Drake kissing me, the memory hazy since it dated from a time when I lost the past every morning. The sensations, however, carried through to the present. The strength of his hand cupping the back of my head. The scent of lemon-meringue pie surrounding me. His lips on mine, at the same time soft and hard…

  Pleasure, pure pleasure, spinning through both of us. Drake was my mate in every way that mattered.

  But he couldn’t remain my mate. Not if I wanted to end this now.

  “I said, what is that?” Ambrose jabbed the gun into my throat, as if a bullet could be more painful than what was about to happen. My gut clenched with preemptive tremors and I swallowed hard against the cold metal, forcing out words before I could second-guess myself.

  “That is part two. Part one is this: Drake, I sever the mate bond between us.”

  For one split second, our connection was not just a physical tether but a visible glowing cord of light. A manifestation of everything that bound us together.

  A mate bond wasn’t anything like a marriage, I realized too late. Losing it wasn’t like losing a limb.

  It was like losing my entire self.

  I realized that when the tether snapped so easily it seemed to have been on the verge of breaking already. When unbearable pain radiated out from my stomach to my arms, my legs, everything in between them. I could have sworn even the hair on my head ached.

  “What are you doing?” The gun pressed so hard into my throat that it would have halted my breath if I hadn’t already stopped breathing. “You bitch…”

  Words were almost impossible to come by. Almost, but not quite. Because I had to keep moving forward for Drake’s sake. Even if he wasn’t my mate any longer, he was no less dear to me.

  I needed Drake to survive and thrive. Which meant ripping Ambrose out of the body he currently inhabited then defanging him once and for all.

  I didn’t think the words would come, especially not with the gun pressing harder by the moment. Especially not with the overwhelming pain growing inside of me instead of turning dull.

  But I did speak, finally. “And I choose you as mate, Ambrose Reed,” I choked out, ignoring the physical threat his gun represented. He wasn’t about to kill me. Not when I was, I suspected, his key to remaining here in the physical realm.

  This time, the tether that materialized was more like a noose. It lashed out and encircled my throat, choking me more thoroughly than the gun had, sending agony arcing through me worse than the loss of my connection to Drake. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe as Ambrose smiled using Drake’s lips.

  “That’s better,” he purred. The gun drifted down to the table between us. His free hand came up to stroke my cheek. “We still have the issue of making this body permanently mine. I wonder, will fucking you work even better than blood? Shall we try both and find out?”

  The foulness of his touch was worse than the foulness of his language. It made the inside of my mouth pucker as if I’d bitten into an unripe persimmon. I recoiled and he let me scuttle three long steps away.

  Why shouldn’t he when we were now bound together more thoroughly than I’d ever been to another person? This wasn’t a half-formed mate bond like the one I’d shared with the man I realized, too late, completed me. Ambrose had accepted my mating the way I hadn’t accepted Drake’s. The evil spirit and I were now a unit, us two against the world.

  We were a unit and it was horrible. Every one of Drake’s actions had reassured me that he cared deeply for me, for Lynette, for his Strays, for Rosa. With Ambrose, I knew exactly what he cared about: himself. His pleasures. The pursuit of overwhelming power no matter the peripheral cost.

  The darkness inside him—the darkness inside me now—was smothering. I couldn’t see through the tears welling up then rolling down my cheeks. They tickled, the incongruity almost but not quite breaking through the pain that consumed me.

  But I couldn’t let myself fall into that pain. I had to focus. I had to do this.

  The mate bond between me and Ambrose was still barely visible if I looked to the side and used the corner of my vision to find it. I reached up and grabbed hold with both hands.

  “Don’t try to break that.” Ambrose’s rasp sawed into my skin. “I already have reasons to punish you. Don’t give me another.”

  “I have no intention of breaking this connection,” I told him quite honestly. Then I took one more step backwards and fell through the portal into the past.

  I landed on my back on the rough matting of my mother’s home. The tether gripped in my hands was invisible now, but I could feel it tightening around my throat and tying my stomach into knots. I could only hope I wasn’t bringing more with me than Okaasan could handle.

  “The evil spirit is here!” I warned, calling out even before I found my feet and set eyes upon my mother. “He’s bound to me. Quickly!”

  Then Okaasan was by my side, a stick of incense in one hand. She swirled the smoldering tip around my face, down my front, then back up my rear, leaving a trail of smoke that cavorted and eddied.

  We both waited, holding our breath so as not to impact the smoke patterns. Her lips pursed, thinner than they’d been when last I saw her. Her hair was pure white now. Had years passed?

  Neko was the one who broke the moment. Leaping off the low table, he aimed for the smoke and went straight through it. Striking my chest instead, tiny claws emerged to catch himself and they ripped into my bare skin with pain so intense I forget for one split second the agony of replacing a true mate bond with awfulness so foul it coated me in the emotional equivalent of molten tar.

  Then Okaasan was plucking Neko loose and walking away. Her steps were slower than I remembered, hitching as if her hip pained her. She slipped the incense into a holder, turned back toward me with a kimono in her free hand.

