Chapter 16

Aria

“Aria, your blood is quite unique.” The doctor crossed the room and held the test results out so I could see them, even though it was a bunch of medical jargon that I couldn’t really understand. “It looks like you are a hybrid.”

“Hybrid?” Darren, Liam, and I all said in unison.

Edward nodded. “You have both werewolf and human blood in you.”

I felt like my head was spinning. “So… Does that mean that one of my parents was a werewolf?” I murmured. I never knew my real parents—I was adopted.

This all would have been so much easier if only I could have asked them about my heritage. And then they could have told me that I was going crazy or being scammed and everything would be okay.

“Well, it’s not a perfect half-and-half split,” the doctor said, scratching the side of his head with one finger. “It’s more likely that one of your grandparents was a werewolf.”

For a few moments, I was speechless. So that meant…

“Are there others?” I blurted out. “Others like me, I mean.”

Edward, Darren, and Liam exchanged glances. “If there are, they are likely just like you—with no supernatural abilities or indications that they are not fully human,” Edward explained. “For all we know, half of the humans on Earth have werewolf blood.”

“It seems likely,” Darren mused. “For our kind to have… bred at some point in history.”

Liam scoffed. “I wonder if that was before or after they started slaughtering us.”

“Oh? Last I heard, your kind was the one slaughtering humans,” I quipped.

Liam’s eyes darkened and he opened his mouth to say something, but quickly shut it again when Darren shot him a withering look.

The doctor took a deep breath. “You know, that leads me to my next question: you have no abilities, and yet you survived a trio of rogues in the forest today. How?”

The question gave me pause. I furrowed my brow as I thought back on what had happened in the woods with those wolves—who were apparently werewolves themselves, I was just now learning. Rogues, whatever that meant.

Before I could come up with an answer, Lucas suddenly blurted out, “I heard my Dad’s voice!” He grinned and deepened his voice in an attempt to copy the sound of an adult man. “Stop!”

Blinking dazedly, I looked over at Darren. I hadn’t recalled hearing his voice—I had been the one who said ‘Stop!’

“It’s true,” Darren said with a nod. “That was me.”

My mouth hung open. “How? You weren’t there.”

Darren rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and said, “Sometimes, bonded wolves can see through their mate’s eyes. I used something called the ‘Alpha Voice’, where I spoke through you. If you felt like your voice seemed unnatural or different during those moments, that’s why.”

I frowned, thinking. If I threw all logic out the window, I supposed it made sense—I had felt like my voice had an otherworldly authority to it when I had yelled, and the wolves had run away as soon as it happened.

“So you knew I was your mate then and didn’t tell me?” I asked.

Darren shook his head. “No, nothing like that. It didn’t occur to me that we could be mates. I figured that you being with Lucas while he was in danger allowed it to happen. I don’t know. It all happened so fast, and I was just worried…”

He paused, his eyes flicking over to his son. Lucas was playing over on the sofa, giggling and making shadow puppets with his fingers in awe of his human form. A shadow passed over Darren’s face then, and I felt my heart soften.

I couldn’t stay mad at him. Perhaps we were from two different worlds, but we shared one thing in common.

Caring about Lucas.

“So.” Liam cleared his throat and turned to Edward, possibly to put the tender moment between us to its end. “Does she have any abilities now that she’s marked? Is she…” He glanced at me warily. “...One of us now?”

The doctor shook his head. “That’s the strange part; she has no abilities, no wolf, no pack bond. By all counts, she is still human.”

“Then how was I able to mark her?” Darren asked, having regained his composure.

“That, my friend, I have no answer for.” Edward turned to me. “Do you feel any different? Stronger? Faster?”

I quickly shook my head, pursed my lips and retorted, “All I feel is exhausted and sore.” I shot Liam a wry smirk. “And terrified.”

Liam’s face reddened somewhat, as if embarrassed, before he turned to Darren. “Alpha, don’t you think that having a human mate would negatively affect your campaign for the next Alpha King election?”

Alpha King? They had a fucking king? I sank into the nearby chair, too exhausted to even process what they were saying.

“Potentially,” Darren said thoughtfully.

“It won’t be easy to keep her a secret, you know,” Liam remarked. “Especially not with the election coming up.”

“You don’t mean to avoid telling the pack that their Luna is a human,” Edward cut in, placing his hands on his hips. “If you don’t disclose it now, then it will be an even bigger problem down the road.”

Liam’s mouth tugged up into a rueful smile as he glanced at me. “Perhaps. But without any werewolf abilities of her own, she’s a weakling. No offense.”

“Offense taken,” I replied quickly.

“Anyway,” Liam continued, “let’s say she gets injured—Alpha Darren’s body will take a hit, too, because mates share each other’s pain. And she won’t be able to heal herself, which means that he won’t be able to heal. Imagine the kind of image that would create for the pack: an Alpha and Luna who are weak. Vulnerable.”

Edward furrowed his brow. “But—”

“No more arguing.” Darren held up his hand to stop them. He looked just as tired as I felt. “I’m going to keep it a secret.” He turned to me, and a look passed his face that I couldn’t quite read. “For now.”

…

“I’m going to find a way to unmark you.”

Darren said this to me as he dropped me off at my apartment. By now, my block was dark and quiet, and Lucas was fast asleep in the car, where Liam was also waiting.

I paused in the midst of unlocking my apartment door. “You… That’s possible?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s complicated once mates actually mark each other. But there has to be a way.”

For a moment, a tiny part of me actually felt… disappointed.

But that part of me was quickly overshadowed by relief.

“Good,” I said, pulling my shoulders back. “I don’t want to be a werewolf, or a mate, or a ‘Luna’. I want things to go back to the way they were before.”

“Very well. You have to promise to keep everything to yourself, though. All of it. Don’t tell a soul.”

I placed my hand over my heart. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Because I don’t want to be murdered, I thought as I glanced over at Liam, who was leaning against the outside of the car.

“Okay. Take tomorrow off. See you at work on Tuesday.”

With that, Darren turned, hands in pockets, and headed back toward the car.

It was at that moment that Liam furrowed his brow and pulled his phone out of his pocket, checking the caller ID for a call that was coming in. “Hm,” Liam said, holding his phone out to Darren. “Your girlfriend is calling, Alpha.”

I froze, my key still in the lock.

Great. This was just peachy.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, I had become the mate to a werewolf who already had a bloody girlfriend.

It’s just like Jackson all over again!