Page 31 of Entering a New World

My chest tightened, and my wolf whined. Yeah, it fucking hurt to not be the one he turned to for information, but I got it. Well, at least the human part of me got it. The human part of me that was still thinking rationally.

I hadn’t expected Levi to just drop everything and proclaim his everlasting love to me the second I told him about shifters. That didn’t mean I didn’t wish for that exact scenario to have happened. Who didn’t? One perk of being a shifter was knowing you’d find your perfect match, the one person fate herself had chosen for you.

Shifter couples tended to jump into things with both feet, often not waiting for even a full day until claiming each other, if there were no outside reasons not to.

My eyes shifted to Quentin, a mountain lion shifter, and Cathy, his wolf shifter mate. The scars covering part of his face were a stark reminder that not every pack was like ours, and that sometimes, the outside reasons were stupid but incredibly dangerous.

The phone buzzed again, and this time, Gray simply grabbed it, unlocked the screen with a swish of his hand, and started reading the messages.

“Looks like your mate is out and about,” he said and chuckled, a font smile on his lips. “And he appears to leave a very good impression.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I bit out, even though that couldn’t possibly be further from the truth. In reality, I longed to hear what my packmates were saying. I longed to absorb every little piece of information about my mate. Like the fact that he loved our honey and maple syrup.

A warm feeling spread through my body, my wolf puffing up with pride because we were providing for our mate. We were the ones who had suggested keeping bees, collecting the honey as a side business for our pack.

“I think you do want to hear it,” Gray taunted, winking at me. “I think you’re desperate to hear from your mate. I think if I told you he’d been asking questions about…”

“Let it go,” I snarled, shaking my head. My wolf demanded I keep quiet so our Alpha could talk, but he didn’t really care about the Alpha part of it. He just wanted to hear every little piece of information about our mate. The one person he was longing for, maybe even more so than I did.

“Okay, okay.” Gray held up his hands. “Damn, you’ve got it bad, brother. Anything I can do to help?”

I shook my head. There wasn’t. There was only one person in the whole universe who was able to put me out of my misery—and that person still needed space.

Maybe I needed a bit of space, too.

Space from being cooped up in my office, space from people texting me about Levi, space from constantly waiting for Mave to report back to me, space from… everything.

“You know what?” I said, nodding towards my phone. “Maybe there is something you can help me with after all.”

“Sure, just tell me.”

“Can you watch my phone? I think I need to run a little. In theory, it’s not my day to patrol our territory, but I think… I think running would do me good.”

The wind whipped around my head, the salt in the air growing heavier and heavier with every step I made. My paws steadily hit the soft forest floor at a rapid pace, carrying me along the border of our territory.

Something was different today.

The air felt charged, as if there was a storm coming, even though the weather was calm, and there wasn’t even rain on the forecast—I’d checked. Yet, there was something in the air. A crackling, an electric spark that wasn’t normally there.

My wolf felt it, too. The relief of running got tangled with curiosity.

Smiling internally, I tried focusing on the weird feeling. It wasn’t a bad sensation, not a foreboding feeling of something horrible happening, not at all. It felt… positive. As if the forest was perking up, as if the barrier had suddenly…

My thoughts halted so abruptly, my paws lost their rhythm. Tumbling, I hit a root, then hit the soft forest floor with a dull thud. Lying on the soft, moist leaves and bed of moss, I inhaled deeply, trying to check for something I didn’t even know how to check for. My eyes searched for the barrier, even though I was well aware there was nothing to see. The barrier ran along our borderline, an invisible magic wall designed to protect our pack from outside threats.

Legend said that it used to be strong enough to keep enemies out, repelling them if they tried to cross the barrier while harbouring ill intentions. Other stories said the barrier used to keep every other paranormal being out if they weren’t given permission to enter packlands by the Alpha.

It was all hearsay.

Bedtime stories we told our young ones.

Truth was, we had no idea what the barrier was like a century or two ago. We knew it’d been built with magic, but the witches and wizards were keeping their cards close to their chests, and we, as a pack, had lost too much information about them in the past few decades.

However, if the stories were true, the barrier we had nowadays was a poor imitation of what it used to be. While it told the pack when strange paranormals crossed the barrier, that was all it did. It didn’t distinguish between friend and foe, and it sure as shit couldn’t keep anyone out.

Closing my eyes, I willed myself to calm my breath, to focus on what I was feeling rather than what I was seeing. If it concerned the barrier, I couldn’t see it. I was no witch; I couldn’t see magic.

But I could feel the barrier. As the pack’s Beta and the one responsible for defending our pack, I had a stronger connection to the barrier than most others, maybe even stronger than Gray. I had no idea how it worked, exactly, but I’d learned from my predecessor like he’d learned from his.

---