Kuva said, “He has not been himself since Indigo ran away. I believe it was difficult for him to miss the mating thrall.”
“The what?” Boaz asked.
Ginnifer knew a little about what Kuva was referring to. The mating thrall, or frenzy, as it was referred to in some literature, was the precursor to mating, when a male shifter laid claim on a fertile female. It was supposedly an intense, hormone-fueled experience, with generally resulted in conception, which solidified the bond between mates.
In simpler terms, Kuva explained as much, and then added, “Indigo left the same day Coral was becoming fertile. Zane did not stay to mate with her, not even once. Perhaps if he did, he would not be so…”
Kuva trailed off, seeming not to want to speak poorly of his alpha.
“Dick-ish?” Boaz offered.
Ginnifer chewed on this information as they walked. From what Zane had told her before, she had a feeling that he might have left as much for his own sake as for his sister’s.
“When will it happen again?” Ginnifer asked.
Kuva shrugged. “Another month or two? Our kind is not fertile every month, not like humans.”
He put a hand on Ginnifer’s back, and she inwardly sighed. “I think we can make it back from here,” Ginnifer told him. “Why don’t you go fishing? Maybe I’ll be able to convince his holiness to at least let Boaz join you tomorrow.”
She was relieved when he left, and she and Boaz fell into easy conversation as they headed in the direction of the spire. While Boaz was telling her about an interesting piece of footage he caught, she noticed something. Right at the juncture, where his neck met his shoulder, were two puncture marks.
“Did…did Tallow do that?” she asked.
His hand went to his neck, but unlike Ginnifer’s reaction when he’d noticed her mark, he stroked the area gently, a warm smile spreading over his lips.
“She gets a little overzealous sometimes.”
“Didn’t it hurt?”
His cheeks reddened. “A little, I guess. To be honest, I didn’t really notice at the time.”
“Are you two…”
“It’s personal.”
The sense of hurt she’d already gotten from Zane only deepened as Boaz shut her out. There was something else there too, a more insidious feeling that she didn’t quite know what to make of.
“You seem to have a lot of personal things going on lately,” she muttered. “I hope you haven’t forgotten what we’re supposed to be doing here.”
She recognized how hypocritical that was, and felt guilty when he apologized to her.
Boaz said, “It’s just…women, they never look at me the way she does. With everyone else, I’m always marginalized, but with her…”
“Boaz, you don’t mean that,” Ginnifer said, shaking her head. “What about me? You and I, we’ve always been best friends.”
“I know I’m your best friend,” he said. “But I’m also a man. And Tallow, she sees that.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“So, Indigo, do you want to show us what you’re doing?”
Ginnifer tried looking over her shoulder, but Indigo put her hand on Ginnifer’s face and pushed her back.
“Stop crowding me,” she said, eyes focused on her task.
From what Ginnifer could see, she was using a pair of tweezers and the tip of a rattail comb to gingerly prod at wires on some sort of circuit board.
“Do you want to tell us what you’re doing?” Boaz asked hopefully.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
It was the third time in the past four days that they’d come to Indigo’s room to try and interview her again. Getting even the smallest bit of information from her was like pulling teeth, and somehow she seemed to always redirect the conversation from herself. Ginnifer thought she secretly enjoyed the company, almost as much as she enjoyed annoying them.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Indigo put the comb down and reached over to the table beside her bed. She picked up a folded piece of notebook paper and handed it to Ginnifer. “I heard you were going to Port Trent with Marl and Zo. Pick those things up for me.”
Ginnifer unfolded the paper and scanned the list, which filled the page on two columns, including everything from shampoo to industrial strength batteries.
“Where am I supposed to get all of these things?” she asked. And furthermore, how am I going to carry all of it?
Indigo bent to reach under her bed. She pulled out a shoebox, and when she opened it, Boaz made a strangled noise. There were stacks of Canadian money, without a single small denomination to be seen. Indigo grabbed a wad of fifties and tossed it at Ginnifer.
