Concentrating, I went through my jerky, painful shift, and took a breath once I was through it, falling forward onto what were now hands and no longer paws.
The same nose pressed into my hair, and I lifted a hand and smoothed my palm over the side of his head, careful there under the canopy of his wide antlers, which stretched outwards rather than upwards, like a deer. His dark, thick-lashed right eye held me in his sight, and I could see my own reflection in the inky depth, like a scrying mirror.
“Tucker.”
Turning to my alpha, I saw Kelvin standing beside Quade. He had returned from outside, dressed now, as the others were, in warm winter outerwear.
“My alpha,” I addressed him, sucking in a breath of icy air, “forgive me for my breach of––”
“It’s fine,” he snapped at me and then gestured at my mate. “He’s what you sensed in the forest?”
I nodded.
Quade turned to Kelvin. “You didn’t catch his scent?”
Kelvin shook his head.
“It’s all I can smell in here.”
“Aye,” Kelvin agreed, tipping his head at me. “But he was nae leakin’ pheromones as he is now.”
Quade nodded, his dark blue eyes, which were, at one time, the darkest I’d ever seen, back on me. “Your mate wants us all to know that you’re his, and so he’s drowning out anything else that you might possibly scent, but him.”
I nodded.
“It’s the way of it before the claiming.”
I’d heard that, of course, but had never been subjected to it myself, as I’d never had a mate before. He was my first and only.
“The pheromones are so thick in here it’s making it a bit hard to breathe.”
Not for me. I wanted to pull every trace of his musky aroma deep into my lungs: the burning firewood, wild black spruce and pine, and the hint of leather and mulled wine.
“Why did you come out here alone three days ago?”
“It’s been three days?”
“You didn’t know?”
I shook my head.
“We traced the satellite phone; thank you for following my orders and keeping it with you at all times.”
It was his rule, since normal cell phones couldn’t hold a signal so close to the mountains. “It must have been in my coat,” I confessed. “I didn’t purposely take it with me. I completely forgot. I was too invested in proving Kelvin wrong.”
He nodded. “You didn’t answer.”
“I just woke up. I think I smashed my face on his antlers. I’m lucky to be alive.”
Quade grunted, squinting at me. “Your ankle healed.”
“I think my face must have too,” I told him. “I fell out of a tree and down onto him. There had to have been blood.”
“There was,” he assured me. “A lot. We found it on our way here.”
Which meant that in three days, I’d healed more damage than had been inflicted on me after my run-in with the coyotes.
“Oftentimes, a mate will absorb traits or power from the other, but you know that.”
“I’ve heard,” I said as my enormous elk bumped me with his nose, wanting my hand back on his head. I couldn’t help smiling as I stroked gently under his jaw. “But I never thought I’d have a mate, and even if I was blessed to find mine, I had no idea it would be anything like this.”
“Like what?” he asked me, his voice gentle, coaxing, like he really wanted to know.
“Like one second I was alone, and the next I was different,” I whispered, overwhelmed for a moment, unable to speak around the knot in my throat. My life had changed in an instant, and I could almost feel my mate’s heart beating inside my own chest, next to mine.
He nodded and turned to Linus. “Explain.”
“Tucker,” Linus began gently, treating me like he never had before, kindly, reverently. “First, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
He coughed softly. “I thought you still wanted…” He trailed off, unable to give voice to what we both knew, that he was under the impression I still wanted Arman. As though I had not jettisoned that desire years before. “I’m sorry I missed the change in you.”
I smiled at him. “It’s okay. I’m sorry too.”
Our gazes held for a second, and then he took a breath. “Your mate is very important to all of the glen. He’s the deigh.”
“It sounds like you’re saying day, as in the opposite of night, but that’s not right, is it?”
He shook his head and spelled it for me. “He’s a black deer, a dorcha, and now that I see him, I understand why we’ve never before seen one like him, and why he’s the last and only, making him the deigh.”
“Tell us,” Quade ordered before he caught his breath.
My mate took a seat beside me then, wrapping us both in a heavy black fur, curling his arm around me, and drawing me close.
“I’ve never seen a shift like that in my life.”
Linus nodded quickly.
“Talk to him, I want answers.”
Linus turned from Quade, cleared his throat, and then addressed my mate.
When he answered Linus, his voice, deep and rumbling, rolled through me like a warm caress and a strangely tingling wave. It danced over my skin like tiny pinpricks of electricity, making me break out in goose bumps. When he stopped speaking and brushed his lips over the side of my neck, it brought up a moan from me I wasn’t proud of.
“We need to get you to your cabin,” Quade said quickly, standing up. “Explanations are going to have to wait until after you’ve exchanged marks.”
“Begging your pardon, my alpha,” Linus countered, “but the deigh must first make his presence known to the princes of the fain before he claims a mate. There are tenets that must be followed. He has to make his choice publicly or we’ll have issues with the entire glen, and they may ban L’Ange as a sanctuary.”
“Why do I care?”
“Because if the glen withdraws their support of the sanctuary, they’ll attempt to influence the wolves, and if the two most powerful groups of shifters both revoke their endorsement, then most of the others will follow.”
“We can run our sanctuary without any outside support,” Quade assured him.
“Financially, yes,” Arman agreed, “but if we, or the people we’re trying to help, are attacked, we have no recourse but to fight, and that will spill over everywhere.”
“And you have a pack in Phoenix to consider as well,” Linus chimed in. “You’re aware of that, of course, but if you’re trying to protect them there, that leaves us here without you, and that could end badly. The same is true if you’re here and they’re alone there. Both places need our alpha with us in times of trial.”
“Aye,” Kelvin agreed. “Ye hae to consider the glen. They are nae of tooth and claw, but they are many, and their reach is verra long.”
Quade growled low and gestured at my mate. “Who is he?”
“Again,” Linus said, sighing deeply, “he is the deigh, the last of the dorcha, the only black deer I have ever encountered, or even heard of. All of the glen will want to travel here to see him. Merely standing near him is like being in the presence of a god.”