One True Mate 1: Shifter's Sacrifice (2 page)

Her smile vanished. “I know. You miss her," she told the cat softly, her voice echoing in the large attic.

Ella couldn't say the same, but she wouldn't tell Smokey that, not that Smokey didn't already know. Ella snorted, then bit her lip. “Sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. Now that she had no other humans to talk to, having conversations with the cats seemed normal, but she knew it wasn't. She feared it was just one more reason to believe she was going insane.

The cats looked at her as if to ask if she was going to stay up in the drafty, dusty attic and Ella nodded before she could catch herself. The cats meandered away and she watched them, until Chelsea carefully picked her way down the attic steps and Smokey dropped to the floor and began to clean his paws.

Ella's phone chimed in her pocket, startling her. No one knew her number except her mom and her aunt, and both were dead. She had no friends, her mom had made sure of that.
Except Accalia
.
Online friends count.

Ella pursed her lips and wondered if in fact they did, really, but Accalia didn’t have her number, so it didn’t matter anyway.

She looked at her phone. The text had no name with it, but she knew immediately it was Shay. The words were too vicious to be anyone else.

So you finally did it. You killed them both. I want what's coming to me you fucking bitch. You better not have spent all the estate yet.

Ella's hands trembled as she muted the conversation and put the phone away. The only question now was, how long would it take her sister to show up at the house where she would not be so easily muted? Was she in town, or on her way?

Ella turned back around to the boxes, desperately trying to distract herself. She could do nothing else. The van from the resale shop had taken all the furniture, the china, the hutches, and her aunt's and mom's clothes the day before. Today was all the miscellaneous things left downstairs and everything in the attic, and she needed to get to work.

She ran her fingers over a trunk to her left, then opened it and peeked inside. Clothes. Old clothes. She eyed a standing mirror and wondered if it was worth anything, but a quick check with Google told her no. She pushed her long, black hair out of her eyes and made a face at herself in the mirror, choosing not to look at her wide hips and the pooch forming in her belly, like maybe she was two months pregnant. She stress-ate, always had, and no matter how much she exercised, it didn’t seem to matter. Maybe now her stress would back down a bit and she could try to get a handle on her life and the way she looked.

Ella moved away from the mirror, moving moth-eaten blankets and kicking through a pile of platform shoes, feeling completely hopeless. There was nothing good up here, she should just turn around and─

A crashing noise called her attention and she whirled around to see Smokey leaping through the air away from a tipping pile of boxes. The top one had already hit the floor and spilled its contents everywhere.

Ella watched the cat stare hard at her. The cat wanted her to look in that box. She was sure of it. Ella walked forward slowly, then shook her head and swore softly. The cat didn't want anything and she was a fool to think so. Hadn't her mother told her that a thousand times?

She shooed the cat away from the mess and straightened up the closed boxes that had fallen, then knelt down to gather the contents of the open one. Mostly cheap jewelry. Fake pearls. Rhinestone earrings. Beaded bracelets. Ella didn't know a lot about jewelry, but she knew this stuff was junk. Probably her mother's. Aunt Patricia had never worn jewelry, and when she saw Ella's mother wear it, she would shake her head, press her lips together and mutter something under her breath. Ella couldn't remember it exactly, but it started with  
Neither
 
love the world nor the things in the world…

"How about your cats, Aunt Patricia, were they of the world?" Ella said absently as she shoved the jewelry back into the box. "Were you allowed to love them?"

Without warning, her thoughts repeated, then doubled on top of each other, causing a dizzy sensation that rocked her until she couldn't remember if it was her mother's jewelry and her aunt who hated it, or her aunt's jewelry and her mother hated it. She shook her head, hating the queer sensation that had been happening so frequently lately. Her mother had liked jewelry. Of course. She knew that.

She shoved the last necklace back in the box then froze as a shiny gold pendant caught her eye. She pulled the knot of fake stuff away from the pendant, her eyes glued to it, as she felt suddenly transfixed. Had she seen it before? She couldn't remember but a feeling of
déjà vu
hit her hard, like maybe she'd had this experience before.