  And I forced myself to inhale so I could remind her of what was here and now and desperately important. “Okaasan! The spirit!” Had age dulled my mother’s mental processes? Or had I just forgotten how important the strictures were against nakedness in this day and age?

  Whatever the reason for Okaasan’s delay, we had to find a way to cage Ambrose, even though I couldn’t feel his presence beyond the awfulness of our mate bond. To that end, I forced sluggish muscles to spin me around as I tried to remember where my mother kept received correspondence.

  “Ambrose must have sent a letter to arrange our marriage. Where is it?”

  There. I strode toward the stack of papers only to have Okaasan place herself in my path. She was smaller than I recalled, as if she’d shrunken in on herself since my last visit. Her hand trembled as she touched my right temple, the one that was newly growing white.

  “Only two dark hairs left,” she told me, meaning I might be stuck here forever. That I might not have enough of my second life remaining to pass through one final time portal and return to the people I’d grown to care so much about.

  Lynette. Rosa. Drake.

  The agony at both gut and throat once again overcame Neko’s scratches. I couldn’t do anything about my current mate bond but I pressed a fist into my stomach, external pain somehow making internal pain easier to bear.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I lied. “I brought the evil here away from them. We have to contain it. Okaasan! Please!”

  My lips were numb, the words coming out too slowly. What would Ambrose do if we weren’t able to deal with him immediately? Would he invade my mother’s body? Had he done so already?

  No, I would have known if evil was inside Okaasan. I would have known because of my mate bond, which seemed to be pulling me backward instead of forward. Back toward the portal still open in the floor. The tug was so tenacious it nearly yanked me off balance and slammed me flat against the floor on my back.

  I forced myself to stay erect, watching Okaasan’s head shake slowly, gently. “You brought nothing with you other than the kitten,” she told me, stating what I hadn’t allowed myself to believe until that moment. “Any evil spirit was left behind.”

  Chapter 29

  Tru

  I tried to pass back through the portal. But walking out onto it felt like stepping on ice that creaked at each footfall while refusing to break.

  Neko had no such problem. He leapt into the glow as easily as ever and I tried to follow, slamming myself onto the ground and pounding my fists against a barrier that froze my skin when I touched it. The mate bond around my neck grew colder as I lay there, attempting to drag me down into Ambrose’s present.

  I only managed to bruise my cheek though. No matter what I tried, no matter what the mate bond threatened, I couldn’t pass through.

  Oddly, the portal didn’t close behind Neko this time. Instead, it stayed there, perhaps held open by my deep connection to Ambrose. And I stayed atop the portal while cold intensity strained to drag me back toward the evil I’d mated with, the evil who might even now be venting his rage on unwitting Strays with no one to make him stop.

  “You can pass through,” Okaasan said at last, speaking for the first time since telling me that Ambrose had been left behind in Drake’s present. “Watch.” She tried to take a step toward me and the portal, only to veer away when she struck what seemed to be a solid, albeit invisible, barrier. “I can’t get close, which would be the case for you as well if you’d lost the ability to pass through time. You still have two dark hairs left. You can go back if you wish.”

  Despite my mother’s assurance, the portal refused to let me in. And I couldn’t bear to walk away from it. Couldn’t bear to accept that I’d played my hand and failed, abandoning Drake to be tortured by Ambrose’s maliciousness. Drake had chosen me as his life partner and I’d betrayed him, not just by breaking our mate bond but by taking myself out of the picture so I couldn’t try again to cast Ambrose out of Drake’s skin.

  The water gun abandoned on the backseat of my brand new car haunted me. Why hadn’t I saved Drake first? Why hadn’t I put his needs above everyone else’s? He wouldn’t have hesitated if I’d been the one in danger. He wouldn’t have betrayed me the way I’d betrayed him.

  For a long time, Okaasan left me alone with the horrors inside my head. The gentle clatter of dishes was warmth in the frigidity. The hum of her voice as she sang softly to herself soothed the rawness inside me just enough to let me open my eyes again.

  “Get up,” my mother said at last, standing the length of a body away from the portal. “Move the screens to hide this. My helper will be here soon.”

  I couldn’t quite make myself speak, but I could help my mother. So I forced myself erect, my muscles moving like rusty hinges as I positioned the screens where Okaasan indicated. Then, when light continued to pulse through even that barrier, I dragged an entire futon over the portal to finish blocking it from view.

  Just in time. “We’re here!” The cheerful female voice preceded a young woman not much older than Lynette stepping in the front door with a toddler on her hip. When last I’d been here, Okaasan had told me there was a girl in the village she planned to hire to help her with chores. But this was a mother, albeit a young one, who raised her eyebrows as she set eyes on me. “You have company!”

  Somehow, Okaasan managed to explain away my presence without ever mentioning my name. Somehow, Okaasan hustled me out of the house and into the garden where no explanations were necessary.

  It was summer here. Okaasan’s squashes grew as long as my forearm, dangling neatly from trellises. Her beans had twined even higher and were ready to be picked.

  Together, we plucked vegetables off their vines, Okaasan asking me questions I wanted to answer but couldn’t. I shook my head, unable to be fully present but equally unable to be anywhere else.

