Page 58 of Mortal Blood
“Yeah, why am I not surprised? Kallan, fuck off. Cole, stop your mate because if I have to, I’m going to put a hole in her throat.”
Abruptly, a bigger, slate gray wolf was blocking my path, and his warm, delicious scent filled my nostrils. I drew in a deep breath, drowning myself in the ambrosial odor, and felt the aggression easing out of me as he stepped closer, nuzzling my shoulder gently. I leaned into his soft touch, thrumming my contentment and desire.
And then my legs collapsed from under me.
I snorted in irritation from my undignified heap on the ground, and at once Cole was beside me, using his strength to support me as I struggled back to my feet.
“You two are sickening even as wolves. Fucking mated pairs.”
Mates, not mated,I tried to say, but only a series of unintelligible grunts made it out, and I managed to bite my tongue in the process.
Ryker looked smug. “Oh, yeah, I could definitely get used to you being in a form that can’t speak.”
I settled for glowering at him for all of three seconds until I realized what this meant.
I was a shifter. Somehow. It didn’t make any sense. My mom was a human—there was no doubt about that—and my dad a vampire. The council had done the tests to prove it. But they must have missed something, because there was no mistaking the fact that right now I was a fucking wolf.
A wolf. Shit.
A sharp, earthy scent rent the air beside me and I jerked my head round—my front leg almost slipping out from under me—and found myself staring at Cole in his human form.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “There’s nothing to panic about.”
A whine slipped from my lips and I backed up a half-step without meaning to.
“It’s going to take some getting used to, but this is a part of you, princess. You can handle it.”
He twisted round and looked up at Ryker. “Why now, though? She’s been trying to shift ever since the assessment lastyear. What’s different about today?”
“The alpha command,” Ryker said grimly. “She’s shifter—or at least some part of her is—so my command hit her just as hard as the rest of you.” He shook his head. “If I’d known it was that fucking simple I’d have done it months ago.”
The alpha command. So it was Ryker’s fault I was in this mess. Well, that figured.
Except…mess wasn’t the word I’d use. Not really. I could feel the raw power in my coiled muscles. Uncoordinated, sure, but strong. I wasn’t weak little Cali who couldn’t defend herself anymore.
Well, didn’t that just change things?
Chapter Nineteen
Over the nextfew weeks, I barely had a moment to myself—even less so than usual, that was. I’d been kept busier than ever learning how to control my wolf form, and celebrating its discovery with Cole. Okay, mostly with the celebrating thing. And most of our celebration was done in the privacy of our room. I couldn’t shift at will yet, only when Ryker forced me to shift, but Ihadmanaged to shift back once on my own. Learning to run on four legs was proving harder than I’d expected, though. I mean, if I reallywasa shifter—and seriously, how the hell had the council missed that? Because the whole turning into a wolf thing kinda proved I was—shouldn’t this all have been instinctive? Ryker, I could tell, thought the whole thing was as amusing as hell, and my lessons were split between trying to walk in a straight line, and resisting the urge to take a run at Kallan every time I caught his sniggering face turned my way, which was more often than not.
And then there was learning to use my newly enhanced senses, which sadly didn’t apply when I was in my human form. Ryker agreed it was weird that my senses were only on par with a normal human if I wasn’t shifted, but given the fact I wassupposedto be a dhampir, weird was getting to be kind of relative.
And if weird had been the extent of my problems, I’d have been elated. Because the wolf thing? Having the coordination of a two-day-old pup aside, that was pretty damn cool. The Thaden situation, on the other hand, was a mess. I wasn’t sure if he regretted what we’d done together, or what he’d told me the morning after, or if he just hated me on principle, but the rejection stung just the same. And I’d promised myself I wouldn’t waste any more time even thinking about it—it wasn’tlike I didn’t have enough to occupy me, what with Cole and shifting and Cole’s reaction to my shifting—but he just kept creeping back into my thoughts.
“If brooding could fix your problems, they’d have been fixed a long time ago,” Ling said over the top of a dusty tome.
“I am not br—Oh, I’m so brooding again, aren’t I?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t know how he manages to get under my skin like this.”
Ling lowered her book. “Girl, after everything you’ve been through, it’d be strange if hedidn’tget under your skin.”
“At least Thessalia has stopped giving me a hard time.”
“Firmly in the plus column,” Ling agreed with a shudder. I might have been allies with Thessalia for a brief time last year, but we were never going to be friends. Which was fine by me—I was quite happy being ignored, thank you very much. People ignoring you tended not to be actively trying to kill you. Which, as Ling so eloquently put it, was firmly in the plus column.
