Chapter 17 #2
“I could eat,” he said, and walked inside. Kess passed Lucy in the doorway and looked her over, her eyes stopping on the crescent at Lucy’s neck. A low growl came from my chest, the tiger making our position clear. Kess’s eyes found mine, held for a second, then she moved past.
Lucy put her hands on her hips. “You don’t need to protect me from them. I can handle myself.”
“Of that, I have no doubt,” I said, sliding my arm around her.
Inside, Davan had taken the armchair by the window. Scott was still at the table, and Kess had positioned herself behind Davan, standing, hands at her sides. Guard position.
“So, boy. This is your mate?”
Davan never could do small talk.
“I’m right here,” Lucy said from the stove, cracking an egg into the skillet without looking up. “And I prefer Lucy.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “But yes, I’m Warrick’s mate. How do you like your eggs?”
Davan laughed. He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Pride, maybe. “She’s got a mouth on her.”
“You have no idea.”
“Good. You need someone who talks back. You’ve spent too many years surrounded by people who let you brood.”
Kess dropped her weight onto one hip. “Can we skip the part where everyone pretends this is charming and get to the part where it’s a problem?”
Lucy turned from the stove. “I’m not entirely sure I like being called a problem.”
“It is not personal.”
“It feels personal.”
Kess started ticking items off on her fingers. “You’re human. You can’t Shift. You don’t know our laws or our stories or what it cost us to get here. And now you’re standing in this kitchen with a mating mark on your throat, and I’m supposed to … what? Welcome you? Throw a party?”
I took a step toward Kess, but Lucy held up a hand to me.
“A party would be amazing, but right now I’d settle for a hello.”
My tiger liked that. My tiger liked it very much.
Mate is small, but she does not back down.
“Kess has a point,” Davan said. “And so does the mate.” Lucy narrowed her eyes at him. “Er … Lucy. Sit down, both of you. We’re going to talk about this like adults.”
Kess dropped onto the arm of the couch. Lucy glanced at me and, when I nodded, sat at the other end.
“Lucy. How much has this one told you about us?”
Lucy glanced at me, then back at Davan. “That he’s a tiger Shifter from another world.
That the mate bond is real, and I’m it. That there are others like him here, and that you’re the one who holds them together.
” She paused. “And that twelve men died last night because of me, and your people cleaned it up.”
“Because of Coleman,” I said. “Not because of you.”
She didn’t argue, but she didn’t agree either.
Davan watched her through all of it, then nodded slowly.
“Alright, then.” He rubbed the heel of his hand across his knee, the way he did when he was choosing his words.
“I’ve had a night to think about this. A long night.
Moving bodies and thinking.” He looked past me, out the window, at the trees.
“Thirty years I’ve been on this planet. Thirty years trying to build something out of scraps and stubbornness and a monthly gathering that half our people pretend they don’t need, when it is the thing that holds them together.
“And for thirty years I’ve been telling myself we’re preserving what we had. Keeping the old ways alive.” He shook his head. “But most of us chose to leave. We came here because we wanted to be here. We chose this world. It’s time we acted like it.”
Davan had chosen Earth. Kess had chosen Earth. Every other tiger in the ambush had walked through that gate knowing what they were leaving behind.
“We’re not visitors here anymore,” Davan continued. “We’re not exiles waiting to go home. Earth is home. It has been for a generation. The earth-born know it, even if the rest of us won’t say it.”
My tiger went still. He’s right.
I didn’t answer him.
He’s right, and you know it. The gate is dead. She’s alive. Choose.
Davan gestured toward Lucy. “Rethaar, our God, has sent a Kassar son a human mate. Not a tiger. A human. If that’s not a sign that we’re meant to build here, to stop treating this world like a waiting room, then I don’t know what such a sign would look like.”
Scott’s jaw tightened. A fraction. There and gone.
Kess pushed off the wall. “A sign? You see a man thinking with his hormones, and you call it theology?”
“I see a mate bond,” Davan said. “I know what they look like. Rethaar doesn’t waste them. It’s a sign that it’s time for Warrick to lead all of us into the future. The old ways are dying. We need new leadership to steer us forward, help us adapt, truly turn this place into our home.”
When Davan found me in the forest by Starved Rock, even when he’d realized who I was and what had happened, he’d looked at me then like I was worth saving. He was looking at me now like I was worth believing in.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“So it’s decided,” Davan said. “Lucy stays. She’s Warrick’s mate. Rethaar has spoken, and I won’t argue with a God.”
Kess stood. “Like hell it’s decided. You’re making policy for all of us without asking what any of us wants, old man.”
“I’m making policy out of faith. You don’t have to share it. But you do have to respect that I’ve earned it.”