Page 7 of Undesired Mate

7

LEVI

No wonder she didn’t want to tell me.

The whole time she spoke, I heard the pain ringing out in her words. Shame, too. She could barely look at me.

One thing is obvious: I can’t kill her. Not for something that isn’t her fault. Her fate was set in motion long before she was born, and she’s been paying for her father’s sins all this time.

Her father. There isn’t much that disgusts me more than what she described. It takes a special kind of cruel, heartless monster to traumatize someone who couldn’t possibly defend herself against them. She might be a witch, but I doubt that means she could have fought off not only one shifter, but a whole group of them.

A flash of bitter, searing heat rushes through me when I imagine what I would do if I got my hands on them. Not only for what they did, but for what they turned Clara’s life into. She’s only known rejection, first by her own mother, and then by the pack she fled to. I bet she saw them as her salvation. They cured her of that misconception, didn’t they?

“Well, now you know everything.” The only word that comes to mind when she lifts her chin is dignity. Somehow, she’s more dignified than she was before. Now that I know everything she’s trying to hide.

I can’t sit still. I can’t suppress this energy rolling through me, forcing me to my feet. Action, that’s what I need. To make a difference. Because my wolf will not be denied the mating much longer. I’m hanging on by a thread as it is.

“Where does your mother live?” I ask, taking the bowls to the sink for lack of anything else to do. “Is she part of, you know? A coven or something?”

“They banished her a long time ago. She lives on her own.”

This keeps getting worse. “For what was done to her?” It’s not beyond belief, but it strikes me as being fucking cruel and unnecessary.

“Even though it wasn’t her choice, I came out of it. They couldn’t accept me.” Her tiny shrug is pitiful. “Just another reason to hate me and make sure I know she wishes I was never born.”

She deserves normalcy. The chance to live the way she’s meant to. “Can you take me there? I’ll find some other way to track her down, but it would take less time if you would lead me to her.”

“Now wait a second. What are you planning on doing?” She stands slowly, and the suspicious, dark energy pulsing through her is kind of enticing. “I know what I just told you, and every word was true, but I can’t sit by and let you kill her.”

“That’s not what I had in mind. I was thinking more about asking her to lift the curse. It’s keeping you from living as a normal shifter, and it’s going to get you killed. Not everyone is as understanding as I am.”

Am I imagining the way her mouth twitches? Like there’s something funny about that. “She’ll never do it. It doesn’t matter what you say.”

“You get me to her, and I’ll handle the rest.”

If I were human, I would never imagine a witch lives here. When they think of witches, they imagine all of the shit they have been fed since they were children. All about what witches are supposed to look like, what they do, how they live. I’m fairly sure that started as a way of protecting real witches, letting them blend in. It’s the same with our kind. Fill their heads with legends and lore, and they can’t see the reality in front of them.

A shifter like me, on the other hand? I smelled her a mile back, maybe further. Loping through the woods with Clara on my back—she wears a backpack containing my clothes, and when I shift a few hundred yards away from the neat, quiet cabin, I change into them.

“I feel like this might be a mistake.” If she chews her lip any harder, it will bleed. Her eyes are wider and filled with more terror than they were when we first met. “I don’t know if we should be here. Especially with you being a shifter. What if she?—”

Pulling my shirt over my head, I mutter, “I can handle her. But I need to know you’ll be able to handle yourself.” I can’t keep my attention on the witch while protecting the shivering, frightened girl now staring at the cabin through eyes as wide as saucers. Every breath she takes sends a shudder through her thin body. I’d swear I hear her bones rattling.

She frowns, chewing her lips some more, before nodding. “Okay. I’ll handle myself.” Her shoulders roll back, and her furrowed brow goes smooth. My wolf sees this, senses how hard she’s fighting to hold herself together.

I’m strangely proud of her as we continue to the cabin. The front porch is covered with potted plants, herbs for the most part, filling the sweet air with spicy, pungent aromas. I recognize a few symbols above the front door, drawn in what looks like brick dust. “Protection spells,” Clara whispers, noting the direction my gaze traveled in.

“So long as they’re not the kind that kill a shifter instantly on crossing the threshold.”

Snorting, she replies, “Then they would have killed me… not that she would’ve cared,” she adds, and some of the light drains from her eyes before she raises a fist to rap against the door.

Inside, a voice rings out. Female, powerful, tinged with rancor. “Why bother knocking? I know you’re there, and you’ve brought one of them with you.”

What a nice welcome from mother to daughter. We exchange a look, and Clara holds up a hand like she’s got this under control. “We came to talk. It’s very important. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have come back.”

