Chapter 2 Caelan
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Caelan
“Ky. Ky. Caelan. Brother. Light of my life. Are you listening to me?”
I was not listening to her.
I was scanning the street for magical fluctuations, trying to pinpoint the source of the portal instability that had brought us to this mountain town in the first place.
Three weeks ago, a new portal opened in Duskmere, unstable and unpredictable, its magical signature spiking in ways that concerned the royal council.
My father, King Mortimer Goldridge, had sent me to this human world to investigate.
Me. Crown Prince of Duskmere. Heir to one of the greatest thrones of Lytopia. Chasing magical anomalies through the human realm like a glorified errand boy.
“You’re brooding again,” Thessa said, skipping beside me. “You have your brooding face on. The one that makes you look constipated.”
“I don’t have a brooding face.”
“You absolutely have a brooding face. It’s your default setting. Mother says you came out of the womb brooding.”
“Mother would never say that.”
“She said it to me last week. She also said you need to ‘loosen up’ and ‘find joy in the little things’ and ‘stop acting like the weight of seven allied kingdoms rests on your shoulders.’”
“It does rest on my shoulders. I’m the Crown Prince.”
“You’re the Crown Prince of one kingdom. The other six have their own heirs. You’re not that special.”
I loved my sister. I truly did. But some days, I understood why our brother Pattryk locked himself in his study and refused to speak to anyone for hours at a time.
We’d been in the human world for two weeks now.
It had been seven years since the first portal connecting our realm, Lytopia, to this human Earth opened in Ravenor Kingdom.
Seven years since the Ashborne brothers stumbled into Earth and turned Lytopia’s understanding of the world upside down.
In that time, wolves had learned a great deal about humans.
Their technology, their customs, their bizarre obsession with small glowing rectangles called phones.
Thessa had thrown herself into research with the kind of enthusiasm she usually reserved for causing diplomatic incidents.
She’d devoured every scrap of information about human culture she could find.
Clothing, food, something called “reality television” that she insisted I needed to experience, though I had my doubts.
“Oh!” Thessa grabbed my arm and pointed at a shop window. “Look at that poster. It’s a book signing about wolves.”
I barely glanced at it. “We’re not here for books.”
“We’re here for research. Books are research.”
“We’re here to investigate the portal instability.”
“And we can do that after I buy a wolf book.” She was already heading for the door. “It seems the author writes about all sorts of wolfy things. What if she knows, Ky? What if she’s one of us?”
“She’s not one of us.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No wolf would write books exposing our culture to humans.”
“The Ashborne brothers mated humans. Xander Silvermane mated a human. Wolves and humans are reconnecting.” She pushed open the bookstore door. “Maybe some wolf decided to spread our world through literature. It’s clever.”
“It’s a security risk.”
But she was already inside, and short of causing a scene in the middle of a human street, I had no choice but to follow.
The bookstore was small, cozy. Filled with the particular mustiness of old paper and ink that seemed universal across realms. Thessa was already making her way toward a signing table, weaving through humans with the kind of cheerful determination that had gotten her banned from three different diplomatic functions.
I had no idea how the humans would react to her.
Portals had been appearing across Lytopia for years now. Ravenor, Noctherion, the outskirts of Valoryn, Wynter Kingdom, and now in my kingdom, Duskmere. Five of the seven allied kingdoms of Lytopia had portals, though there was no information about the kingdoms outside the peace alliance.
Some believed the portals were a blessing from the Moon Goddess, a sign that wolves and humans were meant to reconnect after millennia apart. Others thought they were a threat, a destabilization of the natural order.
My father believed they were a mystery that needed solving before catastrophe struck.
I believed I was going to strangle my sister if she didn’t stop flirting with the author and get back to our actual mission.
I started toward her, mildly irritated and fully prepared to drag her out by her hair if necessary.
That’s when the scent hit me. Warm vanilla, old books, and underneath, a current of electricity, the way the air feels right before a thunderstorm breaks.
My wolf slammed against my consciousness so hard my vision went white.
Mate.
The word reverberated through every cell in my body. Not a suggestion, not a hope, but a fact. An absolute, undeniable, soul-shaking fact.
My mate was here. Now.
Find her.
