7. Orion
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Orion
The bullet is working its way out.
I can feel it, a dull, grinding pressure in my left shoulder as my body rejects the foreign metal with the efficient brutality it’s used for three centuries.
The wound is already closing around the exit path, tissue knitting itself back together, pushing the flattened slug toward the surface like my flesh is spitting out something distasteful.
It hurts. Not as much as it should, pain is relative when you’ve survived plagues and wars and the particular agony of watching empires fall, but enough that I’m aware of it. Enough that I’ll feel it tomorrow.
Worth it.
The gun swung toward her. Barrel dark and terrible, finger on the trigger, and in that fraction of a second I didn’t think, didn’t calculate, didn’t do anything except move.
Centuries of control, of measured responses, of never acting without consideration, all of it gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
She’s safe. The rest is details.
I reach through the bond I share with my beta, not the mating bond, never that, not yet, and think: Intruder. Armed. Headed northwest through the territory.
Theo’s response comes immediately, a pulse of acknowledgment that requires no words: On it. Pack’s already tracking. He won’t get far.
Don’t hurt him. Just… adjust his memory. Standard protocol.
Understood. A pause. Then: You okay?
I’m fine.
You took a bullet.
I’ve taken worse.
In front of her.
I don’t answer that. Don’t have an answer for it.
Because yes, I shifted in front of her, and yes, she saw everything, and now she’s standing in my living room with my cat pressed to her chest, a furry orange shield, and her eyes are too wide, and her mouth is open but nothing’s coming out, and I have approximately thirty seconds to explain why I just transformed into something from her nightmares.
Except I don’t think I’m in her nightmares. I don’t know what I am to her. That’s the problem.
Mate.
The word pulses through me, a second heartbeat, the same way it has since the moment I pulled her from that wreckage.
Since before she opened her eyes. Since she looked at me with blood on her face and called me pretty like it was the most obvious observation in the world, like of course I was pretty, why wouldn’t I be, she was dying and she wanted to say something nice.
If she rejects the bond, I will still guard her door until I die.
That’s not devotion. That’s a symptom. That’s the obsession of waiting three hundred years for something you weren’t sure was real, and then finding her, and then nearly losing her to a man with a gun before you’ve even had the chance to…
“I can explain,” I say, because the silence is stretching too long and she still hasn’t moved. “What you just saw. What I am. I can explain all of it.”
She throws a pillow at my head.
It’s a good throw, solid arc, surprising velocity for someone who claims to have no upper body strength. I catch it on instinct, which is probably not the reassuring display of humanity I was going for, and she makes a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a scream.
“WHAT THE FUCK.” Her voice cracks, climbing octaves I didn’t know human vocal cords could reach. “What the, you just, you turned into a…”
“A lycan,” I say, keeping my voice calm. Steady. The same tone I use with spooked animals and newly turned members of the pack who don’t yet know how to control their shifts. “A shifter. It’s different from a werewolf.”
“THOSE EXIST?!”
“Yes. And I’m the king of my…” I catch myself before the word pack can slip out. She’s not ready for that, not ready for any of this. But I can at least control the dosage, the flow of impossible information. “Of my people. The ones who live on the mountain.”
“Your PEOPLE.” She’s clutching Mario so hard he squeaks. “You have PEOPLE. You’re the KING of PEOPLE who turn into WOLVES.”
“Lycans.”
“I don’t CARE what you call them!” Her voice is climbing again, approaching a register that only dogs, and apparently lycans, can hear. “You just, you transformed, there was FUR and TEETH and…” Her gaze drops. Snaps back up. Her entire face goes crimson. “You’re NAKED.”
I look down. She’s not wrong.
“The shift doesn’t preserve clothing,” I explain. “It’s an inconvenient biological limitation. Something to do with the molecular structure of organic versus inorganic matter. The science is actually quite fascinating if you…”
“Put on PANTS.”
“I don’t have any pants in this room.”
“Then go GET SOME.”
“If I leave to get pants, will you still be here when I come back? Or will you run out the front door the moment I’m out of sight?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her eyes dart toward the door, calculating distance, probably, weighing her options, and then back to me.
“I’m not going anywhere until you EXPLAIN YOURSELF.”
“Then I’ll stay. And explain. Pantless.”
“That’s, you can’t just, that’s INDECENT.”
“I just turned into a lycan in front of you. I think we’re past decent.”
“LYCAN. You just said lycan. Pick a word and STICK WITH IT.”
