Rejected Mate (Feral Shifters 1)

He levels his hard gaze on me. “Getting out of this alive. All of us.”

I give him a feral grin. “Sure. All of us.”

Like I’d ever let that happen.

Erik’s “library” is simply a converted bedroom lined with bookshelves that has an interior table and chairs. I hoped for something cooler, considering the parlor looks like something out of a duke’s manor, but clearly, the witch’s magic only ran so far.

Frost enters first, then picks the nearest shelf to start shuffling through books. I head for the table, where half a dozen notebooks are scattered around as if Erik was recently in here researching something himself. Chances are good that something is the potion he was making for us.

I settle in a seat and pull the closest spiral-bound notebook toward me, then start flipping through the pages.

We left Kian and Malix downstairs to search the living room, where Erik kept his altar and magical supplies. When silence settles over us, giving my overwrought nerves a chance to breathe, I decide I’ve made the best choice in choosing to accompany the silent shifter.

I can’t help but glance at Frost as he works. He has his finger pressed to a row of spines on the shelf, moving slowly along as he reads the titles. No clue what criteria he’s got in mind for picking out books that might help us. Native Trees of New Mexico or some shit, I guess.

But it’s his tattoos that stand out.

He’s wearing a plain white t-shirt, and his black tattoos are moving again. Doing that eerily beautiful shifting thing I’ve seen a couple times already. Frost’s tattoos seem… restless. They move more than Kian’s or Malix’s, and I wonder why. He reaches up to pull a book off one of the higher shelves, and there’s a ripple effect down his arm.

I put down the journal full of Erik’s chicken scratch and ask, “Are your tattoos made of shadows?”

His shoulders tense. He glances over his shoulder at me, the book open in his palm.

I think he’s not going to answer. He usually doesn’t, being the strong silent type. So I speak again.

“The shadows that attacked us,” I say softly. “Like the one the night you came into my motel room. Are you one of them? Is that kind of… I don’t know, magic? Is that what you have inside you?”

I brought up the night in my motel room for a reason. I still have no idea why he came to see me, but I do know both Kian and Malix argued with him not to. Maybe he just wanted to see the woman fated to be his mate, maybe he was curious. Hell, maybe he wanted to kill me. I don’t know.

But I think it was the right call to bring that night back to his mind.

Frost’s hard expression falls away. His eyes soften, such a brilliant sapphire that they glow like spotlights in the light from the dim overhead bulb.

He turns back to the shelf and shoves the book into the empty space. “I’m… not certain. We are the first of our kind. But it is a probability.”

I turn in my seat to give him my full attention. “How so?”

He lets his hand rest on the shelf overhead, his gaze on the books instead of me. “My brothers and I were created from shadow. We are the only corporal beings on earth made with that magic. So while we aren’t shadows, we’re... related. In that we carry that magic inside us.”

“Made” with that magic. That’s not the choice of word I expected when I ventured down this path.

I open my mouth, ready to ask him what he means by “made,” but I stop before I utter a sound.

These men—all of them, even Malix who never shuts up—are hard to get straight answers out of. If I want Frost to keep talking, to give me something to work with, I have to navigate this discussion carefully. Keep him talking. Keep him engaged.

“Why do your tattoos move so much?”

Frost’s hand falls away from the shelf, and he turns it over, palm up, to stare down at the black markings roaming the smooth skin of his forearm. “It’s always been that way for me. Since I was a child. The magic gets… restless.”

“So it’s separate from you? The way shifter magic is separate and has its own thoughts and desires?”

He finally turns and looks at me. I think, for the first time, I’m seeing him at ease. His brothers aren’t around to keep him from talking to me. His eyes are bright, interested. His stony walls seem to have come down, or at least lowered a bit.

It’s just the two of us and my twenty questions.

“Yes,” he says after mulling over my words. “The magic is a separate being, but part of us nonetheless. Like the wolf. When we’re far from the shadow realm, the magic aches.”

The shadow realm. This isn’t the first time they’ve mentioned such a place. I don’t know quite what it is, but even hearing the words makes snippets of the vision I got from Gwen flash in my mind’s eye. “Why does it ache?”