by A. K. Morgen
Dace bowed his head. “I don’t know why, Arionna.”
“What are you, Dace?”
I knew what he was going to say before he ever opened his mouth. That knowledge had beat at me all night long, demanding I listen to the little cues I’d been given since meeting him. That I pay attention to the animal that leapt and snarled, and stared and waited. The one that defended me without a moment’s hesitation tonight, and bound me to this confusing person who just might have owned half my soul from the moment our eyes first met.
I didn’t need confirmation of any of that, but Dace gave it to me anyway.
“I’m the wolf you saw.” He closed his eyes, his shoulders slumping.
I felt no surprise, no shock, and no fear when he said it. Nothing at all. I was numb inside and out, like everything I’d suspected had been confirmed. And I guess it had. I’d grasped at this truth from the moment I met him. I’d simply been too ignorant to understand.
I wanted to cry, but not for myself. Dace looked defeated, as if his admission cost him everything. Remembering the way his fear whispered across my mind, choking me, I thought maybe it had.
“How? It’s … .” I shook my head, trying to dislodge words and make my mouth work. I wanted to tell him he was crazy, that no one in their right mind would believe him. That he could not be a wolf any more than I could be a fairy. I couldn’t make myself voice those denials though, because it seemed less possible that he was merely human than it did that he was a wolf, or half a wolf, or whatever term defined him.
“What am I?” I whispered. The question hurt. For my entire life, the question had always been who am I, and now it wasn’t. Somewhere between meeting Dace and waking twenty minutes ago, everything I knew about myself, people, and the world around me had changed. I was a what now, not a who, and knowing that didn’t scare me nearly enough.
“Human,” he answered.
I wanted to believe him. I desperately wanted to believe him, but … “You felt it. Whatever happened to me tonight, you felt it.”
“I did,” he said, looking at me. His eyes were wide and sad. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not you, Arionna. It doesn’t mean you’re like me.”
“Maybe,” I whispered. “But I think maybe I’m supposed to be.” The truth of my words settled over me, and I couldn’t escape them. I was supposed to be like Dace. I’d felt the thing in me at the rave, demanding I hurt Ronan, that I force him out of my head and kill him. As unfamiliar and frightening as the urge had been, it had been by no means foreign. Maybe I hadn’t felt that part of myself before meeting Dace, but it had always been there, or should have been. Now I just had a big, gaping hole where that piece went. So I might not have been like Dace, but I was supposed to be, and for some reason I didn’t understand, I wasn’t. That piece was gone. Left somewhere I couldn’t follow.
That hurt.
“I don’t know,” he said. This time, he wasn’t trying to evade me. He honestly didn’t know the answer, and I think that hurt him as much as it did me.
”Are you a werewolf?” I looked up at him, the word quivering uncertainly between us.
”No, I’m a shifter. A shapeshifter.”
“A shapeshifter.” I tried out the word, feeling the shape of it on my lips. The word felt right, more right than werewolf had. I looked up at him, trying to understand, to make sense of this new world and his place in it. “Is there a difference?”
He didn’t say anything for the longest time. He simply looked at me as if trying to find some answer in my eyes, on my face, somewhere. He sighed and shook his head. I knew he hadn’t found the answer one way or another.
“How much do you want to know?”
”I … .” I thought about his question for a minute. How much did I want to know? Before he’d walked in the door, I would have said everything, but that wasn’t true anymore. Now that he stood in front of me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any of it, or that I could handle knowing any more right now. My entire life had changed in the course of a few hours, and I’d had no choice in the matter. Did I have a choice now?
”Does it matter?” I looked up at him. “Will it make a difference if I know everything or not, Dace? Will knowing change anything?” I couldn’t hide the bitter edge to my question. I wasn’t angry, not really, but he’d known. As with Chelle, I could understand him not telling me about him, but he’d known all along that there was something different about me, and he’d let me find out the way I had.
I resented him for that.
He hesitated a minute, closed his eyes, and then opened them again immediately. “Do you trust me?”
And then there was that. Despite the fact he hadn’t told me any of this, and despite the fact I barely knew him, I did trust him. I trusted him instinctively, implicitly, without hesitation. I shouldn’t have. Part of me didn’t even want to. But I did anyway.
“Do you trust me not to hurt you?” he asked when I didn’t answer right away.
“I think you may be the only person here that can hurt me, Dace,” I whispered. “And I think that maybe it would kill you if you ever did. Do I trust you? I don’t think I ever had a choice.”
“Does that scare you?” he asked softly, taking an involuntary step toward me, his eyes glowing like they seemed to do when I got too close, broke through too many of his barriers.
“Should it?” I climbed to my feet and then walked toward him, knowing he could back away from me no more than I could stop walking toward him. I needed him to ground me, to pull me back into reality and make sense of the dichotic push and pull going on inside me. The one taking everything I knew and reordering it in new, no longer impossible ways.
“It should terrify you, Arionna,” he whispered, reaching out to touch a strand of my hair when I stopped in front of him. Auburn wisps slipped through his fingers. “I should terrify you.”
