Page 5 of Beginning Fate

“He just found out he's a tiger?” I asked. “And they just sent him off to the ARC?”

That sounded like a nightmare to me. No wonder he seemed to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

“No. I think he's known for a while. He just kept it to himself for a few years.”

I couldn't even imagine what the kid had gone through. My heart went out to him.

“Leave him be right now and let him get settled in. We'll reach out later,” I informed them.

The others nodded in agreement.

We settled in and ate while catching up with everyone. It felt great to have so many home early.

I looked at the time. “Shit! I'm leading a tour group for orientation in ten minutes.”

“You better run.”

I got up to leave and then grabbed the last sandwich on my plate before sprinting out of the cafeteria and across campus to the green.

Lauren

Chapter 2

I toggled the light switch off and on three times.

“Kylie, we're going to be late. Let's go,”I signed.

She scowled at me and gave an inappropriate gesture back.

Sighing, I left the hotel we were staying in and walked out to the car and sat in it waiting for her.

My little sister had begged me not to come with her, but she'd never flown on a plane before, and I had to make sure she arrived safely. So I drove her here myself, all the way across the country. I just wasn't ready to let her go.

Kylie was four years younger than me. When she was five and I was nine, our family had gone out for a day of boating on the Hudson River. I had loved every second of it, but a drunken boater had turned its course at the last second and drove headfirst into our boat. My parents had been below deck at the time and their bodies were found downstream three days later.

My sister had been thrown from the boat, and I'd spent what seemed like hours and was probably only minutes searching for her. She'd lost consciousness, though rescue workers had been able to revive her.

I never really understood what went wrong or how it happened, but somewhere in the midst of the accident she'd lost her hearing. The human doctors told us she had an eighty-three decibels loss and was deaf.

We were wolf shifters, and even as children our hearing was far superior to that of humans. We relied on it for our survival, and here was my baby sister who couldn’t hear. It madeher so vulnerable. I'd known it even though I was just a child myself.

My aunt said my natural maternal instincts had kicked in that day right there in the hospital. We may have grown up living with her, but I was Kylie's protector and her caretaker. I watched after my sister like a mama bear guards her cub. Maybe even a little too much.

I'd talked to every doctor I could and read everything I could get my hands on.

She'd been a candidate for Cochlear implants to give her back some of her hearing, but after careful consideration our Alpha helped me see how dangerous that could be. We had no way to know what a device like that would do when she started to shift.

Even at ten years old I'd understood his concerns. It would have been even more horrific had we given her the illusion of hearing only to have it ripped away from her once more when she finally shifted for the first time.

So instead, I learned American Sign Language and taught it to Kylie as well as anyone in the Pack who showed the slightest interest.

We weren't textbook perfect with it, but over the years Kylie and I had found our own ways to communicate, sort of like our own secret language.

For high school I'd even managed to get her into one of the best deaf schools in New York City. Maybe that had been a mistake. All of her friends there were human. She was closer to them than anyone in our Pack, well, except for me.

They'd put this idea of college in her head. All of her friends were going to Gallaudet University, so that had been her first choice too. After discussing with Matt Snyder, our Alpha, he and I thought the best option for her would be Archibald Reynolds College, an all shifter school, instead.

Kylie wasn't happy with me about it. But she needed to learn to live and interact with her own kind, or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

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