My claws threatened to extend. My vision sharpened, colors bleeding brighter, sounds amplifying until I could hear individual heartbeats in the crowd. The scratch of pen on paper, the rustle of pages, the soft intake of breath from someone near the counter, my sister’s happy chatter…
There.
She was sitting behind the signing table, black hair piled in a messy bun held together by a pen. Ink stains marked her fingers, a worn leather watch circled her wrist, old and clearly broken but loved anyway. Thessa sat in front of her, and they were both laughing at something.
My mate was laughing, and I wasn’t the one who made her laugh. It felt like a personal offense.
I’d stopped believing I would find her. The engagement to the Briarfield girl had dissolved years ago when my wolf refused to accept her and wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. I’d assumed my wolf was broken, unwilling to bond. Destined for solitude.
I was so fucking wrong.
My wolf wasn’t broken. My wolf was waiting. For her.
I moved toward the signing table, each step drawn by a force I couldn’t have resisted even if I tried. And in that moment, her head lifted and her eyes met mine.
Green. Bright, vivid green with gold flecks that caught the light. They widened as she took me in, confusion and curiosity flickering across her face.
She was beautiful. Messy and real and so achingly gorgeous my chest hurt just looking at her. The slight smudge of ink on her cheek, the way her t-shirt slipped off one shoulder, the defiant tilt of her chin as she stared up at me.
My wolf was losing its mind. Mine. Ours. Claim her. Mark her. Never let her go.
“Mate.”
The guttural word ripped out of me. I couldn’t have stopped it if I fucking tried. Her mouth dropped open, maybe about to ask what the hell was wrong with me-
Then Thessa’s elbow connected with my stomach. Hard.
I grunted, the impact enough to make me blink, to pull me back from the edge of completely losing control in the middle of a human bookstore. My sister was glaring at me with murder in her eyes, her smile fixed and dangerous.
“Brother,” she said through her teeth, “what the fuck are you doing?”
Right. I just growled “mate” at a stranger, in public, while my eyes were probably doing that amber-flash thing that tended to alarm humans. Fucking hell. This was bad.
“Who are you?” my gorgeous mate asked, and her voice husky and warm. “And why are you calling me mate?”
“I’m so sorry about him. He’s…We just moved here,” Thessa said quickly, stepping in front of me with a laugh that was slightly too bright.
“We used to live in Australia. The slang stuck. ‘Mate’ means ‘friend’ there. He calls everyone mate. It’s embarrassing, honestly.
We’ve tried to break him of the habit but he just keeps doing it.
Don’t freak Riley out, asshole.” She glared at me.
This was a lie. I had never called anyone mate in my entire two hundred and thirty years of existence because the word was sacred, because it meant everything, because I’d been waiting my whole life to say it to the right person. But something else caught my attention.
Riley. Her name was Riley. It was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard.
She was staring up at me with wide, confused green eyes, but not afraid. I noted that with a rush of relief so intense it nearly buckled my knees. This woman, who barely reached my chest, who had no idea what I was or what I could do, wasn’t afraid of me.
Thessa kicked my ankle.
“Right,” I managed, my voice rough. “Australia. Everyone.”
Eloquent. Years of diplomatic training and that was the best I could manage.
Riley raised an eyebrow. “Huh. I’ve never heard an Australian accent like yours.”
“It’s regional.”
“What region?”
“The... outback.”
Thessa made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a groan of despair at my complete inability to lie convincingly.
Riley’s lips twitched. She was enjoying this. Enjoying watching me fumble and fail. And instead of being offended, I found myself wanting to fumble more if it meant she kept looking at me with that spark of amusement.
“Well, nice to meet you, Ka-e-lan.” She pronounced my name wrong on purpose. I could tell by the way her eyes danced. “I’m Riley. Wolf book lady extraordinaire.”
“Nice to meet you as well.” My voice came out lower than intended. “Riley.”
Her name felt sacred on my tongue. I wanted to say it again. I wanted to say it a thousand times. I wanted to learn every variation of how it sounded, whispered and shouted and moaned...
“So what brings you to my signing, Outback?” She leaned back in her chair, arms crossing over her chest. “You don’t really seem like the romance type.”
“Thessa likes wolves.”
“I love wolves,” Thessa agreed, beaming. “Totally obsessed. It’s a whole thing. When I saw the poster, I just had to come in. And then I made Ky follow me because he’s my ride and also he has the money.”
“He looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.”