“Thanks for coming,” Mira said.
“Hey, you found your family.This is so neat to be a part of.”
Mira looked at Leo, and he smiled at her encouragingly.
“I’d like to sit down and chat,” she said.“I have so many questions.”
“Us too,” Auron said.
The falcons and white lions excused themselves to visit with the wolves, and Mira and Leo sat with her biological family.
Layla sat at a picnic table across from Mira and Leo, her mates on either side of her, and squeezed her hand.“Are you still with the psychics?How long have you and Leo been together?”
“I’ve been with them all along, and I just met Leo this past weekend.The psychics are staying in Delta Park at a bed-and-breakfast, but they’re leaving for their travels on Saturday.I just found out—like literally—about you.About what I am.”
“What?”Rami asked.“What do you mean you just found out what you are?”
“They told me I was a psychic,” Mira said, explaining the suppressing spell the Wiccan had cast at their request, and that she’d been told her psychic abilities were simply latent and may never appear.“It wasn’t until I talked to the North Corner of a coven in the area that I learned the truth, which my adopted family confirmed.Then, when I met Leo at the festival, I started to feel my gryphon.”
“I can’t believe they never told you,” Theron said.Their uncles were hovering nearby but letting the family have time together.
“Daphne and Gideon must have been very scared,” Layla said.
Auron cleared his throat.“When you and Theron were born, we knew that your mismatched eyes meant something was different about you, that instead of being amadter, you would be a gryphon.And we knew our king—Dravon—would kill you.He was superstitious and crazy, which is not a good combination.”
“I grew up with Daphne,” Layla said.“Our gryphon clan lived in the Montana mountains, and her psychic house would travel through the area several times a year.We made the decision to have her and Gideon keep you safe.Their house had a reputation for protecting those who needed it, so we trusted they would keep you safe.We kept in touch through an online message board, and they never came back through Montana again.”
“Right,” Rami said.“They used shielding spells to hide their trail, and the plan was to raise you until our king was no longer a threat, or we could break free of his iron rule and meet with them.
“Then tragedy struck.Four years after Mira was born, the king died, and a subsequent coup of the new king destroyed the clan.Only seven of our family members made it out alive.
“By the time we got to Washington State, which was the last time we’d heard of a location for the psychics,” Layla said, “we found the camp destroyed and the town gossip was that a wolf pack had killed every person.”
“That happened when I was three,” Mira said.“They lost a lot of members of the house, but they escaped with me and four others.We pretty much stayed out of the Pacific Northwest after that.”
“I dreamed about you sometimes,” Selene said.“I always felt like you were out there somewhere.”
“The Wiccan spell must have kept me from feeling that,” Mira said.
“We never gave up hope that you might have escaped and were alive somewhere,” Auron said.“We don’t like to be nomadic by nature, but we just kept searching.None of us wanted to admit that our family was going to be missing you forever.”
Mira listened as her family shared about their lives and asked her questions.They ended up talking for hours, long after the pack had gone back to Thorn Hollow.
She had her biological family now.And it made her feel odd toward her adopted family.What if they had told her the truth years ago?What if she’d been able to search for her biological family?
But then she might never have met Leo.
She realized that the star her adopted family had followed—Velastra, prophesied to reveal secrets—had actually done just that.It had revealed the secret of her shifter nature through not only the Wiccans but also her truemate.
Much later, she stood under a streetlight with Theron and watched her mate talk to her fathers and uncles.They accepted him immediately, and she loved that.
In a heartbeat, she’d gone from her adopted family and Leo and the pack to having her biological family too.
“It’s wild, isn’t it?”Theron asked.
She looked up into the eyes that matched hers.“What’s that?”
“The roads we don’t take.If you’d known we were out there, we might have been reunited, and then you wouldn’t have been in Northern Ohio to meet Leo.And if that asshole king of ours hadn’t been so scared of powerful shifters—like a unique female gryphon—you wouldn’t have ever been away from us.”
