Page 95 of Enticing Monsters

Cadmus flashes me another one of his unreadable looks. “For now.”

I shiver and step closer to Foster. He immediately wraps an arm around my shoulder. The heat his body emits soothes me, chasing away the frigidness of all of the recent discoveries and revelations.

“I think I recognize this place,” Tristan says, perking up. “We’re almost to the portal.”

Cadmus nods once and then turns towards me. “I’ll help you save your mate, but then I must return. The human world isn’t meant for fae like me.”

He gestures towards his scaled, mutated face and those eerie yellow eyes.

“You don’t have to go back if you don’t want to,” I tell him cautiously. “You can stay?—”

“And hide away?” One of his brows crests upwards. “I can’t fit in like the other fae. None of us can.”

A strange sadness arrows through me. I don’t know Cadmus well, but I’ve come to enjoy his company during the brief time I’ve been with him. However, I understand his reasoning. He’s not only thinking about himself, but an entire community of people who look up to and admire him.

We pick up the pace once more.

Tristan’s right. I do recognize this place. Electricity skitters across my skin with every step towards the portal we take.

“Do you know why my biological parents would abandon me?” I ask Cadmus abruptly, as the glittery abyss of the portal comes into view.

The question takes me off guard, since I didn’t intend to actually ask it. Still, now that it’s out in the open, I can’t take it back.

Cadmus’s gaze lowers. “I’m sorry. I don’t. Perhaps your parents suspected you were to become the next skinwalker.”

“That still doesn’t explain why they would abandon me and hope for the best.” A wave of raw, unencumbered anger flows through me. If my adoptive parents didn’t come by when they did, I would be dead.

“Maybe it wasn’t chance that saw you with Shelia and Jensen,” Cadmus tells me pointedly.

I lick my upper lip. “Are you saying that my birth parents could’ve left me there on purpose, knowing that Shelia and Jensen would find me?”

I never considered that a possibility before, but now that it’s been presented to me…

“A parent would do anything for their child. If you had stayed here, the virus would’ve either killed you or mutated you.”

“I’m so sick all of the time,” I whisper around the knot in my throat. “I think it’s because I was exposed to the virus as a baby.”

Sympathy fills Cadmus’s eyes. “But you’re not dead, and that’s more than can be said about seventy percent of the other children who are born in this world.”

Dread nestles into my stomach at the reminder.

Is it possible that my birth parents sent me away…to give me a chance at life?

Hope starts to edge in over the shock.

Because if that’s true, then maybe my birth parents are still alive. Maybe they’re here. Maybe they can provide more answers about where I came from.

But those are problems for me to focus on at a later time. I need to worry about getting Cadmus to V.

Please be okay, V. Please.

Tristan and Cadmus—the fastest of the group—are both waiting by the portal, but I shoo them ahead.

“Go! Get him to V,” I tell my wolf mate.

He nods, grabs Cadmus’s upper arm, and they both disappear through the portal.

I quicken my pace, Kian and Foster still on either side of me.

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