Chapter Three
“You need to invest in some fences.” Sobek stood on the front porch of the neighboring house again, three days after his first attempt to return the wayward children, holding Timothy with one arm like a sack of particularly scaly potatoes.
The hatchling had his face pressed against Sobek’s neck and was making soft chirping sounds that crocodile shifters only made when they felt safe, which was concerning on approximately seventeen different levels.
“Oh, no.” The door swung open to reveal Rudy in paint-splattered overalls and a bright yellow T-shirt that read “I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m right.” His curly hair stuck up in about forty directions, and he had a smudge of yellow paint across one freckled cheek. “Timothy. Again?”
“Again,” Sobek confirmed, and tried very hard not to notice how Rudy’s eyes - which were an absolutely ridiculous shade of blue - went wide with what looked like genuine distress.
“I am so sorry. I was literally just painting the living room, and I turned around for two seconds…” Rudy reached for Timothy, who made a protesting chirp and clung harder to Sobek’s shirt. “Timothy, sweetheart, you can’t keep running off to the pond. We talked about this.”
“Perhaps,” Sobek said, in what he considered to be a very reasonable tone, “you should consider that your children have some rather concerning behavioral…”
And that’s when it happened. The world exploded into light.
It poured from Rudy like he’d swallowed the sun - golden, blinding, and absolutely impossible to look away from.
Sobek’s entire body locked up, his knees went weak, and his crocodile side - which had been contentedly dormant for the last three millennia except when Sobek was near a pool - suddenly roared to life with a possessive fury that made his teeth ache.
MINE.
No. Sobek took a step back, nearly tripping over the porch step. Absolutely not.
“Concerning behavioral what?” Rudy asked, completely oblivious to the fact that Sobek’s entire existence had just tilted sideways.
He’d managed to extract Timothy from Sobek’s grip - when had that happened?
- and now held the hatchling on his hip while those impossible blue eyes regarded Sobek with confusion.
“Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Sobek opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “Your children…”
“If you’re about to tell me they’re weird, I’m going to stop you right there.
” Rudy’s expression shifted from confused to protective so fast it gave Sobek whiplash.
He actually stepped backward into the house, partially shielding Timothy with his body.
“We don’t judge in this house. These kids have been through enough without some stranger showing up to tell them they’re… ”
“That’s not what I meant.” Sobek forced the words out through a jaw that felt welded shut. His hands were shaking. When was the last time his hands had shaken? “They’re shifters.”
Rudy blinked. “They’re what now?”
“Shifters. Paranormals.” Sobek gestured vaguely at Timothy, who’d gone very still against Rudy’s shoulder. The hatchling’s dark eyes were fixed on Sobek with an intensity that suggested he understood every word. “The scales. The claws. The fur. They’re not human children.”
“Okay.” Rudy’s voice had gone very flat. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you hit your head or something, because otherwise you’re standing on my porch telling me my kids aren’t human, which is…”
“A statement of fact.” Sobek pinched the bridge of his nose, trying desperately to think through the howling in his head that kept insisting he needed to get closer, needed to touch, needed to claim. “The boy is a crocodile shifter. Extremely rare, virtually extinct, actually. The other two are…”
“Stop.” Rudy’s free hand came up, and he actually covered Timothy’s ear with his palm. The hatchling’s other ear was already pressed against Rudy’s chest. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I’m going to ask you very nicely to leave. Right now.”
Every instinct Sobek possessed screamed at him to stay.
His crocodile side was practically crawling under his skin, desperate to shift, to prove what he was, to make this impossibly bright creature understand.
The territorial urge to guard Rudy - and by extension, the children - made his scales itch beneath human skin.
But Rudy looked genuinely upset, and the hatchling had started to whimper.
“I apologize.” The words tasted wrong. Sobek never apologized, not for anything, and he wasn’t wrong, but clearly he’d misspoken. “I shouldn’t have…that was poorly done.”
“Yeah. It was.” Rudy’s expression softened slightly, though he still held Timothy close.
“Look, I get it. The kids are different. They’ve got their quirks.
But they’re kids, okay? They’re not shifters or paranormals or whatever else you want to call them.
