“I don’t get it. Why are you so hated? Are you—” I shook my head. “No, you can’t be. They can’t dislike you because you’re horrible. Ethan has a sharp tongue and an attitude problem, and you’re a joker, but that’s nothing to hate about you.”
Austin laughed. “Attitude problem. Understatement.”
Ethan flipped him the bird. “You grow up around here long enough, stay around these people, you’ll get a stick up your ass too.”
“I wasn’t criticizing,” I countered genuinely. “I was just stating a fact.”
“A fact that you’re an asshole,” Austin hooted, and I glowered at him.
“Enough,” Eli rumbled, and though Austin stopped snickering, his amusement was clear.
“They don’t like us because we’re twins.”
Ethan’s dour tone had me frowning. “Huh?”
I had to have misunderstood that, right? He couldn’t have said what I thought he said. Surely?
“You heard him right,” Austin said drolly. “They don’t like us because we came from a multiple litter.”
My eyes flashed at that phrasing, and I shot Eli a look. “Your babies are born as dogs?”
He winced. “We’re not dogs. But no, they’re not born as pups. We don’t shift until we’re around thirteen or fourteen usually.”
“So, what’s the problem with multiple litters?”
“They’re considered bad luck.”
“Why?” I demanded, even more bewildered by Ethan’s abrupt retort.
“Just are.” Austin shrugged. “They’re incredibly rare.”
“Well, they are in humans too.”
Eli shook his head. “If we get one a generation, that’s a large amount. We haven’t had twins in our pack since…” He whistled. “1854.”
My eyes widened. “How come?”
“We keep small numbers so we don’t come to the humans’ awareness. It’s said that the Mother blesses us with small litters for that reason.”
“So a multiple litter birth is considered, what? Mother unblessed?”
Austin pulled a face. “That’s one way of thinking of it.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Lots of things don’t,” Eli admitted. “But sometimes, it’s not whether or not it makes sense, but if enough people believe it.”
His words resonated with me on a base level. “I understand,” I murmured. “It’s like, people think the Roma are dirty. But we’re not. It’s a part of our culture to be clean. Ridiculously clean. We have so many rules about cleanliness that it takes up a large part of the day just cleaning.” I shrugged. “People believe it, so it must be true, even if it isn’t.”
“Do you abide by those rules?” Eli inquired, and I sensed his curiosity.
“No. The day I left my family behind, I changed my lifestyle to fit in with normal people. It was no hardship. I hated my culture by that point. Hated what it meant for me and my family.” I bit my lip. “So you’re disliked because you’re twins, will that make it harder for you to take on leadership roles?”
“I won’t be leading anything,” Austin rumbled.
Eli snorted. “Yes, you will. You’ll have more responsibility once you can’t share the burden with Ethan.”
“You’re certain he’ll win the challenge?” I asked.
Ethan bared his teeth. “I’m a thousand times stronger than Brandon. He’s beta in rank and character too. Me? I’m alpha.”
Eli nodded. “He’s right.”
“What’s the difference between you two then?” I pondered.
“You can be alpha by nature, by spirit, but not by rank,” Ethan explained.
Eli agreed, “Sometimes it’s down to personality too. Ethan would kill someone if he had to rule the pack.”
Ethan surprised the hell out of me by laughing. “Damn straight.”
“He isn’t a people person, that’s for sure,” Austin inserted.
“But you didn’t seem to be either?” I noted hesitantly, sending the question to Eli.
“Not with the council. I hate them. They’re all a bunch of self-serving assholes, and I’ve had to put up with them for years because I didn’t want to hurt my mother. Every day I had with her was a gift from the Mother. She lived a long time, she stayed on for me, striving past the pain and loneliness once Father died, because I wasn’t granted a mate at my covenant—”
My eyes flared wide at that. “Huh? What’s a covenant?”
“The ceremony where we officially shift. For the first time. It’s like our bar mitzvah.”
I reached up and rubbed my temple. “I have a lot to learn, don’t I?”
“You have an entire culture to pick up,” Austin said sympathetically. “But you have time, and you have people at your back who’ll teach you whatever you need to know.”
“Okay, so start with the basics.”
Eli
The basics.
If only it was as simple as that, but there was nothing simple about our world.
I blew out a breath and murmured, “It starts with the Mother.”
“Your goddess.”
“Yes.”
“Is there a Father?”
“Yes, but we don’t worship him.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Mother created the land, and she created animals to roam it. She gave us what we know now to be ecosystems—perfectly balanced to sustain us.
“Then, the Father created humans, and humans destroyed that balance. To counter his creation, the Mother gave animals dominion over humans. Whichever human we bite, at certain points when the Mother’s power reaches its zenith, like at a blue moon, for example, we can blur the species.”
Sabina frowned, and I gave her a second to contemplate what I was saying, because I knew I was asking a lot of her to just blindly accept this.
To be fair, we could have been trying to tell her that red was white, and she had no alternative but to believe us.
Hell, if Austin had been the one teaching her, he’d probably have dropped some bloopers into that if he could.
