“I told you,” Rory says to his brothers before turning back to answer me. “We all just thought about how we felt while we were away from you, we let ourselves really feel it again just now. And when we did, you felt it too. I can see that you felt it.”
This time when he reaches for me, I don’t pull away.
Still, even Rory looks a little stunned. He’d already believed me before, but I think that seeing it has made it undeniably real.
There’s a slight shuffle of sound at the bedroom door and we all turn to see what it is. Romulus is standing in the doorway, looking at his three sons and their ignited eyes. He doesn’t look angered or even surprised.
Instead he looks at the three boys with empathy.
“Do you know how this is happening?” Marlowe asks him from the bed.
Romulus walks slowly into the room with Lydia appearing at the door a moment behind him. She looks at the boys with the same sort of compassion that Romulus has, and she gives me a reassuring smile as she nods at her husband and then leaves to go continue preparations for tonight. It’s almost like she’s honoring this moment for Romulus to come and talk with us alone.
This is his fight.
This is his wrong to right.
“I’ve seen many bonds before,” Romulus says as stands beside the bed to talk with us. “But this is something of an anomaly.”
“How can Sabrina feel this too?” Rory asks. “She’s human. I thought that was impossible.”
“It is,” his father answers.
We all sit there in silence trying to wrap our heads around what is going on until Romulus starts to speak again.
“But impossible things happen all the time. No one has ever heard of a human being able to feel the bond. But there’s something different about you, Sabrina … I see that now. I’ve tried to deny it for a long time for my pack’s sake, for my family’s sake.”
“Controlling shifter abilities is difficult even for a shifter. Yet you are somehow able to control that part of my boys involuntarily. The bond you have with one, or maybe even all of them, is greater than anything I’ve ever seen in all of my many years.”
He pauses a moment to clear his throat.
“It is because of this that we will turn you and you will join us fully.”
Even though he’s mentioned it already once before, back in the forest, hearing him say it to me now … it’s different.
It’s final.
It isn’t a declaration made in the heat of a moment. It isn’t driven by adrenaline or rage.
It’s driven by something else.
When Romulus looks at me, I see the apology in his face. I see how it’s pained him to see what he’s done. To his family. His sons.
To me.
Romulus walks over to the far side of the bedroom and pulls a calendar off the wall. The boys flaming eyes show no signs of fizzling out as they watch him bring the calendar over to the bed. He flips the pages until they reach further toward the back of the calendar and holds it out to me.
“Choose a date anywhere in this month,” he says, pointing to the page.
; I look at the empty white squares on the page and point to one randomly. Then he takes it back and takes a pen off the top of Rory’s desk. He circles the square that I pointed to in a big blue-inked oval.
“This is the date that is set for your turning,” he says as he holds it up for all of us to see before walking back over to tack it back up on the wall. “By the next eclipse, you will become one of us.”