had eventually learned to hide my peculiarities – which I now understood were part of my shifter nature – the cruel taunts and feeling of loneliness had never left me. But I was not weak like that any longer. I was strong and I would not let any creature bring me down again, even a gorgeous, dirty-blond vampire.
I closed my eyes, taking a moment to inwardly connect with my unborn child, to Zen my mind, as Jessa would say.
The ebb of pain did not ease.
Dammit! Wasn’t time supposed to heal wounds and stuff? The twin connection flared inside and a sense of love wrapped around me. It was so hard to explain, but the warm sensation was how I’d describe home. Together with my wolf, Jessa had given me my first true sense of family, of not being alone, and I loved her so much that my heart swelled at the pure emotion of it.
And still it was not enough.
It’s going to be okay, Misch. He’ll come back to us. And he’ll learn to be okay with his pain. The same way you are. This child will be loved by both parents.
We didn’t speak through our link much. I preferred it that way. It scared me that she could see the sadness inside my heart and soul. I worried she would think I was weak again. Jessa was the epitome of everything I’d always wanted to be, strong, sassy, beautiful, and confident. We looked almost identical, but even our face she wore better than me. Her inner confidence gave her a shine I’d never have. Which was fine. I’d learned early on looks were nothing to strive for. Kindness, intelligence, and the ability to continue caring even when everyone and thing had knocked you down, that’s where my goals were.
Truth be told, I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered from our parents’ decisions to separate us at birth, even if they had done it to save our lives. Jessa, too, had lost her mother and sister, left with an absent, grieving father. When our parents had seen we bore the dragon mark – symbol of the long dead king who was touted to rise again – they’d known they had to separate and hide us and our marks or we’d both have been taken from them.
Despite him being a thousand years locked away, the supernatural communities had feared the king, prophesied to return with an entire army of dragon marked supes at his disposal.
Thanks to a few stupid moves from me, he did manage to escape his prison a month ago. And he most certainly had control over all of us who’d been marked, but in the end he’d been defeated by my sister and the Compasses. They’d permanently ended him, which meant all of us “marked” were now free to return to our lives.
So yes, Jessa had suffered, but she’d always had her pack, the Compass quads. And those four boys were almost the toughest supernaturals in existence. I thought Jessa was even tougher.
It’s your pack now too.
She gave me that final gift before initiating the block between us again. She was better at mental barriers, having learned from her dragon. For most of her life Jessa had been a dual shifter, dragon and wolf, but had had to release her dragon’s soul during the last battle. Now she was a plain old wolf shifter like me – even if nothing about my sister was ever really plain. Josephina, her dragon soul, now resided in a beautiful golden dragon body, and was queen of the beasts, living in Faerie.
I made Jessa promise she would take me to visit as soon as we could. There was no rush of course, supes lived for hundreds of years. Still, there was some human in me, and I always worried about running out of time.
A hard kick by the baby had me jumping about a foot in the air, instinctively I clutched my ribs.
“Good boy,” Tyson said, shifting my hand out of the way so he could feel the kicks too. It was unbelievable to see these absolutely lethal males get all gooey over the babies Jessa and I carried.
“You don’t know it’s a boy,” I said, my heart beating rapidly as warmth and joy flittered through my mind and into my blood.
A
Michelle Pace, Andrea Randall