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Thorne turns and holds one of my hands. “I love everything about you, Iris. Of course, I love that you’re human. You are perfect, Iris. In every way you can be.”
“Even though you don’t think this baby is yours?”
“I don’t care. I really don’t,” he whispers.
I shut my eyes. His words are kind, but they still fall flat.
“Why won’t you just believe me?”
“Yes, indeed. Why?” Coral muses.
Thorne turns. “Because it’s impossible. There’s no way that you’re a shifter. And you’re not a faerie. Right?” he looks at Coral.
She tilts her head. “Iris. May I have just a tiny drop of your blood?”
“Sure.”
She leans forward, an elegant needle suddenly poised between her fingers. I give her the hand that Thorne isn’t holding, and she takes the tiniest amount of blood from my fingertip.
Coral blots it onto what I thought was a napkin laying out on the coffee table, but on closer examination, it looks like a giant petal. She nods as the petal turns a brilliant, resplendent shade of purple.
“Just as I thought.”
She turns to the two of us and smiles. “Iris. Do you love being human?”
“Um. I don’t know. I’ve never been anything else?”
“Wrong!” she chirps.
I blink. “What?”
“That’s wrong. It turns out, you have likely never been human at all!”
My mouth drops. “What on earth are you saying?”
She waves the petal at us. “This is a flower that detects the presence of shifter DNA. It’s carefully cultivated from a strain of flower that faeries keep around. It also makes a really excellent poultice for wounds caused by silver, actually. That’s its primary purpose. But a nice side effect is that it detects the presence of shifter DNA down to the tiniest, smallest amount. The petal turns green when human DNA is present. In the presence of even a small amount of shifter DNA, it turns this lovely color,” she waves the petal. “The results are conclusive. You, Iris, may not be able to shift. But that does not mean you are human.”
I blink. “I’m not human?”
“Nope,” she trills. “If this creature is anywhere near accurate, you likely have some latent DNA. Ermine shifter. Or is it a stoat?”
The ermine rubs his face against her, and she smiles. “Same thing. Either way. Somewhere in your DNA, darling, you are, in fact, a shifter.”
“How?”
She shrugs. “Many centuries of shifters have not been able to find their mates in time for their thirtieth birthdays. You may lose your abilities, but the DNA to become a shifter remains. After the magic is lost, shifters can mate with humans. They just cannot transform into their animals.”
I glance over at Thorne. He’s just as shocked as I am. His eyes are wide and he’s staring at Coral like...
Well.
Like she just dropped the bomb of the century on him.
I guess this is news for him, too.
Her face falls and she looks at Thorne. “And you will probably need some time to beg for your mate’s forgiveness now.”
He pales. “I…”
