Chapter 7
Ryder Bosu
Ihad no idea how I was going to make this happen.
I didn’t want Effie to leave my condo. Hell, I didn’t want her back on that fucking campus ever. It didn’t help that there had never been a more perfect sight in my life than Effie stretched out on my leather couch, the firelight reflecting off her colorful appearance. So why couldn’t we stay here?
Oh, right. I had promised her that I would figure something out, and now I was managing to stall just to avoid doing so…
because the issue was that I did have an idea of how to make this work.
Unfortunately, it would require me shifting, and I am not positive she would understand everything that entailed.
Fuck. Wasn’t retirement supposed to be easy?
I couldn’t refuse Effie though. If she wanted to go save her mates, then I would help her.
That word pissed me off, mostly because I knew she didn’t consider me one, and that infuriated me on an instinctual level.
Actually, it worse than infuriated me, because at least anger was something I’d been familiar with in my past. This was something new, and it felt like a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“I have something that could work,” I breathed out, unable to resist the urge to serve her a solution to her problems on a silver platter.
I sat down on the cement coffee table to face her as her bright gaze ran over me, putting down the coffee cup she’d been holding.
A pink blush decorated her skin at how close I was to her, and heat fizzled between us.
I knew she could feel the mate bond, and I knew it only served to confuse her more on why I was fighting this… But I knew it was for the best.
I would continue to tell myself that until I believed it.
“Okay.” Effie sat forward, and my eyes dipped to her tight frame that I could see every inch of once she had shed the oversized sweater she wore, leaving her in a tight undershirt and leggings. I had never hated two pieces of clothing so goddamn much.
“The huler are located north of campus, facing the lake towards the east. They consist of two main caves or alcoves that each have a separate entrance and are accessed through passages from campus. Unfortunately, they are not only locked from the outside, but spelled as well,” I offered with a dark sigh.
“The alcoves are open, though, towards the lake…which is where they chain up the shifters that are currently in there.”
Effie’s face paled and I cursed my bluntness, hating that I had such a clear lack of emotional intelligence when it came to this beautiful creature. Honestly, it was painful how bad I was at interacting with her. She probably thought I was a fool, and I wouldn’t blame her.
“They are chained up?” Her eyes filled with sadness.
“Presumably.” I tried to push on. “Since we can’t use the passages, we would need to get there a different way.
We would need to travel over the ice, and my power as a kitsune just so happens to be in exact opposition.
Our shifted shape doesn’t hold to normal standards of a shifted wolf or even a lycan—we have different abilities that would allow us to do that easily. ”
“What kind of abilities?” she questioned.
“What do you know about kitsune?” I was hoping close to nothing, because I very much wanted to be the one to teach her about our kind. Hell, there was a fuck ton of stuff I wanted to teach Effie, and that was the problem—I wanted to consume all of her time. Every single second of it.
I knew I would be selfish when it came to her.
“Nothing really,” Effie hedged. “I’d never heard of kitsune until I met your sister.”
“I’ll start at the beginning then. We are descendants of the sun god, and our lineage isn’t Earth-based, exactly, which means that our magic only grows the more we practice.
Unlike most wolf shifters, we don’t have a max capacity.
There is no ‘alpha’ because kitsune can constantly change and achieve higher. ”
“You have no hierarchy?”
“We do, but it’s not based on social situations, it’s based on how many tails our kitsune form has.” I could feel my magic jump at the concept of us talking about our many tails to Effie.
“Tails?”
“Yes, tails. Each one we earn represents more power.” There was no reason for my ears to be heating, yet they were.
Her mouth shaped a tantalizing ‘O’ before she sucked that plump bottom lip between her teeth. “And how many tails do you have?”
Fuck me. I should have expected the question, but I hadn’t, and it had me wanting to lay her out on the couch.
Effie’s eyes went wide. “Crap, am I not supposed to ask that? I keep messing stuff like this up.”
Not unless she wanted to get fucked. Kitsune showed off their tails to their mates like fucking peacocks, so the creature inside of me loved the idea of doing just that.
I tried to keep the growl in my throat down as I attempted to find a way of not freaking her out while answering the question honestly.
