“She-wolves can’t shift until they’re mated.” I glanced down at her, watching the implications of that land somewhere behind her eyes. “You’re mated now.”
“So I’m going to turn into a wolf.”
“Yes.”
“Involuntarily?”
“The first time or two, yes.” I considered how to frame the rest of it carefully, which was not a thing I had much practice doing. “It’s not painful. Disorienting, but not painful. You’ll run into things until you get your depth perception sorted out. Wolvesdon’t see the world the way humans do. Your brain will need time to learn how to interpret what your eyes are giving it, and until it does, you’re going to have a complicated relationship with stationary objects.”
She stared at the ceiling. “I’m going to run into trees.”
“Almost certainly.”
“That’s humiliating.”
“I witnessed it happen once, with another shifter’s mate. She hit a fence post at a full sprint within the first thirty seconds.”
She made a sound I recognized after a moment as a laugh, short and startled, swallowed almost immediately like she hadn’t meant to let it escape and wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to acknowledge it had. Then the silence stretched longer, and the subtle shift in her breathing told me she was working through something more complicated than fence posts.
“So why do you keep talking about your territory like it’s some kind of anchor point?”
“Because it is. Male shifters are bound to a physical location. The further we are from our territory, the more difficult it becomes to shift into human form at all, let alone hold it. What you saw at the hospital, at the cabin, every time I was running on fumes trying to stay upright in a body that wanted to be a wolf—that was me operating at the edge of what’s possible outside my range.”
She absorbed that for a moment, turning it over in her mind before she responded.
“I’m in law school,” she said at last. “I have friends who are going to notice I’ve vanished off the face of the earth. I can’t just disappear into the forest to become your… mate.”
“You’re already my mate. And no one said anything about the forest.”
“You live in a cabin.”
“It has running water and a very good espresso machine.”
“I’m serious, Silas. I have professors who are going to file reports. I have a landlord. I have Dana’s dying plant to feel guilty about. I have a whole non-wolf life that exists outside of whatever this is.” She pushed herself up onto her elbow, her hair falling forward over her shoulder. “I can’t just run off to be your Stepford Wolf Wife because the Earth or whatever decided I’m your mate.”
I ran my hand slowly down the curve of her back, feeling the warmth still radiating off her skin. “I’m not pulling you out of your life. Your life is just going to be different.”
That sounded like I was going to lock her in my basement.
“I mean, that’s already true regardless of anything I do or don’t do.” Better, if not by much.
I met her eyes steadily. Time to bring it home. “I’m not asking you to disappear, Katie. I’m telling you that right now, until the skinwalker is dead and in the ground, you don’t have the option of going back to Canyon Road and sitting in your apartment like none of this happened. You know that, I think.”
She chewed on that with a focused, slightly resentful expression. I watched the way her jaw tightened and released, the careful internal engineering of whatever she was constructing.
“I’m hungry,” she said finally. “There’s nothing in Dana’s kitchen. She’s been in Europe for weeks.”
She clearly wasn’t quite ready to fully sit with the weight of everything yet, and I wasn’t going to force her. “There’s a market two blocks north,” I replied.
The look on her face softened toward reluctant trust over the course of a long moment.
“Fine,” she said, finally. “But I’m picking what we eat.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you’re explaining more when I get back.”
“Also fair.”
