From the Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (6 page)

The expression in his eyes had turned hopeful, and I hated to crush it. It was obvious to me that my mate
(I was amazed by how quickly the phrase had become comfortable to me) had lived a very lonely existence, having never even met a werekind before, let alone another chimaera. His countenance became crestfallen as I slowly shook my head. “I’m so sorry, but no,” I said softly. “Unless there are more like you in hiding somewhere, you’re the first chimaera to be born in nearly three hundred years.”

“But how is that possible?” he demanded to know.

“At risk of sounding crude, you’re kind of an anomaly. Some legends tell us that only a handful of chimaera are born every few hundred years. Some say there are only two, a male and a female. Some even say there is just one at a time. Others say your species was incredibly prolific once, but that some sort of plague or natural disaster killed all but two, and that’s how come there are so few born. The origin of the chimaera is just as shrouded in mystery as that of werekind. We don’t know how we came to be, either. Just that we are. But because werewolf legends are so peppered throughout Eastern folklore, the wolves have claimed the prefix ‘were’ for themselves, and since there hasn’t been one of your kind in so long, the other werekind breeds took to calling themselves shapeshifters.”

He drew a breath and held it as he absorbed all that I had told him. I could tell that he was still confused, and I knew that I would explain things to him as many times as it took for him to understand.

Of course, I was confused as well. Alana O’Mara had said that my mate was a man from my past. Someone I had once called my friend. So who was this guy to me?

“May I ask you a question? Please,” I said. “I need to know… Who are you? What is your name?”

He chuckled as he looked at me and said, “That’s technically two questions, and I could ask you the same ones. But since you asked first, my name is Race. Race Covington.”

I did not think it possible that I could have
withstood one more shock, but I was wrong.

“Oh my God, no way!” I exclaimed, stepping forward yet again. I felt a huge grin spread across my face as I stared at him in disbelief. So
that
was why he looked so familiar!

“Uh, yes way
—at least, that was my name last time I took a look at my driver’s license, my birth certificate, my Social Security card, and all the bills that come in the mail,” Race countered. “Well, actually, my legal name is—”

“Horace William Covington the Third,” I supplied for him with a giggle.

“H
ow the hell do you know that? Have we met before?”

The psychic
weredragon had been right, about everything. The man standing before me was definitely someone from my past, as he’d been Mark’s best friend for several years. Though technically he had never called me
his
friend, I’d considered him one of mine. I’d looked up to him in much the same manner as I had my brother, except in Race’s case, I’d also had the hugest crush on him. Not that I ever told him, of course.

I remembered all of a sudden
that Race and his mother had moved shortly after his 14th birthday. I remembered spending an afternoon in my room crying because he hadn’t even come over to say goodbye to me. Well, he’d have actually come over to say goodbye to Mark, but he’d always been nice to me, the pesky kid sister, and I know he would have said something to me as well.

And fourteen
—the year of the double-seven—was the age when werekind (and chimaera, according to the legends) shifted for the first time. Increments of seven were significant to the two-natured, as there was a long-held belief that the number seven had a mystical power behind it.

“I know that’s your full name because I heard you say it once,” I explained, “and right after you said that, you added that
you went by Race because Horace was an old man’s name.”

“Seriously, how do you know that? We’ve obviously met before, and I a
dmit you look kind of familiar—now that I’m looking at you like this—but I can’t seem to place you,” Race returned.

I felt like I was buzzing, I was so deliriously happy and excited. Who’d have thought that my destined mate was a guy I’d developed a crush on when I was a kid, one I hadn’t seen since I was nine? That he would be quite possibly the only living chimaera in existence, same as my brother was the only
dhunphyr
—or immortal human—in existence?

“You probably don’t recognize me because you haven’t seen my face in sixteen years,” I replied.
“I’m Juliette Singleton—you used to be best friends with my brother, Mark.”

“No way!” Race exclaimed, echoing my own words of a moment ago. He then surprised me by closing the distance between us and throwing his arms around me. I returned his embrace by wrapping my arms around his waist.

“My God, I can’t believe it’s really you!” he said with a laugh, standing back to look at me but not letting me go. “How the hell could I forget those angel eyes of yours?”

I grinned. “Is that why you called me Angel Eyes when I was in my animal form?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I know huskies commonly have blue eyes, but the first good look I got of yours when you were the dog, it made me think of you—the you I knew all those years ago. Back then I thought you and your mom had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen.”

I grinned even wider
to hear him say he’d always thought my eyes were pretty. At the same time I was taking a breath, and I suddenly became very aware of how close we were, of how he still smelled like that funny mix of human and animal, but also very much like a man. Instinctively I leaned toward him to breathe his scent in deeper, infusing my memory with his very essence. I’d never forget what he smelled like now, not that I would ever want to.

Perhaps because he was also caught up in the moment, Race lowered his head, capturing my lips beneath his
, his hands on my shoulders tightening their grip—and then the moment was ruined as I suddenly flashed back to the Day of Hell. Martin and Peter had kissed me as they forced themselves on me, and even though Race’s pillowy lips were quite warm, and not at all cold as theirs had been, I couldn’t stop the memory from bursting across my consciousness and I pushed him away.