  “You don’t want to go back,” my mother observed at last, after her helper had placed a steaming meal on the table then left us alone to consume it. My mother ate her portion with relish but I couldn’t quite get the chopsticks to sit in my hand properly. I seemed to have forgotten the most basic of skills.

  Like tasting. Swallowing. Breathing in and out.

  “I can’t go through the portal,” I said as the silence extended, my voice so rough it sounded like Drake’s. That thought seized my throat up so hard I couldn’t get another word out, which was just as well since Okaasan disagreed with what I’d already said.

  “No. You don’t want to. Why?”

  I couldn’t eat, but eventually I managed to force out an explanation. To tell Okaasan about the mate I’d been too scared to accept until too late. The awfulness I’d bound myself to instead. The woman, Rosa, who had taken me in out of pure kindness but who had so many relatives she didn’t need me. The brother, Jack, I’d found then immediately lost.

  And Lynette. The teenage girl had become family then had used my oath to push me away from her.

  “I have nothing to go back to,” I concluded, my throat as sore as I imagined Drake’s was after he spoke for extended periods. I’d never hear that rasp again, never hand a juice box to an alpha werewolf and accept his faint smile by way of thanks.

  Pain tried to drag me back under and Okaasan’s hand brushing across mine was no anchor.

  “Hmm,” she said in lieu of an answer. Then: “Sleep. Tomorrow will come soon enough.”

  The morning dawned gray and dripping with rain that felt like tears when Okaasan sent me out to gather duck eggs. The portal continued to glow on the floor of the cottage but it resisted my every effort to break through. Eventually, I forced myself to keep my distance rather than continuing to pick at the emotional scab.

  Time passed. One day. Another.

  I learned that Okaasan’s helper walked over from the village three times a week to clean and cook a hearty feast that lasted us until she next visited. She was the girl my mother had hired that winter I’d been given the ruby, older now and with a daughter that Okaasan entertained while the mother worked.

  “Which cup do you think the bean is under?” my mother asked the child now. And the little girl pointed with unerring certainty at the middle cup, the correct cup as we all discovered when Okaasan’s gnarled hand lifted the hiding place up.

  I remembered playing this very game with Okaasan at a very similar age, the past overlaying the present now as Okaasan slowed her motions to ensure the child’s success. I remembered my mother praising me just as she praised this girl, calling us both top-notch puzzlers. I remembered how that praise had prompted me to seek out other puzzles to untangle.

  Puzzles tried to claw at me now. Why was the portal open but refused to let me pass through it? Why were memories I thought lost forever starting to filter back again? Why did my mother never call me by name even when it was clear I was finally grounded for good in the time where I’d been raised?

  I couldn’t quite talk myself into picking up the puzzle pieces and fitting them together, however. The world was too gray, my body endlessly tired even though the hardest work I did was hoe the garden, even though the brilliant summer sun had returned and stuck.

  The mate bond around my throat stuck too. The mate bond, invisible now but always present. Always trying to cut off my air.

  Chapter 30

  Tru

  A week after my return, Okaasan shook me awake at dawn. “Brush your hair then put this on.”

  This turned out to be a kimono far too fancy to be worn while cooking or gardening. The puzzle of it almost grabbed me, but not quite. Instead, I obeyed, following my mother around the side of the house and down the path her helper always arrived on. We walked until we came to a much larger residence on the edge of a village I almost recalled.

  “Be silent and demure,” Okaasan demanded before sliding open the front door and calling out the traditional greeting: “Excuse me!”

  We were expected. A woman midway between Okaasan’s age and mine drew us inside a space fancier than my mother’s simple dwelling. We took tea together and the haze in my mind meant I didn’t realize for a very long time what we had come for. I didn’t realize Okaasan and our hostess were discussing me until a young man whose spunk reminded me of Neko appeared outside the window, dark eyes sparkling as he darted behind a tree trunk just before his mother glanced in his direction.

  “She had no babies with her first husband?” our hostess continued, turning away from the window so she could peer at me the same way Okaasan considered her duck flock when choosing the least healthy specimen to put in the pot.

  “Short marriage, very tragic,” Okaasan answered.

  The man was around my age but somehow appeared much younger as he peeked back out to see if the coast was clear. His eyes widened dramatically as if he was terrified that the woman—his mother, I guessed from the family resemblance—might catch him eavesdropping.

  I almost smiled. Almost, but not quite.

  “And what makes you think she’s worthy of my son?” our hostess continued.

  Worthy of her son?

  “Her English is very fluent. Don’t you think that would help the family business?”

  It struck me then what this was. My best kimono, Okaasan’s warning before we entered that I remain silent and demure.

  I was being paraded through this house as marriage material. As if I was staying in this time forever. As if Drake was truly lost to me and this child in a man’s body was my future not a fragment of forgotten past.

  “We need to go.” My hip knocked against the table as I rose too quickly, rattling teacups and teapot. Our hostess’s lips pursed. This wasn’t appropriate daughter-in-law behavior.

  I couldn’t have cared less. “Okaasan,” I continued. “Now.”