“You don’t,” I said, allowing the truth of that statement to fill me up. There were a million things I was afraid of, but he still wasn’t one of them. Nor was that wolf side of him, despite everything I’d learned tonight. Dace may have held the power to hurt me, but he wouldn’t, because he didn’t have any more choice than I did. We were connected to one another, and that meant something. For both of us, I think. Whoever we were, and whatever this new life had in store for us, we were meant to face it together. I couldn’t doubt that. “You don’t frighten me at all.”
He groaned when the truth of my statement flowed through me and into the little corner of my soul that belonged to him. His eyes fell closed. “You don’t understand what you’re saying. Until you, I could control the wolf, keep him contained. But when you’re around, I lose the will to even try controlling him, Arionna. I can’t even control myself.” He shook his head as if frustrated, but didn’t back away from me. His voice was low, the confession seeming pulled from somewhere deep inside. “I want to let him slip his bonds so we can both have you. Both possess you. I want to throw you to the ground and bury us inside of you until you’re screaming for us to stop.”
My body clenched tight. Desire flared, licking me in places I’d never even been touched. In that moment, despite everything, I wanted exactly the same thing. I belonged to him, and nothing at all would change that. Why fight it? Why try to fight it when I didn’t want to?
I stepped closer and laid one hand over his heart. It hammered against my palm. “It doesn’t matter, Dace. None of it matters. I don’t think it would even if I wanted it to because I feel you in my head. I feel whatever is inside me, and whatever is inside you, and it feels right. I feel what you want from me, and I want it too. I want you so much I can’t think straight,” I said, wanting to shock him as I suspect he’d wanted to shock me with his confession.
My plan worked.
His heart raced harder beneath my palm, and his gaze didn’t waver from mine.
“At the end of the day, does what you are change anything at all?” I shook my head slowly. “Maybe it should, but I want this enough not to
care if it does or not.”
“You shouldn’t,” he muttered, jerking me into his arms. He buried his face in my hair, exhaling a shaky breath.
His skin was hard heat beneath me, and everything felt better. The world hadn’t been knocked out of orbit. I was still grounded in reality. This reality was new and confusing, certainly, but still reality.
“I don’t care,” I said, looking up at him even as my arms went around him. “I know I should, but I don’t. For a thousand reasons I don’t even understand, I don’t. I want you, Dace.”
”You don’t know what you’re asking of me,” he groaned, a half tortured sound.
“I don’t care what I’m asking.” And I didn’t. It didn’t matter what he was or whether he could control the wolf or not. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t told me sooner or that my entire world had stopped making sense the minute I saw him on the quad. It didn’t matter that something bad waited for us like a serial killer in the dark. I didn’t care if this was impossible or dangerous, or if wanting him made me stupid. I did want him. I think I’d wanted him from the minute I saw him, and nothing I learned would change that any at all for me.
Was our connection fate? I didn’t know, but whether fate or destiny, or something else altogether demanded it, this strange new reality belonged to me and Dace, and that mattered to me a whole hell of a lot.
He looked down at me, his expression severe. Every muscle in his body tensed. And then he sighed, exhaling so completely I was certain he had no breath left. Just like that, he stopped fighting me.
“So be it,” he said, dragging me up against his chest.
Chapter Ten
I stayed with Dace all night. By silent agreement, we didn’t broach any of those subjects hanging like storm clouds over our heads. We couldn’t hold them off forever, but for one night at least, we agreed not to talk about them any further unless we had to.
Instead, we talked about all the little things that had shaped us over the years and turned us into the people we were. Of our individual childhoods and our parents, of our hopes and our dreams. I learned more about him as we sat together, I think, than most people learn about another in an entire lifetime.
As it had been from the very beginning, nothing he told me about him surprised me. Listening to him talk felt curiously like rereading a favorite book from childhood. I might have forgotten the exact details over the years, but as soon as I turned to that first page and started reading, everything came trickling back in.
I think he felt the same way about me.
I told him about my mom and all of the fears and sorrows losing her brought up. “I don’t know how to do this,” I confessed, tears running down my face. “I don’t know how to be strong. Some days it hurts so much I can’t breathe.”
He wiped away my tears and pressed his lips to my temple. “You don’t have to be strong,” he said when I sniffled. “You lost your mom, Arionna. That’s supposed to hurt.”
We sat quietly for a minute before he spoke again. “My dad knew about me,” he said. “He obsessed over legends and myths when he realized I was different, trying to find answers. He drove himself crazy looking for a cure. He dragged me halfway around the world, hoping someone could fix me, make me normal. Eventually, the obsession overwhelmed him and he cracked. By the time he died, he didn’t even remember why he was looking. Sometimes I’m not even sure he remembered me.”
“How did he die?”
“He was shot during a convenience store robbery three days after my fourteenth birthday. Wrong place, wrong time.” He said it so softly, so matter-of-factly, that I couldn’t help but hurt for him and the fourteen-year-old boy he’d been when his dad died.