“I’m using them interchangeably.”
“You literally corrected me three seconds ago!”
“I’m a complicated man.”
Mario chooses this moment to contribute his opinion.
He turns his head, looks directly at me from his position against Fable’s chest, and produces a sound that can only be described as screaming.
He isn’t meowing or yowling. He is screaming, with the full theatrical force of a cat who has been personally betrayed in ways too numerous to catalog.
“Is THAT why he hates you?” Fable’s voice is climbing toward hysteria again. “You’re a giant DOG? Mario has been living with a GIANT DOG this whole time?”
“Technically, lycans predate the domestic canine by several millennia, and the comparison is…”
“DO NOT ‘TECHNICALLY’ ME RIGHT NOW.”
I close my mouth.
Mario screams again, as if providing additional evidence for her case. He’s always had impeccable timing, that cat. And apparently impeccable judgment, given that he chose her within seconds of their meeting.
Smart animal. Smarter than me, probably.
“Okay.” Fable takes a breath. Then another.
I watch her trying to find her footing, trying to process the impossible thing she just witnessed.
Her hands are buried in Mario’s fur, fingers working through the orange strands like she’s grounding herself in his solidity.
“Okay. Let me make sure I understand this correctly. You’re a… a lycan. A wolf person.”
“Yes.”
“Who can turn into a giant wolf whenever you want.”
“Within certain limitations, but essentially yes.”
“And you’re the king of other wolf people who live on the mountain.”
“Lycan people, but yes.”
“And you’ve been… what, pretending to be human this whole time? Pretending to be a normal person who shows up at hospitals and alphabetizes bookshelves?”
“I wasn’t pretending. I was just… omitting certain details.”
“CERTAIN DETAILS.” She laughs, and it’s not a happy sound. “Certain details like ‘by the way, I turn into a giant predator when threatened.’ That’s a DETAIL?”
“It didn’t seem relevant until tonight.”
“Didn’t seem…” She makes a strangled noise. “You took a BULLET for me.”
“Yes.”
“You threw yourself in front of a GUN.”
“Yes.”
“And turned into a WOLF to do it.”
“The shift was necessary. My lycan form is faster, stronger. I couldn’t have gotten between you and the bullet in human form. Not quickly enough.”
“So you just…” Her voice cracks. “You just decided to take a bullet for me. Without thinking. Without hesitating.”
“There was nothing to think about. He pointed the gun at you. Everything else was reflex.”
She stares at me. The fear is still there, I can smell it, sharp and metallic, but underneath it there’s a new expression now, one that looks like confusion, or wonder, or the particular bewilderment of a person whose entire understanding of reality has just been rewritten.
“Why?” she asks, and her voice is smaller now. Quieter. “Why would you do that for someone you barely know?”
Because you’re mine. Because you’ve been mine since before you opened your eyes. Because I’ve waited three hundred years for you and I didn’t even know I was waiting until you called me pretty while bleeding, and now I would burn down the world to keep you safe.
“Because I wasn’t going to let him hurt you,” I say instead. “The why doesn’t matter.”
“The why ALWAYS matters.”
“Not tonight.” I reach for the blanket on the couch, the one she was wrapped in earlier, before everything went sideways, and wrap it around my waist. It’s not pants, but it’s better than nothing.
“Tonight, I’m going to take you home. You’re going to process.
And tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready, I’ll answer every question you have.
As many as you need. For as long as it takes. ”
“I have approximately seven thousand questions.”
“Then I’ll answer seven thousand questions.”
“Starting with how you can possibly be three hundred years old.”
“Three hundred and change. And that’s question one.”
She laughs again, and this time it sounds almost genuine.
Almost like herself, underneath the shock.
“You’re insane. This whole situation is insane.
I’m holding a cat in a serial killer’s murder cabin and I just watched him turn into a wolf and I’m somehow having a conversation about it like it’s normal. ”
“It is normal. For me. It’s been normal for my entire very long life.”
“Well, it’s not normal for me. I sell romance novels and make laminated checklists and talk to myself in the mirror. This is…” She waves her hand vaguely, encompassing everything: the candles, the blood on my shoulder, the cat in her arms, the impossible truth of what I am. “This is not my normal.”
“I know.” I take a step toward her, slowly, carefully, giving her plenty of time to back away if she needs to. She doesn’t. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out like this. I was going to tell you eventually, when the time was right…”
“Was the time ever going to be right? For something like this?”