Derek
Slowly but surely, Cal’s cat side came out of its shell, but it wouldn’t let Cal out. One day, about a week after the cat had come back home, Kit pulled Derek aside and whispered that he was pretty sure Cal didn’t want out, because Kit couldn’t feel him much when he talked to the cat.
“Usually, when he gets stuck like this, or the few times he did when I was younger, I could still feel him there. This time… I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what’s going on with his brain and while he feels completely happy as a cat right now, it’s….” Kit sighed and ran his fingers through his dark hair.
“Yeah. There’s a lot of baggage. We’ll give him time.”
To his surprise, Kit hugged him and stayed close for a while. Derek guessed he was used to being hugged by Cal and he missed it now.
“Hey, he’ll come back. He just needs time,” Derek whispered into Kit’s hair.
“But they say it’s not good on either end of the spectrum. Like you got to shift back and forth. He was just human for such a long time that it made me really, really scared, Derek. But now he’s just cat. What if… what ifthisis how he loses his mind?” Kit trembled in his arms.
Derek choked up. Resilience was one of Kit’s main characteristics. The boy could survive anything and he often seemed older than he was because of that. This teenager in Derek’s arms now felt exactly as young as he really was, if not younger.
“Hey, I’m here. You’re not alone. We’ll take care of him together and eventually he’ll come back to us.” Derek hoped he was right.
Life slipped into a comfortable routine. Derek worked with Mikael’s people on fixing the outbuilding and the rest of the house. The windows wouldn’t arrive until early fall, but they needed to be changed because the old ones were letting too much draft in, even on rainy summer days.
He couldn’t imagine what it would be like in the winter.
“You’ll be dead in the winter with those windows.” Noah snorted. “At least if it drops to the minus thirties like it did last winter for a few days.”
Derek blinked slowly. “Wait, Celsius or Fahrenheit?”
Dallas, who was changing the battery of the rechargeable drill grinned. “Both.”
Yeah, better windows would definitely be needed.
“The house itself has been fixed so that there’s proper insulation everywhere. It won’t help if the windows let the warmth out, though,” Noah mused.
“Can I at least pay some of the window costs?” Derek asked.
“No, the Council is paying for everything,” Mikael said as he came around the corner just in time to hear him.
“I hate taking anything from them,” Derek spat out. “I got hurt and they fucking wanted me to be their computer tech.”
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Dallas grinned.
“Yes! And I get that I’m a fragile human but I have pretty much twenty years of experience inonlysecurity. Working forthem. It’s not like I forgot to do my job when I lost my eye.” Derek stopped and leaned his back to the closest wall. Yeah, he got so riled up about this all still.
A tentative almost-meow sounded from the stairs across the yard where Cal’s cat side had been supervising their work.
“At least he knows you’re his mate, no matter his shape,” Mikael murmured very, very quietly.
Derek sighed. “I guess so.” It did help though, to have Cal react to his emotions like this. To take his mind off things, he asked, “So how close are our closest neighbors?”
It turned out they were pretty damn secluded, which should’ve made Derek feel bad, maybe. Mostly because he hadn’t minded living in close quarters to a lot of people in Italy. The city hadn’t had more than forty thousand people, but it still felt busy with how he’d lived with people all around him.
Here, he felt more at peace. Maybe it was because his mate was there, he couldn’t be sure and he sure as hell wouldn’t go asking about it. They’d all agreed that nobody would mention the fact that Derek, a human, felt the mate bond.
Normally, a human couldn’t feel it. Mikael only felt his with Maxim because Mikael’s mother had been a Siberian tiger like Maxim.
It also wasn’t any sort of a mystical bond, not like some fiction portrayed it anyway. It was more like this feeling of being settled around that person, but knowing it wasn’t a regular old human kind of falling in love or loving someone.
When one of Derek’s shifter friends had found her mate in Italy, she’d told him that there was an instant connection, and as soon as she spent time with him, she justknew.
Maybe that was why Derek had doubted what he’d felt toward Cal at first. He’d thought his feelings were the by-product of being a human and a bit of a closet romantic. Despite the training he’d gotten and the way he’d been made into an asset for the Council, Derek had held onto the way he’d loved the romantic comedies he watched with his mom growing up, and the notions of finding that one special person one day.
