Page 9 of Titan’s Mate

Then he sat down with his back against the wall and uncapped it, taking a long pull. His bear receded further, though it still growled every now and then.

It was still angry.

Finally the bear said, We were supposed to save her.

Yeah. The story of their lives. He took another swig of whiskey, unable to get Mari out of his head. Now he knew her eyes were a pretty brown, like oak leaves in the fall, holding humor as well as sadness. Remembering them made him shivery inside.

We must help her, his bear said.

“No,” he muttered out loud. They couldn’t keep her away from the demons. They couldn’t even be around her without hurting her.

She shouldn’t suffer for his failures. No one should.

The level of the whiskey bottle was much lower when the door opened and Brock came in. Brock was a rangy wolf shifter with chestnut hair and demons of his own. But he was a good friend.

He sat down next to Titan, knees bent and back against the wall, his shoulder barely touching Titan’s.

The Wild Blood crew was big on touch—Titan guessed most shifters were. Raised as an apprentice shaman, he’d been isolated from the rest of his clan, so it was taking time for him to learn how comforting that kind of touch could be.

Slowly, he began to feel calmer.

“How’d you know I was out here?” Titan asked finally.

Brock shrugged. “Nick. He came down to the house.”

“Interfering spook.” But Titan didn’t mean it. He liked when Nick looked out for him.

“You okay?” Brock asked.

Titan snorted. “Would I be sitting here alone in the shed drinking if I were okay?”

“I guess not.” There was a short silence. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Longer silence. Titan had never been good at keeping conversations going. Finally he said, “There’s a girl in my cabin.”

Brock was silent for a beat. Two beats. He took the bottle from Titan and took a long drink. Finally he said, “And you’re hiding in here? You do realize that’s not the way dating is usually done, right?”

Dating was the absolute farthest thing from Titan’s mind. Even though his friend Remy—one of the crew—had been trying to fix him up on dating sites for months. Titan sabotaged all of them.

“It’s not a date,” he said. “It’s about as not-dating as you can possibly get. She wants me to cross her over to the other side.”

There was another silence, and then Brock gave a low whistle. “She’s a ghost?”

That would have been easier. Titan shook his head gloomily. “Not yet.”

Brock sprayed a mouthful of whiskey, tried to breathe, and started coughing. Titan pounded him on the back. When Brock caught his breath, he said, “Please don’t tell me she wants you to kill her.”

Oh, hell, he hadn’t even thought of that. “No!” He tried to remember exactly what she’d said. “I don’t think so? No. She said she was already dying.”

“Well, that’s good. Shit. For you, I mean. Ah, fuck.”

“You’re not helping.” Titan took the bottle back and drank.

That got a faint grin from Brock. “Well, I’m kind of all you’ve got,” he said. “Nick pretty much sucks at giving advice, because of the whole ghostly inability to speak thing.” He paused. “Did she say how she’s going to die?”

“No.”

“Or when?”