One True Mate 1: Shifter's Sacrifice (21 page)

Khain The Destroyer, his father, stood in front of him, big arms flexed, powerful hands clenched, awful face tense and angry. “We need more
foxen
! You have sons and daughters. Call them to me!”

Boe took a deep breath. He was over three hundred years old, but his Father was as old as time, and not to be disobeyed. “Father, I cannot. You must call them yourself. They believe me to be dust.”

Khain paced through the grand palace they lived in, the rounded temples towering over even his head, but his footfalls fell flat and empty in the space, reminding Boe of their lives there. Khain rounded on Boe, his black eyes narrowed, his jagged mouth snarling. “They do not answer. Why would that be?”

Boe tried to make himself as small as possible. “I do not know, father. Maybe the march of time has whittled your connection with them. Perhaps you are still weak from your fight with the angel and they cannot hear you.”

Khain whirled, his expensive suit transforming into black robes, then white robes, then a scarlet red bodysuit. This one scared Boe most of all, as it had no place in any space or time. Khain faced the faded metal enclosure in the middle of the room.

“Or perhaps inbreeding has weakened my line. You know that bitch has a power to draw
shiften
to her that I could never pull off. Maybe all my sons and daughters have flocked to her.”

Boe said nothing. He would not remind Father that all the daughters were gone, female
foxen
along with the rest of the
shiften
. Only males remained.

Ah, but maybe that would cheer Father up. “Father, if you could just wait another fifty years, the
shiften
will have all begun to grow old and crumble, exactly the way you planned it. There is no need for you to try so hard. The females are gone. The
shiften
are dying.”

Khain crossed the room with eerie speed, speed that made Boe slightly sick to his stomach. He snatched Boe up by the scruff of his neck and screamed into his face. “Do you not recall the
Promised
? If even one of them is found, the
shiften
can rebuild. No one knows how many young the progeny of an angel can have, or how short their gestation! Or what the childhood of a half-
shiften
, part-angel will look like! We could be facing a new
shiften
army with powers we’ve never dreamed of in only a few short years.”

Boe nodded his head. His memory was failing him in his old age. He should have died a century ago, but Father kept him alive, somehow. He was ready for the comforting draw of The Light, as even
foxen
were allowed to retire there, and his mind was trying to beat him there. “Then consume the angel, Father. Consume the angel and take the energy he gives you.”

Khain dropped Boe to the floor, where he landed smartly on hands and feet. “There is nothing in the signs about consuming an angel. True, it will give me energy, but I cannot do it until I’ve mated with at least one
Promised,
to continue moving the signs forward towards our end goal. That is why I need another
Foxen
.”

Boe shook, and tried to work out in his mind what should be done. “What about the first Promised? You know where she is.”

Khain turned and shot a stream of fire from his hand out one of the windows, not starting a fire, but putting one out. One that was creeping too close to their home. He paced around the long white balcony that circled the special metal enclosure in the middle of the circular floor. He looked out the windows, shooting fire seemingly randomly, then pausing to walk in close and knock on the enclosure. Boe watched him, thinking him agitated, but then wondering if maybe he was scared of something. Boe had never known his father to be scared of anything, not even his nemesis. Finally Khain spoke and his voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I do not believe I can get to her. She evaded me twice and I know she is with the
wolven
now. I probably led them right to her.” He clenched his hands into his palms and Boe saw living blood spill to the floor and seek a body. He scrambled backwards.

“You are right then, Sire, we must find another Promised. Let me go into the
Ula
, I will get you a
foxen
.”

Khain fixed him with a stare and Boe knew he was going nowhere. “I want the first Promised. The best Promised. The one who is to be queen. Taking her would destroy the
shiften
as surely as the
vahiy
will.”

Boe turned the idea over in his mind. “Is there no way to get her away from the
wolven
? No way to control her? Humans have strong bonds to their families, father, and I’m sure half-humans are no different.”

Khain stared at him and Boe gathered himself to run. No matter how sure the punishment, he could not stay his instincts to try to escape it.

