Page 44 of The Stone Initiation
Serath’s gaze locked on him and darkened with fury. He bared his teeth in a fresh roar aimed at my friend. Orix forgotten, his body bunched ready to launch into the air.
At us!
“Serath!” Orix grabbed him around the waist and yanked him back, pinning a thick forearm across the leader’s neck. Serath growled, snarled, and bucked, his gaze flicking from Touron to me.
“What the fuck?” Touron said.
I caught the flash of Orix’s ocean blues, filled with a storm and aimed at me. “Go!” The command had the initiates backing up, but there was no doubt in my mind that the order was for me.
Touron must have come to the same conclusion because he took us higher, swerving toward the dorms, his arms wrapped tight around me.
We landed on the lawn in front of our residences, but Touron didn’t set me down straight away.
“You’re shaking,” he said. “And…you’re warm.” His grip on me tightened a fraction, his green eyes darkening as he tracked across my face. “You smell…so good.” His voice dropped an octave, thickening with emotion that made my insides thrum.
“You need to put her down,” Sharniza said. “Now!”
Touron blinked sharply and shook his head before carefully setting me on my feet. Palia was there to brace me when my knees gave way.
Touron took a step back, exhaling mist as if to clear his senses. “Damn. That was…”
“Um, Touron, you might want to…” Palia waved a hand toward his crotch where the fabric of the Lastonflex was working exceptionally hard.
He looked down and cursed. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”
My mind was fuzzy, my body throbbing in the strange needy way it did when I needed to get off but multiplied by ten. “What just happened?”
“It makes no sense,” Sharniza said, “and it shouldn’t be possible for youorfor him, Serath’s a sigma after all, but I think…I think you’re his mate.”
* * *
The kitchens were occupiedby a couple of gargoyles I didn’t know but we’d seen in class. They were busy cooking chicken on the stove. Sharniza snorted in annoyance.
“I know where we can go to talk,” Palia said. “There’s a library with a study room we could use.”
“Trust you to have found the books,” Ginia muttered.
Palia led us through the entrance hall where we took an arch onto a dingy corridor. A wooden door halfway down opened into a booklined space dotted with seats and a couple of study tables.
“There’s a room over here.” Palia crossed to another door that hid a smaller room housing two tables and adjustable lamps.
We squeezed inside and Ginia shut the door.
“How are you feeling now?” Sharniza asked me.
How was I feeling? “Confused.” My mind reeled, processing emotions and sensations that Serath had somehow evoked, not to mention Sharniza’s conclusion that he was my mate.
“This makes no sense,” Palia said. “Sigma’s don’t have mates. They never have.”
“Never doesn’t mean they can’t,” Touron added. He leaned across the table and cracked open one of the windows. “It’s warm in here, right?”
“There is no other explanation for Serath’s reaction to Cam,” Sharniza said eyeing me with interest. “Maybe your half-blood genes make you…different somehow.”
“Halfbloods don’t conform to alpha, beta or omega status,” Palia said as if quoting from a textbook. “In fact, not much is known about them at all.” She looked deflated as if she’d let us down somehow.
“I’m hardly the only half-blood out there? Surely if sigmas could mate with halfbloods, it would have happened before now.”
“They don’t come through Stonehaven often, so maybe sigmas don’t usually come across them,” Palia suggested.
