Page 44 of Alistair

He grimaced, then turned his attention back to his mate. She looked bewildered now, her gaze pinging between the five that he’d called out and himself.

“It’ll be okay, sweetheart, I promise,” he said. Then he stripped fully and let himself go into his shift. His elephant was so happy to get to shift in front of Maggie that it took almost no time for his body to change and reform into an enormous elephant. He shook his head out and stamped his feet a little to shake off the nerves that cascaded through him.

Maggie’s gaze slipped up up up, and then the color leeched from her face and her eyes rolled back in her head.

Shit!

Maggie had never been as pissed in her life as she was right this moment, when her forever-guy Alistair made up some nonsense about being able to turn into an elephant.

An elephant!

Of all the stupid animals to be able to turn into, he picked an elephant! Why not a tiger or a lion?

She shook her head as he called for his friends, then urged the women to turn away.

She opened her mouth to scold him, to tell him to stop the nonsense and take her home immediately, when he stripped fully and something happened.

Something…she couldn’t really explain.

His skin shimmered, turning from lightly tanned to gray. There were loud cracking sounds as his body seemed to come apart and reform so fast she wasn’t sure she was even seeing what she knew in her heart she was witnessing.

He grew bigger and bigger, turning from a man to an elephant in what felt like mere seconds.

She wasn’t sure she was even breathing.

She tilted her head up until she could see him, tusks and all.

He let out a curious sound, and she had the hysterical urge to ask if anyone had peanuts.

Her whole body went numb and her heart pounded loudly in her ears, and then everything went white.

When her vision cleared, she was lying on the grass and the five people he’d called his family were gathered around her. An elephant peered over her, his trunk grazing her shoulder.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You fainted,” Novi said. “How do you feel?”

“Crazy. I…didn’t just see what I saw, right? I’m dreaming?”

She sat up slowly as her head swam and everything tilted for a moment.

“You’re not dreaming,” Cael said. “We’re shifters.”

“Well, not me,” Novi said. “My biological father is a polar bear and he could shift, but my mom is human, so I can’t shift. So I kind of know how you feel, because I didn’t know shifters were real until I met Cael and learned the truth.”

“This doesn’t seem real,” Maggie said.

“It’s very real,” Indio said. “Your soulmate is an elephant shifter and he happens to be the alpha of our memory.”

“Alpha?”

“The leader,” Kelley said. “Indio, Cael, and I are cousins, and Alistair is our uncle and also our alpha. He came here to the park a long time ago and started the memory with Indio, and Cael and I joined up a few years later.”

“This doesn’t seem real,” she repeated. She could hear the disbelief in her own voice, but she knew what she’d seen.

Alistair had turned into an elephant before her eyes.

One minute he was a guy she was in love with spouting what sounded like serious delusions, and the next he was an elephant.

---