“They know about you?”
“Yes. Many of them do. Not all. But unlike white men, our elders, or the elders of the Native Americans on this reservation, have known of our abilities for centuries. We live in harmony.”
“Does that make the shifters somehow inferior or superior to the others?” she asked, trying to put this puzzle together, crazy as it was.
“Honestly?”
She nodded.
“We are considered superior in many ways. But we don’t think of ourselves that way. The other tribes have historically looked up to us. Especially since our line of shaman often can predict things that are helpful to the entire reservation.”
“Like your grandma.”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
Griffen leaned back in his chair and pushed his plate back. “So, tell us more about what your grandmother was so intent to impart yesterday.”
Miles set his fork down and grabbed his coffee. “My grandmother is a shaman, like I said. A medicine woman. As was her mother and her mother before that. In addition to having a deep knowledge of healing and the powers of the local vegetation, she knows things. She can sense them. She feels things even the rest of the shifters do not.
“And she has connections to the spirit world even I can’t comprehend.”
“So, if the black shadow I saw and the one we all three saw wasn’t some sort of coincidence, what does the spirit want?”
Rebecca whipped her gaze back and forth between the men, trying to take in everything they said. She sensed that Griffen was leery about the strange black aura. Odd considering he was a freaking wolf shifter.
Griffen turned toward her and chuckled.
“You’re in my head.” She scrunched up her nose at him.
“You think I’m a freak?” he teased.
She shrugged and toyed with the hem of her T-shirt. “I’m just not sure I understand. If there are actual humans who can shift into wolves living among men, why not strange black shadows that demand attention also?”
Miles laughed. “See? She has a point, Masters.”
Griffen lifted his eyebrows. “Sure, everybody laugh at the plain white shifter.” He cracked a smile at Rebecca. “I can see how this might appear to you. Makes sense, but I’ve known about shifters my entire life. It’s a tangible thing. Weird black spirit shadows that demand my attention? Hell, that’s fucking strange.”
Miles leaned back and crossed his arms. “Anyway, Grandma believes the spirits are trying to tell us something. And not solely based on her intuition, but also because there have been many other such sightings. Though the spirit isn’t necessarily evil. It could have good intentions. It’s hard to know the difference. The level of my grandmother’s concern is rather alarming.” Miles turned toward Rebecca as he explained this. “I told Griffen a lot of this last night. You were sleeping.”
She nodded.
“Let’s say for the sake of argument she’s right, what does it mean?” Griffen asked.
Miles took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No one really knows.”
Griffen’s shoulders slumped. “Great. And you don’t suppose now that we’ve mated, it’s over?”
Rebecca was wondering the same thing.
Miles shook his head slowly. “I’m not buying it. There’s more to this. We didn’t need the presence of a spirit to guide us into mating. That would have happened naturally.”
Griffen nodded. “But maybe not in the time frame the spirit intended.”
Miles agreed. “Who knows how long it might have taken before the three of us were in the same place at the same time? I’m not going to deny your fall could have been by design to bring the three of us together in one spot in time, but why the urgency?”
“Does your grandmother have visions or something? Does she know more than she said?” Rebecca asked. Honestly, the entire thing sounded crazy to her, including the wolves. But she couldn’t overlook the fact the woman was sitting on the front porch when they arrived, a knowing look in her eyes.
“Sometimes. She meditates. She has many ways of slipping halfway out of the world and sticking a foot in other planes. Often she simply senses a message. She may never know why. In this case she’s convinced something bad is about to happen. And she believed the spirits were angry at us for not mating quicker, even though there hadn’t been time yet.
“She thought we were mocking the ways of Nature by not heeding Her call immediately.”
Rebecca furrowed her brow. She pushed away from the table and stood. “Right. Well, I’ll withhold judgment for now.” Anything was possible after what she’d witnessed in the last twenty-four hours.