42
LEVIATHAN
I’d been sitting on my front porch, wallowing in my own guilt, most of the afternoon. No one had seen June since the night before, and she hadn’t been in her room when I went to check on her. Now, the sun was setting, and I still hadn’t managed to talk to her about what had happened. Which wasn’t that bad of a thing, once I thought about it, since I still wasn’t sure what I’d say.
That was why, when she appeared from the forest, I could do nothing but stare at her in shock as she strode toward my cabin. When she reached the porch steps, I finally managed to rise from my chair.
“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,” I said.
She nodded, not looking at me, instead peering into my cabin. “Is anyone else here? Rainier?”
“No. It’s just us.”
“Good,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“I’m sorry about yesterday.Andthe day before. I fucked up. I can see that. I never should have acted the way I did, and I don’t want you to be upset about that.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about,” she said, and something about the way she said it made me uneasy.
“Okay. What is it?”
“This,” she said. The necklace I’d given her dangled from her fingers.
She must have seen the way my eyes widened, because she gave me a bitter, humorless smile.
“Did this belong to your old mate?”
I cursed myself for yet another stupid decision. All these years of knowing what to do and when to do it, yet ever since this woman arrived, I couldn’t seem to get anything right.
“I… There’s an explanation,” I said, cringing at how fucking pathetic that sentence sounded even to my own ears.
She tossed the necklace to me, her face a storm of emotion as I caught it.
“Do you have any idea how disrespectful that is?” she hissed. “You gave me a gift that belonged to yourfirst mate. You did that and didn’t even tell me?”
A million thoughts spun through my head. There were a billion ways this could go, and none of them seemed good.
“That’s an insult,” June continued. “Not just to me, but to Naphele’s memory. Why would you give it to me?”
I hung my head, feeling both cornered and defeated. “I thought it would be nice. I thought you might like it… for deeper reasons,” I said, stating something I hadn’t even admitted to myself until right then. “I thought it might help you remember.”
June let out a heavy sigh. “Jesus. You think I’m Naphele’s reincarnation?”
My head snapped up, eyes locking on June’s, and her anger radiated off her face like a storm.
“Even if I was,” June went on, “I’m still my own person. You do know how this works, right? Every shifter does. A reincarnation doesn’t magically become the old person!” She was actively shouting now. In the distance, several people turned to watch the drama unfold. Shame washed across me.
“I thought?—”
“No, Levi, you didn’t think,” June said. “You hoped that…what? You’d give me this necklace and thenboom,Naphele would come through and erase all that I am? You know that’s basically the same as me dying, don’t you?”
“No! I didn’t want that. I never wanted that. It’s just that the first time I met you, when I found you in the snow, you said something that only would have made sense if it was said by Naphele. That’s what first put the idea in my head.”
“The idea that you could erase me?” June snapped.
“Please,” I begged. “Let me have my say. That’s not what I wanted. There were things that made the two of you seem like the same person, but also things that showed how different you were. Like the overlook. I began to fall for you.You. Not Naphele. That much is true?—”
“But?”
