Page 76 of Colton’s Mate

Callie woke up early—not long after the sun was up, which she almost never did. Colt was dead asleep beside her, and she slipped out of his grasp and dropped a kiss on his head before getting up.

After finding her clothes and getting dressed, Callie went quietly down the stairs and outside, making a stop in the kitchen for a pack of Kitty’s Hostess cupcakes.

The birds had just started singing, and the air smelled fresh and clean. Nobody was around.

She walked up the hill behind the house, through the woods to Titan’s cabin. The stone sculptures in his front yard were still deep in shadow, looking almost alive.

As she approached his front steps, the door of the cabin opened and Titan came out. “Hey,” Callie said. “I brought breakfast.” She tossed him the cupcakes.

Titan was almost as fixated on snack cakes as Kitty.

He caught them, and a rare smile split his face. “Thanks.”

“I should be thanking you,” she said. “You got Colt into the spirit world yesterday, didn’t you.”

“I saw you there together. Bonding.”

She didn’t know if he meant before it happened, or during. But it didn’t matter.

“Which brings me to the reason I came here,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Titan sat down on the porch steps, and Callie sat next to him. Titan opened the snack cake package and took out a cupcake, then handed Callie the other one.

She bit into it. She’d been thinking a lot since yesterday about Colt and his owl, and what Remy had said to her about owls. She’d bonded to the leopard part of him in the spirit world, but she still didn’t know how his owl felt.

And if it was unhappy with the bond, then this whole thing could still go sideways in a really bad way. She had to make sure that didn’t happen, and she thought maybe she’d figured out a way. But she needed Titan’s help.

The big bear shifter waited, eating his cupcake, until she was ready to talk.

“Here’s the thing,” she said finally. “I need to talk to Colt’s owl, but I don’t want Colt to know about it.”

Titan thought about that for a minute. Then he said, in his deep soothing voice, “Should you be keeping things from him?”

Callie considered. “I think this is between me and the owl,” she said. “If Colt knows, then he’ll try to deal with this himself, and I need the owl to be the one doing it. Is there any way we can find him in the spirit world, without Colt being there?”

Titan frowned, thinking. “I can try,” he said finally. He finished off his cupcake, wiped his fingers on his pants, and then wrapped his hand around Callie’s wrist.

And she was there. In the forest in the spirit world, in lynx form. Next to her was a big ghostly polar bear, as translucent as Nick was in this world.

Call the owl, he said in her mind.

How? Do I just yell, ‘Owly owly owly?’

The bear shook his enormous head. Picture him in your mind. His essence. And then try to draw him to you.

That sounded nebulous as fuck. What if he won’t come? What if she couldn’t find his essence? Especially since she wasn’t even sure what an essence was.

There’s a good chance he won’t. I’m not the owl whisperer—I can just take people to the spirit world. But the owl is connected to Colt, so he’s connected to you too. If you ask nicely, he might show up.

Callie sat and tried to think about what the owl was like, what it wanted and needed. How it felt on the inside. What mattered to it.

It thought it was better than other people. But it also maybe felt left out, because it was ignored for so long.

Maybe shifter animals didn’t like being left on their own?

Maybe he needed to know he was valued and respected.

And he was. He’d defended her when the crows and panthers attacked the Crows’ Nest, and she couldn’t defend herself. She hadn’t ever really thanked him.