“None of us could even think straight,” Marlowe adds. “It was pure hell. After a while of not being able to eat, or sleep, or even act like a wolf properly … Lydia started to get seriously worried about us.” Marlowe pauses thoughtfully for a moment. “Sabrina,” he says. “I know it’s hard for you to understand how this makes us feel, but—”
“She can feel it,” Rory interrupts.
Both Kaleb and Marlowe reel back in shock.
“What?” Kaleb asks.
Rory shakes his head, as if he’s struggling with his own disbelief when he says, “Sabrina can feel the bond too. I don’t know how it’s possible, but she can. She told me.”
Both Marlowe and Kaleb stare at me.
“It’s true,” I say. “I can.”
“But …” Marlowe starts, his head cocking to one side, “only shifters can feel the bond.”
“I’m telling you,” Rory says on my behalf. “She can. She described what it felt like in perfect detail.”
The three of them look around at each other for a minute, not quite sure what to make of it.
“Okay then,” Kaleb says, practically bouncing on the end of the bed where he’s perched. “Let’s test it.”
“Test it? There’s no way to just test the bond,” Marlowe says with a skeptical laugh.
“Why not?” Kaleb reaches across the bed and grabs my hand as he pulls me toward him. Rory looks as if he’s about to protest but Kaleb shakes his head at him. “Just let me try something.”
Rory sits back down and watches carefully as Kaleb and I sit facing each other with our knees touching.
He reaches for my hands and lays one of them against his chest and the other on his forehead, before closing his eyes.
“Close your eyes,” he tells me. “And tell me what you feel.”
I do as he says and sit there with my eyes closed, feeling awkward.
I’m not any sort of psychic and I can’t really call upon the feelings that I had of the boys on a whim. They just happened and I couldn’t really control it.
I get ready to open my mouth to say that I can’t feel anything, but then I feel a chest up against my back and a finger pressed to my lips to shush me. I can feel Marlowe sitting behind me and I can tell that it is Rory’s finger against my lips. I keep my eyes closed and I relish in the feeling of the three of them cocooned around me.
This is my safe place, here between the three of them.
This is the spot that I never want to leave.
But then, as the moments pass, I begin to feel something else. I feel a sorrow that falls over me so deeply that I feel like I am drowning. Try as I might to gasp for air, my lungs are left empty.
I feel a heat in my veins that burns so hot it feels like my skin is turning to ash from the inside out. A million thoughts start to scream inside my head, and they are all voices of despair and dread and they sound like my own voice shouting back at me. My heart starts to race and pound uncontrollably as I begin to worry that I’m having some sort of cardiac episode.
And then a throbbing between my legs begins to intensify to such an unbearably painful point, that I can’t help but thrust my eyes open.
All three of them are staring at me with their mouths agape. All three of them look as if their eyes have been set on fire. The golden glow of their irises spark with flickering specks of amber and I can see the labored rise of fall of each of their chests heaving.
Kaleb looks at Rory in an astonished bewilderment.
“What was that?” I ask, my hand fluttering back to my own chest in some effort to get my beating heart back under control.
Kaleb looks at me with smoldering eyes wildly out of control … but it’s Marlowe who answers.
“That was how we felt while we were apart from you,” he says, quietly. He looks away from me, almost like he’s ashamed for doubting me in the first place.
“What? How did I feel that?” I ask.