Page 261 of His Hungry Wolf

“Did I ask something I wasn’t supposed to?”

Neither of them answered. When someone finally spoke, it was Cage.

“Maybe you should.”

“Should what?” I asked confused for the second time by their reactions.

“Have you ever heard of the guy who could turn into a wolf?” Quin asked me.

I thought for a second. I had. For a few years when I was a kid, I was obsessed with him. As different as I felt from everyone else, I used to imagine that I was like him. I was about to tell Quin that when I suddenly realized who I was talking to. My head almost exploded.

“You!” was all I could say.

“Me,” he replied softly.

Thoughts flashed through my mind so quickly I couldn’t hold one long enough to share it.

“Are you okay?” Quin asked with sadness in his eyes.

“I’m… good, yeah. I’m just a little…” I said falling silent again.

“Are you freaked out? Should I have not told you?”

“You…” was all I could get out before I rushed to him, threw my arms around him and hugged him as tight as I could. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t hugging me back. I let him go and backed away.

“Sorry. It’s just that I read every story about you growing up. My parents couldn’t get me to stop talking about you. They kept saying the whole thing was fake and that your father made it up to explain how your mother died. But, I knew it was true.”

My body stiffened when I realized that I could finally get the answer to the question I had wondered about for so long. But looking at how normal he was, I began to think that my parents might have been right. Quin couldn’t turn into a wolf, could he?

“Were the stories about you true?” I asked hesitantly.

“Would you believe me if I told you they were?” Quin asked sadly.

“I would,” I said solemnly.

Quin looked back at Cage one more time before taking a deep breath and saying, “They’re true.”

I was speechless. I believed him. I had always believed him. Believing in him was one of the things people made fun of me for. But here he was standing in front of me telling me it was all real.

“Can you share with me what it was like?”

“What, exactly?”

“Growing up like that. All of it,” I said imaging what he had had to endure. Whatever teasing I lived through had to be a fraction of what the world heaped on him.

“It was hard,” he began.

Quin next explained his complicated childhood. He told me how he had been made to feel like a freak by everyone around him. Those who believed his story saw him as a carnival sideshow and his father as a mad scientist who had tried to play God. And those who didn’t believe treated him like a liar who had helped his father get away with murder.

That was the closest he got to talking about his mother. As I remembered the story, Quin couldn’t control when he turned into a wolf and as an infant, his wolf had killed his mother. There was no way I was going to ask him about that.

“Doesn’t any of this stuff freak you out?” Quin asked when he was done.

“Not at all. It makes me feel like I’m not alone,” I said with gratitude.

“Are you… a shifter as well?” he asked hesitantly.

I looked at him surprised and then laughed.