Chapter 3
KOJO
Two women in tight dresses are screaming at each other on the television. I have no idea what they are fighting about, but one of them just threw a drink in the other’s face and now men in black shirts are pulling them apart. I cannot stop watching.
Before Aiden, I had never watched television.
My village had electricity, but only for the essentials.
No screens, no need for them. The elders would have laughed at the idea of staring at a glowing box for entertainment.
They told stories around the fire instead, tales about hunts and battles and lovers lost to time.
Now I watch this garbage every night and my Bouda hates me for it.
Your brain is rotting, my Bouda says. I can feel it happening.
Probably. But the noise fills the room, and other people’s drama is easier than my own. The woman in the red dress is screaming something about betrayal. The woman in the blue dress is calling her a liar. Neither of them seems to realize that the man they are fighting over is not worth the energy.
Humans are strange, my Bouda observes. They fight over mates who do not deserve them. They scream and cry and throw drinks. We would simply kill the rival and be done with it.
That is why we do not live among humans.
That is why humans fear us.
Aiden sits at the desk by the window, laptop open, typing. He stops to scroll through photos, scribbles in his notebook, types some more. Looking for his next story. Another shifter species to document.
“I’m gonna miss you, man.”
I turn my head on the pillow. He is not looking at me, still staring at his screen, but I hear the sadness in his voice. Aiden does not say things like that often. He is a journalist, trained to observe and report, not to feel. But we have been together long enough that the mask slips sometimes.
“You will find another story.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He closes the laptop and swivels to face me. “We’ve been running together longer than most of my relationships. Longer than both my marriages, actually.”
He has been married twice? my Bouda asks. How did we not know this?
We did not ask. Humans have complicated mating rituals that I do not understand and do not want to understand.
“My Bouda is ready to start over,” I say. “Wintermoon has open land. Other shifters. We want to find our fated mate, settle down. Die happy with her, if Mother Fate allows.”
Aiden frowns. “If she allows? What does that mean?”
“Mother Fate has not been merciful to the Bouda.” I sit up against the headboard. “My Matriarch is gone. My village is ash. My sister escaped, but I do not know if she survived. I know nothing. I have known nothing since the attack.”
“Kojo.” Aiden leans forward. “That’s not your goddess punishing you. It’s men being stupid. The fucked up patriarchy where humans with money and guns take whatever they want.”
He curses too much, my Bouda says. I like it.
“My people died because we stayed,” I say. “The Matriarch refused to leave.”
“You told me she was stubborn about that.” Aiden runs a hand over his face. “Maybe the attack was a push. Maybe fate was trying to get your people to safety and she just wouldn’t go.”
“My people are dead.”
“I think you’re wrong.” He holds my gaze. “I’ve been doing this work a long time — documenting shifters, tracking migrations, following survivors. Your people are hard to kill. Your sister made it out, and others did too. You just haven’t found them yet.”
I stare at the ceiling. There is a water stain above the bed that looks like nothing at all — just damage, time and neglect and a building that nobody cares enough to fix.
“If others survived,” I say, “why have I not found them?”
“Because you’ve been running. And so have they.” Aiden shrugs. “Maybe Wintermoon is where you’ll reconnect. It’s supposed to be a haven, right? If other Bouda made it out, that’s where they’d go.”
He makes a point, my Bouda admits. We saw Zaki escape. We do not know what happened after.
I do not answer. The possibility hurts more than the certainty.
Aiden grabs his phone. “I’m gonna order pizza. You want anything?”
My nose wrinkles. “Human food is disgusting.”
He laughs. “You say that about everything I eat.”
“Because it is true. Your water tastes like chemicals. Your meat comes wrapped in plastic. Nothing is fresh.” I wave a hand at the bathroom. “I watched you brush your teeth with water from a pipe this morning. That water has been sitting in metal tubes for days. You put it in your mouth.”
“It’s treated water. It’s clean.”
“It is dead water. Water should come from rivers, from rain, from the earth. Not from pipes.”
Aiden shakes his head. “And you eat raw antelope.”
“It is food. Fresh meat that was alive an hour before I ate it, not sitting in a refrigerator for a week wrapped in plastic like a corpse in a coffin.”
“Jesus, Kojo.”
“You asked.”
He taps at his phone, shaking his head. “One large pepperoni. If you change your mind, there’s plenty.”
I will not change my mind. Pizza smells like grease and processed tomato and fake cheese.
In my village, we ate what we killed, blood still warm, the life force still passing from prey to predator.
Everything here is dead and packaged and old.
The humans call it convenience. I call it an insult to the animals who died for it.
They do not understand, my Bouda says. They have been separated from the hunt for so long they have forgotten what real food tastes like.
Aiden finishes ordering and cracks open a beer from the mini fridge. He offers me one out of habit, even though he knows the answer.
“Water,” I remind.
He grabs a bottle from the fridge and tosses it to me, then settles back on his bed with his beer, eyes on the television.
Shifters only drink water. Our bodies reject everything else.
Aiden learned this the hard way when he pushed for me to try a beer our first week together and I vomited on his shoes.
A new show has started. A man in a suit is talking to a woman in a sparkly dress, and they are both smiling too much. Fake smiles. Humans make that face when they want something.
“This one’s about finding love,” Aiden says.
“Do they find it?”
“Never. They pretend to, and then they break up three weeks after the show ends. It’s all theater.”
