Page 7

MARLOWE

Marlowe…

He was here.

I was deliciously sore, having knotted each of my pack mates in preparation for my trip. Cam’s arms were wrapped tightly around me, and I carefully extricated myself from the tangle of limbs and got out of bed to look out the window, squinting into the darkness. I found him after a few moments of searching, the black silhouette of his wolf waiting in the trees.

We couldn’t have a conversation while either of us were shifted. Deep talks were almost impossible in that form, and my wolf was still too naive and suggestible. She could easily follow him off into the night, and I couldn’t let that happen.

I pulled on a sweater and leggings, and grabbed an extra pair of sweatpants one of the guys had left in my room. Once I made it downstairs, I slipped on a pair of boots and Elias’s down jacket. The back door slid open silently, and I headed towards the woods, crunching through the snow. Ezra’s eyes shone in the moonlight, tail wagging slowly.

“Shift,”

I demanded. My heart was almost beating out of my chest, and I was afraid of the face I’d see in front of me. It felt equally terrifying for it to be Ezra or someone else entirely. “I need to hit you, and doing it when you’re a wolf feels like animal abuse.”

The transformation was fast. I had barely blinked when suddenly a tall, bearded man stood in front of me.

My brother, Ezra. In the flesh.

In the very naked flesh.

I averted my gaze, throwing the sweatpants in his general direction. “And I refuse to stand here and talk to you with your dick out.”

He smirked, catching them one-handed with ease. “People in this realm are far too hung up on the natural body.”

Once he pulled them on, he gestured to his lower half. “Better?”

“Much.”

I walked up and punched him as hard as I could in the gut, but he barely flinched. “You fucking asshole!”

I cried. “You left me! You lied to me! You abandoned me!”

Each accusation came with another punch, but Ezra never moved. Maybe I should have brought Julian out here. “How could you do this to me? You were my brother, my twin brother! Half of my fucking soul, and you didn’t even care!”

He finally wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into him tightly. I sobbed, now having the nose to recognize his scent—almond and cherry. Growing up, that smell had just been Ezra. Had just been home.

“I’m still your brother, bitch,”

he said teasingly, referencing our nicknames for each other.

“No!”

I yelled. I pushed away, wiping the tears off my cheeks and pointing my finger at him. How dare he try to worm his way back into my good graces with nostalgia and inside jokes? “No, you don’t get to break my heart and then show up like it hasn’t been eight years. Like we can just pick up how we were. I don’t even know you anymore.”

He tilted his head, the expression on his face amused and patronizing, as though he was observing a child. It pissed me off even more. “We shared a womb, we’ll always know each other.”

“Shared a womb?”

I repeated, nearly gagging on the phrase. “Fucking gross, since when do you talk like that?”

Ezra shrugged. “Since I grew up and discovered my true home. My destiny.”

He stepped closer. “Our destiny.”

I squinted in the darkness so I could take a better look at his face—hazel eyes, just like mine. His jaw had sharpened and widened as he’d grown into manhood, and what used to be a playful smile now felt sinister.

“What kind of cult did you fall into, Ez?”

I whispered, gaping over the intricate tattoos that covered his torso. “What did this shifter commune offer you that your own family couldn’t?”

He scowled and spit on the ground. “Family? Mar, you’re my sister, and I will always love you, but our parents… Mom did nothing but lie and manipulate us, and Dad abandoned us. They suppressed our biology, kept us from our culture and our people. And for what?”

“Safety!”

I shot back. “They were scared. And now it doesn’t even amount to anything, because it looks like whoever they were trying to hide us from got their hooks into you anyway. Our parents sacrificed so much for us, and you threw it back in their faces.”

“You think they sacrificed?”

he bellowed. “No, we sacrificed, because they were too stubborn and stupid to understand what we were born for. Do you want to know why I never dated back in high school?”

He pulled his pants back down, gesturing towards his genitals, and I shut my eyes. “I’m an alpha, Marlowe! When puberty kicked in and I grew a knot, I had no fucking idea what was happening to me! I tried to talk to Mom about it. I was afraid I had cancer or something. But instead, she told me I could never talk about it, never be naked in front of anyone, and never have a girlfriend. And you…”

I opened my eyes slightly, then turned back to face him once I saw his pants were back up. “Do you think it’s okay that Mom told me I had to be prepared to fight grown men off you? That you had a condition that made you irresistible to some people and it was my job to make sure they never touched you? And that I couldn’t even tell you about it? I was a teenager, for fuck’s sake! And then she forced you on those pills, Moons know how they’ve affected your body after taking them for so long.”