They’re just children who’ve had a rough start, and they don’t need some random guy showing up to… ”
“I understand.” Sobek took another step back, even though it felt like someone had wrapped barbed wire around his lungs and was pulling tight. “I won’t mention it again.”
He should leave, just walk away. He could drive back to the cabin and then send his car back into the ether, and translocate somewhere else entirely - maybe Fiji, maybe Antarctica.
Basically, anywhere Rudy’s scent wouldn’t follow him into his dreams. But his feet refused to move, and Rudy was still standing there glowing like someone had threaded gold through his veins, and that’s without the hatchling who was watching him with eyes far too knowing for a child that age.
“Would you like some coffee?” Rudy asked suddenly.
Sobek’s brain ground to a halt. “Excuse me, what?”
“Coffee.” Rudy shifted Timothy to his other hip.
The protective tension had drained from his shoulders, replaced by something that looked suspiciously like pity.
“You look like you could use some, and I feel bad about yelling at you. You did bring Timothy back twice now, even if you did just insult my kids.”
“I didn’t mean to insult…” Sobek cut himself off and drew in a long breath.
His crocodile side rumbled as he caught a hint of something that definitely wasn’t paint fumes and could only be Rudy’s unique scent.
“Coffee would be...acceptable. By the way, my name is Sobek.” It was probably polite to offer his name at the very least.
“Nice to meet you, Sobek.” Rudy’s smile lit up his entire face, and Sobek had to physically stop himself from stepping forward.
“Come on in. Fair warning, the house is a disaster because I’m painting, and Rose is somewhere wearing only underwear and a tiara, and Jack is probably reading in the closet because that’s his favorite place for some reason. ”
The house was exactly as messy as advertised.
Sobek followed Rudy through a hallway painted in alternating stripes of purple and green, past a living room where furniture sat covered in paint-splattered drop cloths, and into a kitchen so aggressively yellow it made his eyes water.
Rose - the panther cub - was perched on top of the refrigerator in nothing but pink underwear and a plastic crown.
She hissed at him, then went back to eating what looked like an entire box of crackers.
“Down,” Rudy said mildly, setting Timothy in a chair at the kitchen table. “We eat at the table, not on appliances.”
“I’m a bird,” Rose announced.
“Well, birds don’t eat crackers from a box. Get down, now.”
She climbed down with a dramatic sigh that would’ve done any theater actress proud, then proceeded to drag her box of crackers to the table.
Jack appeared from somewhere - possibly the closet, based on Rudy’s earlier comment - with a book tucked under one arm and suspicious amounts of brown fur poking out from under his sleeves.
Shifter pups, Sobek’s crocodile side insisted. Pack. Ours.
They’re not ours, Sobek told it firmly. Their guardian is our mate, but…
MATE. OURS. PROTECT.
Fantastic. His crocodile side had apparently regressed to caveman logic, which meant he wasn’t going to listen to anything Sobek said for at least another hundred years.
“How do you take your coffee?” Rudy asked, already pulling mugs from a cabinet painted in a shade of blue that clashed magnificently with the yellow walls.
“Black.”
“Boring, but easy to make. As I said, we don’t judge here.” Rudy poured two cups, doctored his own with what looked like half a bottle of cream and enough sugar to put a horse into a diabetic coma, then slid Sobek’s mug across the table. “So. Are you renting the cabin next door?”
“For the month.” Sobek wrapped both hands around the mug, using the heat to ground himself.
The three children watched him with varying degrees of suspicion and curiosity.
Timothy had stopped whimpering, but his scales were visible on his forearms - thin lines of green-gray that any shifter would recognize instantly. “It was meant to be a quiet retreat.”
“Ah.” Rudy’s expression turned sheepish. “And then my kids kept invading your pond.”
“Repeatedly.”
“I really am sorry about that.” Rudy took a sip of his absurdly sweet coffee, leaving a small foam mustache on his upper lip that he didn’t seem to notice. Sobek noticed. “They’re usually good about staying in the yard, but something about that pond just calls to them. Especially Timothy.”
Because he’s a crocodile shifter, Sobek wanted to say. Because I’m a crocodile god, and hatchlings are drawn to powerful crocodilians for protection. Because his instincts recognize me as safe.
Instead, he said, “How did you come to have them?”
