t quite notice the way his touch lingered in an almost-caress, too caught up in her own disbelieving thoughts. “Let’s get you another drink; there’s a lot for you to know.” The bartender brought her another cocktail, and Mia sipped it with relief, taking a deep breath and exhaling in a sigh. The liquor burned on the way down, and Mia glanced at the bartender, realizing that the man had deliberately made it stronger than usual. He gave her a faint almost-smile of sympathy before turning his attention to the next patron.
“Okay,” she said, shaking off her sense of shock. “I think… I think I’m ready.” Jack gave her another supportive smile and sat down next to her, his thigh barely brushing against hers.
“The reason that you’ve been having these symptoms is because you’ve been around a full werewolf,” Jack said, holding her eye contact. “The dormant werewolf inheritance you have inside of you was brought out by exposure. If you hadn’t met Caleb, you might never have had your werewolf essence awakened.” Mia made a face; on the one hand, she would never have experienced the symptoms she was having if she had never met Caleb. On the other hand, she couldn’t say that she could regret having met him, even with the symptoms; he had livened up her life and given her back the confidence that Gary had taken away from her. Mia glanced at Caleb, to see that he was watching—but the moment she looked at him, he glanced away, an unreadable expression on his face that Mia didn’t quite like; but her need for more information, for clarification and understanding, trumped her concern for the moment.
“I still don’t understand how I could be half a werewolf, or how werewolves can even exist,” Mia said, looking around the room. Jack nodded.
“It’s kind of a complicated story. Our pack has been around for several generations. We’re not sure how the first werewolf came to be—it’s too far back in history—but we know that we’ve been around for a long time. Our pack has been very secretive over the entire time we’ve been together.” Mia nodded. It was easy to see how keeping their status as paranormal creatures secret would be a good idea. She glanced at Caleb, but he wasn’t looking at her. Mia turned her attention back to Jack. “It took us a long time to be able to trust normal humans; after generations of being hunted and feared, with werewolves becoming well-known in popular culture it was no longer as dangerous for us simply because everyone thought that we didn’t exist. So we blend in as much as possible, but we still keep to ourselves.”
Mia wondered just how it could be possible for her to be half a werewolf if they were so insular. But then, she thought, Caleb had had sex with her, before he had known she was half a werewolf. As if he knew the tracking of her thoughts, Jack continued.
“Some time ago, we realized that our community was too insular—we were becoming slightly inbred, and we understood that if we didn’t diversify our gene pool, we could run into real trouble. So we began to breed outside of pack lines.” Mia thought that stood to reason. “We even decided to begin mating with regular humans. It’s now forbidden.” Mia glanced at Caleb, wishing that she could have his support; Caleb was avoiding her gaze, drinking slowly but steadily. The fact that it was forbidden for the werewolves to mate with non-werewolves now made her briefly question the fact that Caleb had slept with her without knowing her nature—or at least, she couldn’t assume that he had known her nature when he had first taken her home, could she? Mia shook her head, pushing the question aside for another time as Jack began to speak again. “The reason it’s no longer allowed is because the pack discovered that half-werewolf offspring had a lot of health problems. They were infertile—which of course is a problem when we are trying to expand our mating pool—and they also developed symptoms like yours.”
“Why does it happen?” Mia asked, confused. She couldn’t understand why having half werewolf genetics could cause the problems she was having.
“The paranormal essence that makes werewolves isn’t stable,” Jack explained, smiling slightly in sympathy. “When it’s mingled with regular human genetics, it’s particularly volatile. It’s not something that any medical test can detect—as with most paranormal things—but it’s sort of like tissue rejection when someone receives a transplant. Your body is basically at war with itself; your werewolf half is fighting your human half for dominance.” Mia looked down at the bar, struggling to understand. It wasn’t that the idea was complicated, but she couldn’t comprehend how it could exist in the first place, and why it was happening to her. “The problem is that it tends to be progressive in nature. There’s medicine that we can give you to slow it down, to make it stop, but the formula for it, the recipe, is only known to the werewolf community, and it’s very difficult to come by.” Mia sighed.
“I’ve known I was infertile for about a year,” she said quietly. “But I guess… I mean, I never would have thought that something like this was the reason why.” Jack’s dark eyes fastened on her face and he rubbed her shoulder warmly, smiling slightly. Mia felt her body tensing up—not with fear but with desire. She couldn’t deny the fact that Jack was attractive, though she told herself firmly that she was with Caleb—she didn’t have any business ogling another man, even if Caleb seemed to be awkwardly avoiding taking part in the conversation and looking away from her so coldly.