Humans mate for theater? my Bouda asks, confused. What is the point of that?
I have no answer. Human mating rituals make no sense to me.
They date and break up and date again, cycling through partners like they are trying on clothes.
Shifters do not work that way. We have one fated mate, chosen by Mother Fate before we are born.
We spend our lives waiting to find them, and when we do, we stay with them until death.
Or we die alone, never having found them at all.
We watch together. The snow falls harder outside, visible through the gap in the curtains.
The fake couple on the television is kissing now, and Aiden is making gagging sounds around his beer.
I will miss this. Sitting in silence with a man who does not expect me to talk.
A friend who filled the empty space when I had nothing left.
The knock comes thirty minutes later. Aiden gets up, grabs his wallet, heads for the door. I keep watching the television.
Then the scent hits me.
My Ridge snaps upright beneath my shirt, every spike calcifying before my brain catches up to what my body already knows. The television noise drops away. The room shrinks to nothing but the crack under the door and what is coming through it.
It slips through that crack, cutting through the motel’s smell of bleach and old dust. My nose isolates it. Tracks it. It is the smell of the first storm hitting the plateau. That heavy, electric scent of rain-washed earth slamming into sun-baked red clay. The smell of home.
What is that? My Bouda is alert now, every trace of laziness gone.
Underneath the damp earth, there is the honey. Wild honey, raw and golden, like my mother used to harvest from the hives. That scent does not exist in Michigan. Especially not tonight.
Aiden opens the door with cash in his hand. In front of him, a woman in a puffy black coat holds a pizza box. She is stamping snow off her boots. Her scent slams into me.
Rain-washed earth and wild honey pour off her skin and hit me so hard I cannot process anything else.
My Bouda goes perfectly still. Not the lazy quiet of boredom or the cautious freeze of something dangerous nearby. He holds it in our shared lungs for three heartbeats. Then he detonates.
MATE. He is screaming, roaring, throwing himself against the walls of my head. THAT IS OUR MATE. THAT WOMAN. SHE IS OURS.
Suddenly, I am on my feet. I do not remember standing. My body is moving toward the door and I am not controlling it. Aiden takes the pizza and hands over the cash tip. He says something I cannot hear because the roaring in my head is too loud.
She looks up. Dark skin, tired eyes, hair pulled back.
My claws punch out of my fingertips without permission, and I grip the back of the chair to keep from crossing the room.
The wood groans under my hands. Steam curls off my shoulders where the furnace inside me has spiked so high that the air around me shimmers. She is beautiful, and she is mine.
Go to her, my Bouda demands. Touch her. Claim her. Do not let her leave this building without knowing who we are.
She gives Aiden the polite smile, but her eyes look so tired.
Aiden takes the pizza and starts to close the door. She turns to walk down the hallway.
“Kojo?” Aiden is staring at me. “You okay?”
I push past him and open the door, staring into the hallway. She is walking toward the stairs, her back to me. The scent trails behind her, and I follow it before my mind catches up.
Call to her, my Bouda begs. Say anything. Do not let her disappear.
I do not know her name. I know nothing about her except that she smells like the rains of my childhood and the honey my mother used to harvest from wild hives.
My throat locks. My Bouda throws everything he has at my legs, roaring at me to move, to call out, to do anything but stand here like a fool while our mate walks away.
I manage one step. Then the stairwell door swings shut behind her, and the scent fades to a ghost of what it was, and I am standing alone in a hallway that smells like bleach and loss.
I walk to the window at the end of the hall and press my palm to the glass. The parking lot below is white with snow. A few seconds later she comes out the front entrance, head ducked against the wind, and climbs into a Lexus near the dumpsters.
I turn and walk back to the room. Aiden is standing in the doorway, pizza slice in hand.
“What the hell was that?”
“That woman.” My voice sounds strange. “The one who brought the pizza.”
“Huh?”
“She is my fated mate.”
Aiden stares at me. His mouth opens, closes, opens again. Then he grins. He sets down the pizza and grabs his phone. “I’m calling Kade.”
“I have to get her.”
I am already moving. Past Aiden, through the door, into the hallway. Behind me I hear him cursing, fumbling with his phone, yelling for me to wait. I do not wait. I hit the stairwell door and take the stairs.
Yes. YES. Go. Find her. Do not let her disappear.
I burst through the front entrance into the storm.
The cold slams into me, snow driving into my face, wind cutting through my thin shirt.
My Ridge stands fully extended. My furnace kicks higher, steam rising from my skin as the flakes melt on contact.
The blizzard is a blessing and a curse. My heat signature will be harder to track in this weather, but so will she.
Her car is already pulling out of the parking lot. The taillights glow red through the white curtain, turn onto the street, and disappear into the storm.
But her scent does not disappear. It lingers in the air. Faint, fading, but there. My Bouda locks onto it.
Hunt, my Bouda says. Hunt her.
I break into a run.
The snow swallows my footprints almost as fast as I make them.
My bare feet burn against the frozen pavement, then go numb, then burn again as my furnace compensates.
I do not care. I do not feel it. All I feel is the scent pulling me forward, leading me through the storm, guiding me toward the woman who smells like home.
Behind me, somewhere in the motel, Aiden is yelling my name. Wondering what the hell just happened to his friend. He will understand later. Right now, there is only the hunt.
My fated mate is out there in the blizzard, and I am going to find her.