Wolf Song (Wolf Singer Prophecies Book 1)

seem like two completely different entities. “I’m glad for that, then.” I didn’t know what else to say.
Creed laid a tentative hand on mine when I would have rather retreated into my memories. “Your dad had a lot to do with that, you know. He cast a shield over us and kept us safe in the Hill Country and mountain basin. Shielded us so we could grow.”
I nodded to indicate that I heard his words, but it was hard for me to make that connection with the Reggie Bishop I knew. Creed’s thumb played over the back of my hand and I couldn’t help but think that his mocha skin was well-suited to my caramel. And together, we were caramel mocha.
I took my hand back from him and raked my fingers through my hair. “Did Zorah say anything important that I should remember? I kind of tuned her out.”
He laughed without mirth, a kind of pulse in the back of his throat. "If it helps, she seemed to have difficulty speaking as well, so she might be under the same restrictions as me. She only admitted to working at a lab, ramina. What she didn't make clear was the fact that you were taken from your real family, taken to be preyed upon like some lab rat. Or worse. Used like a broodmare to create some other kind of monstrosity."
He didn't seem to be talking about a simple test tube or genetic splicing. The way he was simmering, it seemed he meant actual breeding and mating.
The thought of it made me sick. It wasn’t like I was sitting around dreaming about my wedding day and meeting Mr. Right, but being seen as nothing more than a living test tube was particularly abhorrent.
I hid a shiver. "It's that lab, right? AEGIS? She couldn't say anything, but it was whatever lab that's been doing this? The one in that coded message?"
Creed nodded. "Yes. They were the ones that created the monsters of this world."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "My dad. Ma? What were their roles in all this? Keep me close like some prized pig for slaughter?”
Creed grumbled in his chest. “Your dad. Your mom. Reggie and Lena Bishop. They saved you. They smuggled you out of the lab when you were just a baby and kept you. Raised you as their own.” The passion behind his words was arresting.
"Your mother saved you again that night she walked out of the protected wards." There was no censure there, just unmarred facts that Creed thought I should know.
The weight of survivor’s guilt still squeezed my heart. “What lured her away from the wards?” I asked quietly. “Do you know?”
He was pensive. "I believe it was the shimmer folk. They were hungry."
I nodded. Shimmer folk were also known as the weird folk. The fae.
"The night your dad left you, he visited the elders. He had every intention of coming back to you. But he was fulfilling his promise. He thought it was time for you to know your past. He would have told you."
The unspoken But he didn’t make it hung in the air.
“You know the whole ‘keep her past secret for her own safety’ is highly overrated, right?” I tried to keep the bitterness from my voice but failed. I knew that none of this was his fault, but I had no one else to vent to. “I mean, whatever happened to ‘knowledge is power’ anyway?”
Creed nodded. “I know, I agree with you. The elders, though, were convinced that if you knew, even a stray thought would have attracted Reapers.” He made me look at him, pressing strength and faith from his metallic eyes into mine. "You have to understand, Soleil. You were the heart of two shifter packs. I know you don't understand what that means, any of it, but it was a tumultuous time for shifters and they made their decision to hide you out of fear and out of seeing their loved ones be killed or experimented on. They wanted a different path for you. They did not make their decision lightly." He held my hand again. “You were loved. The decision that was made for you was done from love.”
“But why? I’m nothing special. Yet you make it sound like I’m some kind of hope or something. Look at me. No talents or gifts. I’m just me.”
He looked me over like I was trying to sell him something and I couldn't be believed. Not really.
"You are special just by existing. You need to believe that."
Sure. I'd believe it. Simply because I was too tired to argue otherwise.
Out of the shadows, Vin and Remy appeared again, followed by one I hadn't met. He sort of materialized next to them as if he'd dropped out of the sky.
The stranger’s thick, rich black hair tumbled over his shoulders, held back by a leather cord. A tattoo that looked like tribal marks curved gracefully up his left cheekbone. He wore tight black jeans that hugged his muscled thighs, his black shirt buttoned as if in after-thought, framing a defined torso.
He tilted his head to the side, looking at me like I was a curiosity. "You don't remember me, do you?"
There was that slight sheen in his eyes, the yellow ring and dilated pupils reminded me of a hawk’s eye. "Were you that bird at my window?"
Suppressed laughter from Creed turned into a cough as this newcomer came closer.
His decadent lips twisted into a roguish smirk. "They call me Osiris, and no. The bird at your window is Hugh. The raven." He spoke with a lush accent that curled around his words.
As if on cue, the huge black bird plummeted from the sky to drop onto his shoulder. He looked normal-sized there, even though he had practically filled my window and had a hard time finding footing when he had visited me.
"Creed and I were agreed that you would benefit from borrowed memories. Since we,” he indicated Creed and himself, “are unable