“Is there also…sort of a hollering in your head…a loudyes, a loud need…?”
Cassius nodded. “That’s the need of the wolf, Ezra. The need to claim her. And you’ll find out it’s got layers. It’s…it’s the loudshe’s minebut also the loudI’m hers. You both belong to each other. You both need each other.”
Ezra scoffed. “Willow doesn’t need me.”
“Except as a bodyguard at the craft fair?” Cassius flashed his teeth in a grin.
“Oh, shut up, man.” Ezra tried not to smile back. Failed. “I told Trevor about her. He’s ecstatic, of course. Wants me to get to know her and ‘let it happen,’ no worries at all.”
Cassius’s hand landed on his shoulder. “You’re not Trevor, Ez.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You don’t have to flow with the feelings. You’ll find your own way to your mate, man. Just like we’ve all got to do.”
Ezra had sifted through every story he knew. Dad had recognized Mom as his mate from the time they first laughed together, strangers on a Harmony Ridge street corner watching a flock of ducklings trying to hop up onto the curb. Jeremy had known Lucy the hour they first met, when her bright purple ponytail brushed him as they turned in college essays, single file at the front of their classroom.
Aaron had recognized Ember when Jeremy prodded him to describe her; until then the easygoing wolf had been clueless despite the thickness of his changed scent. Trevor had recognized Kelsey when he was fourteen, yet he’d been too young to understand the change in how he saw his best childhood friend once he began changing under the moon. And Cassius had recognized Sydney when she asked him to reach something on a top grocery shelf, looked up and met his eyes without glancing away despite the fact he was a muscular six-foot-five black man in a mostly-white town, a glaring detail for a man who spent his life wondering if humans who avoided him did so because he was a wolf or because he was black.
None of their stories involved a gradual friendship over the counter of a coffee shop. Ezra hadn’t formed a strategy forwhat if my mate is the local barista who likes to talk to me?because he never knew a wolf could find his mate this way.
“You’ll figure it out, Ez.”
He blinked, met Cassius’s eyes. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense foryou. All up in your head, you had to get jarred out of that to recognize her. And like I told you. I knew a wolf who recognized his mate when they bumped into each other in an elevator.”
“I want a strategy,” Ezra said.
“Well, make one then.”
“Trevor told me not to overthink it.”
Cassius roared a laugh, clapping Ezra on the back twice. “Okay, first off,” he said, his rumbling chuckle still filling the room, “nobody gets to tell you how to pursue your mate. And second, why he thought that advice would be doable for you…well, I’m at a loss.”
Ezra closed his eyes, letting his brother-in-law’s easiness and care seep into him. When he opened his eyes again, he could say to Cassius what he hadn’t been able to say to Trevor. He’d chew off his own arm before he did or said anything to hurt his brother. He tuned his hearing for a moment to the rest of the house, ensuring Trevor was focused on a lively conversation with the others. Then he lowered his voice. It wasn’t impossible Trevor was tracking his words to Cassius, but it wasn’t likely either.
“I’d rather not pursue her, if I’m going to lose her.”
“And fade,” Cassius said, equally quiet.
Ezra nodded.
“Can’t live your life like that.”
“I can when I spent eleven days watching him…” He cleared his throat. “First-hand knowledge, man. His fever got up to a hundred and nine. Dad and Mom beside themselves, Sydney silent and furious.”
“And you scared all the way out of your head.”
It was undying lore now that Kelsey had come home, spoken of freely, one of the stories knit into the family fabric. Didn’t mean remembering it no longer hurt. “I couldn’t understand what was wrong. I couldn’t make it make sense.”
“But it does now,” Cassius said. “You’ve got the knowledge now, Ez.”
“Exactly.” The petrifying knowledge of the cost of a lost mate.
Cassius sighed. “I can’t tell you to go after her. I can’t tell you what’ll happen if you do, or if you don’t. All I can tell you is…if Willow is one tenth the woman your sister is, she’s worth it. My Sydney is worth everything.”
Slowly Ezra nodded. Willow was sweetness and seriousness. Willow was depth and beauty and honesty. And while the first painful squeezing of his chest had occurred when Ezra was only twelve years old, he was not a coward.
