I blew out a breath and murmured, “It starts with the Mother.”

“Your goddess.”

“Yes.”

“Is there a Father?”

“Yes, but we don’t worship him.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Mother created the land, and she created animals to roam it. She gave us what we know now to be ecosystems—perfectly balanced to sustain us.

“Then, the Father created humans, and humans destroyed that balance. To counter his creation, the Mother gave animals dominion over humans. Whichever human we bite, at certain points when the Mother’s power reaches its zenith, like at a blue moon, for example, we can blur the species.”

Sabina frowned, and I gave her a second to contemplate what I was saying, because I knew I was asking a lot of her to just blindly accept this.

To be fair, we could have been trying to tell her that red was white, and she had no alternative but to believe us.

Hell, if Austin had been the one teaching her, he’d probably have dropped some bloopers into that if he could.

“Okay, so why didn’t the Father mind that?”

“Because she beat him.”

“She beat him? How?”

“The weather. Storms. Lightning, thunder. They are her arsenal. She is the Earth, she can do with it as she wishes, and through it, she controls the Father in ways that he has no option other than to submit.”

“That’s kind of cool.”

“Not for the Father,” Austin pointed out dryly.

“True.” She grinned sheepishly, and I watched Austin’s eyes soften as he took her in.

She looked majestic, sitting in this too formal lounge in a dress that covered her to perfection. Showing not enough skin, but revealing slivers that made me want to touch the silk of her all over.

I licked my lips, just thinking of tasting her, before I forced myself back on track.

We’d wasted time this week, and we needed to get her on board with the situation. Because she was handling things so well, I saw no reason to hide anything from her.

She was rational and level-headed in a way I appreciated. Not once had she panicked or freaked out, and if I had to thank some romance author somewhere, I’d be forever grateful.

Although, she wasn’t the first woman who’d been okay with being turned into a shifter. Most males whose mates I had to transform were all grateful to people called Sherrilyn Kenyon and Nalini Singh. Apparently, they’d been pivotal in their mates wanting to belong to shifters.

Wonders would never cease, but I wasn’t foolish enough to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Tugging at my bottom lip, I thought about the best place to start next. Having always left this to the mated males, and never having gotten involved, I was as out of the loop as I could be.

Maybe Ethan saw my discombobulation, because he took over, saying, “So, with this dominion, we can transform any human at will. Which is what happened to you—on the night of a blue moon. You are what we call a wolf child. You’re an adult, fully grown, but your she-wolf is still an innocent.

“Normally, wolf children are not powerful like you. They’re mated to regular, run of the mill shifters. Not the alpha, and certainly not two additional alpha shifters.”

“Why am I different?”

“Because my mother discovered a rite in a passage. Our lore runs through the annals of time,” I murmured. “Just as humans’ does. We have history books and texts that need translating from ancient languages into modern ones.

“So the covenant is for a full-blood wolf, like myself, Austin, and Ethan. The first time we shift, we are taken to the totem once we return to our skin, and there we stand upon the pedestal, and the Mother judges us. She decides what we will be in spirit—alpha, beta, will we be leaders or soldiers, teachers or healers. It is her will, and she decides that at that moment. She also grants us a mate.”

“Sometimes, there are people who aren’t lucky enough to be given that guidance. We weren’t,” Austin stated, and for the first time, he sounded sober. Serious.

I knew the disappointment of not being given that guidance was a mutual pain.

Even if, now, it made sense.

“But…I’m your mate, aren’t I? I exist,” she asked warily, concern bobbing in those gemstone-like eyes.

“You exist now that you’re a wolf child,” I rasped. “Human mates are not shown to us. The Mother and the Father do not cross paths in this.”

“Seems shortsighted to me,” she grumbled, making me smile, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching over and starting to fiddle with a couple of strands of hair that had clung to the silk backing of the sofa.

I could scent her from over here. Flowers and sin.

My new favorite combination.

My cock hardened at the scent, her essence, but like I’d been doing all week, I pushed it aside. There was no point in thinking about it. Nothing could be done about my arousal yet, even if it was fucking painful.

“So, because you weren’t given that guidance, you knew your mate was human?”

“Either that, or we were to be given no mate at all,” Ethan murmured, his pain bleeding through, even though he knew, now, that he wasn’t fated to walk his life alone.

Our woman was sitting here, before us, asking questions. Trying to understand our culture.

We’d never be alone again.

For myself, I shuddered with relief. “We are the lucky ones.”

She swallowed, and her eyes were big as she cast each of us a glance. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. You are more important to us than you could ever imagine,” I told her, my voice husky.

Her eyes were wide with emotion. “I can see that,” she whispered.

“We are always taught to err on the side of caution. To not have hope because, where the Father is concerned, there is no hope,” Ethan rumbled.

“We are the lucky ones,” I repeated, and she charmed me further by blushing.

I smiled at her, curled a lock of her hair around my finger, and murmured, “It gets more complicated, unfortunately. Someone, like us, who has no mate, can simply have a relationship with another who is not blessed, or they can have a union with a human. There is no pressure on that scale. We are realistic creatures, of the Earth. Even without that blessing, we need a home and hearth of our own, and we will go and find one for ourselves.

“But for myself? I am alpha. All alphas are granted a mate at their covenant, for their mate is the pack’s omega.”

“When Eli wasn’t given a mate,” Austin inserted, his tone still serious because this subject was no laughing matter, “there was a huge fight over whether he would be alpha. Normally, alphas inherit the role from father to son. If twin births are rare, so is an alpha not producing the next alpha.”

“But challenges exist for a reason, don’t they?” she queried.

“Sure, but they don’t happen often, and only under dire circumstances where leaders are cruel and vindictive. But even then, that doesn’t happen often. We would be punished by the Mother if we were to abuse our position of power.”

“How?” she asked, her voice soft, her interest clear.

“I’ve never been punished, so I don’t know,” I admitted. “Some say the Mother reaps sickness on alphas who shame her.”