“It’s all easy to find, trust me. Make sure you bring back my change,” she said, before resuming her project.
Ginnifer glanced at the list again, then put back half of the money, and then half of what she had remaining.
“I think this will be enough,” she said slowly. “Um, Indigo?”
“Hm?”
“Where’d you get all that money?”
Indigo glanced up, her expression blank. “My mom left it for me.”
“Was she rich?” Boaz asked from his perch behind the camera.
“She was a bank robber.”
Ginnifer and Boaz stared at her, until Indigo shook her head, grinning. “You two can be so gullible. If you want to know about my mom, you should ask anyone but me. She died when I was seven. I barely remember her.”
“My grandfather died when I was six,” Ginnifer said. “And I remember him pretty well.”
“Good for you,” Indigo muttered.
And uncomfortable silence fell over the room, the only sound being the scrap of metal on metal as Indigo worked. Ginnifer studied her face, wondering what parts of her came from her mother. She looked so much like Zane, from the shape of her Cupid’s bow lips to the way her dark brown hair always wanted to fall to one side. The only real difference Ginnifer had noticed were her freckles, which she usually kept hidden under makeup.
When she’d first met Indigo, Ginnifer had taken her tendency to be brash for teenage petulance, but now she was starting to see that it was simply one aspect of Indigo’s multifaceted personality. In that regard, she was the complete opposite of her brother, who always seemed to choose his words carefully.
Except for the other day, she thought. Unless his goal was to humiliate me, in which case, he was spot on.
She hadn’t thought much about Zane in the past few days, except during mealtimes, when she sometimes caught sight of him in the common room. Or at night, when she closed her eyes and it seemed as though he were tattooed on the backs of her eyelids. And then there were her dreams, which had gotten so graphic that Breeze had taken to waking her by sprinkling cold water on her head.
“My mom died of cancer,” Indigo said, not looking up from what she was doing. “The doctors only gave her a few months to live, five or six, I think. When she met my father, she stopped thinking about dying and started living. She fell in love. She lived for eight years after that, but she was always sick. That’s how I remember her, being sick. Smelling like death and decay. And then when she died, she took my father with him. He just…checked out. Like it didn’t even matter to him that he still had a pack, or Zane, or…whatever.”
“And Zane raised you?” Ginnifer’s voice was barely a whisper, as though she were afraid she was going to spook Indigo into clamming back up.
“He took care of all of us,” she said. “He was my age at the time. I still don’t know how he did it, but he did. And he’s done a way better job than my father ever did.”
Ginnifer looked over to make sure that Boaz was recording, her heart thumping in her chest. Indigo wasn’t exactly baring her soul, but this was more than she’d ever opened up to them before.
“It must have been—”
Ginnifer was cut off by a shrill cry from the hallway.
“In-di-go!”
Indigo’s back straightened and her head whipped towards the door.
“Don’t you dare come in my room!”
From the hallway, the voice came closer. “Where are my tweezers?”
Indigo stuffed the tweezers under her pillow, just as the pelts in her doorway were yanked back. A young woman stepped in, her pale blonde hair tied up in a big bun on the top of her head. She wore a dress of soft leather, and draped over her shoulders was a large pelt of white with gold overtones.
“You can’t barge in here whenever you want,” Indigo said hotly.
The blonde female wasn’t paying any attention to Indigo. Her mismatched eyes were on Ginnifer, staring at her with open hostility.
“What is she doing here?”
Ginnifer wouldn’t have to guess twice to know whom she was staring at. Coral was Tallow’s cousin, and the resemblance between them was striking, though Coral was a good six inches shorter, and had a more petite frame.
From what she’d heard of Coral, she’d pictured her as looking much younger, but in actuality, with her full chest, wide hips, and elegant bone structure, she appeared more mature than the slightly older Indigo.
“I’m doing an interview,” Indigo said, getting up off her bed. “And you’re interrupting.”
