Page 77 of Mortal Shift
“Maybe you’ve been liaising with the wrong humans. Excuse me.”
I set my mug down and made to move past him, but he caught my arm and halted me as easily as someone controlling a puppy.
“Don’t play games with me,” he said.
“Now who’s the suspicious one?” I asked, leveling my cool gaze at him and hoping like hell he couldn’t see beyond it.
“I can hear your heart pounding.”
“Fucking supernaturals!” I twisted irritably. “Would you get off me already? It’s not my fault, alright? It’s not like I asked for it.”
“Asked for what?” he asked, and I arched a brow at his hand on my arm. With a condescending smile he released it and raised his hands in a facsimile of surrender. “Asked for what?”
“There are vamps all over that stupid academy, I can’t help it if one of them thinks I’m his own personal juice box. He’s avampireand I’m a human. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t enjoy it. He’s a little bit stronger than me, so what do you expect me to do?”
He searched my face and then snorted a laugh. “That? That’s your big secret? Vamps have been feeding on you?”
“Vamp,” I ground out. “In the singular. That’s what you’re smelling on me, right?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. I…don’t think that’s something you can smell.”
“Oh.” I felt the blush creeping up my cheeks. “Wait, if it’s not that, then I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“May I?” He arched a brow at my arm, and I was so taken aback that someone was actually asking my permission for anything, it took me a while to realize what he was getting at.
“Oh. Uh, sure. Knock yourself out.”
He lifted my arm and turned it carefully, then skimmed his nose along the inside of my wrist.
“There’s something about your blood.” He frowned, sniffed again, and then shook his head. “Or… Maybe not. I’m not sure.”
He let me go and I tried to decipher his expression.
“So… there’s something weird about my blood. Or there’s not something weird about my blood. That really narrows it down. Good job.”
“Tell me about your father,” he said.
“Can’t.” I shrugged and looked over his shoulder at the cooling mugs on the worktop. “Never knew him.”
Blaine clicked his tongue in what sounded suspiciously like disapproval, and I rounded on him, my blood heating.
“Hey, don’t go holding it against us that the cowardly lowlife ran off. My mom did the best she could raising me, and if she says he’s bad news and to be avoided, then he is.” A thought trickled down my spine like liquid fire. “And don’t you eventhinkabout having someone start questioning her about this, because it is none of your business and she doesn’t need the past dragging up.”
He held his hands up in surrender with a chuckle. “You’re fiery. No wonder you’re mates with Cole. The two of you are a good match.”
“Aside from the whole part where I’m not a shifter.”
He lifted one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe? Pretty damn sure I’d know if I happened to turn into an overgrown wolf.”
“Maybe.” He repeated the word absent-mindedly, seemingly looking through me, like he was deep in thought. I eye-balled him, which was completely wasted seeing as he had the whole looking-without-seeing thing going on.
“Whatever. I meant what I said. Leave my mom out of this.”
That snapped his attention back to me. “Relax. No-one here is going to do anything to jeopardize Angela’s recovery. And for the record, it wasn’t her actions I disapproved of—it was your father’s. It’s unthinkable in our culture for a father to abandon his children.”
“Oh.” I scuffed my feet on the tiled floor. I tried not to think about him too much. He was just some loser who knocked my mom up and then took off, or so she said. And she’d always refused to tell me more than that, other than that he was bad news, and eventually, I’d stopped asking. We didn’t need him, anyway. We’d been fine, just the two of us. And when mom had started getting sick, I never even considered looking for him. He was the last person I would turn to for help—thenandnow.
