Chapter 27

“Just a glass of lemonade, find out what’s wrong. Comfort her. Get her to call a friend. Then you can send her home.” Jameson stood at the kitchen sink, talking to himself under his breath as he poured lemonade into the shortest glasses he owned.

You’re such a bastard. When he’d opened the door and seen Coralie standing there, Jameson’s heart had thudded hard and his entire body has stiffened, especially his traitorous dick. After last night he’d thought she’d never want to see him again, much less apologize to him. So he let her in, and had that ever been a mistake.

She’d been perfectly at home standing in his living room, smiling as she looked around, wandering through the garden he’d spent years designing and creating. Cora just fit. What the fuck kind of game was fate playing? Making a switch slide into his life so perfectly, then holding her up as forbidden fruit?

He picked up their glasses when Cora appeared, frantic, on the other side of the sliding glass door. She slammed it open and ran through the kitchen, barely even glancing at Jameson as she tore past him.

“Cora? What’s wrong?” Jameson set the glasses down as quickly as he could and looked out the back door. Had she seen a wasp nest? No. A shifter maybe? Flint or Bryce in their bear form? He wouldn’t put it past either of them, especially since he’d told them that morning that she still didn’t know what they were.

Nothing in the yard. Jameson slammed the door closed and sprinted to the front.

Cora sat in her car, keys in hand, hunched over the ignition, keys jingling as her shoulders shook, forehead on the steering wheel.

He knocked on the window and she yelped. She opened the door instead, her expression stricken. “I can’t put the window down because I can’t start my car. My hands are shaking too bad.”

A suspicion formed in his mind. Shifters wasn’t the only thing she hadn’t known about yet. What switches and shifters were to each other? That could knock her on her ass like this. “Tell me what happened, Cora.”

Coralie closed her eyes and drew in a breath. “Your neighbors were talking about me.”

Jameson growled. He was gonna have roast-bear for dinner. “What did they say?”

Her cheeks flamed pink, the flush moving down to her chest where the thin straps of her kelly-green sundress decorated the skin of her shoulders. Her voice was a whisper when she spoke. Whispered really. Two words. “Prowl sex.”

Jameson closed his eyes and inhaled sharply, trying to keep the images at bay. He was no help to her distracted. But hell, the thought of how magnificent Cora would be in her Prowl was one that Jameson could easily lose days to.

He took Cora’s keys gently with one hand, the other helping her to stand. “Come with me. I’m taking you somewhere quiet.”

Cora didn’t protest, just followed along as he led her to his truck and settled her on the passenger side. Once he had her there Jameson realized that what he had in mind was an even bigger mistake than lemonade. Thoughts of the duty his family had upheld for centuries swam through his mind. But she needed him.

He dug his keys out of his pocket and climbed in, the truck rumbling as he put them on their way, trying to calm his heart. “What else did they say?” He needed to know it all.

For long minutes she didn’t say a word. When her voice came it was a hushed murmur. “What if there’s nobody there?”

Jameson’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tight his wrists ached. “Nobody where, Cora?”

She drew in a shaky breath. “If I kill a vampire, what if there’s nobody there? Those guys back there said I would go after humans.”

Jameson muttered a curse. Roast-bear on a stick. “Someone will be there, Cora, I swear. Switches and shifters are a team.”

Cora turned on him, eyes wide. “Switches and what now?” Her black eyes were almost healed, barely visible under the makeup. He wanted to kiss them both.

“Ah, shit,” he said, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck as he drove them into the forest. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

But she didn’t even press it, other queries taking center stage. “Someone who? You? Will you be at my Prowl?”

There it was. Out. In the open. Flapping on the seat between them. Did she want him to be there?

He looked out the window, unable to meet her eye. Cora’s shoulders sagged and she curled into herself, shutting him out.

Fate sucked and if it were in front of him, he would drive directly over its head, then back up and do it again. He turned the wheel savagely down the curves of the road, trying a hundred times to say something that would make her understand, but every time he opened his mouth, nothing came out.