But Khain was not mad. He did not smile, but his dark hair lifted off his head at the ends and he floated above the floor, flying almost to the ceiling in elation.

“I need another
foxen
,” he growled, and then he disappeared from sight.

Boe sighed and started into his room. Things would be quiet for a while.

He hoped.

Trevor stared at Ella on the pillow next to him, admiring her quiet, relaxed form and the curve her hip made under the sheet. He felt his cock jump and he averted his eyes quickly. This was not the time. But then she reached forward and touched him lightly, her eyes still closed, her hands feeling their way to his center.

She touched him, stroked him, made him hard, but spoke softly, her words ignoring her hands. “Why do you need these one true mates? Aren’t there female
shiften
?”

Trevor bucked his hips forward, not wanting her to stop, but unwilling to not answer her. “There were. Khain killed them twenty-eight years ago.”

She did stop the bliss she was giving him with her hands then, opening her eyes in alarm to stare at him. “All of them?”

“Yes,” he said softly.

Her eyes drifted closed again and she continued to stroke him, almost thoughtfully. “You believe I am one of them? The mates?”

He bit his lip in an effort to be able to continue to talk to her while she was touching him. “You could be. You’re the right age. There’s something between us that I can’t deny. But you aren’t named after a plant and you know who your father is, so unless─”

“If I’m one of these mates, am I your mate, meant for you alone?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, the thought that she might not be making him dizzy with fear for the first time since the war camps. She had to be his and his alone. “We don’t know how it works since we haven’t found any yet.”

She opened her eyes again. “None?”

He shook his head, holding his lower lip between his teeth as her palms drug against his sensitive flesh, taking him somewhere good.

She threw her leg over his hip and quietly pushed his cock inside her core, making him gasp and shudder. She felt so good, so right, like she
had
been made just for him. “My first name is Fern,” she said quietly, her eyes still closed, as she pressed herself onto him. “My mother always hated it and I knew that, so I thought if I made her call me something else she would hate me less. I wouldn’t answer to Fern, even if they spanked me, so finally, they agreed to call me Ella, which is from my middle name, Gabriela.”

Trevor’s normally iron stomach fluttered and his pulse raised. He thrust into his mate, the only mate he wanted, feeling the strong connection between them solidify, become steel.

She opened her eyes halfway and peeked at him. “Sorry.” He tried to tell her not to say that but she rushed on. “I lied to you. I didn’t know my father. I don’t look like him. I don’t think my own mother even knew who he was. In fact, my sister used to tell me that all the time, that I didn’t even have a daddy. She didn’t have one either, but at least she had a picture. I didn’t even have that.”

Ella closed her eyes again and Trevor pulled her close to him, slowing his thrusts for just a moment and doing his best to kiss her sadness away, then flipping her around, his stomach to her back, and doing his best to distract her from everything that was piled atop her at that moment.

No matter what happened, no matter what Wade told him in the morning, she was his mate, if she would have him.

Ella woke to the sound of someone’s phone buzzing. Trevor’s. He was already out of the bed and typing away on it. She pulled herself into a sitting position, noting how sore her lower body was. She’d only had sex one other time in her life, a hurry-up-and-get-rid-of-it bid to lose her virginity that she’d never regretted, but always knew had been lacking. Trevor had made her feel every inch of what she had been missing, making her come until her body gave up.

She watched his strong, lean, muscular body move as he paced across the floor, wondering if she dared try to entice him back to bed.

He turned to her. “That’s Wade. He wants us in his office in thirty minutes.”

Ella felt a ripple of fear go up her spine. What if she was tested by Wade, and found lacking? Would Trevor leave her?

She pushed the thought to the side and stood, pulling clothes out of the dresser. “Do we have time for breakfast?” Her eyes went wide. “Oh no, the dogs, we didn’t let them out last night or anything. And all they have to drink from is the water in the cat bowl.”

Trevor chuckled. “Wolves. Don’t worry about them, they’re very resourceful.”

