Page 12 of Shifters Unifying (Shifters Destiny: Willow Creek Shifters #2)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

emma

Sophia Carter, the woman who had adopted me as a newborn, carried a large glass bowl into the dining room where she’d instructed us to take our seats. Her graying hair had been gathered into a low, no-nonsense ponytail.

I raised my hands in the universal sign of surrender. If I’d had a white flag, I’d have waved it. “Mom, I’ve been checking in when I can, and you know I’ve been busy.”

She placed the bowl on the end of the table where we’d taken refuge. Then she put her hands on her hips while she studied me. “Too busy to tell me what’s really going on?”

At first, I didn’t answer. “It’s not like I consciously thought about it.” Lies! I did because I didn’t want to tell her about the

Her mouth pinched, and she left the room without speaking. A moment later, she returned with a large metal bowl, filled with thick tortilla chips. She filled two soup plates with Ceviche and handed one to each of us.

Jasper stood and leaned over the serving bowl filled with the colorful salad of halibut, tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and red onions. He took a deep sniff. “Lime juice, garlic, cilantro? Smells delicious, bright, and cheerful.”

“I don’t think you’ve been honest with me,” Mom said, continuing as though Jasper hadn’t spoken at all, and he returned to his spot, defeated in his mission to diffuse the tension with charm.

“Well, I want to talk now, don’t you think you should… should…” Gesturing wildly in response didn’t help leach my nervous energy as much as I thought it should. So, I said, “It hasn’t even been that long… in the scheme of things. Daughters go years without reaching out to their moms.”

She gasped as though I’d struck her. “What does whatever everybody else does have to do with me? With us? We’re not everyone else. We’ve never been everyone else.”

Jasper scooted back in his dining room chair. “Mrs. Carter, maybe, I should wait outside.”

“Sit. Eat,” she said to him. “No need for you to starve while we’re sorting out or differences.” Her gaze hardened, and he shrank back down into his seat. Then she flashed her Southern belle smile. “You must call me Sophia.

“Ms. Sophia, it is, then, ma’am,” he said, more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Are you from across the pond?” she asked.

“No, but me da and ma immigrated not that long ago, and their brogue stuck.” What he didn’t say was that “not that long ago” for a shifter might be one hundred or two hundred years, but he started eating.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asked Jasper.

Jasper’s eyes widened, and the edges of his mouth twitched.

“Mom!” Rubbing my temples didn’t help the headache creeping into them.

“It’s a reasonable question… You have cousins.”

“He’s dating a friend of mine,” I snapped.

My mother nodded evenly. “Ah, yes, I see. Off the market, then. Good to know.”

“I told you that this earlier.”

“Did you? I lose track of what you tell me. There’s so little.”

“That doesn’t even make sense, but you get a thousand bonus miles for your first class attempt at a guilt trip.” I shoved a big bite of Ceviche into my mouth to keep from saying anything else.

Unexpectedly, my mother chuckled, and her smile lit up her face. “That was a good one. Do you remember when you were a teenager, and we’d go ‘round and ‘round until your father would come in and demand to be taken for ice cream?”

The recollection stamped out my irritation, and I laid my hand on her forearm. “I have so much I want to tell you, but I have to make sure you’re ready for it.”

She tipped her head to the side. “Like what, sweetie?”

“Everything I’ve been up to…”

“Such as?”

Jasper stopped shoveling Ceviche and tortilla chips into his mouth long enough to tune into our conversation. His ears twitched as though his inner fox had gotten nervous.

“Training, networking, and meeting new people of the male variety,” I said. “Same ol’, same ol’.”

She sighed. “I see.”

He gave me a hard look. “Seriously?” he mouthed. “Tell her.”

“You had mentioned training. I thought maybe it was something more life-changing than that. You do have all the hallmarks of someone grabbling with big news… or maybe a drug problem.”

“I do not have a drug problem, Mom.”

“You know I have to ask.”

I rolled my eyes and shrugged. “Sure.”

Jasper nodded. “She does have to ask, lass. Ye never know.”

“Then…” She paused, probably for dramatic effect. “Are you pregnant?”

My mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. “Uh, no…” I croaked. “No, no, I’m not.”

Her gaze narrowed, and she leaned toward me. “Why are you hesitating? Are you certain you’re not pregnant?”

I trusted Logan’s promise he could tell when I was ovulating… and not ovulating. Based on the that, I was in the clear, but technically, I could be knocked up at any time. “Well, no, I am not pregnant, but if you must know, I’ve met someone. His name is Logan Blackwood.”

Her face exploded in a wreath of smiles, and she clasped her hands over her chest. “The contractor? He’s successful, isn’t he?”

“That’s the one.”

She froze and deposited her fork on her plate. “But he lives in Willow Creek, doesn’t he? His signs are all over the place. Why have you been in New Port Orleans?”

“I haven’t exactly been in New Port Orleans,” I murmured.

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t been in New Port Orleans. I’ve been staying with Logan.” At least that part was mostly true. “And I wasn’t ready to tell you.”

The silence at the table stretched.

“When do I meet him?” she asked, her voice timid.

“As soon as possible,” I answered, deciding without thinking.

