Chapter 10 Clark
TEN
CLARK
The cozy space that was Flynn’s apartment that had been so welcoming when I was last here, was now charged with tension. The air crackled with it. I sat on the familiar couch with the pregnancy tests in the pharmacy bag on the coffee table like a ticking time bomb.
"Before we..." He picked up the bag. “Before we deal with that, I need to tell you who I am.”
Was he married? Or living under an assumed name because he’d ripped off gangsters or was hiding from the police? I might be bringing up the baby alone. But the Flynn I knew wasn’t that person. “Whatever it is, we can work through it."
"Can we?" His bitter laugh worried me. “What I'm about to tell you will sound insane. You're going to think I've lost my mind."
"Try me."
He was quiet for a long moment, staring at his hands. When he looked up, there was resignation in his eyes. "Do you believe in fairy tales?"
The question caught me off guard. "What do you mean?"
"Is there any truth to the old stories? The ones about things that go bump in the night?"
Was he referring to my dragon story and the countless books I'd written featuring magical creatures and impossible worlds? I considered my response carefully. “There's truth in every story. Maybe not literal truth, but emotional truth. Why?"
He strode to his bookshelf and pulled out a thick, leather-bound volume. "This belonged to my great-grandmother. It's a family history, of sorts."
I opened it carefully. The pages were yellowed with age. The ink had faded and I studied hand-drawn illustrations. As I flipped through the pages there were sketches of wolves and what appeared to be... transformation sequences?
"What is this?"
"It's a record of my family." He sat beside me and heat radiated from his skin. “My family... we're shifters. Wolf shifters to be precise.”
I waited for the punchline. When it didn't come, I looked back at the book because I didn’t understand where our conversation was headed. "Shifters?”
"I know how it sounds but it's true."
"Werewolves.” I needed water because of my dry mouth but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. "Like, full moon, howling at the moon, werewolves?" This had to be a joke though Flynn wasn’t the joking kind.
He almost smiled but shut it down. "Not quite like the movies. We don't lose control during full moons, and we don't turn people with bites. And we’re shifters, not werewolves."
I flipped through more pages of the book because I had to do something with my hands. My brain had given up trying to grasp this shifter thing. There were family trees with strange notations and pressed flowers, and maps.
How could any of this be true, though it would explain why he thought we were incompatible. We fit together pretty well when we were in bed together though.
“This is why you've been pulling away?”
“Yes and no. There’s a lot to tell.” He took a deep breath.
“I was seven when I first shifted in front of two human classmates. It was much earlier than most shifters had the ability to shift, and it was the first time I’d met my wolf.
The terror in their eyes... Our pack Alpha had to convince their parents they'd imagined it all.”
I blinked away tears as I imagined a little boy messing up and the lifelong consequences of that.
“But Alpha and the council didn’t punish me. They taught me how to control my beast.” He tapped his chest. “But some years ago I left the pack. Too much drama and too many rules. I thought I was better off on my own. And then you walked into my store."
“You have a pack?” My poor brain couldn’t cope with any more information.
“Technically yes.” He told me to forget about that for the moment and said he was worried I would reject him if I discovered the truth. “It’s not something you put on a dating profile. 'Enjoys long walks on the beach and occasionally turns into a wolf.'"
Despite everything, my lips twitched. "You'd be surprised what people are into these days."
Flynn stared at me. "Are you... are you joking right now?"
"This is how I process. With inappropriate humor and a level of shock."
Flynn’s rigid body suggested he was braced for me to take off. But all I could see was the man who'd been so careful with my dragon book, the same who held me at night.
"Show me.” There was nothing else to say. "I need to see your… wolf so I know I’m not having a breakdown.”
He was quiet for a long moment. "Okay. But not here. It's not safe to shift in the city. There's a place about twenty minutes out of town. Private land."
"Shifter land?"
“You catch on quick.”
The drive was quiet and I was lost in thought. The pregnancy tests were at his place and though I was almost certain I was pregnant, I didn’t know for sure.
Flynn navigated winding back roads that led deeper into the forest and turned onto a dirt path which led to a small clearing surrounded by tall pines.
"This is it.” He turned off the engine.
It was beautiful in a wild, untamed way. The kind of place where fairy tales happened. Perhaps I should have been scared because I was alone with this man, one I adored, but who said he wasn’t human. But I trusted him and had to go through with whatever this was.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked. "Once you see... there's no going back."
My mind flitted back to the past month of confusion and heartbreak and how he’d looked at me in the pharmacy like I was his whole world.