Rudy’s expression shifted - something sad, fierce, and protective all at once. “I found them, all three, just at different times.”
“Found them,” Sobek repeated carefully, doing his level best not to sound judgmental.
“I know it sounds weird, but that’s literally what happened.
It was Rose first.” Rudy reached over to smooth down one of her wild curls.
She batted his hand away but smiled while doing it.
“She was outside a gas station about three years ago, just after I got this house, actually. She was barely walking, just sitting there by the dumpster like someone had left her out with the trash.” His voice hardened on the last word.
“No ID, no note, nothing. I called the police and social services, but nobody was looking for her, and nobody cared.”
The territorial rage that swept through Sobek was so intense he had to physically grip the table to keep from shifting right there. Someone had abandoned a panther cub, leaving her alone and vulnerable where anything could have happened to her.
Mine, his crocodile side growled. Pack. Ours to protect now.
“Then it was Jack.” Rudy nodded toward the wolf pup, who’d pressed closer to his side.
“I found him in the woods behind this house about two years ago. Poor thing was so terrified he wouldn’t talk for weeks.
I still don’t know his whole story, but from what I’ve pieced together, something bad happened to his parents, and he saw it. But he’s safe now.”
Jack’s fur rippled under his sleeves, and Sobek understood the impulse. Wolf shifters were pack animals. Losing parents that young would have been doubly traumatic.
“And Timothy was last.” Rudy’s hand moved to rest on the hatchling’s head.
Timothy leaned into the touch, those too-knowing eyes still fixed on Sobek.
“I found him about a year ago, sitting by that pond, actually, over in what I thought was an abandoned property. Just...sitting there, waiting. Like someone had told him to stay put and they’d come back for him. ”
The fury in Sobek’s chest crystallized into something cold and deadly.
Crocodile shifters didn’t abandon their young.
Ever. Hatchlings were precious, protected, and guarded with a ferocity that made dragon hoards look casual.
For Timothy to have been left alone meant something had gone catastrophically wrong with his family. Or someone had taken them.
“So yeah.” Rudy smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“They’re mine now. All three of them. And I don’t care if they’re different or weird or if Timothy’s skin gets scaly sometimes, or if Jack gets hairy when he’s scared, or if Rose’s fingernails are sharper than they should be.
They’re kids. My kids. And anyone who has a problem with that can kindly go fuck themselves. ”
The mate light pulsed brighter, if that was even possible. Sobek’s crocodile side rumbled so loudly he was surprised Rudy couldn’t hear it.
Perfect, it said. Perfect mate. Protects the young. Ours. OURS.
“You really don’t know,” Sobek said quietly.
“Know what?”
That your children are shifters. That the paranormal world exists. That you’re glowing like a star and that I would burn down the world to keep you safe.
“Nothing,” Sobek said instead. “You’re a good parent.”
Rudy blinked, then his cheeks flushed pink beneath those freckles.
“Oh. I… Thank you. I try. Most days I feel like I’m just barely keeping everyone alive and the house from falling down around our ears, but I love these kids with all my heart...
” He trailed off, smiling properly this time. “So, yeah, I try.”
Sobek took a drink of his coffee to avoid saying something catastrophically stupid. Like “You’re my mate,” or “Let me help you with the house,” or “I would kill anyone who tried to hurt you or these children.”
The whole situation was a disaster, an absolute disaster.
His mate was human, had no idea the paranormal world existed, and was accidentally raising three shifter children who couldn’t properly shift yet.
The logistics alone were enough to make Sobek’s head hurt, never mind the emotional complications.
The sensible thing would be to leave - right now. To walk away and never come back. Find another cabin in another state that had a lovely deep pool, or better yet, buy one for himself on the other side of the country and just fucking stay there.
But Timothy was still watching him with those dark knowing eyes, and Rose had stopped eating crackers to study him thoughtfully, and Jack’s fur had smoothed back down beneath his sleeves.
Meanwhile, Rudy was smiling at him over a mug of tooth-rotting sweet coffee in a kitchen that looked like a rainbow had vomited on it, glowing with that impossible mate light.
Mine, his crocodile side insisted. Ours. Stay.
Sobek took another drink of coffee and accepted that he was absolutely, completely, irrevocably screwed. His life was going to change whether he wanted it to or not.