Cael (Were Zoo Book 11)

and not for a life-long mating. His mother and father were not mated, but neither had ever mated others. While both his parents believed he should’ve had a child years earlier and not waited, they weren’t romantics at heart like Cael was. He wanted to wait for his soulmate. He didn’t want to mate with a random female simply to have a child, he wanted to build a life with the one female on the planet meant for him, and in order to do that he had to wait for her.
He’d certainly like it if she hurried up, though. His bed was damn lonely.
“You look like you’re thinking about something,” Kelley said.
Cael looked up and realized that Rhapsody was gone. Kelley explained she went to take a shower while Khap was sleeping.
“I was thinking about my soulmate.”
“You’ll find her when the time is right.”
“Everyone always says that.”
“Well, it’s true. You don’t want to go into an arranged mating or have a child without finding your soulmate, so you have no choice but to wait. Once you find her, though, your whole world is going to change in a heartbeat. Finding Rhapsody was like suddenly realizing that part of me had been missing and I hadn’t ever realized it. She completes me.”
Cael rolled his eyes. “You’re getting really poetic there, bro.”
“Love will do that to a male. Wait and see how goofy you sound when you find your soulmate.”
Cael and Kelley talked for a while longer, with Cael holding his friend’s son and thinking about how much he longed for what Kelley had. He knew it would be his someday, he just hoped he’d find his soulmate sooner rather than later.
Cael’s phone buzzed, alerting him that his shift was about to start. He handed the still-sleeping Khap over to his father. “Where did you guys get his name, anyway? It’s cool.”
“It’s our names together. Rhapsody was trying to combine my first and middle names to come up with a new name, and I suggested we use both our first names and see what we could come up with. As soon as we said Khap, we both loved it.”
“Maybe you’ll start a trend in the park of combining names.”
“I think because Khap is unique as an elephant-panther hybrid that having a unique name suits him.”
“You’re really lucky, Kelley. Congrats.”
“You’ll be lucky too someday, trust me. I believe with my whole heart that every shifter has a soulmate out there somewhere, it just requires a whole lot of patience.”
Cael said goodbye and left the house, shutting the door quietly so he didn’t wake Khap.
“Hey.”
Cael looked up and saw his alpha, Alistair, walking out of his house. There were only four elephants in the memory led by Alistair. Kelley and Cael had both come from other memories, but Indio had been part of Alistair’s memory and followed him when he came to New Jersey to join with the other shifters. Cael was a veterinarian and handled the non-shifter animals, which they referred to as the “norms.” Alistair, Indio, and Kelley cleaned the paddocks and tended to the norms, but Cael was solely responsible for the norms’ health and welfare. He’d come to New Jersey when he was eighteen, and after spending time with the norms, he’d decided to go to college to be able to take care of them. There were three sections of norms—rhinos were in one paddock, giraffes were in another, and deer, antelope, and a cranky Moose named Tank were in a third. A bird sanctuary had been created in the fall and was run by owl shifter Jess and her wolf mate Auden, and while birds were not his specialty, he helped with the rehabbing and care of the natural birds whenever he could.
“You heading topside?” Cael asked as he caught up to his alpha.
“In a little while. I have a meeting with the alphas to discuss the VIP tour.”
“What about it?”
“We’re just going to look at the numbers and see if there’s a way to cut costs for the tours without sacrificing what they were designed for. We probably need to either do more tours in a day or add a day.”
“So long as you’re not planning to stop them.”
“Not even a little bit,” he said. “We’re also talking about whether we can get into some online advertising and encourage people to register online which would help with printing and shipping costs for the paper tickets.”
“Advertising sounds like a good idea to me.”
“Me too. We’ll see what the number crunchers say.”
“Good luck,” Cael said.
“Thanks. I’ll see you up in the paddocks after the meeting.”
The two parted ways, his alpha heading out into the hall to go to the conference room as Cael opened the door that led to a stairwell that would take him up into the norms’ paddocks. He could get topside three ways—through the main hall, with a stairwell that would take him directly to the employee cafeteria, through a stairwell that would take him into the elephant paddock, and through a second stairwell that would take him into one of the norms’ paddocks. Both paddock entrances opened up in the floor of large maintenance sheds in the paddocks, so he could get into the paddock without having to walk all the way around the park.
He climbed the stairs and opened the door in the floor that led to his favorite of the norm paddocks: the one with Tank. The moose’s full name was Cantankerous, and he was the park’s unofficial mascot. Cael was going to check each deer and antelope to ensure they were healthy, give them their vitamins, and set out feed, and then he’d see if Tank would cooperate with an exam. Sometimes the moose would, and sometimes he’d try to swing his big antlers around like he