***

Jameson eased his truck to a stop outside his own primitive cabin on the Nantahala grounds, far away from the one where he’d sequestered Carick with enough technological gadgets to occupy him. Coralie’s head rose. “Where are we?”

Jameson pushed open the driver’s door, pausing a moment before answering. “Somewhere we can be alone. A quiet place for you to think.”

She seemed to accept that, climbing down from the truck before he could make his way around to help her. Jameson ran one hand through his hair, questioning his decision. Too late now. He unlocked the door to his cabin and let her in.

He had been right to be worried. Coralie’s sweetly-blooming smile was like a corkscrew to his heart as she stood in the center of the single room and slowly turned, taking it all in. He would never forget how she looked in that moment, no matter if he lived another hundred years.

Cora’s eyes lit up as she looked over his shoulder to the small bookcase where he kept his favorite books. They were the ones that never failed to comfort on long, lonely nights.

“Jameson, you could be one of my students!” She snatched a thin volume of poetry from the shelf with a grin. “I’ll admit I did every assignment I could on Dracula, even my Master’s thesis. But every time my advisor started to get hinky about my ‘narrow focus’ I’d turn to Eliot. My paper on The Wasteland kicked ass.”

She slid the book back into place, bending down as she scanned each subsequent shelf, chattering happily. “Eliot’s the only poet I know who consistently gets taught in both American and British lit classes.” She chattered on, more facts about her favorites.

He nodded. “I like the one about the coffee spoons.” In fact if Cora’d opened that copy of The Wasteland she’d picked up, she’d have seen a personalized inscription Jameson wasn’t sure how he’d explain: To the original J. Alfred Prufrock. I couldn’t have written it without knowing you. -T.S.

Her laughter was musical, showering him like raindrops. “I like that one, too.” His heart kicked up a notch. Cora’s smile slipped a bit.

He pulled back from her, busying himself across the room. Way too cozy. He needed to distract them both, or else find a way to wrap his fingers around fate’s neck. “I’m hungry, Cora. I could make-”

But Cora was glowing. Her normal aura, the one he’d barely noticed, was bright and twisting with green. She’d crouched down to see the bottom shelf of books. Her body was tight, rigid. She raised one hand to grasp something, but only hovered her fingers above it, her voice reverent. “What is that?”

Ah, shit. Jameson knew what it was. Carick’s words from the meeting with the shifters came back to him.

There may be those among you who have something precious, an object you’ve held sacred for much of your life, but you’ve never known why. It could be a stone, a weapon, a piece of wood that you never knew what to craft from it. You’ve carried it with you for years, not understanding the compulsion. This is one of your most important purposes. Shifters can intuit what the switches need, even the weapon that will be the most true for a switch to whom they are covenbound. They are compelled by the instinct to gather or create the item, to hold it, save it for decades if that’s what it takes, until they meet the switch to whom it belongs. Then they hand it over.

Carick’s voice in his head again. If Jameson had a choice at that moment, he would put the Steward right back in his deep cave.

She is not for you. It has never been so.

He spoke quietly, cursing fate, cursing Carick, cursing all the bullshit that was between him and Cora. He’d made her a resonant even though she could never be his? “A knife I made from a railroad spike a long time ago.”

Her reply was hushed and breathless, putting Jameson in mind of intimate secrets. “May I hold it?”

An unholy ache moved through him and Jameson wrestled it down, settled his breath. “Of course.”

She was talking about a knife he’d made. Or dagger, as he sometimes thought of it. It was smaller than a hunting knife, but wicked dangerous looking. Her hand neared the head of the dark spike, where he’d heated and twisted the shaft to form a grip, then beaten and pounded the rest until it became a blade. He’d apprenticed with a blacksmith for free, just to learn how to do it. The compulsion he’d felt back then became clear to him for the first time. Shit. It couldn’t be her resonant. But if it was…

Jameson knew the moment her skin made contact with the dagger, because the green aura around her body lit up brighter still, alive and crackling with energy in shades of shamrock and seafoam. “Do you see it?” he whispered, pointing weakly to her.

