Page 62 of Hexy Beast

“Do not even think you can tell me to calm down,” I say in my coldest, scariest, meanest Sherwood witch voice. “If there is a time to be all chill, this is not it. This is the time to freak the fuck out.” I stomp over to him, and this time I do mean to poke this hard when I jab a finger into his solid chest. “What did you do to me?”

He holds his hands palms out in the universal sign of do-not-murder-me. “I didn’t do anyth—” He stops mid-word and gets that distracted look on his face that sometimes appears before he grimaces and lets out a weary sigh. “Shit.”

“What do you mean, ‘shit’?” I ask as I cross my arms and glare at him.

For a second, he doesn’t say anything, so I evil eye him harder, barely even noticing that he’s naked, hot, and hung. None of that matters right now. I will think about that later, after I have magicked him into a swarm of hornets.

Finally, Darius speaks. “My wolf surfaced while we were having sex. That’s never happened before.”

“What are you talking about? You didn’t transform.” I was there. I definitely would have noticed.

“With alphas, it’s different,” he says, giving me an apologetic look before continuing. “We can be both forms at once, and sometimes it doesn’t present at all.”

Realization dawns. “The claw.”

“Yeah.” He shoves his hand through his long dark hair. “So my wolf must have spoken to yours and brought her forward.”

“My wolf?” I slap my palm against my chest—again too hard, but I am a little (read: extremely) emotional right now. “MY WOLF?” I throw up my arms in repudiation of this obvious falsehood. “That is impossible. I am a witch—A WITCH!”

Okay, maybe I do need to calm down a little. That last bit was more of a yell than controlled icy disdain, and it was loud enough that it scattered the birds in the trees outside the cave’s entrance.

“But your dad’s a shifter, right?” Darius asks.

As if he doesn’t know the answer already. “He is a bear shifter, not a wolf shifter.”

He lets out a long sigh and nods as he looks past me into the distance, obviously trying to come up with his next string of bullshit words. I really am going to spell him into a world of misery. I don’t care if that means I’ll go with him because of the proximity curse. It will be worth it.

“Shifters marry other kinds of shifters all the time,” Darius starts, his tone calm and his pacing deliberate. “I have an aunt who’s a weregopher and another whose partner is a weredolphin. One of my cousins, who is a werewolf, married another werewolf, but their daughter is an eagle shifter. My cousin’s husband had a great-great-great-grandmother who’d been an eagle shifter, and the trait had just been passed down through the generations, but it had been a recessive trait—like red hair. It happens.” He pauses long enough to give me a comforting smile. “There must be some wolf shifter on your father’s side. Witch genes are usually dominant, but that doesn’t mean a recessive wolf hasn’t been in the family DNA the whole time, just waiting to be called.”

“If that’s true, then why didn’t my mom turn into a witch shifter?” I ask, hating the doubt already creeping in through the haze of my original surprise.

“Maybe she isn’t, or maybe she is, and it just remained dormant,” Darius says. “Is your dad an alpha?”

I shake my head, his words making more and more sense with each second as I mentally go over the Sherwood family tree and its many, many branches. I start pacing the cave because my brain works better when I’m moving. The cool stone under my bare feet helps connect me to the here and now even as I’m picturing the massive embroidered family tree that hangs above the fireplace in our living room back home.

“That makes sense.” Darius nods. “Only an alpha werewolf can call out to another shifter’s inner wolf; I imagine it works that way with bears too.” He cocks his head in question. “Do you have any werewolves on your dad’s side?”

“Great-Aunt Ly.” Fifth branch up from the trunk on my dad’s side. It’s distant, yes, but there.

“So you have your answer,” Darius says with a carefully neutral tone.

I continue to pace the small confines of the cave, but instead of imagining my family house’s living room, I look deep inside myself, reaching out toward something I can sense even if I can’t see. Soft fur brushes up against me, and there’s a hint of something more, something powerful in a different way than my magic in the periphery, but I can’t get a fix on it. The truth of my reality settles on my shoulders. It’s not heavy. Instead, it’s almost like a thick blanket that makes you all cozy and warm. It’s new, and I don’t really understand what it all means, but as I run metaphorical fingers through my inner wolf’s fur, I can’t help but smile.

I stop my pacing and turn to Darius. “So now I’m a werewolf and not a witch?”

He walks up to me a little cautiously because he’s not a complete idiot and takes a long deep sniff of my cheek. “I smell both.”

“Both,” I repeat, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of being two when conventional wisdom says you can only be one. “But that can’t happen.”

He brushes a kiss across the top of my head. “It’s unexpected, but not impossible.”

“Witchingdom really needs to improve the shifter biology classes in school,” I grumble.

Darius chuckles and wraps his arms around me, pulling me in close against his warm body. “Are you going to be okay?”

Honestly? I think I am. It would be one thing if it felt wrong. It doesn’t. Different? Yes. Will it take getting used to? Oh, yeah. But wrong? Not even a little.

“It kind of makes sense, really,” I say, resting my head against his chest. “Maybe this is why the family magic didn’t pick me and gave me this instead.” I lift my arm out to the side of us so the freckles on my wrist that look like the Kardia constellation show in the morning light. “It was fate.”