At the river, Shan removed her shirt and Harper got her first look at her damaged arm.

She promptly vomited.

“Move your fingers,” he instructed.

She obeyed, or at least, she thought she did. She couldn't bring herself to look at her arm again.

“Now your wrist.”

The lack of feeling she'd experienced earlier must have been shock, because now she was intensely aware of how much pain she was in.

“I can't. It hurts too badly.”

He didn't press the issue. Using fabric that he'd torn from her shirt, he slowly cleaned the blood from her arm. She could tell that he was being careful, but it still hurt like a bitch.

“Why did he attack you?”

It was the first question he'd asked, and one she actually thought she could answer.

“It was the other one, not Caim.”

“I know,” he said, his impassivity giving way to a flash of irritation. “Your blood was all over him.”

“Oh. Well, I think he must have seen me with Dawn—the pup. I was trying to find you. I was running. He didn't know who I was. Though, even if he had known, apparently your scent makes me a persona non grata in these parts.”

She tried to smile at him, but he wouldn't look at her face.

“You were trying to find me?” he asked skeptically. “Not your brother?”

“I didn't know, Shan. I was just walking along the river and I heard something. I found the girl stuck in a tree. Part of me thought I was hallucinating and when she told me her name, I...”

“You expect me to believe that you just happened across your brother at the same time I was preparing to execute him? Your brother whom, up until this point, you've failed to mention was a shifter and the alpha of the Lazarus pack?”

“I...”

This wasn't good. She knew it, she just didn't know how to fix it. How could she convince Shan of something she hardly believed herself? And while she was in the midst of what was definitely a mental breakdown?

“He called you Snow.”

She swallowed. “No one has called me that in a long time.”

Shan finally looked at her, and she didn't like what she saw. All of the warmth and affection he'd been so quick to lavish her with before was now hidden behind a wall of distrust. In the back of her mind, she could hear Sarah, the mother who had raised her, reciting a line from a poem in a children's fable.

'A liar is not believed forsooth, even when liars tell the truth.'

She felt her panic rising again, like yet another wave crashing into her. This time, the source of her fear was more abstract and difficult to pin down. The danger had passed, but as she looked into Shan's eyes and saw only herself staring back, she wanted to start crying all over again.

Even if he didn't believe her, if she could have any hope of salvaging their relationship—such as it was, she would have to begin with the truth.

“My mother's name was Dawn. She was the mate of Caim's father, Cain. I don't know what happened between them. I guess their mating bond didn't take, or something. They were never very close. When my brother was young, she slept with someone else and got pregnant with me. She died not long after I was born. Cain took me in. He and his new mate raised me as their own, but when I started to... When I hit puberty, everyone decided it was best that I go live with my own kind. They were right. My life has been so much better than it could have been if I’d stayed here and taken a mate.”

She watched his face the whole time. He'd gone back to tending to her wounded arm, not sparing her a glance as she spoke.

“What else?”

She frowned. “That's it. I mean, I'm sure there are things I'm forgetting, but can you be a little more specific? My head's kind of fuzzy. I think I've lost a lot of blood.”

His brow creased. “You have, but you'll live. Your father, who is he?”

She hadn't set out to hide that detail, but rather, she'd glossed over it as it would have led to more questions that simply had no answers. While she tried gathering her thoughts for an explanation, Shan continued talking.

“It doesn't add up. Your mother left her mate, and then returned to him with a human's child?”

“No, it's more complicated than that. My father was Cain's half-brother, Alder. He—”

Shan's frown deepened. “As in, the alpha of Halcyon? We're acquainted. You're too old to be his daughter.”

“That's what I'm trying to explain. Alder was fourteen when I was born. That's why Cain raised me. My dad was a kid, himself. Look, I know this is a lot to take in and you probably think that I'm some sort of, I dunno, spy or something. But the truth is, I wasn't keeping this from you. I was keeping it from everyone, and I've been doing it for a very long time.”

Harper waited for a reaction from him, but he gave her none. She hazarded a glance at her arm and found that it didn't look much better than it had when she'd first sat down. Blood was still seeping from the jagged wounds and Shan was working to bind them with strips of fabric.

“Oh, that looks bad,” she said. “Am I bleeding out?”

“No.”

Harper wasn't convinced. “I dunno, Shan, this looks really bad. Should we maybe go and find some bandages, or something?”

He continued speaking through gritted teeth. “We're in the middle of the forest. There are no bandages.”

“You planned on taking on a wolf pack and killing their alpha, but you didn't think someone might need bandages?”

He tied a piece of leather particularly tight. She whimpered, her hand shooting out to grab his shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” he said, tying the next one more carefully. “Stay still.”

He didn't tell her to let him go. She relaxed her grip on his shoulder, but kept her hand where it was. Her thumb brushed over the bite mark. It was still there, even though he'd shifted. He had told her that it might scar, but part of her had thought that it would vanish the next time his pelt melded to his flesh.

