Chapter 1
Teck Stalking Horse sat up in bed with a groan lodged in his throat and his bear banging in his skull. He was drenched in sweat, and his whole body felt like it was on fire. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned over, bracing his elbows on his knees. The dreams he’d been having since he was ten had been coming more frequently now. Nearly every night for the last two months, he found himself either standing in the midst of a battle or wrapped up in mind-blowing sex.
He much preferred the sex dreams over the warring ones, for obvious reasons, but the sex dreams had their own problems, which included a perpetual state of arousal. Straightening, he rolled his neck and brushed his hair from his face before glancing at the clock. It was four a.m. In two hours, he would need to be up and ready to go visit his great-grandmother, who was a powerful Wiccan. He’d gone to speak with her when the dreams had started, and she’d offered to help him learn how to tap into his Wiccan heritage.
Teck’s mother, Elizabeth, was a powerful Wiccan herself, and his fathers were bear shifters. He could use both sides of his heritage, not only to cast spells but also to shift. His twin brother, Shy, shared this dual nature, but Shy didn’t train his Wiccan side as much as Teck did. Shy also didn’t have the dreams.
Knowing he’d never be able to get back to sleep after the dream, Teck opted to take a shower. He leaned against the wall and waited for the water to heat. Although he didn’t want to think about the sexy dream, his mind wasn’t interested in listening to him and promptly replayed the scene. Everything about the dream was fuzzy, except for the fact that he was having sex. The dreams always involved the same female. She was curved in all the right places and had long, white-blonde hair, but that was all he could make out about her in the dreams.
He stepped into the stream of hot water, as he searched through his memories for more clues. He wanted to find his dream woman. He’d been dreaming about her for nine years. Whoever she was, he was certain she was his truemate, the one female on the planet for him.
Guilt speared through him, and he growled, shoving the unwanted emotion aside. His family had always assumed that he and Shy would share a female the way that his fathers shared his mother. Bear shifters didn’t generally share a truemate between them, but twins often did. Teck had believed he and Shy were meant to share also, until the dreams started. That his twin didn’t also have the dreams caused him to believe that they weren’t meant to share.
He couldn’t talk to Shy about the dreams. He’d tried when they were younger, but his brother hadn’t understood because he’d never been part of them. Teck felt it was necessary to distance himself from his twin, and it had killed a part of him, but he’d spent his time honing his fighting skills and Wiccan nature. Teck’s behavior hurt Shy, and he didn’t blame his brother for feeling resentful, but Teck couldn’t change the future. If Shy wasn’t having mate-dreams about the white-haired female, then she wasn’t his truemate and Teck couldn’t alter that.
Slamming his palm on the faucet handle, he turned off the water and pushed the curtain aside, causing the metal rings to squeak loudly along the shower rod. Grabbing the towel off the rack, he dried off and wrapped the towel around his waist.
Teck lived alone in a tent in the underground city the bear shifter den called home. His paternal grandparents – Adriel and Filene – were the alphas of the den. Shy lived aboveground with their parents in a large home on the den’s property. Their mother hadn’t wanted to live in the den, but Teck had always enjoyed it. He felt more at home in the underground den and more connected to his people.
Their people had a thriving city, with everyone doing his or her part to make the den run smoothly. There were gardens equipped with grow lights and barns for animals. The den had electricity and running water. Whenever Teck had a desire to see the sunrise, he could ascend the wide staircase that led to the interior of an enormous barn on the property. The den’s hidden entrance opened through the floor of the barn. The den also had a vast territory, with fields used for produce and a few other above-ground homes.
As he dressed, he considered going to see Shy and talking to him about the dreams, but he dismissed the idea. Talking to Shy about the dreams would most likely hurt his feelings, since he wasn’t involved. If Shy were meant to share the white-haired female with him, he’d have started having the dreams when Teck did.
Isn’t that how it would have worked?
He hated leaving his twin, but he’d already started making plans to search for his mate. Their grandmother knew about his plans, but he hadn’t told anyone else. He was going to trust his bear to lead him to her, and it wouldn’t hurt to cast a few spells, too.
He slung his satchel over his shoulder, grabbed the keys to his truck, and walked out of his tent. The den was quiet in the early morning, so he hadn’t expected to hear a lot of people moving around. The part of him that wanted to reconnect with his twin – to have the close bond they’d shared before the dreams started – wasn’t as big as the part of him that belonged entirely to his white-haired woman. He had to think of her and their future together, no matter what that meant to his twin.
* * *
Shy stood in his mother’s kitchen and used a rolling pin to flatten pats of butter between a folded section of dough. They were leaving early tomorrow morning to travel to Canada to meet up with his Aunt Daeton, her husbands, and her young son. He’d only met her once when he was ten, which had been ten years ago. Now they were visiting her again, but in the realm where she lived, time moved slower, so while it had been ten years for Shy and his family, it had only been a year for his aunt.
