9

I paced back and forth inside my sanctuary.

Why did I run? I’d been in battles that had lasted days. I had dived into Eagle’s Nest Sink, a cave so dangerous, it had a sign with a grim reaper on it and a warning “There is nothing in this cave worth dying for,” because I had to talk to a mermaid. I visited my grandfather every couple of weeks, for crying out loud. And the moment Derek opened his mouth, I turned tail and ran.

All the fights I’d been in, all the torture I’d braved, all the magic I’d learned, and that’s what undid me. Meeting the guy who used to be the center of my universe until I turned eighteen.

Stupid. So stupid. Was I thirteen again? What the hell had happened?

He hadn’t recognized me. The look he gave me was so cold.

It hurt.

Some fragile part of me must have been convinced that the moment he saw me he would magically know who I was. But he didn’t.

It wasn’t him. It was me. I made myself run away.

I thought I’d buried that crush. I was no longer an adolescent who kept hoping Derek would realize I was growing up and fall in love with me. I didn’t say goodbye to him before I left because I was too chicken to chance it. If he’d asked me to stay, I might not have gone through with it, and if he hadn’t, it would’ve crushed me. None of that was his fault. He had to know how I felt. He never took advantage of it. He never even gave me a hint that he was waiting for me. In all the time I was gone, he hadn’t tried to find me. After that initial phone call, I called home every week when I could. Kate and Curran knew where I was. If Derek wanted to see me, all he had to do was ask them. For the first couple of years I had held on to a fragile hope that one day he would just show up unannounced, but he never had. And then Kate told me he left Atlanta.

I waited. I was so sure he would make his way to me in California. He hadn’t.

I gave up. It hurt too much, so I let it go. Atlanta had stirred up memories, and I had thought of him more than once in the last couple of days, but prior to that I made myself abandon him. Sah akin tonar erani es. His shadow didn’t darken my mind.

Eight years had passed. Everything about me had changed, but I was still in love with Derek Gaunt. How was this possible?

I sat on a plush azure divan. In front of me, a bronze statue shimmered softly with reflected light. A winged serpent winding around a slender pole, her swan-like wings spread wide, as if she were about to take flight above the white gardenia blossoms and burgundy star-shaped hoyas dripping from their trellises. At once delicate and ferocious.

One of Erra’s artists had created this statue and offered it to me as tribute. That’s how she’d seen me, the princess of this new age always ready to spill blood in defense of the new kingdom’s people, beautiful and deadly.

Thank you for the reminder, Gemeti.

I was no longer Julie. These feelings were a ghostly echo from someone else, and that girl was gone. Derek didn’t know the new me. There was no connection between us.

I didn’t know the new him either.

The Derek I knew had been born into a religious household deep in the mountains of Appalachia, where families were money poor but land rich. They guarded their land and their independence with “Trespassers will be shot” signs and meant it.

When Derek was fourteen, his father caught Lyc-V at a tent revival. He went loup fast, drowning in the brew of runaway hormones. Loupism had no cure. It turned shapeshifters into psychotic, sadistic spree killers. Derek’s father was no exception. Every repressed urge, every dark desire forbidden by religion and law, bubbled up to the surface and exploded.

The neighbors and authorities minded their own business. Nobody had helped. Derek’s mother and sisters became his father’s hostages and slaves. His mother caught the virus from his father and killed herself, leaving Derek, his brother, and his five sisters alone with a loup.

The nightmare lasted almost two years. Everyone became infected within months. They tried to fight their father, but loups were freakishly strong. Two of Derek’s siblings died from starvation, chained by their father in the basement. Three of his sisters died from their injuries. One went loup and turned on her brothers and sisters, reveling in their father’s demented cruelty. The day Derek found the half-eaten body of his youngest sister, he couldn’t take it anymore.

The local authorities finally took notice when a column of smoke rose from the top of the mountain and called in the Pack. When Curran arrived with a group of shapeshifters, they found Derek sitting by the burned-out husk of his house, his father’s blood on his hands. He’d finally stopped the nightmare, but it was too late for everyone else.

Derek didn’t resist. He made no effort to explain what happened. He didn’t speak at all. He’d ripped his father apart and that’s all he cared about. Jim, the current Beast Lord, thought Derek would go loup and wanted to kill him. Curran forbade it. He took Derek with him to the Pack and slowly coaxed him back to life.

That was my Derek, and he held himself in a steel grip. Everything that influenced shapeshifters affected him stronger than normal. The moon made him half-crazy. When he locked onto a scent, nothing else mattered. And when he fought… Derek had a hard time sparring. He was worried that if he let go of his control by a hair, he would fall off the same cliff his father had.

He never felt comfortable around other shapeshifters; their presence made his struggle for control worse. But he was fanatically loyal to Curran and Kate. He stayed in the Pack for their sake, and when Curran stepped down, Derek was right behind him. He didn’t hesitate for a second.