Abertha rummages around the kitchen, filling the kettle and hanging it above the fire before she prods the embers with a poker.
“So I guess I missed an interesting dinner last night, eh?” she says over her shoulder.
“I finally shifted. My wolf attacked Haisley Byrne. I lost.”
Abertha chuckled. “I heard.”
“From who?”
“That gaggle of girls you live with. All three of them showed up in the middle of the night, looking for you.”
“They did?”
Abertha nods and opens the trunk at the foot of her bed. Her cottage is open concept, so to speak. It’s one big room with a low ceiling. Very reminiscent of a hobbit hole.
She takes out one of her long hippy skirts and throws it at me.
“Thanks.”
I have to admit, my heart warms a little. Kennedy I can see walking through the woods past curfew, but Mari and Annie are still afraid of ferals and bugbears. They were pups not that long ago.
“That short, squealy one wanted me to go down to the commons and talk to Killian.”
“Mari’s—” Well, she’s hopelessly na?ve, but that seems cruel to say. “Mari’s a good egg.”
“Egg.” Abertha snorts. “You’re on the internet too much. You’re starting to talk like a human.”
I shrug. I don’t mind humans. They’re easier to deal with than shifters.
“You can’t live with them, you know,” Abertha says. My gaze flies up. She sees too much.
“I know.”
“You’d end up hurting one. Your wolf will never understand that they’re not prey.”
“My wolf listens to me.”
“Was she listening to you just now in the thicket? Or last night?”
I sigh and rub my temples. She’s right.
I breathe deep and let the scent of lavender and sandalwood calm me.
“I don’t want to be here anymore.” My heart tugs. No shifter wants to be alone. It’s not how we’re made. Still, it’s the truth. This place is tainted.
I can’t go back to the commons. I can’t look Haisley and her mother in the eye. Act like shame isn’t corroding me from the inside out. It doesn’t matter that Haisley’s mean and stuck up—she’s pack. I didn’t have the right to go after her. Not when she didn’t know she was touching another female’s mate.
And I guess, she wasn’t. Now.
Abertha sets a steaming cup of tea and a big bottle of sports drink in front of me. “Hydrate while your tea cools.”
Then, she shuffles back to the kitchen and comes back with a plate of muffins, placing them between us and easing herself into a chair. “You don’t have a choice. This is home.”
“I could ask for a trade.”
Abertha doesn’t bother to reply. She knows that’s a non-starter. No pack would trade an unmated female for me, not with my bum leg and doubt about my status, and we both know it.
“How do I do this?” I glance out a thick-paned window. The garden is peaceful, overflowing with green and bright bursts of red and orange and blue. It’s beautiful. Hours and hours of hard work and sweat, but it yields good fruit.
Why doesn’t my life work that way?
Abertha gives me a wry smile. “The same way you do anything. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time.”
My shoulders slump. I’m so tired. “He’s my mate.”
“He was.”
“I just don’t get it. How can he reject me? Mates are fated. Am I wrong? Is this moon madness?”
A primal fear chills my blood. It might take decades, but eventually, moon madness is a death sentence. Either it eats your brain to Swiss cheese until you forget how to breathe, or you’re exiled, or the pack puts you down because you’ve become a rabid animal.
Abertha nudges the muffins toward me. I shake my head. I can’t eat.
“It’s not moon madness. And mates are—complicated.”
I’ve noticed. The story is you sense your mate, you can’t resist each other, you fall in love, and you have babies. But there are a lot of—aberrations.
“So Killian and I aren’t mates?”
“No. You definitely are.”
“I don’t get it.”
Abertha lets out a long, gusty sigh.
“Is this one of those things like the man and the wolf where everything I’ve been taught as a pup is wrong?” The more I hang out with Abertha, the more long sighs I hear, and the more life gets confusing.
“Yup.”