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I halted so abruptly outside my apartment he had to brace his hands on my waist to stop his own forward momentum.
“Desmond, you’d tell me if this was a dream, right?”
“I don’t know what I’d do if this was your dream, but I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m not still asleep. ”
We both stood barefoot on the sidewalk, him staring at me and me wincing at the piercing blueness of the sky and how fucking shiny everything was. Light cut like a blade off any smooth surface it touched, coming back to hurt me. But I’d never felt a pain so delicious as that of the sun.
My skin felt glorious, like I was surrounded by bathtub water. It was nothing like the heat of a summer night. I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in my own skin because of how oppressive the air temperature was. This was nothing like that.
While I basked in the glory of daylight, ignoring the looks we were getting from passing pedestrians, I considered Aubrey’s words to me. He’d said he would take something that was mine alone to give. My greatest weapon.
I was gripped by an overwhelming panic, my hands shaking so hard I thought they’d never stop. I finally had an idea of what those words could mean, and what my greatest weapon was. But I was at a total loss for how to prove my new hypothesis.
“Do I smell different to you?” I asked, grasping at the only thing I could think of on the spot.
“Different how?”
I turned to him and took one of his hands in both of mine, gazing at him imploringly. “Smell me. I need to know if I smell different. ”
He tucked his face into the curve of my neck, the intimacy of the gesture giving me an unexpected thrill. When he withdrew, his expression showed confusion. “I…don’t know if I’m just thinking it’s something when it’s nothing. ”
“I’m different. ”
“Yes. ”
“How?”
Desmond cupped my face in his free hand and stroked his thumb across my cheek. I didn’t know what to make of the look in his eyes or the funny little smile on his lips. “You don’t smell like death anymore. And you don’t smell like wolf either. ”
I swallowed hard. “How do I smell?”
“Human. ”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Desmond and I sat across from each other in a booth at the back of a brunch-only diner in Midtown. The checkered black-and-white floor and butter-yellow walls all screamed 1950s throwback, but I was loving it. I’d been walking past it for years and had felt embittered I wasn’t able to go in. Brunch is a luxury I had never been able to participate in.
Until now.
I had four plates in front of me: one with homemade Norwegian waffles topped with raspberry preserves and whipped cream; one with buttermilk biscuits smothered in a white sausage gravy; a third had a stack of blueberry pancakes doused in layers of butter and maple syrup; and the last held a bacon, bacon and bacon omelet. The waitress had stopped visiting to refill my coffee and left a whole carafe on the table with us instead.
Desmond—still recouping from his shift—was picking at a protein breakfast with eggs, sausages and bacon. He seemed enthralled by watching me eat, though, and most of his own breakfast had been forgotten.
I bit into one of the biscuits. The fluffy, crusty pastry crumbled in my mouth, and the savory, saltiness of the gravy overtook the butter of the bun. I’d eaten real food before in my life, but because I hadn’t had a need for it, the delight of it had been lost to me. Now I felt like I was making up for twenty-three years of forgotten breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
“Are you going to eat that?” I asked, pointing to one of his maple-glazed sausages.
He shook his head, and I speared it on my fork before wrapping it in one of the pancakes and taking a huge bite.
Desmond looked under the table then righted himself. “Funny,” he commented.
“Whurt?”
“I’d assumed you must have two hollow legs under there. But no. ”
I tried to stick my tongue out at him, but there was too much food in my mouth.
“You definitely look like a princess right now,” he added sarcastically.
That stopped me mid-chew, my fork poised over the waffle. All it took was the dreaded P word to pull me back from the dream I was blissfully lost in. He hadn’t meant to kill my joy, but he’d unfortunately brought me right back to the real world. The world where I had responsibilities and people who depended on me.
I put my fork down and sat back in the squishy booth, reaching for the nearly empty coffee cup nearby to keep myself from fidgeting.
“What am I supposed to do about this?”
Desmond mirrored my actions, setting his own cutlery aside and relaxing into his seat. “I don’t know, honestly. I want to be pragmatic and figure out what’s happened, how this is even possible. But right now all I want to do is dance for fucking joy that you don’t smell like a vampire anymore. ”
“I don’t smell like anything anymore,” I reminded him. “Werewolf, either. ”
He gave a half shrug and stopped trying to hide his smile. “It doesn’t matter. I get to see you in the light. ”
The same vision that had been in my head all morning came rushing back, filling me with a fizzy jubilance akin to being drunk on champagne. It was me, free from all the Tribunal and wolf pack bullshit, walking hand in hand with Desmond, not into the sunset but into the bright warmth of the midafternoon sun.