His heavy breathing created little puffs of steam in the cold air, his chest heaving in anger, while my own began to deflate. Why hadn’t I connected the dots yet? Of course Ezra had been an alpha, and no wonder he was so depressed, refusing to date anyone back in high school. And those creeps who’d started showing up when I was a teenager… I guess it hadn’t been just my boobs this whole time.

It was all making sense now. An alpha, constantly on edge and without a pack, driven and ordered to protect his sister but he didn’t know why. And it must have killed him to turn down girls constantly while watching me date half the school. To see me so happy and adjusted while he was clueless about who and what he was.

He was my twin, and while I had sensed his anguish back then, I had naively brushed it off as typical teenage angst. How could I have been so blind?

A cold wind blew straight through me, and I shivered despite my warm, heavy coat. “Ez… I didn’t know that’s what growing up was like for you,”

I said softly. “And I realize you couldn’t exactly talk to me about it.”

His shoulders lowered a bit. “I don’t blame you. Even if I got frustrated with how much easier it was for you to live like a human than me, I still loved you.”

My lower lip trembled. “Then why did you leave me? After all these years, you couldn’t have even texted or emailed me to let me know you were okay? Why fake your death and…”

Ezra pulled me back in for a hug, his warmth radiating off his bare chest, and he chuckled. “Phones don’t exactly work in Vespera.”

“Vespera?”

I asked. “Is that the name of the commune? Is it in the mountains or something?”

He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, lowering his face to mine. “Why do you keep calling it a commune?”

“I don’t know,”

I shrugged. “That was what the guys call them. The fundamentalist shifter communities that…”

“Marlowe,”

he interrupted. “I wasn’t living in the woods with a bunch of Mormon shifters. I was in Vespera, where all shifters and vampyrs came from originally.”

“Originally?”

“Yes, did you really think shapeshifters and bloodsuckers just evolved from humans?”

“I…”

He laughed again, that patronizing look back on his face. “Oh, Marlowe, you don’t even know! Vespera is our ancestral homeland, it’s a whole other world. It’s where magic comes from. We’re not just shifters, we’re a type of fae.”

My mind raced, and my eyes flickered nervously between Ezra’s as his excitement grew. It sounded crazy. He looked crazy. “Fae? What are you talking about?”

He took his hand off my shoulder and held it out in front of me. A small light began to glow from his palm, a flame growing in the darkness. It turned to blue ice, then melted into a ball of water, floating and undulating in midair. Finally, it burst into vines, crawling up his arm like snakes.

My jaw dropped as I watched the vines vanish into nothing, and I gasped. “What the hell?”

He grinned, his face finally reminding me of the Ezra I’d grown up with. It was the face he’d make when he’d beat me in Mario Kart, or had gotten a better grade than me on a test. “This is nothing, simple tricks. You’re going to learn to do all this and more when you come back with me.”

Oh boy, did he really think I was going off with him to cuckoo-ville? I shook my head. “Ez, slow down. What are you talking about?”

He continued, his voice full of excitement. “King Alaroth, he’s been looking for us ever since Mom and Dad left for Earth, when he discovered she was pregnant with twins. We’re the keys, we’re going to help him finally unite the realms and…”

Ezra jolted upright and snarled, looking behind me.

“Because you’re her brother, and we owe you for your help with the vamps, we’re going to let you run off now. But Marlowe is staying here, and you’re never to come back again.”

Camden’s commanding order cut through the stillness of the night, shaking snow that still clung to the bare branches above us. I turned around to face him, but Ezra grabbed me tightly and replied. “And while I appreciate everything you’ve done to protect her so far, just know that she was never meant for you. When the time comes, she will be taken by the king, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

My pack fanned out, stretching and rolling their shoulders, preparing to shift and fight.

“Stop!”

I yelled. I looked at Ezra’s face, his focused gaze scanning his opponents with calculating intent. He was sizing them up, and despite the numbers, I feared with his magic, the odds were in his favor.

“Ez,”

I whispered. “I love you, but this is my pack. We’re bonded.”

I shrugged off the coat and showed him my marks. “I’m never leaving them, I don’t care what your king wants…”

A low growl reverberated through his chest. “Our king is inevitable. We’ve belonged to him since before we were born. I am the sword, and you are the arrow. Under him we will remake the world.”

He shifted, the sweatpants ripping off his transformed body. He gave a final snap of his jaws towards my pack, rubbed his face against my hand, and then ran off into the woods, slipping into the shadows and disappearing.

Julian reached me first, grabbing my hand. “Are you okay, Lowe?”

A mournful howl pierced the air.

“No,”

I replied. I wiped a lone tear that fell down my cheek. “My brother’s alive, and I think he’s lost his mind.”