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I understand protecting people. I understand pleasure and pain. But I don’t understand this need to be with them. I’ve met other Wildmen over the years but the only thing they made me want was to stay away from them.
“Kiaran,” she calls out from where she lies in Finnen’s arms, and I step further back, staggering and almost falling down the slope. “No!”
I lift my hands, as much in reassurance as to keep them away.
Finnen can’t see. I realized when I first met him. He seems to be looking at me now, though, sitting up on the ground and getting on his feet.
“Now what?” he says. “Stop scaring our mate away, Taj.”
“Says the man who tried to strangle him,” Taj mutters. “Hey, Kiaran. It’s fine. I’ll stop asking questions if you don’t feel like answering. Don’t go anywhere just yet, okay?”
Mate?
The word echoes in my ears, like something from a dream.
It means something to me. I dig through my memories, struggling to remember, and my head aches.
“Kiaran, careful! Don’t move!” Taj is edging toward me, a hand held out to me, and I can’t decide if it’s a mirror of my gesture—to keep me away, to keep me calm—or if he’s trying to catch me. “Don’t take another step.”
Slowly his words filter in, too slowly—it takes a long while for my mind to register the meanings, though it’s getting better.
Not fast enough, though, it seems.
I take a step back.
Taj yells out my name.
Ariadne screams.
Finnen curses, grabbing onto Ariadne who’s starting toward me, both hands reaching for me.
I fall.
There’s solid earth and then there’s nothing as I tumble down the slope, the sky with its yellow moon turning to stone and pain, and then nothing.
“Kiaran! Holy Goddess, he can’t hear me. Kiaran!”
I reach out blindly a hand to stop her from talking. “Ariadne,” I whisper.
“Looks like he can hear you just fine,” a male voice says. I think it’s Finnen’s. “Lucky you didn’t fall far, Wildman.”
My head is ringing but I manage to open my eyes. She’s bent over me, her hair a curtain around her face, the half-moon crowning her as if she’s an empress meant for a throne.
“My parents were mates,” I whisper.
“What?”
“I know that word. Mates.”
She puts her hands on my face, over my cheeks, and smiles down at me. She looks like a goddess of the earth, her eyes so big they could swallow me whole. “Good. You are our mate, Kiaran. You have a bond with us. You must have smelled it. Smelled how we fit together.”
Is that what it means? Wonder fills me. Or maybe it’s relief at making sense of the strange feelings. A need. A bond.
“You’re an alpha,” she says. “As are they. And I’m an omega. We have Fae blood in us, as do you. Fate is pushing us together, but…” Her small mouth twists a little. “But that doesn’t mean you have to do anything. If you don’t want to be in our clan, if you would rather stay here, in your cave, your solitude, we will understand.”
“You have a clan?”
“We are a clan. A family.”
