Page 30 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

“And is that why you scooped me up and brought me inside?” Rory asked.

“No, of course not,” Max protested.

“Exactly,” Rory said with certainty. “You’re kind, like I said. And I might be your familiar.”

Max was stunned. Of course there were shifter familiars, but the idea that he might have one had never so much as crossed his mind. He didn’t like people. Why would he ever want to be tied to a person?

“I, uh, never considered that,” Max managed to say.

He’d known that it was a long shot that he’d get a familiar at all. Not all witches did. It was one of those mysteries of the universe: was there a familiar out there for every witch but they often never found one another? Was it genuinely only a small percentage of an already small population? Had it gotten worse recently because in the last few decades, witches had stopped being happy with animal familiars and wanted to find shifter familiars instead?

Rory sounded faintly amused. “I take it you aren’t part of the group of witches who want a shifter familiar to boost their power?”

Max made a face. “Ugh, no, thank you. I thought if I was very lucky, I might find an animal who was willing to put up with me like Nōwē does.”

“I can turn back into a bird?” Rory offered immediately.

This made Max frown. “No, I don’t want to force you to do anything.”

It was Rory’s turn to get a furrow to his brow. “I don’t see it like that. I’m Rory the human and Rory the bird. It’s just bringing one part of me to the foreground.”

Max immediately shook his head. “The only thing that should impact what form you take is your own desires.” He cleared his throat. “And I, uh, don’t mind you being human. You’re not as annoying as most of them are.”

This made Rory grin.

Max sighed. “I genuinely never really thought about it. My mom had a familiar.”

“Thistle,” Rory said softly. “You said.”

Right. Because Max had talked a lot to Red before he’d learned that Red could talk back.

He cleared his throat. “So that was my example of familiars. The idea of being tied to a person for the rest of my life?”

He tried to hold back a grimace, but he wasn’t sure he was successful. He couldn’t quite explain the mounting feeling of dread, the certainty that no matter what Rory thought now, he wouldn’t find Max enough eventually, or Max would be too rude, or Rory would be too cheerful…

There seemed to be so many ways it could go wrong. And if they had a witch-shifter bond, breaking that bond could kill one or both of them.

Rory reached out and squeezed his arm gently. His eyes were full of understanding. “Hey. It’s alright. We don’t have to decide anything right now. We haven’t known one another for very long, and I’m coming at it from a completely different perspective than you are. We’ll never do anything if we aren’t both ready for it. And if we’re never ready for it, then so be it.”

“But isn’t that the opposite of fated mates?” Max demanded.

Rory shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a nudge towards someone compatible. We decide what to do with that. Maybe it means we part ways. Maybe it means we stay friends but it’s never anything more. Maybe we bond but it’s platonic. There are lots of ways people can be mates that don’t mean hot and heavy sex all the time, even if that’s the part all the shifter romances show.”

Max couldn’t help but laugh. “You mean I shouldn’t be taking shifter romances as real life?”

Rory smiled at the joke, but Max realized that he sort of had. He’d been conditioned by a life of being surrounded by allosexuals to think that was always the end goal.

Maybe part of the reason he’d been concentrating on an animal familiar was because it was safe, because he knew he wouldn’t disappoint an animal familiar.

Now here Rory was, saying he wouldn’t be a disappointment to him… and Max just needed to figure out if he could believe him.

But Rory was right about timing. He’d known Rory was a person and not a bird for all of eight hours. Of course he was panicking over the idea that they might belong together.

He had no idea if Rory had some deeper connection to magic that had actually nudged him to this realization, but he believed that Rory believed it. Just like he’d said, he’d come at this from a completely different direction than Max, and he’d had days of being here to further cement his feelings on the matter.

“I’m going to need to think about all this,” Max confessed.

Rory just smiled again. He smiled a lot. It wasn’t as annoying as Max thought it would be. (And then he found himself wondering: was that because Rory was meant to be his mate? Did he like Rory because Rory was his mate? Or might Rory be his mate because Max liked him? Ugh. This shit was complicated.)