Clipped knowledge
Kendrick
Her brother finally stepped out of his hiding place. Out of the corner of my vision, I caught him walking toward us, but I didn’t stop attempting to kiss my mate. Alejandra tried to turn her head toward her twin, but my hand held her neck in place, and my mouth still found hers.
I made it short and quick, then took a step back. “You’re jealous, just say it,” I said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, young Padawan.”
He smiled, the joke passing well between the both of us. He’d decided to spend some years in the human world—lesser than mine—but it did make us kindred spirits, and it did make it easy for me to pass on the intention that I wanted to mate with his sister. She was, after all, my true mate, and I didn’t have much of a choice anyway.
“I’m not your fucking Padawan, you idiot,” he said, but his lips were still stretched in a smile.
“Your smile is approval enough,” I said. “No need to deny it, young boy. Such is your pathetic fate. You’re quite welcome.”
He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “About the girl,” he said, probably careful not to use the word human. It was, after all, established now that she was far from it. “The council wants to stand on Selena and her sharing him, but I don’t think it will happen. Selena is going to look for a chance to kill her, and being that she would now be accepted into the pack as the Alpha’s mate but not his Luna, she’ll do it. She’ll find a loophole—and you know who her father is, and those who back him.”
I huffed. “Yes, we know that. Thank you for pointing it out. Let go of me, Kendrick.”
I looked down at my mate’s red head and found nothing wrong with our current disposition. In fact, if anything, I found it quite nice. I looked back up to her brother. “So, do we tell the human, or do we leave her out of the loop and make her angry when she finds out—and then she promises to take vengeance on us for not telling her the truth of herself?” I smiled.
Alejandro shook his head. “I am aghast with surprise as to how you think,” he mumbled under his breath, even though we could both hear him.
My mate mentioned I should let go of her again, and then one more time, but my mind was on other things—one of the most important being how soft she was, and how well she fit into my body. Nothing else the Moon Goddess had created could rival the perfection of this moment.
Eventually, she squirmed out of my body and stood solitary by herself, without me.
“Oh, don’t give me that foolish, pathetic puppy face,” she said with an exasperated sigh.
I stood straight. “Let’s tell her,” I said. “We couldn’t go back anyway,” I added quickly after.
Moments later, we all sat in front of Elara. Even her name was strange. I’d heard many human names, and none quite like that one. Even in terms of strange human names, there were quite a number of them, but none quite as strange, truly. I nearly smacked myself on the forehead. Too many strange things had happened in one day, and it didn’t make the matter any stranger.
One of those would have been the fact that the Alpha and the Beta came back, their scents slightly tighter than normal. But the most important strange thing was the scent of magic on the Beta’s body. It was as though he was marked by it.
Him, I could hide things from, however. The human—not so much.
She blinked several times at the three of us, looked at each of us one by one, and then eventually huffed out impatiently. “Oh, what is it? First you come, then you leave, and then you come back again. Now I’m worried.”
She blinked, dropping her gaze at me. “What?” I asked, feeling slightly put on the spot.
“You’re the doctor,” she said. “Clearly, you wouldn’t come in here and go back outside and come back again if something was terribly wrong with me. So, what?” She spread out her palms on her thighs. “Do I have a brain tumor or something?”
“What’s a brain tumor?” my mate asked slowly, just as I was about to answer the question.
My mate spoke slowly, testing the word on her lips. “It’s something that grows in the brain of a human. Most people don’t understand how it comes to be.”
I found myself rambling about humans and brain aneurysms—especially given the fact that I had all the time in the world to talk about myself—when suddenly the human began to chuckle.
“I thought we were supposed to talk about me,” she said once she grabbed my attention.
“Oh,” I mumbled under my breath. “Yes,” I said. “You don’t have a brain… whatever. You’re actually quite healthy,” I said. “Too healthy, in fact. I think whatever it is you’re doing with the Beta behind closed doors—”
I felt a smack on my shoulder by my mate. I cleared my throat. “Whatever it is you’re doing with the Beta… you know, training and all that nonsense,” I added the last part under my breath. “It seems to be working, and you might not believe me when I say this, but it’s about changing your physiology.”
She let out a small gasp. “But how is that even possible? Working out doesn’t change a person’s physiology,” she said.
In fact, she was quite right. In no universe did working out change physiology. A human would always smell the same despite how well they exercised. The only thing that would change their scent by the smallest doses was their diet. Changing one’s physiology would involve bone structure or density; her skin—even her body on a cellular level—would undergo some change, and that was what I could see.
Then again, I hadn’t seen her from the beginning, so it was hard to tell what she was like when she came. But being that she passed as human, it was safe enough to say that that was how she was from the start.
Now, I didn’t know how to tell her that part. I opened my mouth and closed it, then opened it again. I felt my mate huff beside me impatiently.
“Oh, fuck this,” she said in that deadpan voice of hers that drove me to blissful madness. “You’re not human,” my mate decided to say. “We don’t think you ever have been, and we don’t think you have ever had the human experience.”
I shut my eyes as she spoke and then slowly opened them one after the other.
Elara was just shocked. “You’re—what?” Her head tilted. “I’ve gotten colds,” she said. “I had chickenpox when I was a child,” she added, her voice slightly trembling. “I’ve gotten a cold like normally every year, and I have terrible cramps every time of the month. If that’s not a human experience, then I don’t know what the heck is. Besides, I got hurt, and it took me weeks to heal. If not for whatever-his-face’s blood, I would have died, remember?”
She looked at me, her eyes begging for approval.
I smiled tightly. “No,” I said.