“Okay, so why didn’t the Father mind that?”
“Because she beat him.”
“She beat him? How?”
“The weather. Storms. Lightning, thunder. They are her arsenal. She is the Earth, she can do with it as she wishes, and through it, she controls the Father in ways that he has no option other than to submit.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
“Not for the Father,” Austin pointed out dryly.
“True.” She grinned sheepishly, and I watched Austin’s eyes soften as he took her in.
She looked majestic, sitting in this too formal lounge in a dress that covered her to perfection. Showing not enough skin, but revealing slivers that made me want to touch the silk of her all over.
I licked my lips, just thinking of tasting her, before I forced myself back on track.
We’d wasted time this week, and we needed to get her on board with the situation. Because she was handling things so well, I saw no reason to hide anything from her.
She was rational and level-headed in a way I appreciated. Not once had she panicked or freaked out, and if I had to thank some romance author somewhere, I’d be forever grateful.
Although, she wasn’t the first woman who’d been okay with being turned into a shifter. Most males whose mates I had to transform were all grateful to people called Sherrilyn Kenyon and Nalini Singh. Apparently, they’d been pivotal in their mates wanting to belong to shifters.
Wonders would never cease, but I wasn’t foolish enough to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Tugging at my bottom lip, I thought about the best place to start next. Having always left this to the mated males, and never having gotten involved, I was as out of the loop as I could be.
Maybe Ethan saw my discombobulation, because he took over, saying, “So, with this dominion, we can transform any human at will. Which is what happened to you—on the night of a blue moon. You are
what we call a wolf child. You’re an adult, fully grown, but your she-wolf is still an innocent.
“Normally, wolf children are not powerful like you. They’re mated to regular, run of the mill shifters. Not the alpha, and certainly not two additional alpha shifters.”
“Why am I different?”
“Because my mother discovered a rite in a passage. Our lore runs through the annals of time,” I murmured. “Just as humans’ does. We have history books and texts that need translating from ancient languages into modern ones.
“So the covenant is for a full-blood wolf, like myself, Austin, and Ethan. The first time we shift, we are taken to the totem once we return to our skin, and there we stand upon the pedestal, and the Mother judges us. She decides what we will be in spirit—alpha, beta, will we be leaders or soldiers, teachers or healers. It is her will, and she decides that at that moment. She also grants us a mate.”
“Sometimes, there are people who aren’t lucky enough to be given that guidance. We weren’t,” Austin stated, and for the first time, he sounded sober. Serious.
I knew the disappointment of not being given that guidance was a mutual pain.
Even if, now, it made sense.
“But…I’m your mate, aren’t I? I exist,” she asked warily, concern bobbing in those gemstone-like eyes.
“You exist now that you’re a wolf child,” I rasped. “Human mates are not shown to us. The Mother and the Father do not cross paths in this.”
“Seems shortsighted to me,” she grumbled, making me smile, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching over and starting to fiddle with a couple of strands of hair that had clung to the silk backing of the sofa.
I could scent her from over here. Flowers and sin.
My new favorite combination.
My cock hardened at the scent, her essence, but like I’d been doing all week, I pushed it aside. There was no point in thinking about it. Nothing could be done about my arousal yet, even if it was fucking painful.
“So, because you weren’t given that guidance, you knew your mate was human?”
“Either that, or we were to be given no mate at all,” Ethan murmured, his pain bleeding through, even though he knew, now, that he wasn’t fated to walk his life alone.
Our woman was sitting here, before us, asking questions. Trying to understand our culture.
We’d never be alone again.
For myself, I shuddered with relief. “We are the lucky ones.”
She swallowed, and her eyes were big as she cast each of us a glance. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh. You are more important to us than you could ever imagine,” I told her, my voice husky.
Her eyes were wide with emotion. “I can see that,” she whispered.
“We are always taught to err on the side of caution. To not have hope because, where the Father is concerned, there is no hope,” Ethan rumbled.
“We are the lucky ones,” I repeated, and she charmed me further by blushing.
I smiled at her, curled a lock of her hair around my finger, and murmured, “It gets more complicated, unfortunately. Someone, like us, who has no mate, can simply have a relationship with another who is not blessed, or they can have a union with a human. There is no pressure on that scale. We are realistic creatures, of the Earth. Even without that blessing, we need a home and hearth of our own, and we will go and find one for ourselves.
“But for myself? I am alpha. All alphas are granted a mate at their covenant, for their mate is the pack’s omega.”
“When Eli wasn’t given a mate,” Austin inserted, his tone still serious because this subject was no laughing matter, “there was a huge fight over whether he would be alpha. Normally, alphas inherit the role from father to son. If twin births are rare, so is an alpha not producing the next alpha.”
“But challenges exist for a reason, don’t they?” she queried.
“Sure, but they don’t happen often, and only under dire circumstances where leaders are cruel and vindictive. But even then, that doesn’t happen often. We would be punished by the Mother if we were to abuse our position of power.”
“How?” she asked, her voice soft, her interest clear.
“I’ve never been punished, so I don’t know,” I admitted. “Some say the Mother reaps sickness on alphas who shame her.”
