Bowman held his breath, waiting for the warm spike in his heart that other Shifters had told him about, the almost-pain that meant he and his mate were bound forever.
It didn’t come. It never had. Exhaustion was there—he and Kenzie always tore it up in the bedroom—but the mate bond eluded them. The Goddess testing them, maybe? Telling Bowman he wasn’t building enough bonfires to the God or meditating hard enough?
Whatever reason the God and Goddess and the wide universe had for denying Kenzie and Bowman the mate bond, it hurt. He knew it hurt Kenzie too—she was simply good at hiding it. Their Shifters also weren’t happy that their leaders shared no bond. Instability could come of that, and they knew it.
Kenzie raised her head and looked down at him. Bowman saw the sorrow in her eyes, knowing she was searching for the bond and not feeling it either.
Instead of comforting her with words, which Kenzie wouldn’t want—she never wanted to talk about it—Bowman stroked her hair. He loved the color of it—dark brown with golden streaks, like the sun on polished walnut.
“I need your report, Kenz,” he said softly. Getting back to business would calm them both. “What did you find out this morning?”
Kenzie snuggled down to him again, which did nothing to help Bowman’s continued hard-on. The last thing he wanted was to talk about the terror of last night, but they couldn’t blow it off. A danger existed that they had to find and destroy.
His hardness deflated a bit, however, as she described the creature’s disappearing scent and her and Jamie’s conclusion that it had been shoved into a semitruck and hauled away.
“By other Shifters?” Bowman asked, still smoothing Kenzie’s hair.
“We couldn’t tell,” she said.
“I know. I’m thinking out loud. Or by humans? And why?”
Kenzie pressed a warm kiss to his throat. “I was more interested in the how. What was that thing? Was it real?”
“It was real.” Bowman flexed his toes and grimaced. “It tore up my leg, smashed Cade’s truck, and laid out half the Shifters of Shiftertown.”
“You know what I mean. I hear people can build some cool robotics, but it wasn’t mechanical. We’d have scented that.”
“That leaves something born and bred. Remember what happened to Tiger.”
Tiger was a Shifter now living in the Austin Shiftertown. He’d been bred by humans using an experimental process Shifters still didn’t understand. The experiments hadn’t gone well, however—all the artificially inseminated Shifters had died except Tiger, who’d been the twenty-third attempt. The researchers had abandoned him, leaving him alone in a cage, barely fed, for years, and he’d pretty much gone insane.
But Tiger, while he was big and powerful and larger than most Felines, was still more or less normal size for a Shifter. After he’d been freed, he’d taken a human mate, a woman named Carly, and Carly so far had no complaints.
Shifters had originally been created by the Fae a couple thousand years ago. Genetic engineering had been invented in Faerie far sooner than humans had figured it out, but it had been blended with magic, as everything in Faerie was.
The Fae had merged humans with big, powerful animal predators—Bowman didn’t really want to know the details of how they’d done it—and produced Shifters, creatures with human reason and pure animal instinct.
After Shifters had banded together and defeated their Fae masters, they’d walked away from Faerie, choosing to live—covertly—with their human counterparts. Fae had started abandoning the human world by then, hating its cold iron, which for some reason weakened their metabolisms and killed them. Fae loathing for the human world had been the point of Shifters staying in it. No Fae to worry about equaled good times. Peace. Cubs. Life.
Of course, neither the Fae nor the humans could leave them alone. Both were constantly doing something to get in the way of Shifter happiness, such as humans herding them into Shiftertowns and slapping shock Collars on them—the Collars had been invented by a half Fae.
Shifters now had figured out a way out of the Collars, but it was a deep, dark secret. Removing Collars and replacing them with fake ones took a special process and was slow going.
Bowman had tried to get Kenzie out of her Collar, but she was being stubborn about it. She’d argued that it was better to let the cubs and the weaker Shifters swap theirs out first. She could take the pain.
And she could. She was strong, his mate.
“What about this cop?” Bowman asked her.
Kenzie lifted her head, her eyes dark in the sunlight filtering through half-closed curtains. “He seems all right. He wants to talk to you. I told him he could come over this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” Bowman half sat up, then ground his teeth as his leg throbbed. “Shit, Kenzie . . .”
“I think he can help us. Cops have resources that we don’t.”
“I don’t want humans in Shiftertown until I heal.” He couldn’t protect his mate, his cub, and his Shifters from cops with guns while his leg was in a splint.
“No humans except cute veterinarians?” Kenzie asked with a sly look.
“Give it a rest, Kenz.”
Kenzie broke into a big, beautiful smile. “I can’t. I’m never letting you off the hook for anything, Bowman O’Donnell. The privilege of a mate.”
“What is? Being a serious pain in my ass?”
“Hell, yeah,” Kenzie said lightly. “I do it better than anyone.”