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Chapter Seventeen
Edie
Isatontheopposite corner of the blanket from Jasper, hoping that the distance would keep me from leaping on him and satiating the hunger I’d felt since he stepped out of the barn.Instead, I unwrapped a sandwich.It was delicious, roast beef with soft cheese on thick bread with some sort of sweet and salty relish, but it did nothing to calm the needy desire simmering inside me.
Again, I had the sense of being in a parallel life.Baltimore Edie would have been eating lunch about now too, but she’d be eating a limp salad from the hospital’s cafeteria with one hand while she scrolled through her phone with the other.She’d have one eye on the clock, mourning every minute of her break as it passed.
Instead, I was enjoying a gourmet sandwich and fresh strawberries that had been picked from the greenhouse that morning.I was warm from the sun and pleasantly tired from learning an exciting new skill.And I was sitting next to a gorgeous, interesting man whose eyes kept sliding over my body as if he could touch it with his gaze.
I sat up straighter.“So.Story.”
He balled up the paper that had wrapped his sandwich and grabbed another from the bag.As he unwrapped it, he said, “Story.Twisted Pines was founded in 1853 by Angelique Moreau and her three sons.”
“I read that on your website.”
“Yeah.Ad copy,” he said with a wave of his hand.“The part about them settling here because Angelique declared it was so beautiful it must be heaven?Bullshit.”
“Poetic bullshit.I thought the same thing when I arrived.”
“Thanks, I wrote it,” he said, the corner of his mouth denting.
“So, what’s the real story?”
He took a swig of his iced tea.“Well, Angelique was the daughter of a French trapper who was married off to a missionary when she was fourteen.Her husband only crawled out of the bottle to beat her or rape her.By the time she was nineteen, she had three little boys.When her husband was sent out to civilize the wild frontier, he dragged her along.”
I swallowed a bite with a throat that had suddenly gone dry.“Yeah, I see why you didn’t put that version on your website.”
He didn’t laugh.“One night, he went too far.One of the boys tried to protect his mother, and the father hit him instead.He was no more than five years old.When she told this story, Angelique would always say that she was born in that moment.She didn’t become a shifter until later, but that was the moment she became herself.She got up off the floor where he’d thrown her, told her eldest to cover the other kids’ eyes, and stabbed her husband with his own knife.”
“Good for her.”
Jasper nodded.“That’s how we see it now.Back then, the so-called religious community chased her and her sons out of town.That still amounted to a death sentence, just a slower and more painful one than hanging.Angelique and her boys were half-dead with exhaustion and hunger when the wolves found them.”
I shivered despite the warmth of the sun.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” Jasper said with a tiny smile.“This part of the story always scared me when I was a kid.It’s raining, it’s nighttime, the family is huddled under a tree trying to keep warm.And suddenly, Angelique sees a pair of eyes in the dark.Then another, then another.She gets her boys up, tries to push them up the tree so they can hide in the branches, but the tree is too big and the wind and rain are ripping the forest to shreds.She runs, her youngest in her arms, through the trees where we just were.”
I could see it in my mind.The black night, the howling wind.The horses had picked their way carefully over the uneven ground, but a woman running for her life would have inevitably slipped on the wet, twisting roots.Her children would have been screaming with fear.They would have been cold and wet and weak.
“And she comes bursting out onto this ridge,” Jasper continued.“Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, only this one tree that’s practically growing out of the side of the cliff.She forces the boys out onto the trunk, trying to protect them with her own body.There are four wolves now, and Angelique knows, just somehow knows, that it’s a mother and her cubs, and that they are desperate and starving too.The tree is swaying under the weight of the boys, but Angelique edges her way out onto the trunk.The mother wolf follows her, and Angelique knows they will all die because they’re trying so desperately to live.
“And then a bolt of lightning comes tearing down, ripping the sky apart.”
I didn’t realize my hands had gone limp until a piece of tomato flopped out of my sandwich onto the blanket.“And then?”
He made a show of taking a bite, swallowing, before he continued.“Then, Angelique wakes up the next morning to sunshine and birdsong.Her boys are beside her, sleeping peacefully.And in her hand is a stone.It’s nothing special, the sort of rock you could find anywhere.But when she looked at it, a portal opened inside her.And she came out on the other side as a wolf.”
I stared at him aghast while he finished his second sandwich.“So, you’re telling me, the secret to shifters is…magic rocks?”
He chuckled and laid back on one elbow.“I guess I am.”
“If I found one of these magic rocks, would it make me a shifter?”
“Maybe.Did you ever collect rocks as a kid?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a theory that every person has the potential to be a shifter in their blood, but they either never found their stone or, if they did, they didn’t have an Alpha to make them.When a young clan member finds their stone, they come out here with the Alpha and touch the tree together.Before that, the stone is just a stone.”