Cora dropped the dagger, frowning. The aura faded.

Jameson crept toward her, crouched next to her. “Do it again.”

She obeyed, slender fingers slipping around the hilt of the blade and gripping tight. Her breath came faster.

God, I have to know… “How does it feel, Cora?”

A ghost of a smile crossed her lips, and in it, he saw more than just her. He saw wisdom of the ages. When she spoke, her voice was deeper than normal and intensely sure. “Powerful. Natural. Right.” She turned glittering eyes on him, her green glow sparkling around her. “Prowl sex doesn’t bother me anymore,” she whispered. “I see what it’s for, what it does. It stretches behind me like a scroll, the evolution of the Prowl.” She said the last two words like they represented something holy.

Blood surged through Jameson’s body. He could see her seeing it, and it floored him.

She frowned down at the knife in her hands and dropped it deliberately, almost throwing it. It clanked on the floor. Her glow lessened and her face looked like just her again.

She picked it back up, like she couldn’t help it, but it wasn’t the same. She still whispered, like the moment was holy. “What is it made of?”

Holy. He agreed it was and whispered back as best as he could. “Steel: Iron. Some copper, a few other metals.” She stared at it as if he had said gold, diamonds, metals we dug up from the surface of Mars.

He had to test her! A real live switch. And he was the Keeper. They would learn together. He grabbed two things from the top of the cold wood stove and brought it to her. “Touch these.”

He had his cast iron skillet and a steel-lined copper pot. Cora reluctantly put down the knife, then took the skillet.

No more whispering. She giggled. “It tickles.”

Jameson couldn’t help but grin along with her. Fresh. Sweet. Feminine. He loved her company. “That one has more carbon. Now try this.”

He traded her for the copper pot, and immediately her mouth pursed in a little ‘o’. “This one’s stronger, like holding a vib-, uh, massager.”

Cora blushed and looked down, handing the pot back to Jameson without lifting her eyes from the floor. Which was good, because he was pretty sure his cock had visibly twitched when he imagined the trouble sweet but sarcastic little Coralie could get up to with a vibrator.

She pulled him back to reality. “Neither of them feels like the knife.”

Jameson waved her off as he replaced the cookware. “It’s obvious metals switch you on. We just have to find the right mix.”

She snickered. Jameson loved how she caught every word-nerd joke that spilled out of his mouth. But why would he have her resonant? Carick had said it had never happened before, the Keeper becoming covenbound. Did he dare hope? But how would that even work?

Coralie sat on the floor, her legs folded, her sundress covering her knees, holding his knife in her hands. It was an unwanted reminder of his most downtrodden days and she was turning it back in forth with her delicate fingers, gazing at it like it was the Hope diamond. She was completely enchanted and it lit him up like a Christmas tree, healed him somehow.

Jameson had always thought the Instinct had saved him because it had judged his duty as the Keeper as more important than his family. For a century it had infuriated him, enraged him, the idea that his family was disposable to the Instinct. But what if he hadn’t been saved just to be the Keeper? What if those days on the railroad hadn’t been about running at all? What if he hadn’t shirked his duty by leaving, but rather… fulfilled it? A stretch. One he didn’t know if he had a right to make.

“It’s yours.” The words stuttered out without Jameson knowing they were coming. Of course it was hers. Everything he had was hers. He groaned at the thought, then spoke quickly when she shot him a freaked-out look. “If you want it, I mean.”

Coralie’s smile lit up the whole cabin. His whole fucking life. She spoke almost primly. “Thank you, Jameson.”

His name in her mouth made his dick spring up hard as a rock, begging for its turn. Jameson angled away from Cora so she wouldn’t see.

He needed a moment, and so did his body.