Fierce (Wolf Ranch 5)

“You okay, doll?” Since the vehicle was so tiny, Charlie was right there. Our shoulders practically brushed.

I saw her throat work as she swallowed. “I think so. How did you even find me?” she asked, a furrow creasing her brow.

“Clint had the info for your boss. For where you worked. I figured you’d have to show up because of Seraphina.”

“How… how did you get here? I mean, didn’t you stay in town last night? I haven’t wrapped my head around what I saw, and I guess after that, it’s possible that you can teleport or something, but… how?”

I gave her a smile, wishing I could fucking teleport. “Plane… and fate.” There weren’t a shit ton of flights out of Montana. I just happened to luck upon one in nearby Bozeman heading to Denver. Some people might call it luck, but it was definitely fate.

I’d been fucked for years, not ever being able to shift or scent a mate. But now… now it seemed as if I’d earned the chance to be with Charlie. Fate had intervened, so I could save her. To make her mine. Although fate was also a bitch because she’d cut it damned close. A few more seconds, and Dax would’ve strangled her dead. I’d have to live with that image for the rest of my life.

Still, I wasn’t going to fuck with what fate had given me.

“I don’t know where to go,” I told her, not pulling out onto the road. I’d used my cell’s map directions to get to the place from the airport, but now I had no idea where we even were besides west of town.

She blinked, looked around. “Oh. We can go to my place. My grandfather’s at a church thing for most of the day.”

“Lead the way.”

“Only if we talk. About you. Stuff.”

“About the fact that I’m a shifter?” I stated plainly.

She blinked. “Oh yeah.”

30

CHARLIE

Levi parked in the driveway. We didn’t go inside. Instead, we took a walk to my neighborhood park and sat under one of the beech trees, our backs against the grey bark. Levi hadn’t said anything the entire way, only held my hand in his big one. It was comforting and reassuring, but I really wanted a hug, something all encompassing, so I could feel him all around me. But not yet. We had serious things to talk about. I had no doubt he wanted answers from me, even though most of them had been made clear at Claymore’s. But I had questions. Lots of them.

“How crazy is it that I picked a stuffed wolf at the county fair?” I asked inanely.

“Not crazy. It was fate.”

I wasn’t sure I believed in fate, but he was right. It certainly seemed like fate.

“Are you really a werewolf?” I blurted, my mind still stuttering on the facts that made no sense.

He set his hand on my thigh, gave it a little squeeze. “Shifter. Yes. But only because of you.”

I frowned and turned my head to look at him. Our sides touched, we were that close. “What?”

“I was the product of a mixed-mating. A human with a shifter. I told you my grandparents hated my dad for marrying my mom. It’s because he was a shifter. My mom was human, and they thought she was tainted. The match is still generally frowned upon in the shifter world. It even goes against shifter law in most packs, and that was the case in my dad’s pack although the law hadn’t been enforced in several generations. My parents mated, and I was born, and we were a happy little family until I hit adolescence.”

I tensed, sensing the part of the story I wasn’t going to like. I remembered he’d told me his parents had been murdered.

“I hadn’t shifted for the first time yet. First shift usually comes on around puberty, but fourteen wasn’t particularly late. Still, it got people in the pack talking. The gossip was that I might not be able to because my mom’s blood had tainted me.” He paused for a second. “See, the prejudice goes both ways. The more the talk got going, the more some radicals got riled up. There's a lot of anti-human sentiment in the shifter world, especially in the less educated populations, and to be honest, most of the shifter population falls into that category. We like to stay up in the hills or mountains where we can run free. That means there’s a lot of isolation. And with isolation sometimes follows close-mindedness.”

My skin prickled. They sounded like the kind of racist fucks I’d been afraid of my whole life.

Levi picked up my hand and squeezed it. “You’ve already guessed the outcome.”

I nodded, a tight band closing around my throat.

“My parents were killed for their love. I’d been at school at the time, so I’d been spared. I was sent to live with my human grandparents in Seattle after that. Of course, they couldn’t forgive the shifters responsible, or shifters in general for what happened. If my parents hadn’t married… I lived with them for four years. They forbade me from ever shifting or showing any wolf tendencies. And it stuck. I never did in all that time. Or after. Not once.”