Page 57 of The Lunatics

This was unnatural. Unholy. An abomination against our very nature. My mind tried to bend around this impossibility and ran into a brick wall ofnope.

The ricochet of the bond snapping tore through my synapses. Insanity beckoned. In wolf form, my emotions were muted, simplified. The numbness of that called to me, and the sudden urge to shift was so strong that I started to shake.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

Michael blinked and came back to himself, his returning power splashing over me. The smell of musk and fur filled my nose. And then there he was, right where he belonged in the corner of my mind.

The whiplash of him feeling alive and then dead and now alive again was too much. My knees gave out and I collapsed to the floor. Michael’s eyes widened as my emotions roared through the bond and he realized what he’d just put me through. How close he’d just driven me to losing my fucking mind. Wolves could turn lunatic after the death of their mates, becoming feral, crazed versions of themselves that were so dangerous to others, we kept them in cages until they came out of it. Some never did. This soon after bonding, the threat of that happening was much higher, and I now understood why.

Michael dropped to the floor beside me. His brows drew down in concern, and he reached out, stopping just shy of touching me. “Layla?”

I abandoned all pretense of keeping distance between us and scrambled into his lap. He pulled me close and slid his hands beneath my tank top, wrapping his big arms around my waist so that we had as much skin-to-skin contact as possible. From the way he squeezed me, to the fear and regret coursing through the bond, he needed this reminder of our connection just as much as I did.

“I didn’t realize what that might do to you,” he said.

I grabbed at him with shaking hands and buried my nose into his neck, taking big gulping breaths full of his scent just to reassure myself that he was here, alive. “Don’t ever… do that… again.”

“I won’t.”

“I almost lost it. Wolves can turn lunatic when their mate dies.”

“I didn’t know. This is all very new to me.”

I kept forgetting that. And it kept coming back to bite us in the ass. We needed to talk this over more. We probably needed another crash course with my parents while we were at it.

“Michael, how did you learn to do this?Whywould you do this to yourself?”

He let out a deep sigh. “We learn from birth. I was taught to mute the wolf before I could walk.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘the wolf’?” It wasn’t a separate entity, just him, but with fur. “Don’t you mean you, in wolf form?”

“No. We’re taught to think of it as separate from ourselves. It makes it easier to suppress the shift.”

I let go of him and pushed away. Our touch was too distracting. I needed to see his face and focus on his emotions while he explained this to me. “Why would you want to suppress the shift?”

“Because the less time you spend in wolf form, the less you smell like a wolf.”

“So it’s true that you only shift once a month? When the full moon forces you to?”

He nodded.

My heart broke.

“Don’t be sad for me,” he said. “The benefits outweigh the costs.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point. For me, nothing would ever be worth neutering myself like that.”

“Really? Nothing?” The look he gave me made me feel small-minded. “Then imagine if you lived in a city, surrounded by your enemies, and one of them killed someone you cared about. That they sat fat and happy, deep within their territory, congratulating themselves afterward. And then, after their celebratory fete, they went to bed, only to find a werewolf waiting for them. Imagine the myth that would surround your kind after such retribution. The message it sends to those who would harm us. That all of their defenses are useless. If you take one of ours, there’s nothing to stopus from strolling, undetected, into the belly of your stronghold to reap our vengeance.”

I stared at him. “Has that happened?”

He nodded. “A vampire killed one of my cousins several months ago, and my mother went alone into their brood and killed their leader. Messily. So there wouldn’t be any confusion about who had done it.”

I really needed to get on that woman’s good side. Otherwise she might decide to end me herself, and I would never even see it coming. If she was able to kill a brood leader single-handedly, she could be a real threat to me.

“Maybe the vampires found out about your secret,” I said. “And have figured out how to mute themselves, too.”

He shook his head. “I think it much more likely that they’re holding a witch and she’s being forced to cloak them. I doubt that a month-undead vampire could gain such control so quickly. Most that age have barely mastered their bloodlust.”