“Shy, the peeler’s not working right,” Malia, one of his sisters, said from where she sat at the kitchen table with a pile of apples.
His mother had asked him to make fruit pies for their journey, and he’d enlisted the help of his four youngest siblings.
He put down the rolling pin and wiped his hands free of flour as he walked to the table. “Let’s see,” he said, taking the peeler from her.
Eleven-year-old Malia smiled up at him as he loosened the screw that held in the blade, adjusted the angle, and then tightened it.
“Here you go, kiddo.”
“Can we also make the cheeseburger pies?” she asked.
Elisia, who was seven, cheered in agreement. “I like those better than apple pies.”
He chuckled. While his sisters were more Wiccan than bear, they all liked meat more than fruits and vegetables, so he wasn’t surprised by their request. “Aunt Daeton’s favorite is apple pie. You guys love them.”
“It’s fall. Daddy says that bears like to eat meat in the fall because of getting ready for winter,” thirteen-year-old Dena said.
“But we don’t really hibernate,” Aiyana, who was fourteen, said as she sliced a peeled apple and put it in a glass bowl. “We den, but it’s not the same. Not like real bears who disappear and sleep the winter away.”
“True,” Shy said. “I promise to make some cheeseburger pies, but only after we’re done with the apple ones.”
The pies would be filled and frozen uncooked, and then they would cook them over a fire in cast-iron piemakers. The pies had been his favorite as a child, and he’d learned how to make them from his dad, Ash, who was their family’s caretaker. His twin, Axe, was their family’s protector, and both were mated to his mother, Elizabeth. Which was how twin bear shifters were supposed to find their truemates – one female for both.
Twin bears were rare, but of all the ones he’d ever heard about, they always mate-shared. But something had happened when he and Teck were young, and his brother had started dreaming about a female who had never, not even once, appeared in a dream to Shy. At first, Teck had told Shy about the dreams. They’d been best friends their whole lives and had never kept any secrets from each other. When the dreams hadn’t started for Shy, but had continued for Teck, his brother had drifted away. It had hurt most when Teck moved out of their parents’ home and into the den, building a small tent for himself and basically closing himself off from everyone.
Twins weren’t supposed to be strangers. At least Shy didn’t think so. His parents felt sorry for him, and his sisters, too, but he hated their pity.
Turning his thoughts to more pressing matters, he finished the dough and helped his sisters assemble the pies. By the time they were finished, the freezer was loaded with enough apple pies not only to feed them on the journey but also to surprise Aunt Daeton. He was looking forward to seeing her. It hardly seemed possible that ten years had passed. He remembered her vividly from the previous visit. Although Daeton had communicated with their family over the duration of her absence, they were still surprised to meet her husbands. Shy hadn’t known that Centaurs were real, let alone that they lived in a secret city in Canada as well as in the Medes Realm that Daeton now called home.
A knock sounded at the front door, and Shy reminded his sisters to wash the dough from their hands before they went to play, and he walked down the hall. He pulled open the door and smiled as he saw Rysk and Tyrant. The two bear shifters had been friends of Daeton’s in the Medes Realm and had asked to come to the states and join their den. His parents had been thrilled to have two were-bears like them. They were both rare shifters. Rysk was a cave bear, and Tyrant was a giant polar bear. The two males were best friends and warriors and were a boon to the den.
“Hello, Shy,” Rysk said. “Is Axe around? We looked for him in the den but didn’t find him, your mother, or Ash.”
“All three of them are food shopping for the trip. They should be back in the next hour or two. Is there something I can help you with?”
“We wanted to get his input on security measures for the trip,” Tyrant said. “Would you let him know that we’ll be down in the den?”
“Sure thing.”
Shy said goodbye to the two males and shut the door. His father, Axe, was the head of security for the den. Although the den wasn’t at war, it was best to be vigilant when so many lives were at stake. When he was little, fairies had come through a portal with the intention of killing his Aunt Shaylee, and the den had rallied immediately to her defense and saved her life. A few other times, they’d had to stand together for survival, which was why den warriors were so important.
Shy was not a warrior by any stretch. While he’d been taught how to hunt and fight in both his human and shifted forms, he’d grown up with a love of taking care of others. He enjoyed sewing and cooking, and had known from a young age that he took after his father, Ash, who was the family caretaker. Up until Teck had started to pull away, he’d always expected that the two of them would share a mate, with Teck being the family protector and Shy being the caretaker. But that wasn’t how his life was panning out, which meant he needed to suck it up and move on with his life. He would find his truemate when the time was right and he would be the best mate ever. He’d train with Axe on how to fight so he could defend his family if necessary, and he’d make sure that his mate never wanted for anything.
If only he knew who she was.