Boaz came out from behind her camera, extending his hand to Coral. “Hi. I can’t believe we haven’t met yet. I’m Boaz, I’m friends with Tallow.” When she didn’t take his hand, he awkwardly pulled it back. “So, you’re Zane’s mate, right. I thought you’d be taller. I think we’re almost the same height.”
Coral silenced him with a scathing look, and then turned to Ginnifer again. “That’s right, I am Zane’s mate.”
Were she still a teenage girl, Ginnifer might have cowered under that stare. But while it was definitely uncomfortable to be the object of Coral scorn, especially when she deserved it, Ginnifer recognized Coral’s display for what it was: she was insecure.
“I know,” Ginnifer said gently. “And you have nothing to worry about.”
It was the most she was willing to say with Boaz in the room, but she hoped that later, she could take Coral aside and offer her some sort of apology and reassurance. She could explain that she had been the one to make a move on Zane, and that she hadn’t known that he was promised to someone else at the time.
Coral blanched, her mouth hanging open, before she said, “So you know, if a wolf has claim on a mate and another one wants to challenge that claim, they fight. You should know, I am a good fighter.”
Ginnifer blinked as Coral began looking younger by the second.
Indigo said, “Oh, please. You couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.”
“Stay out of this,” Coral bit out.
“Don’t order me around,” Indigo said. She went toe to toe with Coral, until the smaller female had to look up at her. Then, Indigo began to backing her towards the door. “Now, get the hell out of my room and stay out, or I’ll tell my brother that you’ve been flirting with Roch.”
“Like he’ll care,” Coral hissed, as she was pushed from the room.
She stood outside for a few minutes, ranting about her tweezers, but made no effort to come back in. Indigo stood with her back to the door, arms crossed beneath her small breasts. When Coral finally stormed off, Indigo seemed to deflate. She made her way over to the bed, collapsing onto it face first.
Once Ginnifer had processed the encounter herself, she went over to the bed and sat beside Indigo. Indigo turned to look up at her, but said nothing.
“Zane told me the two of you used to be friends,” Ginnifer said.
“Yeah, when we were kids. Before she got it into her head that she’s somehow better than me, all because she thinks she’s going to be my brother’s mate.”
Boaz said, “I thought they already were mates.”
“They aren’t yet,” Indigo said. “And they won’t be, if I have anything to do with it.”
“Is that why you ran away?” Ginnifer asked. “Because you knew Zane would come after you instead of mating with Coral?”
Indigo turned away, so that Ginnifer couldn’t see her face. While she spoke, Ginnifer waved Boaz from the room, and he took his camera with him.
“I figured I would either stop them from mating, or I’d be long gone by the time it happened. Either way, I wouldn’t have to be around here to see…” Indigo paused, and when she spoke again, there was a vulnerability to her voice that had Ginnifer reaching out to place a hand on her back.
“I’m half human. I might be able to take a mate one day, have pups of my own, but chances are, I’ll be like the rest of them. It’s not what I want though. I want a mate, and a family of my own, more than anything, and…I wasn’t going to stay here and watch Coral have everything I’ve always wanted.”
Ginnifer climbed in beside Indigo and put her arm around her. Indigo didn’t reciprocate, but she didn’t pull away either.
“Don’t tell my brother I told you any of this.”
“Of course not.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ginnifer looked up from her notebook and checked her watch, wondering what was keeping Boaz. He had said he’d come to her room to go over footage at noon, but it was already after one. Since coming to Siluit, he had adopted the shifters’s habit of being vague about time. Even when they set a specific time to do something, he often came late and rarely offered an excuse as to why.
She knew that he was probably with Tallow. His relationship devoured most of his time, though Ginnifer wasn’t in any position to complain. His close proximity to Tallow, who was high in the pack hierarchy, made it easy for him to obtain candid interviews and boatloads of footage. In fact, even with ample free time, Ginnifer didn’t have half as much usable film.