No more vampires. No werewolf king. No hunting down baddies with Keaty. The bottom line of it was, if I was human, my life was my own at last. I couldn’t be a wolf queen if I couldn’t be a wolf. And if the Tribunal had problems letting a half-blood vampire rule the roost, they certainly weren’t going to let me play boss as a human.
I could be normal. Desmond could leave the pack—Lucas had made it abundantly clear he was willing to let Desmond go. It could just be us two, out in the world. My body would stop fighting me and I could have babies with this man. Babies who’d grow up with werewolf DNA, but they’d exist, and they’d be mine and his.
But if I no longer had my vampire side, what did it mean for me and Holden? My heart sank, and a guilty feeling swelled into the pit of my stomach. For the longest time I’d believed I could keep Holden at a distance and not let him get to me. There was no way I could pretend anymore, though. Now that we’d spent the night together, there wasn’t going to be an easy way to live my life without him, and I didn’t know what this new turn of events meant for us.
I made a little noise and pretended I hadn’t by taking a sip of my lukewarm coffee. “We don’t know if this is permanent or not. ”
“Aubrey told you he would take your greatest weapon, right?” I’d explained my theory to him on the way over. Spoken aloud it sounded more and more logical every time I said it. Desmond continued, “And what weapon did you have more powerful than your supernatural abilities?”
“My keen wit?”
He reached across the table, carefully avoided the carnage of my breakfast and put his hands over mine so we were both clutching the coffee cup. “As clever as you are, I don’t think sarcasm has any special use for a fairy king. ”
“You never know. They’re sort of uptight. Maybe he wanted to be the funniest guy at the party. ”
“Maybe, but clearly you haven’t lost your sharp tongue, so I think it’s more likely he took the monsters from you. ”
The monsters. My hands felt cold under his, and I slid them out of his reach, placing my palm flat against my belly like an expectant mother might. Only I wasn’t thinking about what could live inside me anymore, I was thinking about what had lived inside me. My wolf was gone. There was nothing to feel within, no matter how hard I tried. Her grumpy attitudes and fierce responses had all been replaced by an empty void.
I didn’t know how to feel about it. I’d barely thought about her since this had happened because she had been like another
limb to me. Becoming human hadn’t cut off my arms or legs, but it had ripped the wolf right out of me. And now that I was thinking about her, an ache blossomed inside me, reminding me what I’d once had.
The same empty feeling came when I tongued my canines and they were boring, blunt teeth. That was all they’d be now.
“I’m just human. ”
“Yes. ”
“I’m not your mate anymore. ”
Desmond shook his head. “You’ll always be my mate. You have wolf DNA, even if you’re not a wolf anymore. You can’t change that. And who fucking cares about the soul-bond anymore anyway? Hadn’t we already screwed that up a million different ways?”
I twisted my hands in my lap. “A million sounds like a low estimate. ”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. ”
But it did. If we were going to make this work, I had to tell him what he’d missed when he was trapped in wolf form. Not what he’d done, but what I’d done. I wasn’t sure how much he would remember from being in his other form, but my memory of a night in bed with Holden was crystal clear. “Something happened when we were gone. When you were a wolf. I can’t blame—”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said again, and when I met his gaze, I saw how serious he was. “I want to leave the past in the past. People don’t get fresh starts like this every day, Secret, and I don’t want to waste a single goddamn second dwelling on what did or didn’t happen, and with who, when we can pretend like it was the bad dream and this is reality. ”
I thought more about Holden and how I’d confessed before the fairy court that I loved him enough not to sacrifice his life. I’d meant it. I did love Holden. When I’d been one of the monsters, he’d even been a more sensible choice for me than Desmond. Desmond had seemed wrong for me somehow. He was too good, too kind for my dark little world. But maybe he was right. Maybe this was exactly what we needed to brush aside all doubt. Now I could love him the way he deserved, because now I wasn’t keeping him trapped in the nighttime.