Mother with a prayer of thanks, and to think of all the changes in his life that had occurred over the past few days.
The biggest change wasn’t the fact he was Chanku and could shift with merely a thought. It wasn’t that his father was dead, by his hand, or that his magic was exponentially stronger than it had ever been before.
No, it was Lily. The woman waiting in the big bed with two others he was already growing to love. If there was any magic in this world, he was convinced it began and ended with Lily Cheval.
Smiling, he turned his back on the moonlight and the dark mountains and headed inside the house. Lily, Alex, and Annie were in there together. He’d left them sleeping, all curled together like a litter of pups, though Alex was the only one who’d been in his wolf form. He wondered what that felt like, spending an entire night as a wolf.
There was such a simple way to find out. He slipped out of his sweatpants, dropped them on an empty table, and shifted. Then, padding softly on his big paws, Sebastian Xenakis nudged open the door to the bedroom with his nose and leapt up on the bed. Alex grunted and moved aside, but Lily opened her arms and reached for him.
He lay down beside her and rested his chin on her breast. Her arms tightened around his neck, and he settled against her long, slim form, truly relaxed for the first time since he’d discovered his father’s existence.
Lily’s soft loving thoughts filled his mind, shoving the memories aside. It was time for new memories. Memories with the woman who’d sworn to love him for all time.
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DARK MOON
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December 21, 2008, Kalispell, Montana
Igmutaka, spirit guide, puma shapeshifter, and currently a very nervous man, stood at the foot of the birthing bed, hands raised in supplication to his gods and the woman’s goddess. Tala Temple-Fuentes squatted amid the tangled sheets with her mate, Miguel Fuentes, a man who had long been Igmutaka’s charge, supporting her gravid frame.
Her other mate clung to her hand, gazing at her with such love and so much intensity it was almost as if AJ Temple planned to push the babes out himself.
There were two. The male—the one created from the seed of the white man—would be a strong boy. AJ was a good man, and his son would grow to be a powerful warrior, an ideal sibling for the child Igmutaka waited to meet. The one who mattered to him most.
The girl child, the one born of Mik’s seed, was to be the first female ever in Igmutaka’s charge. Her father, like AJ, was a powerful Chanku shapeshifter, a good, strong man. Called Mik, he was the latest in the long line of Lakota Sioux warriors who had called on Igmutaka as their spirit guide.
Always Igmutaka had watched over the male progeny, but this child was different—not merely because of her gender.
He felt her strength, her power—the feminine power so different from that of the males he had guided. He’d been aware of this babe almost from the moment of conception. He’d known she was special, though he still didn’t understand how or why.
He glanced up, aware the bedroom was filling quickly. Other females—shapeshifters all—coming to share the pain and the joy of the one who labored, using their minds and bodies to ease Tala as she pushed the babies from her womb. Men arrived, ready to share in the celebration of new members joining their pack, but also generously taking on Tala’s pain.
It was all good. Igmutaka focused once again on the mother.
She grunted and strained. He had no time to think, no time to question why he should be the one who slipped his hands beneath her straining body and caught the babe amid a wash of fluids and blood, caught her in his big hands and stared into eyes that saw him in a way no one else had ever seen him before.
He held the squirming bundle of new life as his own impossibly long years flashed before him. Hers so new and fresh, his beginning so long ago that his childhood was lost to memory. He knew he must have started in a time long past, though not as a babe like this. No, he’d not been a helpless child, born of woman into an ancient