“Or their loved ones.”
I nodded at Austin’s statement. “Or their loved ones, who get cast out from their pack. It happens rarely, Sabina.” I didn’t tell her that it had just happened to our neighboring pack—she didn’t need to hear that yet.
She blinked. “So, when you didn’t have a mate shown to you at your covenant, it caused a crisis?”
“Yes. Without a mate, an alpha can’t reign, but then when Eli was so strong, everyone knew he’d never have a position in the pack that wouldn’t be alpha. He was ten times stronger than all the kids his age, and that was when he was eight.”
She eyed me. “I thought you said the first shift happens at thirteen or fourteen.”
“It does. But mine happened when I was eight.”
“The younger the shift, the stronger the wolf?” she guessed.
“Yes.” I blew out a breath. “I was stronger than thirteen-year-olds. I’ve always been strong. I could probably have taken on my father when I was twenty-one, and everyone on the council knew I could have made ground meat out of them by the time I was eighteen, so they kindly allowed me to remain as the heir to the alpha seat.” I rolled my eyes. “Like they had a choice.”
“So they overlooked your lack of a mate, and the pack’s potential loss of a future omega, because you were so strong?”
I nodded. “Don’t forget, we’re ruled by the Mother, who does things her own way. It was unlikely, in everyone’s eyes, that she’d make me such a powerful alpha and not grant me an omega along the way.”
“And they weren’t wrong,” Austin whispered, his gaze on Sabina. “Because here you are.”
Her cheeks burned. “I don’t know what it means to be an omega.”
“Earlier,” I started carefully, “you said you had a vibe?”
For the first time, her eyes weren’t trained on us, but she focused them on her lap. “Yes.”
“Can you explain more? Maybe we can help you,” Ethan murmured, leaning forward and setting his elbows on his knees, his own interest stirred at her statement.
That didn’t come as any surprise. Ethan loved books, loved learning. If he hadn’t been a twin, I had no doubt he’d be a keeper. But keepers were sacred to the pack, and they were only trusted members—no one would trust him because of what he was.
It sucked, and I thought it was a pile of bullshit, but that was how the pack worked.
“I’ve always been able to read auras. You all have an energy around you that lets me sense how you’re feeling. This is like that, but instead of me being able to see it, it’s like I can feel it.”
“My mother said, with time and training, that she could control the entire pack’s emotions.”
“Isn’t that bad?” Sabina rasped, her eyes round as she finally looked at me once more.
“It’s not good,” I agreed, “but omegas never mean the pack harm.”
“Surely there are egocentric ones. Or selfish ones. Or megalomaniacs?”
My lips curved. “That’s not how the Mother works. You’re talking about us like we’re human, but we’re not. Sure, we have foibles and vices. Half the council are self-serving pricks, but they’re elected into that position by the pack. All the pack, from the bottom to the top, votes. It’s an election. They aren’t chosen by the Mother.
“When we are chosen by her, our personalities adhere to what she requires of us.”
“That’s creepy.”
“Is it? Or is that her way of safeguarding her people?” I shrugged. “I know of very few alphas, in history, who have ever abused their positions.”
Her mouth turned as round as her eyes. “That’s impossible. Men are—”
“Men are human. We are not,” I repeated calmly. “My father was a lot stricter than me. He was what you’d consider fire and brimstone.”
“Very much Old and not New Testament,” Ethan added dryly, making me wince. But only because he was right.
“Yeah, that pretty much sums him up. The way I govern the pack, and the way he did, are two separate beasts. But even then, he wasn’t cruel. Not really, and only to Austin and Ethan.”
Her entire face puckered with disbelief. “He was nice to everyone but two boys?”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “But I know why that is, and that had nothing to do with being an alpha, just with him being male, which was why the Mother didn’t punish him.”
Austin tensed at my words, Ethan too. They both frowned at me, and I cast them a look. “I only found out by accident,” I told them. “My parents didn’t even know I knew.”
“Knew what?” Ethan demanded. “Why the hell was he so fucking mean to us when we were growing up?”
“Because you’re my brothers.”
For a second, no one spoke, then Austin started laughing. “Good one, Eli.”
“Shut up,” Ethan hissed, sensing something Austin didn’t. “He isn’t joking.”
“No, I’m not,” I stated evenly. “And, to be completely honest, I would never have said a word about this if Sabina didn’t tie us all together, but I have to believe that everything happens for a distinct reason, and in this instance, you need to know the truth.”
“Don’t stop there,” Ethan ground out, fists bunching. “You have answers, give them to us.”
“Mother was like Sabina.”
She gulped. “She had another mate?”
“Yes. Just the one. My father was jealous. She met her second mate later on. Decades after their claiming of one another.”
“What happened?” Austin whispered, his hands around the armrests, his fingers digging into them like he was forcing himself to stay still.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Just that he died. Mother gave birth to you, and my father forced her to give you to Rebekkah to raise.”
WOLF CHILD: A PNR RH Romance (The Year of the Wolf Book 1) Page 13
