by Sara Summers
SOULMATED
By Sara Summers
Copyright © 2018 Sara Summers
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
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To the Shifty girls.
Thank you for changing my life.
One
Growing up, I was mesmerized by the wall that separated us from the humans. They were afraid of us, I guess. Afraid to become like us.
Shifters.
Not humans, not animals. We were different and that scared them.
They were afraid of us so they did what they thought they had to do: they put us in a cage.
The day that the wall between us came down and the world started to change began like any other day. I went to work at 6 AM and then took my lunch break at the wall with my brothers around noon. We would eat at home first and go hang out at the wall afterward until it was time to get back to work
“Why do we always come here?” I wondered, looking at the forest that surrounded us. My brothers shrugged. They were twins and though they weren’t technically identical, their dark brown hair was exactly the same color and their faces were shaped so similarly that most people couldn’t tell them apart.
“Because we have a strange obsession with humans.” Tanner’s gaze wandered up the tall concrete wall that stretched higher than any of the trees we’d ever seen, curving in a slight dome at the top. The metal bars that reinforced the concrete only made it look even less friendly than it was.
“Doesn’t everyone?” Cody muttered, staring at that the same way Tanner and I were. Despite its harshness, there was something about it that called to me in a way I couldn’t describe.
I stood up, brushing my long, wavy brown hair out of my face. “Come on, guys. Lunch break is over.” I pulled the large t-shirt over my head and shifted into my wolf form in one fluid motion, leaving the clothing in the dirt. We would be back later; we were always back later.
My brothers undressed and shifted too, but I was already gone.
We ran through the forest, down the well-traveled path we’d run every day for the past few years. The boys didn’t catch me, but they tried.
When we reached the house we were framing, I could hear the rest of the workers talking. They were getting ready to resume building. Tanner, Cody, and I put on the clothes we’d left there and grabbed our tool belts, which had been lined up with the others.
As usual, we were the last ones back. Most of the others didn’t shift for lunch, and if they did shift, they were only running back home. In our little town, their houses weren’t far away.
“Kyle said the humans are going to break down the cage.” I heard one of the men say. His voice was familiar, and I didn’t have to see him to know that the person who had spoken was the man who raised me. My brothers and I turned around quickly and hurried toward Ty, their biological dad and my adopted one.
“What did you say?” I asked, stopping in front of the shocked group of men.
The rest of the workers barely glanced at me. Ty gave me and my brothers a small, tight smile, though.
“The walls are coming down. Someone outside the cage saved a grizzly and turned, and when they did they let out the secret. The humans have decided that they have no reason to be afraid of us now that they know how not to become like us.”
“We’re going to be free?” I asked, my eyebrows raising with a few goosebumps on my arm, despite the heat of the summertime in what my parents said used to be Washington.
“Apparently so.” Ty grimaced.
A quick look at the rest of the middle-aged men we worked with showed that none of them looked happy about it.
“We’d better get home.” One of the men muttered, walking away from the group. It began dissembling, the workers headed back to their houses.
“Why aren’t you celebrating?” I wondered, looking back at Tanner and Cody. The grins on their faces said that they were just as excited to meet the humans as I was. “And why are they all leaving?”
“They’re going home to protect their families, just like we are.” Ty dropped his tool belt in one of the many plastic storage boxes around the site and pulled his shirt over his head.
“Why?” Tanner repeated my question. “This is sweet.”
“Because before the humans built the cage, they started killing us like we were rabid animals. We need to get back to Leah.” He said, shifting and running toward our home.
Cody, Tanner, and I followed after him, three dark-colored wolves running through the forest-town that we knew as well as if the entire place was our house. Of course since we were wolves, it was.
When we got to the back door of the house, we pulled on the clothes we’d left on the porch and went inside. Leah, my adopted mom, was waiting at the kitchen table with my little brother Artie.
She stood up when we got there, hurrying to meet Ty in the middle of the living room with a hug and a kiss.
“I need to call the rest of the pack to warn them if they don’t already know. I’ll be back.” Ty disappeared into his and Leah’s room. He and Leah were the Alpha and Omega of the wolf pack in our tiny town, Mount Edge, and that meant they felt responsible for the safety of all of the others.
“Your dad called me, Em. They already took down a chunk of the wall on the west side and he’s doing damage control there.”
“Do you really think the humans are going to try to kill us?” I asked, sitting down on the couch. I’d heard the stories from Leah and the rest of my birth mom’s best friends, the stories about how they’d tried to make a difference but had pretty much screwed up the relationship between shifters and humans.
Their disagreements with the other shifters about what they had done was what got my biological mom killed, so I knew just how deadly the humans against shifters argument could be.
“No. They aren’t afraid of us anymore.” Leah shook her head.
“Then why are there only guys in our generation?” Tanner sat down on the kitchen table and folded his arms. Cody took a chair next to Artie, and Leah grimaced.
