Page 26 of Wolf Mate

“I believe you are what the witches and wizards of that time called an arcane-born.” He lowered his head close to mine, his coffee breath hitting my face.

The closeness caught me off guard, and I took a step back.

“Stay close,” he said, his free hand catching my arm. “We need to keep up the illusion that we’re having a moment, so hopefully even the supernaturals will avoid us. We don’t want people asking the wrong type of questions, do we?”

Right.

Our ruse.

But standing this close to him felt wrong …

Pushing away the weird sensation, I concentrated on the one thing I’d always wanted to know. “Arcane … born?” I hadn’t meant for it to come out like a question, but my tongue had stuck on the words.

He nodded, excitement lightening his irises. “Yeah. It sounds sick, right?”

That wasn’t the description I’d have chosen. “I can tell you no one understands me, especially when my blood does the humming thing.”

“That’s because you haven’t been trained.” He bounced a little, reminding me of a child. “I’m surprised your parents didn’t tell you about this.”

My blood went cold, the fizz fading away to nonexistence. Needing to regroup, I secured the lid on my drink and took a sip. The sweet milky coffee coated my mouth and warmed my throat as it went down, but the chill in my blood remained.

“Skylar?” His forehead creased.

There was no getting out of this revelation. A lump formed in my throat. “I’m adopted.” The adoption was closed, and I had no idea who my biological parents were. But now I had a possible reason why they’d wanted to get rid of me, and it confirmed what I’d feared all along.

Knowing I was a freak, they’d pawned me off on my unsuspecting family, leaving me untrained and prone to chaos.

“Oh.” His mouth held theOfor a second longer than necessary. “That’s unfortunate.”

I snorted, startling him. But it was either laugh or cry, and I chose the former.

That stupid emotion called hope warmed my chest. “I was given to my adoptive parents the same day I was born. My biological parents couldn’t have known I was …” I trailed off. I was positive I would never be able to call myselfarcane-born. That didn’t sound right. But maybe they’d given me up due to an unfortunate situation and not because of what I was.

“Actually, they would have.” He flinched and rubbed a hand on his jeans. “There’s this rare event that happens every two hundred to five hundred years that activates the dormant gene that contains the magic. It’s called the Milky Way flash where, for a brief second, the stars in the Milky Way flare, but it happens so quickly that it’s undetectable by human equipment or eyes. Supernaturals can see it, but only witches can track it. The last one happened twenty-one years ago on January nineteenth.”

My body tensed. “Then it can’t be me. My birthday is March nineteenth.”

“The activation doesn’t happen on the day of birth.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “It happens during the pregnancy, while the baby is still forming. After a person is born, the event wouldn’t activate the magic.”

A sharp pain pierced my heart. “Can the event be predicted?”

He shook his head. “That’s one of the mysteries. It just happens, and no one knows why. Some say that it’s Fate intervening.”

“Fate?” I’d heard of gods and goddesses, and I’d heard fate was a bitch, but it sounded like he thought of it as a sentient thing and not a set of circumstances. “Like a person?”

“No, more of a being.” He shrugged. “She’s all-knowing and sets things into motion, but she doesn’t have power like the moon goddess and Mother Earth do.”

So my parents had given me up because of my blood. “So they gave me up instead of helping me with my blood. They must have known. Why would they do that to me?” I’d always hoped that finding answers would help me understand, but instead, I felt more broken.

“I … I don’t know.” His lips pressed into a firm line.

I placed a hand on my chest, my blood dangerously close to humming. “I need to go into the woods in case I can’t calm down.” I took some deep breaths.

He nodded. “Come on.”

We walked into the woods and stood in a grove of trees. I dropped my coffee, removed my backpack, and squatted. I had to focus on something other than the raw sense of abandonment deep in my heart—the cold void I suspected would never be filled.

I worked my hands into the mulch, needing to connect to nature. The damp earth on my hands centered me, and I remembered how running my hands through it felt.

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