"I'm sure."
He got out and I followed him to the center of the clearing, my heart pounding with anticipation and a snippet of fear.
He undressed. No one told me he had to get naked first. As he stripped off and revealed the scars I’d run my hands over when we were in bed, I wondered if he’d been injured when he was a wolf.
“I’ll still be me. Just... different."
I was mesmerized as his body changed. It wasn’t violent as in the movies but dark fur rippled over him and he sprouted a tail. Within moments, where Flynn had been standing, there was now a massive wolf.
My legs gave out, and I sat down hard on the forest floor.
The wolf or Flynn or maybe the wolf had fur the same dark color as Flynn’s hair, and his eyes were the same storm-gray color I'd fallen in love with. He was bigger than any wolf I'd seen on TV.
He approached me slowly but though my heart was pounding loudly in my ears, I refused to run and lock myself in the car. I reached out with a trembling hand and touched his fur. It was so soft and the beating of his heart beneath my palm matched my own.
"You're really a wolf.”
The wolf pressed his head against my hand and what I saw in his eyes, or who, was Flynn. Then he shifted back.
"I'm dating a man who has a wolf inside him. Wow!”
“I’ll understand if you need time to process, or if you can't—"
"Oh my gods. I write children's books about dragons and magical creatures, I dress up as Peter Pan for research and I spend my weekends at comic conventions... and I'm dating a shifter.”
He stared at me like I'd lost my mind. "Are you having that breakdown you talked about?”
"Maybe a little." I wiped my eyes because I was crying and laughing at the same time.
“Clark, some shifters, not all, have a fated mate, one that the universe connects them with, whether that person is human or shifter. You are that for me.”
I took a moment to process what he’d said. “I have no idea if this is fate or the universe, but in my heart, you are the only one for me.” It was true. That was why I’d been drawn to him and his store. And why I almost lost my mind at him rejecting me.
Flynn kissed me and despite the life-altering revelations about shifters, everything was right in my world.
"Do you know how many paranormal romance novels I've read? How often I've watched movies about werewolves and vampires and thought ‘Wow, that would be cool'? And here I am, living in an actual fairy tale."
I looked at Flynn, my Flynn, who also happened to have an animal inside him, "I'm a little scared,” I admitted. "And overwhelmed. And I have about a million questions. But I'm not going anywhere."
"Even if..." He took my hand and rubbed it against his cheek. "Even if you're pregnant with a shifter’s baby?"
The pregnancy tests. In all the supernatural revelations, I'd almost forgotten about the reason we were here in the first place.
“Whatever happens with those tests, whatever comes next, I’m not going anywhere and we’ll figure it out together."
His eyes filled with tears. "I thought I'd lost you. I thought once you knew what I was..."
"You thought wrong." I reached for him, pulling him to sit beside me on the forest floor. "I'm going to need some time to adjust to the whole werewolf, sorry shifter thing. And I definitely need to know more about the implications for any potential baby."
He pulled me into his arms, burying his face at the base of my throat. "I love you and I’ve been in love with you since the day you walked into my store."
"I love you too.” I meant it with every fiber of my being. "Even though you are a supernatural creature who probably has a bunch of shifter rules I'm going to have to learn."
Flynn's shaky laugh told me there were rules. “There’s more. The scars. You ran your hands over them when we slept together but never asked me about them.”
I guessed he was about to tell me how he got them.
“Though I wasn’t part of our pack leader’s family, I was designated his heir.”
I put a hand over my heart because I didn’t want it to break when he finished telling his story.
“There was an omega who the pack thought should be my mate.” He paused and explained the omega wasn’t right for him, they weren’t true mates.
The omega pined after another alpha and when that guy returned after being away for months, he attacked Flynn.
The alpha was banished and the omega left with him.
And my Flynn gave up his place in the succession.
It was a lot to take in. “So are you estranged from the pack?”
“Not really, no. Me leaving removed any link to the former troubles. And now I return a few times a year. It’s in the past mostly. And they’ll love you.”
Him saying “mostly” worried me a little. “I guess there’s no way around meeting them, is there?”
“Nope. Even if I never return, I need Alpha’s approval to mate.”
I pulled back to look at this man who'd turned my world upside down in the best possible way. “Going forward, we have to be honest with one another.”
“Agree. Hmmm do I have to admit I dance on tables during a full moon?”
“What?”
“Kidding.”
I was going to mate a shifter! Everything I'd ever written about magic and wonder and impossible love had been preparing me for this moment.