“I figure the Creator just decided he needs lots of men to protect the few females left. We’re all going to die fighting off the humans.” Cody shrugged.
“Say that again and I’ll kill you myself.” Leah glared at her son.
Death threats were a common occurrence in our house, and they were never real threats.
The absence of female shifters was a topic frequently talked about in our house and every other shifter home. Ever since the walls had been built to separate us from the humans, the only babies born were boys. I was one of the youngest female shifters alive, and I was nineteen years old.
As our almost-all-male generation had grown closer to the age where we would find our soulmate—the one person in existence who could make us complete, the other half of our soul—the sense of unease around the cage was growing worse and worse. If there were no females, there was no future for our race.
And while we tried to keep things light and simple, that was most definitely not simple.
“I know what your dad thinks, but the humans aren’t going to hurt us.” Leah added, folding her arms. “They’re not afraid of us, so now they have no reason to keep us locked up. Kyle thinks the humans are tearing down chunks of the wall by every town and city on the edges of the Cage. Sometime this afternoon or evening, there’s going to be a hole right next to us.”
“I guess we’ll have to change the name
of our town then.” Tanner smirked. “Mount Edge doesn’t exactly make sense if we’re not on the edge of anything.”
“What else is going to change?” Artie frowned and mirrored his mom’s position, folding his own arms.
“Probably nothing. They’re only taking the wall down because they would feel guilty leaving it up now that they know we can’t make them like us.” She figured.
“Then what are we going to do?” I wondered.
“We’re going to stay inside for a few days until Ty realizes that we aren’t in any danger, and then life’s going to go back to normal. You’ll wait go back to waiting for your soulmate to come sweep you off your feet, and the boys will wait until their brains kick into gear and take them to their dream girls. Everything is going to be fine.” Leah said, smiling.
I absentmindedly touched the quarter-sized marking under my right ear, the marking that said I was a wolf shifter with a soulmate. We called them coties (said like co-t-A) or mate marks, and they were the only piece of our human forms that connected us with our wolves. When my soulmate was nearby I knew that my cotie would tingle, and the first time we touched, our already-matching markings would change together.
“You’re ignoring the fact that there are no girls out there for us to find.” Cody pointed out, walking over to the couch and sprawling out across it.
The way we found our soulmates was simple. At some point between the age of 17 and 30, the male shifter would know exactly where on the planet his female was. We called it their brain or nose kicking into gear, usually. Girls know if the guy is their soulmate based on the tingling feeling, and it would be confirmed when our coties changed together.
“There are plenty of girls.” Leah put a hand on her hip. “They’re just all outside the wall.”
“Shifters can’t be soulmates with humans, mom.” Artie complained, shaking his head. Despite only being fourteen, he had a solid-enough grasp on how our world worked. Shifters were only soulmates with shifters, therefore with no female shifters we were all going to die out in the nearish future.
“Well the only other option is Cody’s idea that you’re all going to die, and that’s ridiculous.”
“Unlike the shifters mating with humans, which is totally plausible.” Tanner shook his head. “I’m with Cody. You’re in denial, mom. We exist to fight a war that we have no chance of winning.”
“Fine. We’ll just have to wait and see who’s right, won’t we?” Leah left us all in the kitchen, joining Ty in their bedroom.
I knew that since we couldn’t shift and go running, it was going to be a long day.
Two
My family went outside when we heard the noise. It was louder than anything I had ever heard before, the sound of the explosives the humans were using to blow a hole in the concrete wall that had caged us in for as long as I could remember.
The air was full of concrete dust which made it a little hard to breathe, but we didn’t care; we watched on the porch for the entire hour it took them to blow a hole in the six-foot-thick concrete. They had to make the whole big enough for a car to fit through, so it wasn’t a small hole either.
Our house was partway up the mountain that gave Mount Edge its name, so we had a good view of everything that was happening.
Though I’d seen cars a few times in my life, I had never actually seen one running until it drove through the hole in the wall.
“Do you hear that?” Ty asked, turning to Leah. His eyes were narrow and suspicious, his body tense and ready to fight.
He was the Alpha, after all, and he was just about always ready for a fight.
“Is it a car?” Leah asked, turning to the road.
“There’s a car! A car is coming up the mountain!” A teenage boy hollered, crashing through our house. When he reached the porch his eyes were wide and crazed, his light brown hair disheveled. It was Alex, the grizzly shifter who was the twelve-year-old son of one of Leah’s best friends.
“Did you see who was inside it?” Leah asked him.
“No.” Alex shook his head quickly. “I have to go tell everyone else.” He said, before he charged back through the house.
“Stay here.” Ty warned us, following Alex out of the house.
Leah barely had time to roll her eyes before she and the rest of us hurried after him.
