Page 15 of Fixer
“Hey,” Shawn hugged me.“Hey, now.”He rubbed my back as I teetered out of control.
One minute.Just one minute of holding onto Shawn, and I’ll believe this.My heart needs to catch up with my brain.I muffled another sob against his shoulder, gritted my teeth, and took a dozen slow breaths.
“Sorry.”Reluctantly, I let go, stepped back, and dragged my sleeve across my face.“How’ve you been?What are you doing here?Tell me everything.”
The other man down by the trees had been standing frozen, watching us, but now he set down his equipment and approached.He was a human, about Shawn’s actual age— early twenties— red-headed, shorter and slimmer than Shawn, who was already small for a werewolf.No threat at all.He reached Shawn’s side and stopped there, his cool gaze on me.“You okay, Shawn?”
“Better than.”Shawn grinned.“This is my big brother, Wade.Dustin found him.”
“Is he like you?”
I had a second to wonder what the guy meant before Shawn said, “Yeah, he’s a werewolf too.Wade, this is my good friend, Isaiah.”
My question of who this man was to Shawn got lost in my shock.“You told him?Ahuman?”
“He found out.He’s cool.He won’t say anything.”
“Found out?”I glanced over my shoulder at Dustin, who’d gotten out but was leaning against his car, not approaching.“Does Dustin know?”
“Yeah, Dustin’s well aware.”Shawn waved at Dustin who came toward us with an easy stride, casual, not like here was a human with whom Shawn had broken our most fundamental commandment.
I couldn’t help moving between Dustin and Isaiah.
Dustin stopped a few feet away.“I see you’ve met Zay.”
“Zay?”
“My nickname,” Isaiah said.“I promise you, the last thing I want to do is hurt Shawn and people like him.”
“And one of the last things I want to do,” Dustin drawled, “is hurt Zay.So you can relax.”
Relaxing was not happening.My entire body vibrated like a bowstring.If Zay knew about us, he could betray us.If the authorities believed him, centuries of running under the radar would end.Werewolves would be arrested, hunted, captured, studied— I was sure of that.I knew how humans treated anyone different.Zay was an unacceptable danger to wolf-kind.Except I didn’t want Dustin to hurt someone my brother cared for.“How can I… I don’t…”
“We need to talk,” Shawn said.“I want to hear about your life.I want to tell you about mine.”He glanced around.“Come on.We put a picnic table under the trees over there for nice days.Come sit down.”
“I’ll fetch some food,” Zay said.“If you’re anything like Shawn, you’re always hungry.”He turned and headed toward the house before I could stop him.
“Are yousure?”I whispered to Shawn.“It’s such a risk.He’s not a bonded wife.”Wolves sometimes waited years to tell their wives what they were.We kept the secret of our race until we had bonded a wife to the pack with indelible links that wove our joy and pain into theirs.A bonded wife was safe at last to know the truth about her man, bonded to her husband and his Alpha, but another male human could never be truly safe.
“I’m sure.”Shawn’s expression was serene as he led the way to the tables.“He’s known from the start and it’s been four years.I trust him.”
“Believe me,” Dustin said.“I spent a lot of time watching him at first, very closely, for months.”
“You did?”Shawn turned a frown on him.
“Of course I did.Some random guy knowing you were a wolf?He could have been anyone, anything, cruel, greedy, stupid.I gave him some initial leeway because he’d been persecuted for being gay, and he was falling for you, and eventually, he gave me enough confidence in his harmlessness to go away and leave you to your lives.”
“I didn’t even see you hanging around, not after that first week.”
Dustin grinned.“How incompetent do you think I am?I chatted up a nurse from the clinic he had his surgery at for any issues there, had your foster parents’ phone line tapped, kept my binoculars on him.I watched from a distance.It was not a comfortable month.”
“Why not?”I asked as Shawn led us to a wooden table set under the trees.
“Winter.More snow than I enjoyed in skin.”
Shawn waved me to the bench on one side and took the other.Dustin sat at my right with fighting room between us.I didn’t read too much into that.Habit, no doubt.Shawn said, “It was the beginning of winter when I met Zay.This was back with my foster folks.”
“Foster?”
