Chapter Eighty-Two
Havermouth, Present Time
Aislen’s eyes dropped to the keys that Heath held. “Of fucking course,” she said. “I should have realized the first time you broke into the house. You took a copy of my father’s keys whilst your law office was holding his possessions for me.”
“Of course,” Heath replied, and helped himself to the glasses, setting four onto the bench and taking the wine glass from Aislen’s hand. “I could hardly let such an opportunity pass me by. This is terrible wine,” he added, after taking a sip. He looked at the label and sighed, shaking his head. “What possessed you to buy this shit?”
“I liked the label,” she replied defensively, claiming a glass. “And it all just tastes like wine to me.”
“It is one step above vinegar,” he inspected the other bottles. “This one is better,” he approved and carried his wine glass and the bottle over to the table, taking a seat. Cameron and Rhett followed him. “Well?” Heath arched an eyebrow at her.
“Fine,” she brought the wine over and took a seat at the head of the table. “Let’s talk, shall we, gentlemen?”
“You need to stop this Secret Keeper business,” Heath said immediately.
“No.” She shook her head. “And that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to discuss why, if I am your mate, as Cameron told me that I am, you treat me so differently than you do each other.”
Cameron flushed. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he mumbled apologetically, sliding a look at Heath.
“No, but it hardly matters what we say,” Heath observed, reaching out and covering Cameron’s hand with his own. “She can read our thoughts… a little, at least. Just enough to develop her own misconceptions.”
“Because I am human,” she answered her own question. “And humans are less than werewolves. A disease, Abigail called me, on your bond because werewolves don’t mate with humans. You didn’t reject me, however, because you were afraid that it would somehow affect the bond that you have with each other. How am I doing?”
“Reasonably well,” Heath conceded. “Humans and werewolves fuck, they don’t mate. We’re taught from an early age, turning a human only has a fifty percent chance of success. Would you want to be the one to take that risk with someone important to you? No. No one does, so humans and werewolves fuck, and that’s it. That’s as far as it goes.”
It was, Aislen realized, why the werewolves saw human girls as disposable and why they socialized so exclusively amongst themselves. Humans weren’t people they became attached to because they knew there wasn’t a future there.
“What if you didn’t turn the human?” She wondered. They could obviously still have children. Rohan had gotten Lucy pregnant.
“Humans are… unpredictable. They divorce each other, leave each other… Werewolves don’t do that. Maybe, sometimes…” Heath hesitated, obviously thinking of his parents. “It would be better for everyone if they did, but we just… don’t. We don’t even know if humans feel the bond - if it binds them at all. If we brought a human into the pack, revealed ourselves and our supernatural nature to you, and you then left… Well, the pack would have two choices – decide to risk that you won’t keep our secrets, or…”
“Kill me,” she finished. It was the normal supernatural reaction to things that threatened them. Kill it before it killed you.
“Which is also why this conversation is dangerous,” he swirled the wine, watching as it tinted the glass before seeping down. “And why we have avoided having it with you. But your little stunt with the Secret Keeper made all our efforts redundant,” he said, with resentment.
“Oh, get over it,” she rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I made any reference to werewolves or vampires.”
Rhett groaned. “Aislen…” He covered his face with his hand. “Let’s not bring vampires into it. That’s a whole serious pile of shit none of us want to deal with.”
“Obviously,” she replied. “And also, why I didn’t mention them, or werewolves.”
“No,” Heath’s voice was tight. “But you gave them evidence that you know things that there is no plausible explanation for you to know. My father and the Boystons are already asking awkward questions. Abigail will begin to suspect that we have told you our secrets, and if they suspect that a human knows more than they should, they don’t take chances,” he said darkly. “They take action.”
“And you’re just going to sit back and let them kill me.”
“No,” Cameron said emphatically. “Why else do you think we guarded you last night? Whilst you were fucking that vamp-- ” He caught himself. “Lumberjack.”
“I know that Talen is a vampire,” she sighed. “Of course, I know.”
“He told you,” Heath’s eyes went to the collar around her neck. “When he put his mark on you.”
“No, actually. He doesn’t know that I know,” she reached up and touched the collar. “And, like you can talk,” she tugged down her top to reveal the twisted triangle just below her collar bone.
Heath’s eyes slipped away.
“You can read his mind just like you can read ours?” Cameron was intrigued.
“No. Only when he drinks…” She saw their reaction and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Oh, come on, stop acting like a bunch of prudes. Of course, he drinks from me. He is a vampire.”
“We know that he drinks from you,” Rhett replied. “We just… assumed that he did it discretely. You are a human, after all.”
“Is she?” Heath said suddenly, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes at Aislen.
“Of course, she is…” Cameron was surprised. “Isn’t she?” He added with sudden doubt.
“There are many different types of supernatural,” Heath murmured to himself. “What if she is just something… so rare that…?”
“Her parents are human,” Rhett argued. “Were,” he amended, remembering that Patrick was dead.
“I don’t know if I would classify my mother as a human,” Aislen commented dryly. “But my gift comes from my father’s line.”
“What do you know about what you are?” Heath wondered.
She shrugged. “We date back to before the Oracles of Delphi, we got confused with witches a lot, but we’re not witches. The gift is passed down through the women of my father’s family, but not every generation, it comes out erratically.”
They all fell silent, and Rhett reached out and opened the second bottle of wine. Aislen tossed back the last mouthful of wine and held out her glass for him to refill. “We’ve gotten off track,” she said, as she settled back into her seat. “This wasn’t about what I am or am not, but about you guys being such dicks.”
“We were never dicks,” Rhett protested.
“Do you really want me to list the times that you were?” She challenged him. “You three were always so fucking good at denying how awful you were to me.” Heath visibly bristled, and she raised her eyebrow at him. “Alright then, Mr. Alpha Werewolf. You keep telling me that I don’t understand you, but you make no effort to understand me. Let's think about it from my perspective for one fucking minute.
“I’m an eighteen-year-old human girl, new to town, and I have a crush on a boy. We have sex for the first time, and before he even pulls out, two other boys walk into the room and proceed to rape me – yes, it was rape,” she snapped, when he opened his mouth to protest. “I don’t care about whether or not you guys thought that I was your mate, or what you smelled when I walked past you, from the purely human perspective, you fucking raped me, and then the next day you boasted about it so that the entire school knew that I’d been fucked by all three of you.”
“Aislen…” Rhett sighed wearily. “This isn’t productive.”
“I wasn’t finished,” she snarled at him. “And you’re not trying very hard to see things from my perspective. What happened next?” She asked herself. “Oh, yeah, exactly what just happened. Oh, Aislen, you’re being difficult in complaining about being fucking raped, you don’t understand us – of fucking course I didn’t understand you. I am a human, or close enough,” she conceded to the possibility that there was something less than human in her bloodline. “As far as I knew, I was human, raised in the human way, and despite a fucking torturous ability to read minds, which didn’t help me at all, because I only got pieces, from my perspective…”
“We raped you,” Cameron hunched his shoulders. “Or I did, right?”