Rejected (Shadow Beast Shifters, #1)(65)

“He still calls you that, you know?” he murmured, not moving away from me. If anything, he was dragging my chair closer with each word until I was practically in his lap.

“Wh-Who does?”

My father was dead, so whom was he referring to? Jaxson?

“Did I tell you what all the doors lead to along the hallway to Earth?” he asked, knowing full well he hadn’t.

“No.”

“Some are prisons, as you know,” he said slowly, drawing out this bullshit. “Others are storage facilities for magical objects that are too dangerous to be out in the wild.” Right, right. Get to the point, dude. “There are also some incredibly special doorways that lead to differing versions of an afterlife. I offer a choice to fallen shifters, depending on how I feel about their legacies on Earth.”

My heart skipped a beat, my eyes burning as tears rimmed them. Pride aside, I couldn’t stop myself from reacting to what he was saying. “You’ve seen my father?”

It was a whisper. A short, simple sentence that burned like it had been branded on my skin.

“I escorted him to his afterlife.”

My hands were moving, wrapping around his biceps as I held on to him with every ounce of my strength. “Can I see him? Please?”

The pain registered a second later—I’d been so caught up in the possibility of having another moment with my dad, I’d forgotten what happened when I initiated contact with Shadow.

“Argh, shit!” I screamed, wrenching my hands away and trying to breathe deeply enough to get through the pain.

Ouch, ouch, oucchhhh. Why did that hurt so badly?

And yet, somehow, it still hurt less than knowing my father was behind one of those doors, and Shadow was the one in control of whether or not I saw him.





36

“You can’t see him.”

I knew the words were coming, I could see it on his face, but still… Was I bleeding to death right now? He’d dangled all the hopes in the world before me and then tore them away.

“Why? Please. Forget the bet. I will submit to you if you allow me to see my father.” I was begging, yep, and I had no fucking regrets about it.

Everything in my life changed when my dad chose to attack the alpha, and I needed to know why. I needed the closure. And I mainly needed to know if I could once again freely love the man who’d raised me but who’d also ruined my life.

I had so many needs. It was a fire fueling my every thought and action.

“Please, Shadow.”

For the briefest, minutest of seconds, it almost looked like he regretted his next words. “There’s no way for the living to converse with the dead. It doesn’t work like that.”

My wolf howled and a choked sob escaped my lips. “I hate you,” I choked out in anger. “I know there’s a way. You just don’t want to help me.”

“I could kill you and then you’d have all the conversations you wanted?” he snapped back. “The living cannot converse with the dead.”

“And yet somehow you did,” I raged at him, trying to wrench myself away. “You heard him use my nickname, so that means unless you’re dead, it’s possible.”

His face was inches from mine. A harsh breath of air crashed against my lips, and I inhaled his intoxicating scent.

“Listen closely, pup,” he said in a rumble of annoyance. “I straddle the line between life and death. The shadows all do. If you learn how to touch the shadow world again, maybe, just maybe, you’ll have the same ability as me to step into the afterlife. But until then…” He shoved me back so hard, my chair scraped across the ground and I ended up many feet from him. “Until then, don’t fucking question me.”

Damn him. Why was it always like this? Push and pull, hot and cold, life and death. We could never find our balance, and maybe there was no balance between us… Maybe we were both yin, with too much darkness in our souls.

Shadow stood, his expression once again neutral as he looked down at me. Usually, this positioning would have me scrambling to my feet, so I was at least attempting not to submit, but I couldn’t move. I’d been knocked down, the breath stolen from my lungs.

“You have thirteen more days,” he said as he turned and left the room, taking his energy and power with him.

I sank deeper into my chair, white-knuckling the side of the table. My dad was here. Just down the hall from where I stood. But which door was it? Should I just go open each and every one of them until I found the realm of death?

Popping to my feet, I rushed toward the library, only to crash fully into Shadow, who’d clearly been waiting for me. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me up with no effort at all, so I was being held completely at his mercy. “So predictable, little wolf,” he purred. “You didn’t even give me enough time to make it out of the library.”

I snarled at him, fighting… fighting as hard as I ever had before. “Why were you waiting for me?”

He grinned and I threw my head back and howled at the top of my lungs. A familiar howl that I’d produced when my mate had rejected me. The howl that had knocked the shifters down and let me touch the Shadow Realm.

My vision doubled over as nausea rose, ready to erupt like a volcano. “That’s it,” Shadow said, sounding far too pleased. “Build from this, Mera. Build a path you can follow.”