Chapter 5
Kiara
An incessant ringing has me groggily slapping my hand around my bedside table. It takes me a hot second to remember how to answer the infernal device, but I manage before the call ends, so I’m calling it amazing progress.
The culture shock of technology has been both the best and worst part of striking out on my own.
Amazing and makes life ten times easier than the hidden supernatural village I grew up sheltered in, but the learning curve makes me feel embarrassingly stupid some days.
Especially when people look at me like I’m crazy for not knowing the simplest of things, like I can’t cross the street until a certain color light allows it, or that everyone is allowed free access to the internet here, not just the elders and security team.
Naturally, my brother mastered it all within a matter of days.
“Let me guess, I woke you up?” Killian’s amused voice asks, and I pull the phone away to see the time and curse, fighting my way free of the blanket trapping my legs.
“No, of course not, I’ve been up for hours. Getting ready to walk out the door right now, actually,” I lie.
This stupid phone must be defective. I set three alarms every night, but they never actually go off in the morning.
He chuckles. “Right, of course. Lots of appointments today?”
As I yank on my fleece-lined leggings, I hesitate before taking off the shirt I slept in.
It still smells like him; smoky with a slight metallic undercurrent.
Folding it up, I tuck it under my pillow before pulling on a clean, dark blue t-shirt.
Not a super professional outfit, but that’s the benefit of being the boss; comfort trumps all.
“Oh definitely, business is booming.” Lie, lie, lie.
Killian goes quiet, and I realize my mistake a split-second before he says, “You shouldn’t push yourself so hard, Kia. Have you thought any more about my offer?”
Yeah, because stepping down from healing animals to be my brother’s assistant at the hospital wouldn’t make me want to jump off the nearest cliff.
I get it, he wants to be able to keep an eye on my ‘condition’ and me to cut back on how much I’m using my abilities.
To keep me close in a town full of horny supernatural men desperate for mates.
But I’ve lived in my brother’s shadow my entire life; this place was supposed to be my fresh start.
If he had any idea how much worse it’s gotten, he’d probably set the clinic on fire himself so I’d have no other choice but to let him take care of me forever.
He doesn’t understand. The only way to fix my backlash problem is to never use my abilities again, or have them stripped from me completely, and I just… can’t. Even if it’ll be the thing that kills me one day, I can’t give up such a major part of myself.
And as a center, I can’t just go live a ‘normal’ human life, either.
I’ll be a target for any desperate myst that finds me out there alone, and have no way to protect myself.
I’d be perpetually surrounded by a world of magic I’m no longer a part of, but can’t leave, either.
At least this is a level of pain I can endure.
“Right,” Kills mumbles, taking my silence as an answer and sighing heavily. “I’ll back off, but the offer stands.”
Putting on my coat and stuffing my keys in my pocket, I smile softly. He really is the best brother a girl could ask for, if a little overbearing sometimes. “Noted. Always good to have a fallback plan.”
He snorts. “Says the girl that ran away from home with a mimic and her band of psychos.”
“Ever’s my best friend, and she has great taste, thank you very much”
“You knew her for like two days before you left!” he argues.
… Fair. But in my defense, she was my ticket to freedom. A fresh start in the real world. Of course I had to capitalize on the opportunity.
I really should have known my brother would follow me.
“Semantics.”
Five bucks says on the other side of this silence, his eye’s twitching.
“Anyway,” my brother drawls as he drops the subject before he develops an aneurysm. “I figured you’d be running late, so I dropped off breakfast about five minutes ago. I would’ve stopped in, but I have a patient coming in for an early appointment and I’m still not used to driving on ice.”
I scowl at the phone. Six months. We’ve been in Mercy Ridge for just over six months and he’s already learned to drive, got a license, a car, and a job at the only hospital where people rave over him like he’s a god, the jerk.
“Thanks, Kills.” And I really do mean it…
sort of. He’s an amazing brother, and has taken care of me ever since our parents died.
If he had any idea how bad business was, he’d be the first to load my kitchen up with groceries without expecting a single thing in return.
I can always count on him. But I’ve had enough of pitying looks and feeling like a failure.
Of nobody expecting me to be anything but a burden.
Hell, even my fated mate didn’t want me.
