I nod.
He sighs and tilts his head to look up at the sky. “I’ve never had it. The Sight. Even before my powers started…” He trails off, his jaw clenching. Then he shakes his head as if to clear it. “Anyway, I’ve never had it. So I don’t know firsthand. But I’ve only ever heard of visions being true. I’ve never heard of one that was a lie, or completely inaccurate.” He pauses. “You should ask Cain about this.”
“But I’m asking you.”
North gives me an amused quirk of his eyebrows, as if to say that he knows what I’m trying to do and he sees right through me, but he’ll indulge me, just this once. “Well, Sight isn’t super specific. It can be showing you something that you think is one thing, only it turns out to be another. It’s not an exact science.”
“So it’s not that a vision is wrong, it’s that someone could misinterpret it?”
He nods. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me,” I point out. “Oh, it’s not the crazy magic we don’t fully understand! We just didn’t interpret it right!”
He snorts in amusement. “I see why you think that. But it’s more like a math equation. When you don’t understand how the math works, you come up with the wrong solution. But when you do know how it works, you can come up with the right solution. A vision is usually a math equation we don’t know how to solve.”
“I suppose.” I’m still not sure. But I can’t tell if my reluctance is because of my skeptical nature or because of the way my heart hurts when I think about the vision I had.
If that vision really is of the future, then it’s of a future where I’m all alone. And that shouldn’t bother me, right? I’m used to being alone. But even though I’m still not sure in a lot of ways if I can accept this whole ‘fated mate’ business, having these three men here supporting me and caring for me means a lot more than I would’ve thought just a week ago.
“Everything all right?” North asks, his brows drawing together. “You smell… sad.”
“You cansmellmy sadness? And here you were saying you had no powers,” I tease.
“Having a slightly heightened sense of smell doesn’t make me a true shifter,” North growls, his ornery demeanor reasserting itself a bit.
I huff out a breath, arching a brow at him. “Still, that takes skill. To guess how someone’s feeling. What does sadness smell like?”
North thinks for a moment. “Like when you’re standing by a river and you can smell the water in the air. Like when you’re eating something with mint and the mint is too strong, it hurts your teeth.”
“Huh.” I purse my lips, considering his answer for a moment. It’s fascinating.
“It’s just because people give off different pheromones depending on how they’re feeling. Adrenaline, things like that.” North looks uncomfortable, like he’s worried I’ll praise him again. Or maybe he’s just unused to letting someone new in.
All three men seem to be struggling with that.
It’s ironic. And frustrating. How can they be professing to keep me safe and look after me and be my fated mates when they won’t open up to me?
At least they’re not forcing me to open up to them, either. That’s fair, I suppose.
North seems to have forgotten that I smelled sad, thank fuck. I don’t know how to explain it to him. It’s ridiculous, stupid even, to get attached to people so quickly. Right?
That’s what I’ve always told myself.
“So I could see only part of what’s actually happening,” I say. “In my vision, I mean. I would have seen just part of something. Or I saw one thing and thought it meant another.”
North nods. “Yeah. That’s why some fae will pay someone to interpret their visions. They’ll explain the vision and the person will do their best to explain it. Or they’ll try to see what the fae saw. Visions are hard to interpret.”
Relief sinks into me, like cool water flowing through my veins.
Okay then. My vision was just wrong.
Or rather, my interpretation of it was wrong. I don’thaveto be without the men. I just didn’t see things right. That’s all.
Before I can say anything else, the door to the balcony opens and Cain and Raven step out.
My stomach drops a little. Even though I know they’re fine with sharing me, a part of me keeps waiting for signs of jealousy to appear.
It couldn’t be more clear that North and I just had sex. Our clothes are disheveled, I screamed like a banshee when I came, and you don’t need a shifter’s senses to be able to smell the sex that lingers in the air.