I was also curious about what she kept ‘messing up,’ but I hoped there would be a better time for that later.
“It’s just a direct show of power, so it’s more of a private question,” I offered, before not being able to help myself, “But I have eight.”
Her eyes flashed with excitement and curiosity. “So you’re super powerful.”
This woman was so incredibly bad for my fucking ego. The worst part? I loved the conviction she had in her voice. It turned me the hell on.
“Something like that,” I murmured, wanting to reach forward to touch her soft skin but pulling my hand back, not knowing if she would want that after everything that had happened.
A sad look crossed her face and I winced, knowing I was causing more problems each minute I beat around the bush about what was happening.
I needed to get my head on straight around this woman.
“Is that why it’s not good for us to be together?” she asked, cutting right down to brass tacks, unintentionally grabbing me by the metaphorical balls. “Because I’m bitten and you’re super important?”
There was so much wrong about what she had just said.
I couldn’t help myself, I moved forward and crouched in front of her, taking both her small hands between mine and keeping my voice even. “First of all, you aren’t just a ‘bitten.’ You are extremely important, Effie—”
“Because I’m the blood-bonded pack’s mate and can be used to ‘breed.’”
Shit, now that was a word that should never come out of her mouth.
“No, because you are special. You, Effie, all on your own, are fucking special, and it has nothing to do with magic.” I exhaled, knowing that despite being able to use this as an easy out, I couldn’t help but keep a bit of hope in the situation, more for myself than anyone.
I wasn’t ready to let go of her, even if I needed to.
“Secondly, I didn’t say we couldn’t be together, just that it wasn’t smart. ”
“So the mark on my arm does mean something?”
“Yeah, it does.” More than we had time to talk about right now.
“What does it mean?”
I hesitated for a second but I knew if I pushed it off it would fuck this all up more, and in order to explain to her why it wasn’t smart for us to be together, she needed to at least partially understand this damn mark I put on her.
“It means that…” I savored the moment, not knowing if I would get to say it again. “That we’re mates. You are my mate, kitten.”
Holy hell, calling her my mate resulted in an accumulation of emotions that I’d felt since meeting her, and I had to fight the urge to learn forward and wrap her in my arms. While there was a large part of me that wanted to ravage the woman, an equal part of me wanted to wrap her up in a cocoon and keep her safe.
Keep her protected and loved. I didn’t deserve the right to do that though.
This moment was supposed to be a happy one.
One that shifters celebrated, and instead I was ruining it completely, turning it into a moment where her face crumpled as if I was causing her pain.
Suddenly tears clouded her large blue eyes, causing me to lunge forward on instinct and pull her against me. “Shit. Why are you crying?”
How the hell did I manage to keep fucking this up?
Her sniffle was followed by a sad sound that had my heart breaking.
“Because when you said we were mates, I was so happy for a minute… But then I remembered how horrified you were when you saw the mark. You don’t want to be mates.
This is a bad thing in your mind, right?
You said it wasn’t smart for us to be together, so you’re upset that we are mates? ”
I pulled back and grasped her jaw in a firm hold, infusing as much emotion as possible into my words. “Effie, I very much want you to be my mate. The reason I was so fucking concerned is because being my mate comes with enough danger that it’s possibly worse than being a bitten female.”
And everything else I was damn near positive my kitten was.
Her gaze ran over my face, clearly looking for any amount of bullshit I was trying to feed her. “Who? Why is it dangerous?”
I knew I needed to explain, it just was painful to do so.
“I grew up very different from my sister. In fact, her birth wasn’t a planned one or welcome, because female kitsune can only mate with non-kitsune to produce viable offspring, so they are completely ‘useless’ when it comes to furthering our family lines.
Their children are either hybrid in nature or exhibit the qualities of the other mate’s genetics, but never a pure blood kitsune.
“Male kitsune can mate with whoever they want, and the offspring that will be produced, whether their mate is human or wolf, will end up kitsune as well. That’s why it doesn’t matter that my mother is human.”
“So you’re half-human?” Curiosity filled Effie’s face, and she seemed open and receptive to what I was saying. I much preferred this expression to the one where she had been hurt and teary-eyed.