Teri blushed hard—her face probably looked like a tomato. No one would’ve called her cheerful in the last few months. But she’d been so happy to be out, she could maybe see how Zach had gotten that impression.
“Okay, enough about me,” she said. “What about you? Were you an outdoorsy kid?”
“Sort of,” he said, allowing her the subject change with a smile. “I guess I was. Compared to my brother, I feel like a homebody, but I guess compared to most people, yes. And I was always running off after Joel when he was real little, because he wanted to be way out in the middle of nowhere but he wasn’t old enough to be by himself in the woods. So I spent a lot of time outside.”
Teri pictured two little boys, chasing each other through the trees, playing make-believe games together, climbing up on rocks. It sounded nice.
“We were also...kind of different from the other kids,” Zach continued. “So we spent a lot of time together.”
Teri was sure she knew what he was talking about. This was her opening. Would she take it? Was she too nervous to bring it up?
She’d felt braver today than she had in a long time, and it had made her feel good. She wasn’t going to stop now: she took the plunge. “I heard you were shifters.”
“That’s right.” Zach seemed to tense up at that. “Is that a problem? Does it bother you?”
“No!” Teri said immediately, and found that she wasn’t lying at all. Now that Zach had confirmed it, she was sure her family was wrong. This man couldn’t be dangerous. This man wasn’t having to fight to restrain his instincts. She knew it, somehow, was absolutely rock-solid certain of it.
“No,” she repeated. “My family...doesn’t like shifters very much. But I always wanted to know more. I think they’re making up half the things they say. But I was never allowed to be friends with the shifter kids in s
chool, so I never learned anything.”
Zach raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “You stayed away when your parents told you to?”
Teri smiled, a little ruefully. “I was a lot more obedient then. By the time I got to high school, I didn’t believe it anymore. I tried to talk to some of the shifter kids, but they knew why I’d avoided them as a kid and they stayed away.” She sighed. “And I don’t blame them. I’m sure their parents taught them that it wasn’t safe to be around people who thought shifters were dangerous.”
“Is that what your parents think?”
Teri nodded. “They’re convinced shifters are a step away from tearing people limb from limb. Which is dumb, because there are a ton of shifters living around Glacier and I’ve never heard of any horrible murders in town. So even if they all secretly want to eat people, they must be pretty good at keeping it under control.”
“We don’t secretly want to eat people.” Zach looked a little offended.
“Sorry,” Teri said immediately. “I didn’t mean to imply that I thought that was true. I really don’t, I promise.”
The waitress appeared with their food, then, and Teri fell silent, hoping that Zach wasn’t upset. It had been a dumb thing to say, she admonished herself.
When they were alone in the booth, she apologized again. “I shouldn’t even have joked about it.”
“It’s okay.” Zach stared down at his fish, a faraway look on his face. “It’s just—Joel and I grew up in the city, not in a community full of shifters like this one. No one except our parents knew we were shapeshifters.”
“Were they shifters too?”
“Yep.” Zach looked up and met her eyes; she could see a deep pain there that made her chest ache. “They’d moved away from their homes because my dad was a wolf and my mom was a snow leopard, and their families had hated each other—almost violently, sometimes. So they got out and went to the city to have a life where they could love each other in peace.”
“Good for them,” Teri said quietly. And then, even more quietly, because she knew the answer was going to be painful, “What happened to them?”
“My mom got sick. Shifters don’t get sick often, but when they do...there’s not much that can be done. There aren’t a lot of shifter doctors, and we don’t have the same kind of physiology as normal humans. And she got worse fast, faster than my dad thought was possible.”
“I’m sorry.” Teri couldn’t imagine it.
“Afterward...my dad couldn’t take it. They were mates, which is a—a shifter thing.”
Teri frowned. “A shifter thing?”
Zach waved a hand, clearly trying and failing to come up with the right words. “A...mystical connection, I guess. That sounds hokey, but it’s true.”
It did sound hokey, a little. Was it supposed to be magic?
“Once you’re mated, it’s for life. And you know once you’re together. You can tell that you’re meant for each other, that you’ll never be apart. I’m not explaining this very well.” Zach looked frustrated.