“Juliette, what’s wrong?” Race asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing heavily. I knew I was on the verge of hyperventilating, and I put distance between us to try and reign in my rattled nerves. “It’s not you—it’s so not you. I just…something happened. A few weeks ago, something happened. I don’t even…”

Tears burned behind my eyes. How could I tell him what I’d been through? Race deserved to know, I knew that, but I had a hard time even thinking about
it let alone saying the words. Deep down, I knew this was because I was suffering from post-traumatic stress for not having properly dealt with the kidnapping and torture and rape, but it was so damn
hard
. Thinking about it or talking about it meant having to re-live the pain and the fear, and I didn’t want to. It didn’t even matter that the men who had brutalized me were dead—I only knew that I didn’t want to think about it. Or talk about it. I just wanted to forget it had ever happened.

“Hey, don’t cry,” Race said softly when the tears spilled over. “It’s obvious that whatever it was, it’s hard for you to deal with. Baby I get that, believe me. And not to freak you out or anything, but right now I’m having the hardest time not running over to you and cradling you in my arms and telling you everything will be alright, and I’m wondering if maybe it will help you to explain that to me.”

I sniffled, thinking that having his arms around me was the most wonderful thing I’d ever experienced. I’d very much enjoyed being held by Race, however brief our first embrace had been. I wanted nothing more in that moment than for him to hold me again but I was afraid of having another flashback, so I forced myself to sit down on the same end of the couch I had fallen asleep on.

“You’re feeling the effects of our bond,” I said slowly, wiping furiously at the tears. “The imprinting bond
drives each shifter to make his or her mate happy above all else. A mate’s safety is of the highest importance, especially once the bond is completed. You’ll be compelled to spend as much time as you can with me, to take care of me. See to my every need. I know that not just because that’s what I’ve been taught but because I feel it too. I feel like I have hurt you by pushing you away and I want to make it up to you, but I don’t think I can. Not right now.”

Moving slowly, probably because he could tell I was still feeling jumpy and vulnerable, Race walked over to my end of the couch. He lowered himself down to si
t on the coffee table and positioned himself so that my knees were caught between his. Cautiously he reached for my hands. “If I’m too close, you just say the word and I’ll move,” he told me. “But I have to say I don’t want to move, Juliette. Whether it’s this bond thing or the fact that I’m ecstatic to have reconnected with an old friend—or even that I’ve finally met someone else with an impossible ability like mine—I can tell that you’re in a lot of pain, and I want so much to make it go away. But I don’t know any other way to do that except to hold you, and to listen whenever you’re ready to tell me what happened to you.”

More tears fell as I looked up at him, into his earnest, handsome face. I wanted to tell him. I
needed
to tell him. I wanted the pain to go the hell away, and I knew that the only way I could begin to drive it out of my mind and my heart was to talk about what had happened. I felt my hands squeezing his as if I could draw some of his strength into me.

“Three
weeks ago,” I began, my throat feeling raw and torn, “two vampires kidnapped me. They drugged me and beat me and tortured me and they threw me out of a moving car and left me for dead. The next day when I went looking for my brother, who had disappeared, they tied me to a bed and raped me.”

As I spoke, Race began breathing heavily
. I saw his eyes flash, changing from human to something animal, and he pushed to his feet, his chest heaving with what I instantly recognized as an effort to keep from phasing. For several long moments he stood that way, and I began to wonder if he was going to lose the fight, if his beastly nature would conquer his human control.

“Answer me one question,” he ground out through clenched teeth.

“What’s that?”

“Are they dead?”

“They are,” I replied, and was relieved to see him instantly begin to relax—though I knew his rage was far from gone. “Saphrona and Lochlan killed them. And I’m the one who put a match to their worthless corpses so they’d stay that way.”

Race looked at me. “Who are Saphrona and Lochlan?”

I took a deep breath. “Saphrona Caldwell is Mark’s bondmate. She’s a human-vampire hybrid and he’s a
dhunphyr
, an immortal human.”

“What the hell?” he said for pr
obably the third time in the last ten minutes.

“Immortal humans
—we call them
dhunphyr
—are created when a vampire has bitten a woman who is with child,” I explained. “If she’s far enough along in her pregnancy that the child could live outside of her womb, the draculin in a vampire’s saliva changes the fetus in a similar manner to the way it turns a human into a vampire. Except the placenta filters out the gene sequences that drive them to feed on blood, and they’re not ruled by the night. They do, however, have an advanced healing factor and they’ll live forever. Mark is the only one we know of.”

“How long has he been this way? Never mind, stupid question,” Race muttered, pacing away from me. “I can’t believe he never told me any of this stuff. Has he always known?”

I nodded. “Mark said that he’s always had an idea he wasn’t normal, because he never got sick. All his injuries healed almost instantly—even when he broke his arm falling out of the tree in your old back yard.”

“I remember that,” Race said. “I remember hearing the fucking bone snap and freaking out, screaming for my mom. But by the time your dad came to take him to the hospital, she couldn’t feel the break anymore.”

He ran his hands into his hair and fisted them in the strands again. “Who’s Lochlan?” he asked after a moment.

“Lochlan
Mackenna is Saphrona’s brother. Her father, a vampire named Diarmid Mackenna, turned him about a hundred years before Saphrona was born. They consider each other as a brother and sister, and are as close as Mark and I are,” I replied.

“I didn’t even know fuckin’ vamps could have kids,” Race muttered darkly.

“Only the males can,” I told him. “And then only with human females. If the mother isn’t turned at the time of the birth she dies, because hybrids are about as strong as we are, if not stronger. Maybe not as strong as a full vampire, though. Anyway, the strength of a hybrid fetus causes so much internal damage as they grow inside the mother that when they’re born there’s massive bleeding. The mother dies within minutes if she’s not bitten. That’s what happened to Saphrona’s mother, and she’s hated her father for it ever since she found out, because he didn’t care about her enough to turn her.”

“How did you even become involved with these people?”