Ella pulled her clothes on quickly. “Wolves? So they are shifters too? Why don’t they ever shift?”

“
Shiften,
” he said automatically and he looked at the floor.

Ella stepped to him quickly, running her hands up his arms. “What? What’s wrong.”

“They can’t shift. My fault, actually.”

Ella peered up into his face. “How could it possibly be your fault?”

He didn’t speak for a moment, then pushed the story out in a rush. “We were all part of the same litter. Trevor, Troy, me, and our sister Treena. Treena and I were conjoined at the back. It was a big deal for a couple of reasons, one of them being because only one of us could live. We shared certain parts of our circulatory system that one of us had to get most of and the other would almost certainly die during the surgery to separate us, so they had to choose which one. And to make matters worse, there was a prophecy spoken the day we were born that made our parents believe that one of us would be the one to kill Khain, so not only did they have to decide which one of us would live, they had to choose the right one, or the entire race would suffer.”

Ella gasped and held her hand over her mouth. “Oh, how awful.”

“Yeah, so while our parents were dealing with that, they left newborn Trent and Troy with an uncle.
Wolven
pups learn to shift by imitating the scent of the hormones adult
wolven
release when they shift. Pups can be born in human form or wolf form and the parents shift around them constantly until they shift at least once into the other form. No one thought to tell our unmated uncle that. He hadn’t realized it and he never shifted. By the time my parents gathered them up, they were stuck as wolf pups and no amount of shifting in front of them would get them to shift into humans. There’s more to it, but that’s the basics.”

“Oh no,” Ella said, and her eyes filled with tears. “They can’t ever shift?”

“They never have yet.”

Ella buried her face into Trevor’s chest, his strangely hairless chest. “Are they sad about it?”

Trevor shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Ella looked up at him. “You’ve never asked?”

He looked out the window. “No.”

“Because you think it’s your fault.”

He didn’t say anything.

Ella wiped her eyes. “Trevor, you couldn’t help any of that.”

“I know,” he said brusquely and pulled away from her, gathering up his clothes and pulling them on. Ella finished dressing also, lost in her own thoughts. She would try to comfort him later, when he responded to her again.

They made their way quietly down the stairs, to where the dogs─ wolves were curled up on the couch. Ella smiled at the sight of Smokey curled up on top of Trent, a perfect imitation if you overlooked the fact that Trent was a dog and about one hundred and fifty pounds heavier than Smokey.

She picked Smokey up and cradled him in her arms. “Where were you last night? We missed you.”

Smokey meowed once and pushed off of her body, wanting back down to the couch, wanting back down to Trent.

Time for breakfast
, she heard Trevor say in her mind.
Wade wants us in to the station in thirty minutes.

Taco salad or bacon and eggs?
she tried to broadcast from her own mind.

Trent and Troy’s heads came up so quickly, identical looks of canine surprise on their faces, that she had to smile. Trevor laughed out loud from behind her and pulled open the refrigerator.

What’s the matter, boys, you never spoke to a lady before?

Ella held Trevor’s hand as he pulled her into the police station and down a long and sterile hallway. Cops were staring at her from everywhere. Trevor sent the dogs─ wolves somewhere, then turned in the opposite direction. “Don’t be nervous,” he told her.

“Sorry, but how can I not be? I’m nervous to be a one true mate and I’m nervous not to be one.”

Trevor nodded sagely and she saw something dark behind his eyes. He didn’t try to tell her she was wrong.

She clung to him, scared of the time when he would drop her hand and pretend like they hadn’t already connected. She knew it had to come. He wouldn’t want his boss to think he’d done something stupid.

“It’s that door,” he said, pointing to an open door in the hallway. She swallowed hard and straightened her spine. Trevor squeezed her hand and pulled her along. In less than a minute, they both stood before Deputy Chief Lombard’s desk, hands still clasped.

“Wade, this is Ella, she’s the one I told you about.”

Wade smiled warmly and motioned towards the chairs. “Sit, please, both of you.”