for sure,” Austin inserted.
“But you didn’t seem to be either?” I noted hesitantly, sending the question to Eli.
“Not with the council. I hate them. They’re all a bunch of self-serving assholes, and I’ve had to put up with them for years because I didn’t want to hurt my mother. Every day I had with her was a gift from the Mother. She lived a long time, she stayed on for me, striving past the pain and loneliness once father died, because I wasn’t granted a mate at my covenant—”
My eyes flared wide at that. “Huh? What’s a covenant?”
“The ceremony where we officially shift. For the first time in front of the pack. It’s like our bar mitzvah.”
I reached up and rubbed my temple. “I have a lot to learn, don’t I?”
“You have an entire culture to pick up,” Austin said sympathetically. “But you have time, and you have people at your back who’ll teach you whatever you need to know.”
“Okay, so start with the basics.”
Eli
The basics.
If only it was as simple as that, but there was nothing simple about our world.
I blew out a breath and murmured, “It starts with the Mother.”
“Your goddess.”
“Yes.”
“Is there a Father?”
“Yes, but we don’t worship him.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Mother created the land, and she created animals to roam it. She gave us what we know now to be ecosystems—perfectly balanced to sustain us.
“Then, the Father created humans, and humans destroyed that balance. To counter his creation, the Mother gave animals dominion over humans. Whichever human we bite, at certain points when the Mother’s power reaches its zenith, like at a blue moon, for example, we can blur the species.”
Sabina frowned, and I gave her a second to contemplate what I was saying, because I knew I was asking a lot of her to just blindly accept this.
To be fair, we could have been trying to tell her that red was white, and she had no alternative but to believe us.
Hell, if Austin had been the one teaching her, he’d probably have dropped some bloopers into that if he could.
“Okay, so why didn’t the Father mind that?”
“Because she beat him.”
“She beat him? How?”
“The weather. Storms. Lightning, thunder. They are her arsenal. She is the Earth, she can do with it as she wishes, and through it, she controls the Father in ways that he has no option other than to submit.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
“Not for the Father,” Austin pointed out dryly.
“True.” She grinned sheepishly, and I watched Austin’s eyes soften as he took her in.
She looked majestic, sitting in this too formal lounge in a dress that covered her to perfection. Showing not enough skin, but revealing slivers that made me want to touch the silk of her all over.
I licked my lips, just thinking of tasting her, before I forced myself back on track.
We’d wasted time this week, and we needed to get her on board with the situation. Because she was handling things so well, I saw no reason to hide anything from her.
She was rational and level-headed in a way I appreciated. Not once had she panicked or freaked out, and if I had to thank some romance author somewhere, I’d be forever grateful.
Although, she wasn’t the first woman who’d been okay with being turned into a shifter. Most males whose mates I had to transform were all grateful to people called Sherrilyn Kenyon and Nalini Singh. Apparently, they’d been pivotal in their mates wanting to belong to shifters.
Wonders would never cease, but I wasn’t foolish enough to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Tugging at my bottom lip, I thought about the best place to start next. Having always left this to the mated males, and never having gotten involved, I was as out of the loop as I could be.
Maybe Ethan saw my discombobulation, because he took over, saying, “So, with this dominion, we can transform any human at will. Which is what happened to you—on the night of a blue moon. You are what we call a wolf child. You’re an adult, fully grown, but your she-wolf is still an innocent.
“Normally, wolf children are not powerful like you. They’re mated to regular, run of the mill shifters. Not the alpha, and certainly not two additional alpha shifters.”
“Why am I different?”
“Because my mother discovered a rite in a passage. Our lore runs through the annals of time,” I murmured. “Just as humans’ does. We have history books and texts that need translating from ancient languages into modern ones.
“So the covenant is