Chapter 3 - Soren
“Soren! Care to fetch me a glass of water?”
“Already got it, Gramps.” I round the corner of his recliner and set the glass on the table next to him, then settle in on his bed, facing him.
His room is small, with just a leather chair, a small TV in the corner, and some photos I found of him and Gran hanging on the wall.
He tells me every day that it’s much better than the caves he had to sleep in while fighting for the pre-Sorel supreme, so it’s fine.
He’s been like that a lot lately. Telling more stories than usual.
Though the room is small, it’s littered with relics from his life, many of the objects belonging to Gran. Some of her dresses even hang in the closet alongside his clothes, like he can’t stand to part with them.
Once, when I was a kid, he told me that though most people don’t believe in it, he’d always known he and Gran were fated. A special kind of connection that rises above choice.
“Determined by the gods,” he’d said, whispering it to me while Gran hummed as she stirred a pot of soup on the stove.
We weren’t wealthy—we lived off of what Gramps could make from his hunting trips, while Gran earned money from mending and tailoring clothes. But we’d had enough, even if plenty of other families in the pack looked down on us.
“You’re always thinking ahead,” Gramps says now, breaking me out of my thoughts. He takes a sip of water and takes great care to return the glass to the side table without dropping or jostling it.
His hands shake a lot, but I don’t know if that’s just from age or from him being sick. Maybe it’s from both. He told me once that the moment Gran died, his body started to give up, too.
“Now,” he says, “I just wish you’d do that when it comes to your future—”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from groaning. Somehow, Gramps was aware that Xeran was planning to make another unit at the firehouse. He thought that I should fight for the position, take some leadership. But Xeran picked Felix for the role.
“I trust Xeran’s leadership,” I say, running a hand through my hair, even though I know it just makes the curls frizzy and more tangled.
“He chose Felix. It’s probably got something to do with keeping morale high.
You know how Felix is, always telling a joke.
I think that’s what we need right now, more than how I would lead. ”
“You could keep morale high,” Gramps grumbles. “And you’d keep things tidy. Has Xeran seen your room? If he saw your room, he’d have made you the leader.”
“I don’t know,” I say, raising my eyebrows at him. “Want me to call him over? So you can tell him he made the right choice?”
“Nah,” he grouses, and I know from his tone that this is the part where he lets it go. He may want me to fight for leadership opportunities, but anytime I bring up trusting Xeran, he folds.
He was here to see what the pack was like before Xeran’s grandfather took over, a time when the supremes fought to the death to get their spot and did everything in their power to keep it once they had it.
According to Gramps, back then, our pack was constantly at war with the others in the area, sometimes even going up against the huge ones, like Denver or Colorado Springs.
The bloodied shifter bodies littered the mountains, leaving human wildlife experts puzzling over what was happening when packs retrieved their dead, leaving only some blood and fur behind.
He may not like that Xeran didn’t choose me, but he knows the alternative to trusting your leader.
“Anyway,” Gramps goes on, lifting his fingers to rub them over his bushy eyebrows, like he would ever be able to smooth them down. “If you’re not going to focus on advancing at the firehouse, then you could at least tell me how your other project is going.”
“My other project?”
“Finding a woman to take as your mate before I die.”
“Gods, Gramps,” I laugh, pinching the bridge of my nose and watching through my fingers as he laughs a little, apparently pleased with the shock factor of the statement.
“First of all, that nurse told you that positive thinking is important, remember? And second, it’s not like I’m just prowling through town, looking for the first single woman—”
“You’re handsome!” he interjects, scowling at me, pointing a bony finger in my direction. “You have your grandmother’s eyes, and my jawline. You should have no problem finding a mate.”
Once again, I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really want to say, which is that I don’t want just a mate. I don’t want to pick a random shifter woman and have kids with her. I don’t want to build a family like that.
Because, no matter his views on whether or not they exist, I have a fated mate.
And I’ll never be able to touch her again.
Which makes the whole just find another woman thing feel incredibly pointless.
I know what it’s like to be with her, so how could I ever settle for something else?
And even more than that, how fair would it be to another shifter to enter into a relationship with me, knowing I’d never be able to love her fully?
