Mated By Fate by Christa Wick

Chapter Twenty-Eight

From Coop's,Denver drove to what many jokingly called "Latent Central" now, an old dormitory refurbished to handle the initial trickle that had fast become a flood of women like Lana in various sizes, shapes, and colors. The latents occupied the second floor, with a few guards on the first floor and a rotating house mother as chaperone.

Knowing most of the guards would want to attend the baby shower and that his own presence at the meeting hall would ruin the night for Esme, he stopped by to see if he could relieve anyone. Not a bad plan, he figured, right up to the moment he opened the office door and realized the house mother on duty was Camille, her rail thin shoulders hunched over as she scowled at a map.

Scanning the hallway in both directions, he frowned. "The guards all gone?"

Camille gave a little sniff, her mouth puckering as if she was balancing a lemon slice on her tongue. "I think Jory is in one of the supply closets."

Denver angled his head, his ear twitching as he tried to locate the sole guard. Hearing a few soft, feminine moans coupled with masculine grunts, he realized why the guard had gone missing.

Glancing back at his mate’s mother as she heard the same sounds he did, he added a second imaginary slice of lemon inside her mouth.

That was Camille Stone day in and day out—a face perpetually puckered with sour dislike for everyone around her. There could be a heartbreaking love story hiding beneath the old witch's bitter shell, but no one knew it, not even her only child.

Denver shook his head, trying to dislodge the anger slowly building inside him. Esme wouldn't throw her mother under the bus, but how could the old witch have been clueless for twenty-five years about her daughter's true nature?

Looking up, Camille read his hard stare and voiced his thoughts aloud, as if simply stating a fact, "You blame me."

Denver bit at his lip, his mind slowly turning over the years he had lived with the clan. At five or so, he'd been found in a seaside town—on Denver Avenue, to be precise—begging for scraps in his wolf form, the human children happy to throw the "puppy" scraps of their burgers and hot dogs until their parents caught them.

The parents had been happy to throw beer bottles and rocks.

He had only the vaguest memory of the beach and no idea how he got there. Whenever he tried to push beyond to even older memories, his internal eye fixed on the ocean with its bands of blue and green and his first night in Camille's home.

As a matter of survival, he'd been in his wolf form for so long, he couldn't remember his way out. Shivering, wondering if the people who had caught him and brought him to the strange smelling house would feed him again, he had whimpered in the dark room in which Camille had left him.

And then she came—Esme. Only a little older than a toddler and as alone in her own way as he was in his.

The only non-shifter child on clan lands, she was a plump, pretty little thing with eyes that matched the ocean he'd been stolen from. Like the children on the beach, she’d stroked his fur. But never once treating him like a pet the way they had. And unlike those other children, she’d sang to him while she did so, her voice a soft, sweet lisping melody that immediately stopped his shivering.

The longer she soothed him with her singing, the more the crushing darkness of the room began to fill with a soft, blue light that seemed to come from inside her.

A gift for him, and him alone.

The following morning, he woke in human form.

Little Esme took one look at him—a rail thin boy with wild hair down to his shoulders, covered in dirt—and hugged him as fiercely as she had the night before, stroking his hair the way she had his fur.

After that, she’d found him a robe to make sure he stayed warm, and food to fill his growling stomach.

From that moment, he’d never wanted to leave Esme’s side. But they’d made him. They’d forced him to leave Camille’s home a week later.

He’d escape whenever he could to visit her, however. Foster family after foster family within the clan disciplining him until finally, Seth's father took him in and let him run as wild, with as much access to Esme as Camille and Jack Cooper would tolerate.

In the end, years later, he had walked away from Esme on his own, knowing he would never be able to surround her with the children she craved after all the years she had spent in isolation with a mother who called her a mistake.

So to answer Camille’s question, did he blame her?

Fuck yes.

Lifting a shoulder, he dismissed that obvious fact with the larger truth. "Not nearly as much as I blame myself."

He turned to leave the office then, but the witch called him back.

"I may have found something, but I'm not sure."

He glanced over his shoulder, his attention focused on where she pointed one long finger at the map.

"What?"

Camille chewed her bottom lip as her nail scratched at the map's surface. "It might be an echo, it's extremely weak."

Denver returned to the room, his hand sweeping down to push her finger aside. She had been scratching at Wayland, a spot that was little more than a ghost town. Traveling on twisting mountain roads, it was maybe ninety minutes past the clan's borders.

His lips flattened into a grim line as he thought it through. "Don't Esme's new crystals and methods make the casting dead easy if a person's that close? Most of the time between here and there is going up, not across."

"That's how it should work…theoretically. But this signal is weak," she answered, mouth flattening for a second before she continued. "Probably just an echo of a cub that's never shifted or maybe a latent. My daughter's improvements don't make the casting better or easier. She just made the readings more sensitive. With more positives come more false positives."

With his thoughts focused on a single word among all her blather, Denver ignored Camille talking down Esme's accomplishments as she always did. Making Esme feel or look like shit was as much a part of Camille as her perpetual lemon mouth.

"You're saying it could be a cub?" he asked, tapping at Wayland on the map. "Would the signal be weaker if the child is injured? Would that make it look like an echo?"

She brushed his hand out of her way. One elbow resting on the table, she let the silver chain holding the crystal pendant at its end unspool from her palm.

"Possibly."

When Camille did nothing but glare at the pendant that refused to move, he wrapped his fingers around it, forcing the witch to look at him.

"Come on," he growled. "Whatever you saw, echo or injured, was it a latent or was it a cub?"

"Their signatures are almost the same if the cub's never shifted," she answered. "Like when my casting led to your little Oscar instead of the latent I thought I had found."

Denver released the pendant, motioning impatiently for her to resume casting. She closed her eyes. He felt a little pull of power as she siphoned off some of his energy to feed her magic. The pendant didn't respond. Not even the slightest vibration trembled through its chain.

"Wayland? That's all you got?" Denver pulled the armory keys from his pocket. He had his gun and holster in the glove box of his truck and a deer rifle on the window rack. If he was leaving clan lands without backup, that wasn't enough. He needed to grab one of the Bushmaster Carbon 15s.

Camille rose from the desk, trying to block him. "You can't go alone."

He pushed past her into the hallway, grumbling as he unlocked the armory door.

"Even if Jory is buried balls deep," he stopped and gave a sniff, "in that little redhead we pulled in this weekend, he has to stay here to protect the other latents if anything happens."

"There are plenty of people at the shower, you can—"

He shook his head, rejecting the idea as he freed one of the Bushmasters from the rack, his big hand popping a thirty-round magazine into it before grabbing two more magazines. "You said it's probably an echo."

"Or a trap," she argued. "Or a latent with half a dozen Hunters on her trail—"

"Or a cub." He pushed past her again, grabbing one of the two-way radios. "Don't pretend like you suddenly care about anyone but yourself, witch."

"Well, I certainly don't give a damn about you," Camille snapped in agreement. "But my daughter would be devastated."

Denver shook his head, the memory of Esme's last words fresh in his mind. "She made it more than clear she hates me."

Herding Camille back into the office, he pressed the radio into her hand and pointed at the map. "Keep casting—and keep your mouth shut unless you find anything useful. I'll be back before the party is over."