More than we were eager to see someone coming up the mountain, I think we were all excited to see a working car in person.
“Whoa.” I stopped in the doorway, blocking my Artie and Tanner inside. I lifted my hand to my cotie, my eyes widening as I realized what was happening.
It was tingling.
The car stopped in front of the house and Ty and Leah stood together to meet it, falling into their role as Alpha and Omega of the house, even though the twins and I were old enough to be considered adults.
“Move, Emma. I want to see the car.” Artie complained, both he and Tanner pushing me forward. I tripped a little but managed to keep my balance, stepping toward the car that I now knew held my soulmate.
I swallowed and felt my hands start to shake a little. I’d been waiting for this man since I was a little girl. Now that I was finally going to meet the other half of my soul, I wasn’t sure if I should smile or throw up.
“Are you okay, Em?” Tanner whispered.
I could only shrug, staring at the car from behind my parents and brothers.
The car door swung open and a man stepped out, and I swear, he was the only thing I could see. He was tall and tanned, his body muscled in a way that I’d never seen anyone look before outside of the human movies. The tight black t-shirt and dark blue jeans he wore were both cleaner and nicer than anything I owned.
His hair was dark and cut close on the sides, a little longer on the top, and his attention was focused completely on me.
My face warmed when he stepped toward me. My parents had seen the way he was staring at me and parted, letting him through.
When he walked past my mom and brothers, she gasped.
I was too focused on the man in front of me to acknowledge the noise.
“Hi.” He gave me a small smile. Despite its size, that smile definitely reached his eyes. He offered me his hand and waited to see what I’d do.
“Hi.” I felt my face flush while this fancy, attractive man stared shamelessly at me. Despite the embarrassment, I lifted my hand to take his.
“Emma, wait.” My mom hurried over and grabbed my arm before I could touch him.
“Why?” I frowned but didn’t pull my arm away from her. In my experience, Leah didn’t do anything without a good reason.
“He’s human.” She said quietly.
“What?” I looked up at the man with no idea how I should feel about that. My entire life, I’d only known shifters. On top of that, I had been expecting my soulmate to be like me. To love the forest, to love being a wolf.
He grimaced and pulled his hand back, resting his thumbs on the edge of his pocket. “You’re human? How?” I looked between my parents and my soulmate, confusion rising like bile in my throat.
“I don’t know. I woke up one day and felt you.” He admitted. “I don’t know how or why, it just… happened.”
“Then what’s going to happen when we touch? I’m not going to turn human, am I?” My eyebrows creased as I looked to my dad for an answer.
“Either that or he’ll become a shifter, probably.” My dad could only try to guess. I knew that when I asked him, but I still had to ask.
“Wait, I’m going to be a shifter?” He looked at Ty too, somehow sensing that he was the Alpha and therefore usually in the know.
“We don’t know, this has never happened before. Humans aren’t supposed to be compatible soulmates with shifters, but if you can feel Emma and she can feel you...” he didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to.
We were soulmates. That much both of us knew.
“Leah, what’s going on?” My mom’s best friend Sav asked, walking up to us.
I glanced behind my soulmate and felt my jaw drop open. The crowd watching us was massive, full of all different kinds of shifters. I knew some of them but had no idea who most were.
“I’ll tell you later.” Leah whispered, looking at me and my soulmate once again. “Go inside, hurry. I’ll deal with this.”
My dad nodded and gestured for me to go inside. I did, and my soulmate followed close but not too close behind me.
He wasn’t ready to risk becoming a shifter yet.
My brothers followed us inside and headed for the kitchen when Ty whispered for them to get out of the way. None of them said anything, so at least they didn’t make the situation any worse.
“Do you know anything about this?” my soulmate checked, walking to the couch. He sat down on the far left side and gestured for me to sit down on the right.
I shook my head and sat down next to him. My cotie was tingling so much that it itched, and I could barely resist reaching up to scratch it.
“This has really never happened before?”
“Never.” I would’ve rubbed my eyes with my hands but I couldn’t take my gaze off the man who was the other half of my soul.
Whether it turned me human or not I longed to touch him, even just on the hand. Human or shifter, he was my soulmate. There wasn’t a piece of me that could deny that.
And he was gorgeous. Up close, I could see that he had the most stunning green eyes. I’d never seen anyone with eyes so bright before.
“What options do we have, then?” he folded his arms and turned his body so he could see me better.
“You can touch and risk one of you changing, or you can go your separate ways and pretend like none of this ever happened.” Ty sat down on the coffee table, a few feet away from us with his arms folded. He wasn’t my biological dad, but he would protect me like I was his own. After being raised by him and Leah for seventeen years, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind about that. They’d never treated me any differently than they treated their other kids.
“Go our separate ways?” I raised my eyebrows, panic rising in my chest at that idea. If Logan walked away and never came back, I would spend my entire life alone.
