to dip you in mud before every operation.”
Snarling, Dorian head-butted his alpha and they sprawled to the ground. Where Lucas held up his hands, eyes bright with untrammeled happiness. “Want to go surprise the others? Let’s see if they recognize you.”
Dorian snapped his teeth and nodded, his cat excited at the game.
In front of him, Lucas shifted, then ran over to climb up to his aerie. When he jumped back down, Dorian growled a greeting up at a wide-eyed Sascha. His alpha’s mate waved at him, her lips curved in a dazzling smile. A second later, he was following his alpha carefully through the trees.
Lucas didn’t go too fast, and when Dorian stumbled, he didn’t baby him, just waited for him to get his feet back under him before they began to run again. They went first to his parents’ house, and hell, there were a lot of tears there, too, a lot of hugs and petting. His mom called him “baby” again and, grabbing his leopard’s face, smothered it in kisses.
The leopard, shameless creature, rubbed its cheek against her, a cub happy its parent was happy. It was the first time he’d seen such joy in his mother and father since they’d lost Kylie, and it meant everything. He’d already visited the pretty, sunny spot where he felt closest to his little sister, told her of the gift he’d been given.
I wish you were here, squirt. I’d finally be able to nip your butt when you got too sassy.
He’d heard his sister’s cheeky laugh on the air, had almost felt her slender arms wrap around him as she laid her face against his chest. I love you, Dori. Only Kylie had ever dared to call him Dori, the habit formed as a toddler when she couldn’t say his full name.
I love you, too, squirt.
Now, covered in the scent of family, he left his parents laughing and padded beside Lucas as they went hunting the other sentinels. Mercy had come off a night shift and opened her door with a bad-tempered look on her face when they scratched on it. “Do you two know what ti—” Her bleary eyes focused and then she screamed in delight and jumped on Dorian, shifting midjump to roll with him onto the pine needles that carpeted the area outside her cabin.
Growling and nipping at him as they tumbled like pups, she kept patting his face as if to make certain he was really there. When she shifted back into human form, her red hair cascading down her back, tears streaked her face. “I’m leaking,” she said in an accusatory tone. “Because of you.”
Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tight.
By the time he met the rest of the sentinels, he’d been pounced on multiple times, each and every one of his packmates recognizing him on sight, though they’d never before seen his leopard. “It’s the eyes and the scent,” Vaughn had said after knocking all the air out of Dorian with his enthusiastic welcome, the jaguar’s heavier body having taken his inexperienced one to the earth a few minutes earlier. “You’re still Dorian, just in a different skin.”
Yes.
Finally, he had the ability to live in both his skins, to be cat and to be human. But whatever shape he took, he thought as he returned home, he would always be DarkRiver . . . and he would always love Shaya and the little boy who was now his own.
Both were waiting for him at home, their identical eyes lighting up when he stepped into the room. Of all the gifts he’d been given, that was the biggest and most precious. Leopard and man, man and leopard, his mate and his child were his reason for living.
V
Dorian took a deep breath and gave in to the shift. The agony and ecstasy of it was beyond anything he could’ve ever imagined. His body broke apart in a thousand sparks of light, and then re-formed, and it amazed him anew to find himself so much lower to the ground, his body on four paws instead of two human feet.
When he moved, it still took him a second to find his balance. At least he no longer fell on his face, he thought with a huffing growl. The sound made the black panther in front of him turn, give him a questioning look. Dorian shook his head at his alpha, but Lucas’s eyes sparked with feline laughter.
If they’d been in human form, Dorian thought,