And the underground compound we grew up in that preached, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ that took in orphaned mystic children and abused mimics?
I was still treated like the blacksheep. Defective.
The healer that hurts herself every time she uses her ability.
I love my brother, but it’s hard to be around someone perfect when you’re just… not.
Hanging up and sliding my phone into my pocket, I brace myself for the cold. But no amount of preparation can really prepare you for that first slap of freezing mountain air in your face.
Wakes me up better than the coffee I can’t afford, though.
An insulated lunchbox is hanging off my door handle, and I shamelessly tear it open like a starving racoon. It’s still warm.
I take back every mean thing I’ve ever said about my brother.
As I trudge through the ten minute walk to work, I inhale the first breakfast sandwich in record time.
I’m halfway through savoring the second when I step into the clinic’s parking lot, and a clatter has me pausing mid bite.
Cautiously, I round the building, the small area empty save for the dumpster.
Come ooooon rabid opossum.
Animals, I can handle. People? Not so much.
The dumpster is open, the lid flipped up and resting against the back fence. Another thump has me slowly inching closer, but the figure hiding back there? Wouldn’t have made it in even my top fifty guesses.
Nearly seven feet long, at first glance, I could’ve sworn it was a lion.
The closer I look, though, the more details come into focus.
The human head with piercing amber eyes, deeply bronzed, golden skin.
What once must’ve been short cropped hair so black it practically has a blue sheen, longer on the top, but now is several months overgrown and hints at slightly curling waves.
Sharp-edged tattoos trail down the sides of his neck to where they disappear in the golden fur of his shoulders.
What really throws me for a loop, though?
The gorgeous feathered wings in stunning shades of gold, brown, and black, the tips a brilliant sapphire blue.
“Sphinx,” I breathe, the word carrying an almost sacred weight.
I know mythological animals still exist. Hell, I spent the last decade working with phoenixes, and not the shifter kind. But a sphinx? I thought they were long since extinct. Hunted down like so many of the other rare supernatural breeds. Or at least in hiding, like the mimic village I was born in.
A low growl rises in his chest the longer I stare and he starts to move, only to flinch and hiss, shrinking away from me again. It’s then that I notice one of his wings is hanging at an odd angle and he’s favoring his left side, barely putting any weight on his right hind leg.
“You poor thing.”
He snaps his teeth at me, shrinking farther away, and I raise my hands in surrender. “I’m not going to hurt you. Do you speak English?” Last I heard, sphinxes were native to Egypt, hence the mythology of guarding treasure in the pyramids. But like most stories, it might very well all be bullshit.
It’s then I really notice… it wouldn’t matter either way. His eyes are wild and he’s retreated so far into his animalistic instincts, he wouldn’t understand me regardless of us speaking the same language. He looks…
Feral.
My heart twinges with sympathy. I haven’t heard of a single case of a feral shifter regaining their humanity enough to rejoin society. Most myst communities deem them too dangerous and either lock them up, or put them down.
I clench my jaw. No. They can’t kill him; he’s a sphinx, for fucks’ sake. That has to count for something.
But in my heart, I know it won’t. As soon as anyone discovers there’s a feral shifter loose in town, his fate’ll be sealed. Death, or locked in a feral facility for the rest of his life.
“Hey there,” I say softly, unwrapping the rest of my last breakfast sandwich. He bristles and bares his teeth, hackles raised, so I immediately lower myself to appear less threatening. His stomach rumbles, and I offer a wry twist of my lips in encouragement. “Here.”
Even though it makes my own stomach protest in regret, I push the rest of my breakfast closer to him, tucking the wrapper in my pocket. “Eat up, you need it more than I do.”
He doesn’t move, eyeing me warily. It’s heartbreaking. That he’s this lost to his instincts and clearly starving, yet still so cautious around people that he refuses to take any offered food, like he thinks it’s a trap.
“I’ll leave you to it then. If you change your mind and want to warm up or let me look at that wing, I’ll leave the back door propped open a bit so you can get in, okay?”
He doesn’t move, and I mentally weep at the thought of the heating bill next month, but if that’s my biggest problem? I’m in a way better position than this poor guy. I’ll figure it out somehow.
I have to.