Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 33 - Unprecedented

"See, you're both idiots," Evie declared then. "It's a mate bond."

The possibility hadn't even crossed my mind, and for good reason. I wasn't supposed to have a mate bond, and ... and I didn't have one. She must have been wrong. My wolf was turning circles in my head—confused, but perhaps not disagreeing with her, which was not a good omen.

Somehow, through all of the shock and denial, I managed to say, "Look, where I'm from, there's no such thing as mates."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe you just can't feel it."

"You heard him. Jessie can't be his mate, Evie," Alex told her matter-of-factly. "And he can't be hers."

The first part I understood. The second part not so much. What was stopping the oh-so-normal flockie girl from having a soulmate? I raised my eyebrows at him. "Why?"

Alex and Evie paused to give each other a look. The sort that said they knew something utterly diabolical.

"Look, Rhodric, I think you need to hear it from her..."

"Hear what?"

They both kept their mouths firmly closed.

"Spit it out," I told them, and my wolf underlined the words with a growl.

Another look exchanged, this time more pliable. Alex stuffed his hands into his pockets, and their eyes had an entire argument over which of them would tell me. I couldn't keep up, of course, but it wasn't hard to see that Evie was losing, probably because she was, after all, better at explaining things.

Finally, Alex smirked triumphantly and his mate caught my attention.

"Okay, fine. There's something you have to understand about soulmates, Rhodric," Evie said patiently. "You only get one. No matter how long you live, no matter if you lose yours or never even meet. You can mate with other people, of course, and the bond will be just as strong, but you'd never be drawn to them before the mark."

"Okay..." I muttered, not liking how this might relate to my situation.

"You only get one soulmate," she repeated.

"And?"

"And Jess found hers months ago."

Right.

For some reason, it felt like I'd been punched in the gut. Whether or not that girl was my mate— and I didn't think she was — I hardly knew her. I certainly had no claim over her. So what the hell did it matter that she had a soulmate?

"We don't like him," Evie went on, "and neither does she, but they are mates."

Well, there was a spark of hope — one that would need to be quickly stamped out. Just because she didn't like the other guy didn't mean she would like me. Maybe she wasn't interested in having a mate at all — and for what I'd seen of flockie society and the way they treated their females, I wouldn't blame her.

"So, if I'm feeling a mate bond, then ... what? There's two of us fighting for one girl?"

She shook her head, and I was surprised to see pity in her eyes. "I'm sorry— I have no idea. I know all of the old stories, and this ... it's never happened before."

"Never?" I found it hard to believe. Shifters had lived here for more than twelve thousand years: there would be a precedent, we just hadn't heard about it. Given that the current stories spanned millennia, there could be two reasons for that. Either it hadn't been interesting enough to repeat, or there had been nobody left alive to tell the story.