Which made no sense.

The pendant was an inch and a half tall, and in the shape of an angel, its head bent, a small gem that looked like a too-large crystal ball between its hands. She hooked the delicate gold chain of the pendant and raised it out of the box, taking a step back with her prize in her hands. The gold piece dangled at the end of the chain and twisted, revealing its back side. Which wasn't the back of an angel, like Ella expected.

It was a snarling wolf with honey-colored eyes.

Ella stared at the wolf, loving everything about it, even as she felt a worm of worry or fear thread through her. She ignored it and felt in her pockets for her phone. Had she left it downstairs? No, no. She shook her head again, chastising herself for forgetting that she’d just received a text from Accalia. She shouldn’t forget something like that. She shook her head again. No, it was
Shay
, she’d gotten the text from. She tried to concentrate, hating the way her mind was slipping, like she was eighty years old instead of twenty-five.

She found the phone and drew it out, wanting to take a picture of the wolf so she could send it to Accalia who would, no doubt, appreciate it as much as she did.

She held her hand out below the slowly-twirling pendant to catch it, then brought it towards her face, as her thumb lovingly caressed the detail of the wolf's body.

The wolf's eyes glowed and the room flooded in bright light, making Ella squint against the glare.

The glare that felt achingly familiar.

Ella gasped and dropped the pendant, her eyes tracking it as she immediately regretted the act. What if the pendant were broken?

But the floor beneath her was gone, replaced by green grass. She looked at her feet, surprised to see they were too small and clad in a pair of pink and white sneakers, one of them streaked with grains of golden sand.

A boy laughed and she looked up, amazed to find herself in a playground, with black swings to her left, a sandbox to her right, a large red building blocking most of her view of the road, and four sneering boys surrounding her. Ella pinched her leg hard, dismayed to discover that the leg pinch happened in what could only be some sort of a hallucination.

Except it had actually happened.

"I said give me your bag," the largest one who stood right in front of her snarled. She remembered his name, it was Chad. He was well-known in the school as a bully and a future criminal.

"No," she spat out at him, unable to help doing exactly what she had done fifteen years before. Her head swiveled, looking for her mother, but her mother had forgotten to pick her up again, drunk and passed out on the couch maybe, and all the teachers had gone home. She was on her own.

"I love it when they fight," Chad said to the boy next to him and they both laughed. Ella heard something evil in that laugh, something that she didn't quite understand, but something she instinctively knew was very dangerous to her. These boys were older than her by several years. Thirteen, or fourteen, maybe.

"She needs a lesson," a sly but somehow awful voice said, and Ella's head whipped to the left. Another boy was sitting on a swing, but he hadn't been there a second ago. She barely had time to wonder who he was when he stood up and approached Chad. He was big, and even older than these boys, with long dark hair and eye-arresting eyebrows. He wore faded blue jeans and a sweatshirt that said
Wolves Drool
with a cartoon rendition of a wolf on its back, it's tongue hanging out and its legs in the air. He held a cigar between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. A puff of wind brought the scent to her. Sweeter than a cigarette could ever dream of being.

Before Ella could work out what any of it meant, her attention was forced back to Chad, who backed up and curled his hands into fists, his face mistrustful. "We weren't doing nothing," he spit at the new boy.

"Indeed," the boy said, and Ella forced down the gorge that rose in her throat at the sound of his voice. Something about it was just so ... wrong. He must not attend her school. She knew she would remember that voice. The way it crawled through the air and fastened itself to her like ticks in the forest.

She crouched slightly and threw a glance behind her. She was fast. If she could slip between two of the boys, maybe she could escape. Her house was more than three miles away, but she could walk it, she had many times before. A pang of sadness that her mother wouldn't let her ride the bus hit her, but she ignored it. Not the time.

Chad looked like he might break and run. Maybe this would all be over before it started. Ella felt a fierce hope stir in her chest.

