Leviathan
I’d been sitting on my front porch, wallowing in my own guilt, most of the afternoon.
No one had seen June since the night before, and she hadn’t been in her room when I went to check on her.
Now, the sun was setting, and I still hadn’t managed to talk to her about what had happened.
Which wasn’t that bad of a thing, once I thought about it, since I still wasn’t sure what I’d say.
That was why, when she appeared from the forest, I could do nothing but stare at her in shock as she strode toward my cabin. When she reached the porch steps, I finally managed to rise from my chair.
“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,” I said.
She nodded, not looking at me, instead peering into my cabin. “Is anyone else here? Rainier?”
“No. It’s just us.”
“Good,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“I’m sorry about yesterday. And the day before. I fucked up. I can see that. I never should have acted the way I did, and I don’t want you to be upset about that.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about,” she said, and something about the way she said it made me uneasy.
“Okay. What is it?”
“This,” she said. The necklace I’d given her dangled from her fingers.
She must have seen the way my eyes widened, because she gave me a bitter, humorless smile.
“Did this belong to your old mate?”
I cursed myself for yet another stupid decision. All these years of knowing what to do and when to do it, yet ever since this woman arrived, I couldn’t seem to get anything right.
“I… There’s an explanation,” I said, cringing at how fucking pathetic that sentence sounded even to my own ears.
She tossed the necklace to me, her face a storm of emotion as I caught it.
“Do you have any idea how disrespectful that is?” she hissed. “You gave me a gift that belonged to your first mate. You did that and didn’t even tell me?”
A million thoughts spun through my head. There were a billion ways this could go, and none of them seemed good.
“That’s an insult,” June continued. “Not just to me, but to Naphele’s memory. Why would you give it to me?”
I hung my head, feeling both cornered and defeated. “I thought it would be nice. I thought you might like it… for deeper reasons,” I said, stating something I hadn’t even admitted to myself until right then. “I thought it might help you remember.”
June let out a heavy sigh. “Jesus. You think I’m Naphele’s reincarnation?”
My head snapped up, eyes locking on June’s, and her anger radiated off her face like a storm.
“Even if I was,” June went on, “I’m still my own person. You do know how this works, right? Every shifter does. A reincarnation doesn’t magically become the old person!” She was actively shouting now. In the distance, several people turned to watch the drama unfold. Shame washed across me.
“I thought—”
“No, Levi, you didn’t think,” June said. “You hoped that…what? You’d give me this necklace and then boom, Naphele would come through and erase all that I am? You know that’s basically the same as me dying, don’t you?”
“No! I didn’t want that. I never wanted that. It’s just that the first time I met you, when I found you in the snow, you said something that only would have made sense if it was said by Naphele. That’s what first put the idea in my head.”
“The idea that you could erase me?” June snapped.
“Please,” I begged. “Let me have my say. That’s not what I wanted. There were things that made the two of you seem like the same person, but also things that showed how different you were. Like the overlook. I began to fall for you. You. Not Naphele. That much is true—”
“But?”
I sighed, closing my eyes for a moment. “But…there’s still a chance that you might not be Naphele reborn, and if that’s true, then she could still be out there.”
“Got it.” June took a step back. “Maybe you should go run in the woods and try to find her. Holy shit, is that what all this is?” she said, sweeping her arm around. “A hundred years of picking up random chicks, hoping they’ll be your long-lost love?”
She was getting angrier by the second, and I didn’t blame her. All my words were coming out wrong.
“Not at all,” I said, taking her hand. Thankfully, she didn’t pull away. “I did that to make sure no one else would feel as lonely as I did. June, look at me.”
She pinned me with her gaze, her jaw set in an angry line.
“I love you,” I said.
Her eyes softened, now looking more shocked than angry. It was the first time I’d said it out loud to anyone in a century.
“You…” June shook her head, but she seemed less pissed, so I continued.
“Yes, June. I love you. Do I still love Naphele? Of course. I always will. But I love you. I love you now, and I’ll love you tomorrow, even if you decide to leave me. That much will never change. I don’t care if Naphele’s soul resides within you. Do you hear me? I don’t care.”
For the briefest second, a smile flitted across her lips, but it vanished as she shook her head. Some of the old anger returned to her face.
“But if I’m not her, you’ll never be satisfied, will you?”
“Yes, I will,” I said, though deep down I wasn’t sure if that was actually true. All I knew was that I didn’t want to lose June to my own idiocy.
“Is there a way to know for sure?” she asked.
That caught me off guard. “Uh, well, there’s a couple options, yeah.”
“What are they?” she demanded.
“Rainier can head to the nearest town and use the shifter blood samples that are on file. It can be cross-referenced to see whether a shifter has been reincarnated from another. It’s fairly accurate, but it takes around a week to get the final analysis,” I explained, suddenly feeling like I was in some surreal dream.
“Is there anything faster?”
I thought back on what Rainier had said.
The stories his grandmother had told him about ancient shifters doing some sort of ritual to determine if someone had been reincarnated.
I’d chosen not to go that route, but now with June here, I couldn’t lie or obfuscate.
Not if I ever wanted a chance to be with her.
“There’s a ritual we can do. It requires a fresh blood sample. Rainier knows the details, but I don’t know how safe it is,” I said.
She nodded once. “Tell him I want to do it. And soon.”
“What?” I said, brow furrowed and eyes narrowing. “You want to do it even without knowing the risks?”
“Yes. We need to find out once and for all. Levi, I don’t know if I can trust you after everything, but once we know for sure—and only then—we can try to talk things out. Okay?”
I hesitated, then finally nodded. “Sure. Yeah.” I didn’t like the part where she said she didn’t know if she could trust me again, but I deserved that.
“Have Rainier tell me when and where,” June said as she walked away.
I opened my mouth to call her back, but then decided against it.
Something inside me withered a bit, like a plant under the heat of a flame. How could I be this stupid? Was I really about to lose two mates in the same lifetime?