“I’m not used to this,” I said, gazing out the window as a massive SUV drove by. “Christ! Why are the cars so fucking big?”
Rainier chuckled. “Damn, man. I really should have tried to get you to venture out into the modern world more.”
“I was fine in the forest,” I snapped. “I had everything I needed there.” I sighed in frustration and added, “Well…most everything, anyway.”
“How many are out there?” Rainier asked, craning his neck to see around me.
Anders had given us the use of this small two-bedroom house as a base of operations while we hammered out the details of our alliance, and so I could cast a wider net to find Naphele’s reincarnation.
“Enough,” I said, letting the curtain fall back into place.
“And that’s my cue to leave,” Rainier said. “I need to head home and make sure all is well there.”
“Thanks, Rainier.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after to see how all this is going. Are yousureyou’re going to find her? We don’t have to do this,” Rainier said.
“She’ll be here. She has to be.”
I’d pushed away all the worries I had about her reincarnating somewhere else in the world. My entire life hinged on finding her. I’d put too many years into it. I’d been willing to give up for June, but she left, and now I was back to trying to find Naphele again. My inner wolf didn’t like it. He was torn and broken. He wanted to find Naphele again, but he was also pining for June. I was being pulled in two different directions, which made it hard to focus.
“If you say so,” Rainier said. “I’m gonna go out the back way. I don’t want to push through all your groupies.”
“They aren’t—ah, fuck it. See you later,” I grumbled.
Rainier smirked as he walked down the hall. I heard the back door shut, and suddenly I was alone with the dozen women standing outside. Taking a breath, I opened the door, putting on my most winning smile.
“Good morning, everyone,” I said.
The women all turned to me, their faces a mixture of hopefulness, anxiety, insecurity, and desire.
“I thought we could take five or ten minutes each,” I said. “Uh…does everyone know why we’re here? What I’m looking for?”
A lovely young woman strode forward, exuding confidence. “You’re hoping one of us is your reincarnated mate,” she said, then placed a warm palm on my chest. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we, cutie?”
My smile stayed in place, but I had to force it. This woman had already proven herself to benothinglike Naphele. My mate had been fierce and determined, yes, but also demure andconservative in her attitude. She wasn’t inside this woman, not even hidden in the deepest depths.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, making the best of the situation, extending my hand. “Leviathan Cross. You can call me Levi,” I added, leading her inside and closing the door.
“Oh, I know you,” she said, taking my hand and giving me what I could only call a lascivious look. “TheDemon Wolf.” She bit her lower lip. “You don’t look scary. I’m Sophie Williams.”
“Nice to meet you.” God, I already wanted to end this meeting. My inner wolf was unimpressed with the woman. There was nothing here. No spark, not even ahintof Naphele.
The discussion with Sophie went as well as I thought it would, mostly her trying to flirt with me and me doing my best to ask probing questions about her life and background. I wanted to get to know her, but she only had one thing on her mind: seducing a powerful alpha. After her, the next several women were more pleasant, but equally disappointing in that I didn’t sense anything.
If any of these ladies had been my fated mate reborn, I’d have felt something. The pull in my chest, that sense of knowing them, the sudden urge and desire to be near them—all the signs that someone was your fated mate. With these women, I felt none of that.
Worse still, even as I did my best to give the women my full attention, all I could think about the one person in the last hundred years who had given me all those sensations. June. My mind kept drifting back to thoughts of her: the moment I found her asleep in the snow; her smile; the sound of her voice; the way her body felt against mine. A constant barrage of subconscious movies playing through my head.
“That was when I dropped out of college,” Tanya, the current woman, said.
“College?” I tore myself from thoughts of June.
“Yeah.” She frowned. “You asked what I majored in.”
I did?
“Right,” I said, smiling at her. “Uh, why did you drop out again?”
