Page 23 of My Salvation

“Excited?” Cassie asked, pulling him out of his thoughts.

He looked at her and smiled. “They worry about me a lot. I think me finding my mate will give them a sense of peace.”

“When did they adopt you? I vaguely remember meeting them as a child, but there hadn’t been any talk of them being parents.”

Priest thought about how he would answer. “You don’t mind being mated to someone younger? It’s a hip thing right now for women to marry younger men.”

She shrugged. “Fae are immortal Priest. Time is different for us.”

“I guess now is as good as a time as any to tell you my sad little tale.”

“Sad?”

He winked. “Once upon a time, in the giant nests of the eagles of Éire Danu, two fae visited on behalf of the Queen to see how the eagles were doing. On that particular day, a nest was hatching.”

“Hatching? What are you talking about?” her eyes showed confusion, and he realized he might have to back up his story a bit.

“Harpy eagles are one of the only shifters that bear animal young in the form of eggs.”

“Get the fuck outta here!”

He shook his head, chuckling. “The eggs are incubated, and once hatched, eaglets shift to their newborn human form within a week. After that, they are like any other shifter, finding their animal again around puberty.”

“You were an egg?”

He sighed. “I was an unbroken egg. I didn’t have the strength to crack my shell.”

“Why do I get the feeling that is bad?”

“Because it is. Eaglets that cannot hatch themselves are left in the nest.”

“But… but that means they die.”

“Yes,” he confirmed softly.

“That’s barbaric!”

“That is exactly what my mother said.” Though he had heard the story many times, the thought of his tiny mother snarling at shifters always made him smile. “She took my egg and helped me be born by breaking the shell.”

“Then what happened?” Cassie asked, her eyes blazing.

“The other eagle shifters walked away, and my mother and father had to figure out how to hand-raise an eaglet for a week before I shifted to human form.”

“They adopted you on the spot?”

He nodded. “It was never a question if they should do it. They simply did. Decisive doesn’t even begin to describe my mother. She’s kinda a force of nature,” he confessed.

Cassie began pulling on his hand. “Hurry, I need to meet your mother.”

He let himself get pulled along. When they got to the door, he opened it wide. “Mother, Father, I’m home.”

“We’re in the kitchen, darling,” his mother called out.

He led Cas to the kitchen and had to laugh at the sight before him. Both his parents were covered in flour, and Merrick looked at his wit’s end.

His normally elegantly put-together mother looked like she lost a fight with a bag of flour.

“What on earth?”

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