“I know it’s a lot to work your head around,” he said, leaning in slightly closer to her. “But at least it’s good to know, right?” His smile grew slightly and Mia couldn’t help but feel like he was flirting with her, moving closer, touching her and smiling the way he did. She had been in so much shock at the news that Jack had given her that she hadn’t noticed it at first; but as she slowly began to calm down her mind to move at its normal pace, she realized that Jack was radiating charm as much as support. Mia glanced over at Caleb again and wondered with a sense of hurt why he wasn’t displaying more jealousy; he wasn’t even looking at her, and seemed to have been avoiding her ever since Jack started talking to her. She wondered what the relationship between the two men was.
“How did Caleb know to bring me to you?” she asked, looking from the man she had considered her boyfriend—but
who now seemed to want to be as far away from her as possible. Mia wondered with a growing sense of hurt if it was because she was a half-wolf, and that she would cramp his style or otherwise be a bad choice. She wondered why Caleb had brought her to Jack if he had suspected it was the case; he must have. And if he had suspected or known she was a half-wolf before they had arrived, and still wanted to have sex with her, then why was he acting so strangely now?
“I’m the Alpha of the pack,” Jack said with a smile that was more than a little proud. Mia half-smiled in response, taking in his regal demeanor. It made sense that Jack would be in charge of the pack; he radiated a charisma that was almost irresistible, even for Mia. He glanced at Caleb. “Caleb is my second in command; the rest of the people in this room have varying ranks in the pack. It’s not the whole group, but this isn’t a formal meeting.”
Abruptly, Mia felt overwhelmed. It was more than just the bizarre discovery that apparently her father—the man she had never met—was a supernatural creature. Everything that had piled up on top of that; her symptoms being part of a dangerous illness that would last the rest of her life, the fact that werewolves were actually real, that there was so much realism to them that they had ranks and social organization, was just too much for her all at once. She was suddenly aware that as the only half-werewolf in the room, she was probably unwelcome—or at least she felt that way. She felt angry at her father for impregnating her mother, angry at her mother for sleeping with a werewolf, upset at herself for tumbling into bed with a man who had caused her symptoms, who had apparently set off the chain reaction that she would have to deal with the rest of her life. She also felt hurt at the strange behavior her lover was exhibiting; even if he was the secondary, he shouldn’t be trying to avoid her glance the way that he was—it wasn’t as if Jack had told him to back off, or made any obvious claim on her that Mia could recognize. She needed to get Caleb alone and ask him what was wrong, to try and work things out. It must be something she could fix, something they could talk about.
“Caleb,” she said, feeling as if she were at the end of her rope, hovering over an abyss and wanting nothing more than comfort. “Please, please take me home. I’m sorry, Jack—but this is a lot to take in, and I can’t… I can’t deal with it right now, not all at once.” Caleb finally looked at her, and Mia was surprised to see the coldness in his bright eyes.
“I’m not going to take you home, Mia,” he said. Mia stared at him in shock, for a moment not sure she had heard him correctly. She shook her head, frowning. Her heart was pounding; the night seemed to be composed of nothing more than shocks for her, and Mia wondered bitterly what she had done to deserve it.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking from him to Jack and back again.
“I can’t be involved with you anymore,” Caleb said brusquely. “The only reason I got close to you was so that I could make sure that you met with the Alpha of our pack—with Jack.” Mia grabbed for the bar under her hands, feeling the world spinning around her. She heard a sob catch in her throat, felt her eyes burning with tears as she stared in horror at the man she had come to have such strong feelings for. He wasn’t quite meeting her gaze, his expression carefully schooled into a kind of firm indifference that shook Mia and started a slow, flickering burn of anger inside of her.
“You’re kidding me,” she said in desperation. “If you have a problem with me being half-werewolf, I can kind of maybe understand that—but you can’t tell me you’ve been lying to me all this time!” There was a flicker of something in Caleb’s brilliant eyes, but it was gone in a flash, before Mia could read it. It was as though a shutter slammed down over his face, his expression once more carefully blank.
“The only reason I was with you was to convince you to meet Jack,” Caleb said firmly. Mia swallowed against the lump forming in her throat, looking at the two men in turn. She felt as if nothing in the room could possibly be real; it had to be a crazy dream, didn’t it? She would wake up and find herself in bed with Caleb, and when she told him about it he would laugh and say that of course she wasn’t a half-werewolf, and of course he cared for her, and he would gather her up in his arms and settle her hips against his, and he would prove just how much he did care. Mia stood very still for a moment, clenching the edge of the bar in her hands, but nothing changed—she didn’t wake up. It was real; Caleb had really said the words she had heard, and he stood there, as unmoved by her plight as a stranger. Mia swallowed against the tightness she felt in her throat, pushing down the tears that were trying to break free. She had to get out of the bar, had to get as far away as possible from both of them.