I snuggled closer and held him a little tighter, mourning his loss as much as mine. His confession was illuminating. Underneath everything, Dace was as vulnerable as me, maybe more so. His dad’s obsession with curing Dace wounded him deeply and made him fear himself. That wasn’t fair.
Being different wasn’t his fault. He didn’t ask to be different. He didn’t get to decide whether he wanted to be a shifter or not. His life was as much out of his hands as meeting him had been out of mine. I think knowing that made everything a little easier for me. His life was as confusing, as frightening, as mine.
“He wasn’t a shifter?” I asked.
Dace shook his head, his chin bumping slightly against the top of my head.
“Does anyone else in your family have the ability?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never had any family outside of my parents. Mom died when I was seven, and then Dad died. I was on my own after that.”
“Oh,” I said, my heart aching for him. He’d been on his own at fourteen. At nineteen, I wasn’t even ready for that. I couldn’t imagine how much harder the experience had been for him.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he said, trying to reassure me, I think. “My parents had money. It made things easier.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
”Have you ever heard the Berserker legends?” he asked.
“Um …” I tried to remember if Dad had ever talked about Berserkers. He’d talked about so many myths and legends over the years, I couldn’t keep them straight. “I don’t think so.”
“Well,”—Dace shifted around behind me before he continued—”according to Norse mythology, the greatest of warriors could take wolf form during battle. A sort of blood lust would come over them and they would lose themselves, lose reality, and shift into wolves. In that form, they were the greatest weapons the Norse people possessed. They were lethal, and supposedly immune to the weapons of man. Flame, sword … ” He paused a minute as if gathering his thoughts. ”My father had this theory that those of us who can shift are reincarnations of those warriors, or others like them in legends around the world. Since shapeshifters were supposedly immune to the weapons of man, I guess it made sense to him that they would be reincarnated. They were eternal. He viewed it as a punishment from God for defying His laws.”
“And what do you think?” I asked, tilting my head back so I could see his face.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I knew his mind was somewhere else, somewhere far off.
“I guess”—he looked down at me—”that he may have been right. Great responsibilities usually are some kind of punishment, aren’t they?”
How could I answer that? My knowledge of responsibility was nowhere near the same as his. Responsibility for me had always been doing my chores, going to school, being a good girl. Responsibility hadn’t meant controlling a part of myself that I feared would be destructive if ever let loose, or a part of me my father viewed as a punishment from God. I couldn’t begin to process how much that had to have hurt Dace. “Are you immune to weapons in wolf form?”
“No,” he said hesitantly, his eyes wary. “I’m bigger, stronger. I heal faster. But no, I’m not immune.” He paused a minute. “Not that I know of, anyway.”
Not sure what he meant by that, I opted not to question him any further, not right then. He changed when talking about that other side of himself. I could tell he accepted the wolf, or was simply resigned to it, but he still feared the animal, still didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t help but think that was because of his father. Dace had been taught to fear himself by someone who should have taught him to embrace the amazing person he would grow up to be.
“Do you think I’m a shifter?” I asked.
“If you were, you’d know. I think you’re just familiar. Maybe we’re soul mates like you thought at one point.”
I barely contained the urge to groan at that. I’d known when he brought that possibility up in the woods that he’d heard my thoughts on the subject. Funny thing though, the theory sounded a whole lot less ridiculous now than it had when I’d first considered the subject.
“Maybe one of your ancestors possessed the ability,” he continued. “Maybe you had the potential in another life. Maybe the wolf simp
ly projected what he wanted and wires crossed in there somewhere. There are a lot of possibilities for what happened tonight.”
“How would I know if I was a shifter?”
“You’d have felt the animal in there from the day you were born. Most don’t change until puberty, but you’d have always known the animal existed.”
“Oh.” I mulled that over, and like so much else, decided it didn’t matter. Whatever had wanted to rip out Ronan’s throat was gone now. Maybe the feeling had been nothing more than crossed wires and the wolf’s desires projected onto me. I didn’t believe that, but I couldn’t do anything about it either. Like so much else in my life, I couldn’t change the situation, fix it, or make the problem go away. My life was what it was, and I had to learn to deal with that.
“Where do we go from here?”
Dace sighed, his breath stirring little hairs near my ear. “Where do you want to go from here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted slow and easy, but I doubted we had that option, and I didn’t know where that left us or what it left. Friends seemed too little. Boyfriend seemed too fast.
“Dating,” Dace said carefully, and I knew he’d heard my thoughts.
Dating. Not just friends, but not quite boyfriend and girlfriend either. I nodded in slow agreement. “Dating,” I repeated.
Dace drove me home with dawn breaking on the horizon. He kissed me on the forehead at the front door before turning and jogging back to his Jeep.
I stumbled upstairs then crawled into bed, too exhausted to do anything more than kick off my shoes. My eyes closed the instant my head hit the pillow, and I was out.
I awoke at nearly eleven, feeling better than I’d felt at any time since opening the door to the officer who told me about Mom. I think I may have felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. Given the past twenty-four hours, and my impending sense of doom, I’m not sure what made me feel that way. A simple conscious decision, maybe?