But no, the boy with the wolf shirt held up his hands, the cigar leaving a trail of wispy smoke. "I mean it. I know you aren't doing anything wrong. I thought you might need help." Ella felt like falling to the ground at the voice. Giving up. Permanently. The boy’s eyes met hers and she saw them flash yellow, but only for an instant.

Chad snorted, but relaxed. "I don't need help."

The boy backed up and dropped into a swing. "Ok, I'll just watch then," he said, with a sick smile, as his eyes found Ella's. As the connection was made she felt a strange stirring in her body, like a car engine turning over. It was pleasant and terrifying at the same time. It made her feel powerful and very strange. But it didn't erase the danger of the situation.

Ella hitched her bag up on her shoulders and backed up as Chad signaled to his crew and the boys began to close in on her. She could hand over her backpack, there was nothing in there but books and assignments and maybe some loose change left over from lunch, but she knew the bag wasn't really what these boys wanted. They wanted something ... more than that from her. Maybe just to make her cry. But maybe not.

Without warning, the boy behind her lunged and caught her by the hair. She made a high keening sound and tried to pull away as the other boys laughed. Chad pushed up against her and looked straight in her eyes, his face only inches from hers. This was it. She knew she was going to get beat up or something worse.

Movement to her left made her shoot her gaze that way. The boy from the swings was up, his grin feral and dangerous, his cigar pitched into the sand. He reached Chad and pushed him out of the way, knocking him backwards easily. But his eyes were on Ella. His attention was only for her.

She shrunk backwards, against the boy who had ahold of her from behind, whimpering. She didn't want to be touched by the boy with the horrid voice. His hand raised, heading for her, the fingers mere inches from her midriff.

He covered the distance in an instant and she felt tears drip down her face. It was going to be so bad...

The moment he touched her that engine inside her kicked over again, pushing a foreign power outwards in a pulse, and a scream erupted from deep inside her. The face of the boy contorted in surprise, and then, not fear, but utter and absolute disbelief, before he was catapulted twenty feet in the air, like he'd been pulled backwards by a rope tied around his middle, the other end fastened to an airplane.

She watched his face, even as she screamed, even as she didn't believe it either. He landed hard, staring at her with a malevolence she’d never experienced, then winked out of existence, disappearing before her eyes, as if he had never been.

Ella's mouth dropped closed, cutting off her scream. She put a hand to the back of her head, noting the throbbing there. The boy who had ahold of her hair had disappeared. She turned in a circle. The two boys who had been at her sides were backing away slowly, like she was a bomb. She flipped back around to face front and saw Chad had the same look in his eyes.

"She's a .... a witch!" one of the boys yelled, and they were all up and running away in an instant.

The sound of the pendant hitting the floor as it fell jolted Ella back to her aunt's attic. The necklace lay between her feet, the angel side of it facing up.

Ella hadn't thought about that incident in years. That had been what had caused her mother to start homeschooling her, and although being home with her mother all day hadn't been as bad as being in school, it had still been pretty bad. But she hadn't been able to go back. Not after what had happened to the boy who had his fingers twisted in her hair.

Her eyes traced the contours of the golden jewelry as her mind tried to make sense of what had just happened. It had been too detailed to be a memory—it had been like she was there. She had even felt the pain in her head.

Ella's hand drifted to the back of her head as she noted with something like terror that she still had a faint throb there. She really was going crazy. She backed away from the pendant, clear across the room to where a broom and dustpan stood. She picked them up and walked back to the pendant, her eyes glued to it, like it might animate and start talking to her. She had no idea what had happened, but she did know she wasn't touching that thing again.

She bent and pushed the pendant into the dustpan with the broom, turning it over as she did so. The wolf snarled at her, making her hesitate. She loved everything about it. The wildness. The duality. But no. She forced herself to dump it into the box. Something was wrong with that thing. And she never wanted to replay that incident again. The nightmares had lasted for months after it had actually happened. Years, maybe.