Rebecca Royce: Wolf Reborn

Faith leapt up. "Are you okay?"

"Yes. I'm not used to talking in either form."

"Evidently." Faith walked to him and immediately started brushing dirt off him. He had to grin; it was a completely female thing to do. Men just didn't go around brushing dirt off of one another. "So which was it? Your Dad or something else?"

"I'm not well, Faith." Saying her name out loud was like uttering a prayer. It felt spiritual and all consuming. "Either the acid from the demon attack damaged my brain or I'm built just like him."

"You're a power hungry megalomaniac? Come on, let's eat." She walked into the tent and once again emerged with a container.

He sniffed the air and picked up the scent of chicken and salad. His mouth watered. It had been a long time since he'd eaten something he hadn't had to kill and he never cooked so the venison or rabbit was always raw.

"I love chicken."

"I know, I asked around about you before I came. I figured I was basically going to have to bribe you to come here and talk to me so I might as well have your favorite things around. There's a music player in there with Frank Sinatra on it. I can put it on it you'd like."

He smiled and rubbed his face. His scar ached, not used to so much talking and smiling, the skin was tight. It throbbed heavily. Hoping she didn't notice, he continued with the conversation. "I'm a little older than you so it's actually very modern of me to like him. I was young when he was popular, even though now it makes me seem old."

"You are older than me but not as much as you think you are."

He stared at her. She didn't look a day over thirty but that was to be expected as neither did he. Unmated shifters stopped aging at thirty until they met their other halves. Cullen had looked thirty for three hundred years although now he'd start to age. Theo had always hated the idea of eternal youth. Maybe it made him strange but with the look of growing older, came the respect of being considered wise. No one gave a thirty-year-old guy much credit.

Another reason he was glad not to be Alpha. Tristan and Ashlee as the Alpha pair would look eternally the ages they were when they met. That meant Ashlee would look twenty-two until she and Tristan stepped down for one of their children to take over the position.

"Where did your mind go? You didn't even ask me how old I am." She seemed disappointed and he realized he failed at this getting to know you stuff.

"Shall I guess, then?"

"If you think you can." The light of the fire was enough he could see her eyes twinkled.

"So obviously you're not thirty. Unless your mother was pregnant with you when she left, unlikely because it was only the unmated females who left, I would have remembered a grown-up you leaving the island. Although, I guess that doesn't make sense both because if you'd been thirty or even twenty, we would have been mated, and I would have killed you."

"Kind of sick how we all chart time based on the massacre but you are correct. However, I can't say if I knew you or not as I blocked out everything to do with my life before I went to the foster home. It's only started to come back to me since I've been on the island."

"How is that even possible?"

"Long story that I might tell you when we know each other better." She shrugged. "Anyway, good logic so far." She seemed relieved when she said that as if she'd been waiting to see if his brain functioned.

He stood up, always feeling clearer when he moved around. "Three years have passed since the thirty year anniversary. So you were under twenty-three when you left."

"Way under." She laughed and he was shocked to see she enjoyed this.

"Don't help me." He gave her a look that was part-amusement, part mock annoyance.

"Okay." She pantomimed zipping her lips. "I won't give anymore clues."

"If you had been between the ages of say fifteen and twenty-three I would at least remember you. Maybe that makes me weird but I like to think as security I paid attention to the preteens slash teenage slash young adult people in the pack."

"Fair enough."

"Since you're too old to have been conceived off island after the fall that would make you between one year old and fifteen when you left which would make you somewhere between thirty-one and forty-five now."

"Ah, but I've told I'm older than I look."

"Okay between thirty-five and forty-five then."

She stood up and clapped. "Good work Theo. Care to place a guess on an exact age?"

He had no idea. "Forty?"

"On my next birthday."

"Which is when?" He was genuinely curious. Not that he could buy her a gift or anything in the state in which he currently lived.

"Three months from now."

The bullet flew by him and he barely heard it until it cracked into the log where they had been sitting. He threw Faith to the ground, blocking her from harm as he raised his head to see if he could sniff out the perpetrator.

"Theo, what the hell is wrong with you?" She shoved at his shoulders, asking for release.

He could see nothing in the dark and still there was no scent to guide him. He wanted to throw something. "Quiet woman, we are perhaps better camouflaged in the dark. When I say run, we are gong to move from the fireside. Can you shift while you run yet?"

"You saw me shift under water. Shifting on the go is nothing. But, hold on a second, run from what?"

Had she seriously missed the whole thing? "The man who is shooting at us."

"Theo, no one is doing that."

"Did you somehow miss the bullet that whizzed between us?" Really, it was too bizarre for words that she didn't know the danger they were in.

"No one shot at us. I promise you, I would hear and see a bullet."

He sat up. Was it possible? Had he imagined the whole thing? That was worse than there being actual danger out there. It meant he'd crossed over a line he couldn't go back over.

Faith sat up, her eyes bore into his. After a moment's pause, she spoke. "Show me."

He shook his head. "What?"

"Show me where the bullet hit."

"It's insane. You would have seen or heard something. You're a wolf and even non wolves would have noticed that."

"Theo," she gripped his shoulders. "Maybe you're just more attuned to things because you've been out here on your own. If my shifting into a wolf in the middle of the jungle taught me anything it is that the impossible is possible, so show me."

He pointed at the log. It smacked into that, right in between where we had been sitting. She knelt down next to it and gasped.

"What is it?" His heart pounded.

"There is a bullet hole here, it's clear as day, but no bullet. How is that possible?" Her eyes were huge.

He grabbed her and pulled her to her feet. "I don't know but we're getting you out of here."

She shook her head. "Not if you're not coming too."

"I'm not..."

Interrupting, she scowled at him. "Don't you dare tell me you're not safe because when there was danger--that I might mention I didn't even know about--your first instinct was to protect me. You are as safe as anyone I know, maybe more. So, either you come with me or I stay here with you and we figure out what is wrong."

I vote we go with her .

His wolf's opinion heard, Theo had no choice but to agree. He nodded. "Let's go."

The lights were too bright. It was the only coherent thought that wrestled its way into Faith's mind. It had been nine months since he'd been indoors with unnatural light and this had to be killing him.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him forward through the front hall of the residence. "I'll see if I can get you into my rooms while we figure this out without everyone else knowing you're here."

You're all wolves remember, they've all smelled him already.