That part of myself would always be reserved for someone else?
“I can tell from that look on your face that you’re thinking about something,” Gramps grumbles, shaking his head. “But you’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“I—”
“It’s fine,” he says, shifting in his seat, pulling a blanket up over his lap dramatically.
“I’m just going to take that to mean you’ve got a girl in mind, and you don’t want to tell me about her until things are a little more serious.
All your friends have paired off. I know kids are doing it later and later these days, but if you don’t find a mate now, you’ll have to go out of the pack to do it, and gods help me if you end up with a girl from the city.
She’s not going to understand Silverville, and she’s going to think her pack is the obvious choice for you to assimilate into.
And if you drag me out to Denver and make me live in that shithole of a city, I’m telling you, I’ll die on the spot. ”
“Stop to take a breath, Gramps,” I mutter, and he wheezes out a laugh. It’s always been like this with him. Since the day my parents died, and I arrived at his doorstep with nothing but a stuffed animal and a single suitcase of clothes, we’ve been the only ones the other has.
So even when he gets into his ramblings, going on and on about how much he hates Denver or what it was like to be involved in the pack wars, I just listen.
Because he’s always been there for me. The least I can do for him is make it through a long-winded story, or a lecture on how I should live my life.
He opens his mouth to say something else, and I brace myself for another lecture—or a continuation on the current one—but a coughing fit overtakes him instead. I get to my feet and rub his back, watching and feeling as his body convulses with the coughs.
When he’s finished, and he pulls his handkerchief back, neither of us misses the bright red blood there. I take it from him quietly, give him a new one, and head to the laundry room to treat it before it can stain.
By the time I get back to his room, he’s blinking slowly, looking tired, his head lolling back against the recliner.
“Go on, get out of here,” he says, waving his hand at me. “I know you have plans tonight.”
“There’s stew in the fridge,” I say, trying hard to ignore the worry coursing through me. “Yours is already portioned out.”
“Got it,” he says, his head tipped back against the recliner, his eyes already closing. “Don’t spill the soup like I did last time.”
“I have my phone,” I remind him. “You can call me.”
“Just go. I won’t let you tell the supreme I’m the reason you’re late.”
“Okay, Gramps. Love you.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
***
When I finally make it to the bar, Kalen is the only one left sitting at our booth in the corner. He’s nursing a beer, and when he looks up at me, it’s with a knowing expression.
“Shit, sorry,” I mutter, sliding into the booth. “Everyone else take off already?”
“Yeah,” Kalen says. “Holden is still fussy with wolves’ tooth. Lachlan went home to say goodnight to Levi, and Felix said Maeve has been down bad with morning sickness, so he doesn’t want to leave her alone for too long.”
I’d say it’s disappointing to see the group fall apart like this, everyone splintering off into their own lives, but it’s not like we all really hung out a lot before Xeran came back to town, anyway.
After that first summer after high school, and after Xeran’s uncle dissolved the firefighting squad, we didn’t really have a reason to get together.
And things were bad enough that it felt better just to keep to ourselves.
“Too bad,” I mutter, and I don’t even have to signal the bartender for a beer before it appears in front of me, her winking in my direction.
“Dude,” Kalen says when she walks away, her hips swinging side to side. “Why don’t you do something about that?”
I take a drink of my beer, raising an eyebrow at him over the side of the glass. “Something about what?”
“She’s clearly got a thing for you,” Kalen says, nodding toward the bartender, who’s bending over a table, her ass hugged nicely by a pair of black leggings, her hair cascading over her shoulder. “Why don’t you ask her out?”
I can’t tell him the truth. The same reason I’m not promising my Gramps that I’ll find a mate here soon. Because I know there’s no other woman on this planet who’s going to work for me, and it doesn’t feel fair to even try.
“Not tonight,” I say instead, taking a long drink of my beer. “I need my sleep.”
“Sure,” Kalen laughs, bumping his glass against mine. “Here’s to sleeping through the night, huh? No fire call would be nice for once.”
“Cheers,” I say, and even as we half-heartedly clink our beers together, I know, hoping for a night without a fire call is simply wishful thinking.