“When I was little, I was sick all of the time,” she said. “Everyone thought I would die. That's why they named me Snow. Because it's impermanent. They needed the reminder that they shouldn't get attached. But I survived. Year after year. Of course, I was never as strong as them, never as fast. I couldn't shift. My whole life in the pack, my life as Snow, it was a study in inferiority. That's why I left them, to live with my own kind.”

“They're not your kind,” Shan said. “You're not human.”

“Yes, I am. I heal slowly, I can't see in the dark, my hearing and my sense of smell are at best, slightly above average, and let's not forget about the obvious part where I can't turn into a wolf.”

With grim fascination, she'd been watching him bind her arm. He appeared to be finishing the grisly task, though Harper could still see a few places that looked to be leaking. A tiny part of her was screaming inside over the fact that her arm was well and surely mutilated, but she'd deal with her vanity later.

She was surprised when he pulled her into his lap, and then startled when he bit down on his wrist. He held his wrist to her mouth as blood dripped from the puncture marks.

Her lips parted to issue a vampire quip, but Shan covered her mouth with his wrist.

“Drink until I tell you to stop.”

Biting him in the throes of passion and drinking blood from an open wound were two very different things for Harper, but she listened to him. She wasn't sure how his blood could help her, but she was still light-headed and not entirely convinced that she wasn't going to die. If Shan thought it would help, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Drinking his blood didn't seem to have any magical effects on her. Her arm still hurt like hell and she still felt dizzy, even with her head resting against Shan's chest. She did feel warmer, but that was more likely due to him wrapping his pelt around her.

His expression softened as he held her, and she felt the last vestiges of her panic ebb away. When he finally removed his wrist, she hoped he would kiss her, but he went back to talking instead.

“Your nightmares. You said they started when you were thirteen?”

Harper nearly groaned.

She was so over being interrogated and her response was clipped. “They started after I was kidnapped and held captive for months. You really want to dredge that up tonight, too?”

“You were abducted? By who?”

“It doesn't matter. And my nightmares don't matter.”

Neither statement was true, the latter, more than ever. The nightmares had had a profound effect on her life. They'd driven her to substance abuse and delinquency. Given how much she'd accomplished in spite of everything, there was no telling how much more she could have done had she not spent her teens and early twenties getting wasted.

Tonight, her nightmares had almost killed her. When they weren't managed, they became so consuming that she could no longer tell the difference between dream and reality.

Harper squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't cry again, but she thought that might be because the blood loss had dehydrated her.

When Shan's lips grazed her forehead, Harper felt a small sense of solace and she leaned into him fully, allowing him to hold her like a child.

Shan's mouth moved against her skin as he spoke.

“My mother was born to a common shifter and his human mate. She had nine brothers and sisters, all of them shifters like their father. When she reached her third year without shifting, she became a pariah.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but believe me, I haven't remained human for lack of trying. I spent the first half of my life doing everything I could to shift.”

“Do not interrupt me,” Shan chided. “When my mother was twelve, she had her first estrus and her family assumed she was human, that somehow she'd taken after her mother. Not knowing what else to do with a human child, they passed her off to a neighboring alpha. When she began having nightmares of a wolf tearing her apart, she assumed it was her mind's way of making sense of being raped each night.”

A chill overtook Harper. She had never told Shan what was in her nightmares. She'd never even told Ian or Jo.

“She bore him six daughters and buried each on her first birthday, when the child failed to shift. The pack considered it a mercy, and with the life she'd lived, my mother was inclined to agree.

“On the night she buried her sixth daughter, she laid down on her grave and went to sleep. In her nightmare, she finally stopped resisting and surrendered to the creature, letting it devour her until there was nothing left. She woke in agony and retreated to a cave, believing she was dying. When she emerged the following night, she had completed her first shift.”

There were so many parallels between their stories, but Harper's mind still railed against it. She had spent the first half of her life trying to be something she wasn't, and when she'd finally realized that she was human, it had been a revelation. Her entire identity was woven around her humanity, and without it she didn't know who she was.

Shan said, “I was ten when I started having the nightmares. If I hadn't had my mother to guide me, I might have blocked them out as she had, like you did. It took me a few months, but eventually, I was able to let it in and complete my first shift. It gets easier, after the first time.”

She didn't know what to say. She wished she could un-hear everything he'd told her.

“Shan, I can't... Even if I could shift, how could I ever go back?”

She should have anticipated his response.

“You're not human. You never belonged with them, just as you didn't belong with your pack.”

“Then where did I belong? With you?”

“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I'll help you. If I'm wrong about you, you can go. If I'm right, then you'll stay here with me, as my mate.”

With everything that had happened, she hadn't expected him to still want her as his mate. But then, he only wanted her if she was like him. The opportunity to have a mate of his own kind was too hard to pass up.

“So you're saying I have a choice, now?”

Shan gave her a look that was utterly patronizing. “Not really, because I'm not wrong. You're already mine. I'm just going to prove it to you.”