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“Ivo, of course I do.”
He let his hand fall away, offering a hint of a smirk. “Even if we’ve only had one date?”
Alani smacked his knee playfully, then sat back and crossed her arms. “Even if we’ve only had one date. Then I’ll know if I want to give you a shot at number two.”
They stared at one another for a long moment, as if both trying to decide whether they ought to make light of things. Everything inside him hurt, and it wasn’t just the cracked rib, the one that felt like hell when he sighed or laughed or talked. It was his heart too. It had been broken for so long already.
“Alani, I…” The last time he had told a non-shifter what he was, they had abandoned him. His parents bailed without a second thought, kicking him to the curb like he was last week’s trash. The thought of losing Alani was devastating. Like he’d not only be dealing with a broken heart but a missing piece of his soul.
It could go either way. Tell her the truth, the whole truth, and she might run. Lie to her, sweep things under the rug, and a day, a week, a month from now she would learn everything and run because he was a liar.
The latter sounded easier for the time being. The former was the only way he’d fall asleep tonight.
So he took a leap.
“Alani, I’m… I’m part of a clan here in Angel Fire,” he started, his voice finding its courage with every word said by the way she watched with a stare so genuine and unwavering that it made his chest tight. “I searched my whole life to find people like me. I was born different. I can… We… All of us are shifters.”
He paused, waiting for her scandalized laugh or her dismissal. But besides the brief widening of her eyes, she said nothing, gave no response. Ivo couldn’t figure out whether that was a good thing or not. He cleared his throat and continued.
“I’ve been able to turn into a bear my whole life. I fought the change for a long time. My parents kicked me out when I was just a kid because of it, but coming to Angel Fire… My clan helped me find out who I was. They bridged the gap between my inner self and the person I was pretending to be…”
Holy shit. The clan had done so much for him. Deep down, Ivo knew that, but it was hard to remember just how much mending Miguel’s parents had done when he blew into town, wild and miserable.
Espie, Miguel… They had treated him like family, even when he was being a shit. They all had. And now they were punishing him, ignoring him, because he’d been a monumental shit, yet somehow Ivo had thought he was the good guy?
He shook his head, unwilling to let his thoughts wander too far—even if they were down a healthy train of thought for once. Instead, he honed his attention in on the woman sitting in front of him. She folded her hands together and set them in her lap, then licked her lips. That beautiful shade of red had returned to her cheeks, and she seemed to be looking at him in a way that was trying to figure out if he was bullshitting or not.
“I know it sounds insane,” he told her, his tone softer, “but it’s true. I can shift at will—”
“Not like a werewolf?” Alani asked suddenly, which made him straighten up. She said it with such seriousness that it startled him.
He cleared his throat and shook his head. “No… not like a werewolf. It’s an all the time, whenever I want kind of thing.”
“Okay.” Her voice had no inflection. Was monotone a good thing? He cocked his head to the side like he was bracing himself to get slapped. What was going on inside her head? It couldn’t be an easy thing to hear, but the truth had to come out sometime.
When the silence carried on for too long, Ivo drew in a soft wince, ignoring the sharp stabbing of the fractured rib, and just as he was about to say something—what, he didn’t know—Alani stood and walked around to the other side of the coffee table.
“Show me,” she said before he could question it. Ivo frowned, slowly and shakily rising to his feet himself. Alani crossed her arms, waiting. “Show me that you can shift.”
Although he didn’t want to—the pain would be excruciating—Ivo shifted.
***
There was a black bear in her living room. Alani watched, both in horror and fascination, as Ivo changed from man to bear. When he first stood and dropped his towel, she had braced herself for a joke of some kind. Ha, just pulling your leg, I’m totally not a mythical shapeshifting creature.
But then he changed. It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment he towered over her as a muscular but bruised pale-skinned man. The next, he toppled onto all fours as a black bear, his head almost twice the size of hers. She stumbled back, knocking into the TV and grasping it to steady herself.
“Oh my God…”
When he first said he could shift, a thousand thoughts had assaulted Alani at once. For a second, she thought he might be joking, or maybe looking for a way to distract her from what had happened to him. She couldn’t have blamed him for that. No man wanted to admit someone got the jump on him.
But the look in his eyes, the sincerity in his voice—it had touched her in ways she hadn’t expected. Alani had grown up on stories of shapeshifting men and women. Favored by the gods, they lived on all of Hawaii’s islands, blending in with humans one moment and soaring through the air as a brightly colored bird the next. When she was a girl, Alani had believed it, always searching for the shapeshifters amongst the trees, wondering if each animal she saw might have a human mind behind those animal eyes. As she got older, Alani took the stories for what they were— proverbs, lessons, and ways to teach children where they fit into society.
Yet here she was, in Angel Fire, falling hard for a man with the soul of a black bear.
She had always thought Ivo’s eyes were dark, but they were nothing compared to the sorrowful stare of the black bear. Her fingers yearned to work through the fur. Her legs wished to crouch before that great black head so that she could inspect him—teeth and all.
Yet that would have to fall to another day. Ivo was in pain today. If his story was true, he wasn’t the only kind of shifter in town, and there was a very real possibility Alani had walked into some sort of clan conflict.
Shaking her head, she rushed forward and gathered his drooping head in her arms. “Change back! Change back!”
He did so just as fast as the initial transition, and the enormous weight of a bear head vanished. In its place was the surprisingly buoyant weight of Ivo’s skull.
“I believe you,” she said. If he were a mythological creature, then that would explain the way he healed. All the stories in pop culture explained that the supernatural were superior healers. TV shows were full of that crap. Apparently, there was a nugget of truth to it.
Ivo wheezed and twitched in her arms. Even if he had healed somewhat, it was still very clear he was in a great deal of pain. Although she struggled somewhat, Alani helped him to his feet and guided him back to her bedroom. This time he didn’t put up a fight to her trying to nurse him and instead let her tuck him into bed and feed him a few pain pills, the kind that usually made her drowsy.
At the sound of her oven timer going off, she hurried from the bedroom to the kitchen to make sure nothing burned. When she returned, intent on asking Ivo if he wanted her to fix him a plate, he was completely conked out—dead to the world, soft snores catching in his throat. Running a hand through her damp, messy hair, Alani sat on the edge of the bed when her knees finally gave way. A foreboding sense of panic started to overtake her.
What did she do to end up in a situation like this? Was this man, this shifter, a blessing…or a curse?