“I’d like that.” Hopefully, Logan was up for meeting my mom. Knowing Mom, she wouldn’t let it go until it happened. “Maybe this weekend?”

“I’m not sure…” My voice trailed away as my inner wolf/bear/cat/whatever scented… shifter magic like an itch in the back of my mind. I leaned toward Jasper. “Something’s happening outside,” I whispered. “Do you feel it?”

“Aye, it’s shifter magic.” He lifted his head. “Somebody’s shifting nearby.”

Shit.

He frowned and tipped his head to the side. “Not strong, though.”

“So…” I considered the implications. “Probably not Acheron? He never shows up with a trickle of magic. He’s either completely hidden or loaded for bear.”

“I’d say not Acheron, lass.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Mom asked.

Before I could answer, the sensation came again, and I jumped up from the table, more than relieved for a reason to take a break from the rest of the conversation I direly needed to have with my mother.

“Mom, I forgot something in the car,” I lied. “I’ll be right back. Jasper, you wait here. Tell Mom about Peaches and Melons.”

Her head whipped toward Jasper. “You visit that place?”

Jasper groaned under his breath and tugged on his beard. Louder, he asked, “Ms. Sophia, can I help ye clear the table?”

Snickering, I strolled out the front door and stopped on the porch. That should be enough to keep them both busy long enough for me to locate who might be shifting nearby.

As I stared, I thought I could almost see a glimmer in the air, wafting almost the way campfire smoke did in the woods. Hmm… That was new. Must be a new multimorph trick. The airborne trail led to the thick, uncleared, and undeveloped forest at the end of the street, so I loped toward it.

The itch in my brain grew stronger, the nearer I got, and I was able to discern more than one shifter somewhere in the woods. Cheap perfume, weed, and body order tickled my nose, and my skin prickled.

Raucous laughter burst through the morning silence, and I angled toward it, mindful of twigs and anything that might betray my approach.

I stepped between two pine trees and ducked down behind a bush, watching a group of four older teens, two males and two females, drinking energy drinks, smoking and laughing.

I creeped closer, keeping to the undergrowth.

Just like Logan did… the first time I shifted. I bit back my own laugh.

My mate’s early behavior made so much more sense. It must have been the natural, usual behavior for a shifter trying to check out a burst of magic and whether someone was friend or foe.

One of the young men, complete with a scraggly beard, nodded toward the shorter of the two women with a bright yellow-green slash of color in her light brown hair. “What kind of shifter are you, Izzie?”

She clamped her eyes shut and scrunched her nose. A gentle breeze blew through the trees and circled the teens, spreading a dusting of color. Slowly, she contorted and compressed down into a swamp rabbit, and she jumped out of the pile of her clothes.

“You’re a bunny!” The young man laughed uproariously.

She angrily shook her cotton tail at him. Then she twitched her nose and morphed back into her human self, redressing quickly.

John still laughed.

“Yeah, I’m a rabbit. I didn’t choose it, so bite me. Not everybody can be a cat, or a wolf,” she glared at John. She waved to the other guy. “At least Oliver doesn’t make fun of me for it.”

“If you could have chosen anything, what would you have picked?” the other young woman, a tall, baby-faced young woman with bright blue hair, asked.

“I would have picked alligator and moved to my grandma’s house in the bayou,” Izzie answered.

“What’re you, Blaze?” the other young man asked the blue-haired young woman.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I still only get the windy part.”

“Maybe we could make a club at school. There must be more like us out there. We can’t be the only ones, and I’ve never heard of anything like this in my family.”

“Uh, uh.”

“Nope.”

“Me, either,” Blaze said.

My mouth turned down. Were they not from shifter families? They should have someone teaching them about shifting. Since I’d been adopted, I hadn’t had that option, but these four… Could this a side effect of multimorph emergence?

Inactive or hidden genes triggered into activating by my primal energy, providing an influx of shifters to add to our ranks.

Most of those would probably have no idea they had shifter blood can learn to shift.

Or maybe the ability manifests later in life than the usual post-adolescent age for most. Was there a chance Logan’s cousin Sheila could eventually discover how to shift?

She had always wanted to shift, and she’d be ecstatic to learn she might still learn how.

Perhaps there was an overlapping situation that linked all four of these new shifters.

They could have been in the woods one of the times I’d used primal energy.

Historically, accessing primal energy wasn’t something most shifters did.

It was one of the occurrences that had earned Giselda’s faith in my status as the multimorph.

John took a long drink of his energy drink and then lit a cigarette. “When did you start shifting? Not long ago, right?”

“Yeah.” Izzie ran her fingers through her hair. “In the last few weeks. It happened one night. My bed shook, and it was like I suddenly had an ability I didn’t have before. Haven’t told anybody about it, at least until you three sensed me playing around with the magic, and you found me.”

“Same for me, too,” the other guy said.

“How long did it take you to start shifting,

If I left these newbies out here, or left them in Willow Creek, Acheron would discover them. Alone, they wouldn’t have any protection from the evil mage, and they would die when he consumed them. That left me with one choice.

I straightened and cleared my throat. “Hello, I’m Emma Carter, and I have a proposition for you.”