“To hell with you,” she said, her emotions settling on anger. Her pride awakened, and Mia got up off of the bar stool, taking a deep breath to suppress the tears that were rising up. Her hands were shaking, and her knees were unsteady, but Mia had never thought of herself as a coward, and she had always hated crying in front of anybody—her sense of indignation rose to the top of her mind, and she determined that if she was going to be insulted, injured like this, then she was never going to let anyone else see it—especially not Caleb. “If that’s all it was to you, then you can go to hell. I’ll take myself home.” Jack grabbed for her arm as she moved to leave, stopping her. Mia glared at him, feeling a mixture of fear—knowing that he was a supernatural creature—and anger that he would interfere. She dug her fingernails into his arm savagely, but Jack didn’t even flinch.
“Mia, take my card. If you change your mind…” He put a business card in her hand and Mia snatched her arm out of his grip, scowling at him for a long moment. She looked at Caleb, pinning him down with her angry gaze.
“I am never, ever going to be involved with either of you in any way ever again,” she said. She was tempted to rip up the card in front of them, but instead walked away, feeling her anger and sadness at war with each other. It was more important for her to get out of the building, and away from the two men who had been involved in her betrayal and upset, as quickly as possible than it was for her to demonstrate her ire. She slammed the door to the private room behind her and ran down the stairs, barely managing to keep from tripping in the gloom. She retraced her steps and quickly left the club, brushing past the security man at the door and running outside. She managed to hail a taxi, idling nearby in case of patrons who had over-indulged, and found to her relief that she had just enough money to pay for the trip to her apartment. She settled in the back seat, barely holding back her tears, not wanting to cry even in front of the total stranger; she didn’t want to be that person, the pathetic betrayed woman sobbing in the back seat of a taxi.
Chapter Seven
At first, Mia had the comfort of her pride and convictions; she decided that she would treat the interlude with Caleb as a rebound, and that the stupid story that he and Jack had fed her was nothing important. She couldn’t even believe it—the idea of being half-werewolf was utterly fantastic, something out of a bad B movie. Her symptoms were bad, but she told herself for one day that it was all in her mind. And even if it was true, she thought firmly as she searched for psychosomatic diseases on her computer and found that there was nothing in medical literature that was quite like what she was experiencing, it wasn’t as if she would actually need their help. She was confident that it was not as bad as they said—that even in the worst case scenario, there had to be something that medical science could do for her. If it were a genetic problem, it would have to be possible for medicine to help her. Mia cried when she came home from the bar, but the next morning she resolved to move on with her life, to figure out a way to manage her symptoms and that she would never have anything to do with Caleb, Jack, or their pack in her entire life. She was tempted once more to throw the business card that Jack had given her away, but something inside of her—a deep-down, paranoid feeling—told her to hold onto it. Just in case.
Over the course of the days following the horrible revelation of her situation, and the heart-breaking news that Caleb had been usin
g her, Mia’s symptoms began to intensify. She couldn’t keep anything down, even when she tried to satisfy the wolfish part of her nature with meat-based meals and even when she diligently avoided coffee. Even regular water came back up, and Mia started to worry that if she couldn’t manage to get some calories to stay in her system, she might have to go to the hospital. She had headaches so intense she could do nothing more than lie in bed with the curtains drawn, the lights turned off, and a cold washcloth draped over her face to blank out as much light as possible. The nausea and pain became unbearable, and Mia found herself crying over and over again, sobbing and curling in on herself, struggling to hold herself together through the waves of unbearable sensations that roiled through her body.
It would have been bad enough for her symptoms to get worse; but even after her strong resolution, she found herself thinking of Caleb again and again. While pain wracked her body, Mia’s mind turned round and round the fact of his betrayal. It was impossible for her to reconcile the way that things had been between them with the fact of Caleb only seeking to get her to Jack. She had had sex with him; she had gone on dates with him. She had gotten to know him, and Mia simply couldn’t believe that there was absolutely nothing to it for Caleb except the duty of getting close to her to convince her. Surely there had to be more to it than that—he couldn’t be that good of an actor, could he? But he had been so cold and distant while she had been talking to Jack. Her heart and mind were at war; Mia couldn’t believe that things were as simple as Caleb had made them out to be, and yet she couldn’t get past the fact that he had baldly told her that he wouldn’t be involved with her anymore, that it had all been a ploy. She was in an agony of anger, sadness, and pain, more miserable than she had ever been in her entire life. She was tempted, over and over again to call Caleb as the symptoms got worse and worse, scaring her the longer they lingered.
Half-Blooded: The Alpha's Mate (BBW Shifter Romance) Page 6