After a silent moment, the voice rings out again. “Enter.”

Clara draws a deep breath before opening the door into what would be a cheerful home if it wasn’t for the presence of the woman standing near the hearth opposite the doorway. She’s tall and slim, wearing a cardigan long enough that it almost sweeps the floor. Like Clara, her eyes are a startling shade of green. Her long, black hair is streaked with silver, but her face is youthful except for the deep frown lines bracketing her mouth. “Who are you? What right have you to disturb my peace?” she demands, glaring at me. I notice she doesn’t greet her daughter.

“My name is Levi.” Looking her up and down the way she does to me, I ask, “And you are?”

“Persephone. Owner of the home in which you stand, so I would advise you to show respect.” Now she turns her cold stare to her daughter before her nose wrinkles. “What could possibly bring you here? With one of them,” she adds, jerking her pointed chin my way.

Clara opens her mouth to speak, but I’m quicker. “You put a curse on your own daughter,” I murmur. “I’ve come to ask you to remove it.”

Folding her arms, she looks me up and down while my wolf growls in my head. “Who are you to come here and tell me what to do?”

“Someone who found your daughter in the woods, close to death, because she cannot defend herself or hunt for herself or live as a shifter due to what you’ve done.”

Snorting, she mutters, “Perhaps you should have let nature take its course.”

How could she mean that? Clara trembles but doesn’t seem surprised to hear it. “Lift the curse,” I warn with a growl, “unless you want me on your doorstep every day until it’s done.”

Her lips purse like she’s thinking it over before the corners tug upward. “You want the curse lifted? I’m afraid you will have to do something for me.”

“It’s not enough to set your daughter free?”

She only blurts out a laugh that sends an icy finger sliding down my spine. “Please. What I want is much more precious than that. I want the life of the shifter who destroyed mine by cursing me with her.”

It takes a second for me to understand what she’s saying, and when I do, I turn to Clara. She is stunned—no one could effectively pretend to be as surprised as she looks now, with her mouth hanging open and her chest rising and falling with each shallow breath. “What do you mean?” she whispers. “You always told me you didn’t know who he was. There were too many of them.”

Persephone flinches, like the pain in the memories is still fresh after all this time. “What was I supposed to tell you? I was afraid you would be stupid enough to go off searching for him, then lead him back to me. You have never exactly been strong when it comes to common sense.”

Clara flinches under her mother’s sharp words. Unnecessarily insulting, antagonistic. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said the woman hates her. I can feel it in the air.

“You’ve always known who it was?” I ask.

“There were a number of them,” Persephone explains, wrapping her arms around herself and turning toward the fire. “But the rest of them held me down. Only he used me.”

Suddenly, her head snaps around, making her silver-streaked hair fan out behind her. “Do you want the details? Or are you satisfied with that?”

“What they did… it is not our way,” I insist. “I’m not defending them. I’m only telling you not to look at all shifters the way you would look at them.”

“I’m not interested in what shifters do.” With a glance toward her daughter, she scoffs. “I already know too much. What interests me now is vengeance, pure and simple. Balancing the forces. He took from me, and he deserves to suffer for that. As he made me suffer.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.” I hear Clara’s disappointed whimper behind me, but it doesn’t change anything. There are things I know, things we all know once we become fully grown. There is what matters to us, personally, but what matters to the pack must come first. Being part of a pack means we can’t think of ourselves.

And killing a wolf from another pack will throw us into war. I can’t be responsible for that.

It occurs to me now that I’m refusing the wishes of a witch who would cast a curse on her own daughter. What could she try to do to me? But instead of snarling or threatening me, she smiles. Somehow, that’s more unnerving than anything she’s done so far. “That won’t be a problem, because last I heard, he was banished. He’s a lone wolf now.”

“And if I can’t find him? He could’ve gone anywhere.”

She lifts her chin and the temperature in the room lowers several degrees in spite of the fire. “Then you came here for no reason.”

Another soft whimper from Clara. The wolf’s presence swells in my mind, expanding with every second she is in pain. I’m consumed by the need to soothe her and protect her, even if the bond hasn’t been completed. Nothing has ever mattered more.

Right now, the best way to comfort her will be to remove this curse. That’s what she needs more than anything. “If I do this, you swear to lift the curse? You’ll let her go? She deserves a chance to be who she is without a curse holding her back.”

“Do as I ask, and the curse will be lifted.” She holds my gaze without blinking. “Those are my terms.”

There’s no choice. It’s either fall in line and do as she demands, or suffer my wolf’s craving until I go insane. “Very well.”

She smiles, but it holds no warmth.