Page 24 of Mated to Team Shadow

"Look," he said in just as low a tone, "are you not getting it? There are four shifters here who think one woman is their mate. There is only one of two ways this goes down. One—we fight each other to the death. Do you want that?"

"No, of course not."

"So there's door number two. We share."

"What! Are you out of your ever-loving mind?"

"Possibly. But I can't see any other way. It's that, or this unit breaks apart. And if your cat is as insistent as mine, there is no way any of us can walk away from her."

"I hate this idea."

"I'm not fond of it myself. Do you have another option?"

I scratched my day's scruff and couldn't come up with a replacement idea. With my glance at Damon and Kane cradling my mate between them, my jaguar growled within. But Damon, Kane, and Ryker were closer than brothers to me. We'd been through hell and back. You could say that I loved them as brothers, and I wanted them to have every good thing possible.

Jeanine was a good thing. Loving Jeanine was better.

"But isn't it strange," I said to Ryker, "that all four of us see her as our mate?"

"Hell, Gunner, what do we know about how we became what we are?"

"Apparently born that way," I said. "At least that is what the Navy researchers said."

"Yeah. I wondered about that too. They didn't seem especially shocked."

Ryker was right. They weren't. The researchers' treatment of us had been routinely clinical as if they'd done all of the work before.

"Do you think there are others like us?"

"I have seen no SEAL units that match us in strength or agility. But when they had us in research, I heard of one of the Navy doctors talk about a group of guys who could be shifters who left the service. No one had seen them since."

"Shifters?"

"Where do you think I got the term?"

Come to think of it, it was Ryker who called us shifters first.

Jeanine's steady breathing told me she'd tumbled into sleep. Kane and Damon's rumbling purrs told me they would sleep soon. The full moon rose in the sky shining like a huge white pearl in the darkness.

"I used to study ancient mythology," said Ryker. "Jaguars feature heavily in pre-Colombian mythology. There is a region in Colombia, around the town of San Agustin where there are tons of jaguar statues, with faces of men, but large eyes and fangs of cats. What we know of jaguar mythology is that the central god is a jaguar god. He is a god of fire who rules the underworld at night and shines his light on the earth during the day. His wife is a jaguar goddess, who rules over midwifery and war."

"So the wife works two jobs, eh?" I said.

Ryker shrugged.

"I guess it keeps her out of trouble," he said with a wry smile.

"There are other depictions of jaguar demi-gods as warriors and protectors. We don't know a lot about their stories, but they were important in different myths. There are plenty of representations of them carved in stone. Maybe they weren't gods, Gunner. Perhaps they were a separate ancient sentient race."

"Come on," I snorted.

"In all the myths of the world, there is always at least one god that's half-beast and half-man. Egypt had Anubis, the jackal-headed god. India has Lord Ganesha, the god with the elephant head. In Mesopotamia, there was Ereshkigal, the winged goddess of the underworld who had taloned feet. Greek gods turned into animals at will, like Zeus, who, if he couldn't seduce a woman with his human form, found an animal form that would do the trick. The list goes on, Gunner. Why would humans associate so many deities with beastly features? I suspect at one time shifters like us could have lived in greater numbers before humans populated every corner of the globe."

"I've never thought about it, Ryker. I found out what I was ten years ago when they brought me to the facility to work with you guys."

"I always thought I was different," said Ryker. "I didn't know how different. During my teenage years, I had odd blackouts. My foster parents didn't know what to do with me, but then they were going through their own troubles. They had lots of fights, and I'd get restless and slip out of the house to get away from it. They weren't bad people, just too little money and too many kids in the house. I think it relieved them when I asked to get the state's permission to sign up for the Marines at seventeen."

"I didn't have that experience. My adoptive parents were crazy in love and had more than enough to spoil me rotten. It did not thrill them I wanted to sign up for the Navy. But I wasn't that good of a student and couldn't see myself going to college, and I wanted to see the world, so the Navy it was. So you could say that I mostly had a stress-free life until I signed up."

---