Page 64 of A Lion's Heart
“Nisa.”
Familiar hands touched her shoulders and Nisa leaned into them. Her eyes were closed, her hands shaking as the scene cleared from her mind, the remnants of it still sifting through her soul.
“Let’s go in here and sit down,” her mother said and guided her down the hall to another room.
This was a more homely place with tiled floors and deep cushioned hunter green couches. The walls were painted a warm orange color, a large screen TV was on one wall, a mahogany based bar in a corner. Nisa sat and Kalina did the same.
Just like when she was a child waking from a bad dream, Kalina kept one arm around Nisa’s shoulders and grasped Nisa’s hand with her free one.
“It’s been an eventful night,” Kalina began when Nisa was still trying to get the right words to form in her mind.
“It’s been an eventful week,” she said. “Or more like the last six months.”
“What do you mean?”
Nisa looked to her mother. To the familiar hazel eyes and bronze hued short hair. She knew every part of her mother’s beautiful face and the different tones of her voice. Her mother’s scent was unique, the sound of her heartbeat still welcomed even though Nisa was now an adult.
“Did you know that Decan was at Headquarters all that time?” Nisa asked her. “Did you know he was in our home?”
Kalina replied immediately, “I knew when he first arrived. I knew of the meetings your father was having with him. And I knew of the plan to send him here with you.”
“I knew too,” she said and then sighed. “I didn’t then, but now, thinking back, there were times that I felt different.”
Her mother’s lips lifted in a soft smile. “You were awakening.”
“No,” Nisa answered immediately. “I had my awakening long before that. You said I was early with my first shift, but it was still before I met Decan.”
“I am speaking of another level of awakening,” Kalina told her. “Think about it as a new awareness of yourself and everything around you.”
Nisa waited a beat, recalling the times she’d felt tense in the last six months and that she’d attempted to do as she always did and please herself. It had grown increasingly harder to reach her own precipice. Her body wanted more. Even her mind had changed. When she would lay down to sleep at night her thoughts that normally circled around creating something new and innovative for the shifters, or fighting for the shifters, or trying to figure out how to change the world for the shifters. But with each night lately, her mind had grasped the fact that she was lying alone in a bed. That was why she hadn’t minded when Decan first lay in the bed beside her and why she’d accepted these past nights that she spent in his arms.
“The awakening of a shifter female and a mate,” Kalina continued rubbing her fingers over her daughter’s. “It’s different than simply accepting that you are a shapeshifter, Nisa. Because mine came so late in my life, my emotions and actions were different. But yours, I could see it blossoming in you in the weeks before your father announced this trip.”
“You knew I had a mate out there and that I would soon find him?” Nisa asked because as much as she prided herself on knowing about the Shadow Shifters, she was now accepting that she hadn’t paid nearly as much attention to the origin of the shifter mating as she should have.
“No,” Kalina said with a slow shake of her head. “I didn’t know who. Not at the time. I just knew that something was changing in you. I hoped that this mission would bring you closer to your place in this world. I think it did.”
Nisa slipped her hand from her mother’s and brought her fingers to rub her temples. She didn’t know what to think at this moment, or how to come to terms with all that had happened in a seemingly short amount of time.
“He’s not who I thought he was,” she said after a few moments. “He’s done things…unsanctioned things from what Mackey just said.”
“You believe the human who has created camps to house the shifters that he captures, then tortures and kills them?”
Her mother’s question was spoken in a level tone as if to soften the blow of shock she had in her daughter. Nisa rested her elbows on her knees and leaned forward.
“Decan did not deny the accusations. He’s been keeping secrets this whole time,” she said. “From me, from dad and the Assembly.”
She was speaking specifically of Keller’s bunker and all the things that Mackey had said Keller and Decan had done in the past year. None of it was mentioned in the databases. There was no record of any assignment that Decan and Keller were on that would have taken them above ground or anywhere near Mackey and his camps. None.
The comlink on Kalina’s wrist buzzed and she looked down before dropping her arm from Nisa and standing.
“Ary has news about Cole,” she told Nisa. “But before I go I want you to think about something.”
Nisa stood as well because she planned to go to the medical center with her mother.
Kalina pushed back the hair that had fallen onto Nisa’s forehead. She touched her daughter’s cheek as she smiled gently at her.
“Finding a mate is unlike any other experience a shifter will ever have. There is no rule book as to when or how it occurs. It is just there one day and you are tasked with believing and accepting.”
