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“I don’t know,” I admitted. “A guy I met in Vegas. A one-night stand, I guess. Wesley was his name. He owns one of the clubs, I think. We met one night, and one thing led to another. He was so…” I thought back to that night.
Wesley had been sodifferentfrom any of the other guys I’d met before. He’d had a magnetic pull to him that I hadn’t been able to ignore. I’d fallen into his cerulean blue eyes—the same eyes Emmie looked at me with now—and when he’d kissed me, the world had stopped turning, and it had been just me and him.
“Wesley… who?” Circe asked. The expression on her face was strange.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a last name. I should have; I know that. I just didn’t think that far. It was a one-night stand, so I never bothered to get his phone number or last name.” I could have spent an eternity with him, and I would have been happy. I’d felt it back then, but he didn’t pursue me, and I didn’t want to come off as clingy. “I wanted to tell him about Emmie when I found out I was pregnant, but I couldn’t find him, and so, after Emmie was born and I heard about the house, I came here.”
Circe nodded slowly. “He was… that is, he had to have been a shifter, too.”
“How do you know?” I asked. The idea of Wesley being something I didn’t understand was terrifying.
“A child with powers as strong as Emmie’s wouldn’t come from a union with two people when there wasn’t at least one full shifter.”
I shook my head and laughed bitterly. “I can’t believe we’re talking about all of this like it’s actually possible. Like it’s actuallyreal. These things don’t exist, Circe!”
Circe only watched me. I scrubbed my hands down my face and shook my head. I rubbed my neck, ran my fingers through my dark hair, pulling it back before letting it fall onto my shoulders again. This didn’t feel real, but it had to be.
After what I’d seen in the bedroom… unless I was crazy.
I didn’t feel like I was going crazy, though. Life wasn’t easy, but that didn’t mean I was losing it. I’d always been determined, and doing life on my own wasn’t new. I’d been alone long before Emmie had come along, and her father had disappeared into thin air.
“What do I do now?” I asked with a sigh.
I wasn’t necessarily accepting that my daughter had special powers, but the evidence was there. There could definitely be some truth to what my friend had said.
“There’s nothing that needs to be done,” Circe said. “I’ll help you understand what this world is like, and you love her as fiercely as you have all this time. It won’t be easy for her to assimilate, but I’ll be here, and we can introduce her to some other shifters in the community. She needs someone who understands what’s happening to her, to guide her.”
I shook my head. “I can’t just let you hand her over to some m—” I cut myself off.
“Shifters aren’t monsters, Danna,” Circe said softly.
“They turn into animals!” I protested “Dragons?!”
“I know what you’re saying, but there aren’t only dragons out there. There are all kinds, even rabbit shifters.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” Circe admitted. “They’re very rare, but shifters are just people, like you and me.”
“Who can turn into monsters.” I was getting scared again.
“They can,” Circe said, nodding slowly. “But so can humans.”
That wasn’t wrong. Humans had done terrible things in the past, and they still did it. The human world was one I understood, though. This new world Circe told me about was new, and new was scary.
We sat in silence while I tried to wrap my mind around the facts Circe had just laid out on the table. I wanted to know more, but I couldn’t take any more right now. Just a little bit.
“What’s it like?” I asked, glancing at my best friend, seeing her as a stranger for the first time. I’d known her for years, and she’d been like a sister to me, but she had a hidden side to her that I’d known nothing about all this time.
“What?” she asked.
“Living with magic.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know anything else, so to me, it’s normal.”
“Is that why you’re a pharmacist? The leaves and the tea and the… spells?”
Circe smiled. “Something like that, yeah. It made sense to do something that will help people, but I can’t be a doctor.”