Unlike Boaz, she was still viewed as an outsider. Breeze was friendly, but almost always away from the den. Ginnifer actively avoided Kuva, as he tried to get more familiar with her each time she looked his way. She had made some headway with Indigo, mostly because of Marl.
Marl was the resident healer, a nurse in her “former life”, and also took care of the youngest children, the ones too little to be left on their own. There were a lot of young children in the den, but only a few under Marl’s care, as shifter children were remarkably self-sufficient once they reached the age of five or six. It was also around that age that they began spending much of their time outside the den, shepherded by the more physically capable Breeze.
To Ginnifer’s surprise, Indigo spent the better parts of her days aiding Marl. She was remarkably adept at mending wounds, and seemed to instinctively know what was ailing a person and how to fix it. She even spent time around the small children, where her hard exterior melted away, and she became an entirely different person, one who hummed songs, made silly faces, and kissed scratches and bruises.
Spending time with Indigo, Marl, and the kids, was Ginnifer’s own indulgence, as it didn’t contribute anything to her project. One of the few rules Zane had laid out when it came to filming was that they were not allowed to film the children, as they were prime targets for poachers.
Sighing, she stuffed her notebook in her bag and tossed it on the floor. She got up, remembering at the last minute to make the bed. She’d never been the greatest at keeping things tidy, and Breeze had threatened on more than one occasion, to make Ginnifer sleep in her own room if she didn’t start cleaning up behind herself. Ginnifer wasn’t eager to sleep in a cold bed all by herself, and she didn’t think she could manage to snag Boaz from Tallow’s room at this point.
She walked to the door, glancing back at the room as she pulled up the pelts. It didn’t look too bad. There were a few things out of place, but she’d clean them up when she got back from helping Marl and Indigo.
As she stepped through the doorway, she collided with something hard. She didn’t have to look up to know what, or rather, who it was. Zane’s scent was already doing sinister things to her body as she took a step back to take him in.
Swathed in his dark pelt, a day’s worth of stubble covered his jaw, and his lips
were slanted into a small smile. His dark hair was pushed to one side, so neatly that Ginnifer thought he might have combed it, though she’d never seen any of the males bothering with that sort of thing.
His golden eyes looked past her, his smile fading.
“What happened here?”
She had almost forgotten how sexy his voice was, and coupled with his scent, her heart began to thrum faster. She heard the words that he said, but they took a moment to register in her mind, as though she were translating them from a language she barely knew.
Following his gaze, she looked at the room again. “Uh, what?”
Smooth.
Zane stepped inside, letting the pelts fall over the doorway. “Is this all your stuff?”
Ginnifer wrapped her arms around her torso. “Not the stuff on the shelves, mostly.”
“I can see why Breeze is so pissed,” he said with a cringe.
Ginnifer kicked a few sheets of paper towards one of her bags. “It’s really not as bad as it looks. I can have it all cleaned up in an hour.”
“Sure,” he said slowly.
Ginnifer stepped in front of him, as if she could somehow block his view of the room. “What are you doing here, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be ignoring me?”
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” he said, his golden eyes falling to meet hers. She almost squirmed under the weight of his intense stare. “I actually came to apologize about last week. I was unfair to you.”
“I’m sure you’ll find some way to make it up to me.”
She’d meant the statement to be light and playful, but when she heard the implication in her own voice and saw desire flash across his face, she almost wished she could take it back. Almost.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” he said, his lips slanting. “And I do intend on making it up to you, now, in fact. If you’ll let me.”
She drew her lips in to wet them. Her voice was breathy. “You do?”
“I’m going to take you hunting.”
***
The muskoxen had only moved a short distance from where Zane had last spotted them earlier that day. He stopped on a cliff, far enough away that they could both see the prey clearly, but they wouldn’t be heard.
Capturing the Alpha (Shifters of Nunavut Book 1) Page 11
