Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Shoulder a polite inch away from hers, Arwen put down his virgin mojito. “Hang around with bears and this is where you end up.” A dire warning in his tone. “Next thing you know, you’re mated and raising six cubs of your own.”
Pavel nudged Arwen’s hip with his own. “Six, luchik moy? I was aiming for an even dozen.”
This time, Arwen’s blush reached the tips of his ears.
Chapter 38
The changelings have a concept called skin privileges. It means that the right to touch is precious and a gift. It is never to be taken. It is to be given. We as empaths must hew to the same ethos when it comes to emotions.
We must never steal that which is not freely given.
Simply because we can read the emotions of others doesn’t mean we should. There is a difference between passive absorption and active excavation.
—Excerpted from the Empathic Code of Ethics
ARWEN WANTED TO bite his playful bear back, but he remained less comfortable making public gestures of affection than Pavel. He didn’t have any problems whatsoever allowing Pavel to kiss and touch him in public. He loved his bear’s possessive affection. Even if it did make him all hot and flustered.
He was reaching to take a sip of his drink in an effort to cool himself down when Theo said, “How does it work in changeling society? Is it like with Psy procreation contracts? You contract with a surrogate to carry the cub?”
Arwen realized he’d have to teach Theo that such personal questions were considered rude in most human and changeling company. The other races weren’t like the Psy, with their cold and pragmatic deals when it came to the next generation. But it was clear that Theo had asked the question in good faith—and she’d done so in the right company. Neither Pasha nor his brother were the type to take offense.
“Not quite,” he said in response to her question, then took a drink to give himself time to get used to the emotional sense of her.
Arwen didn’t read strangers; it went against every rule of empathic ethics. But that didn’t stop certain things from just filtering in—in the same way that a changeling couldn’t help picking up scents, he couldn’t help picking up the outer layer of a person’s emotions.
Theo’s were . . . complex.
When, back at the cantina, Pavel had told him that she was a Marshall—Pax Marshall’s twin—he’d been stupefied. She didn’t feel like a Marshall to his senses. While he’d never met Pax or Theo, he had run across a number of their relatives, and to say he’d hated every single interaction would be a vast understatement.
“Cold” wasn’t the right word. Many in Psy society read as cold because of Silence, but it was a cold without menace. Just a state of being, akin to the cold of a glacier or a river.
Marshall cold was . . . vicious, the ice threaded with poison.
Theo, in contrast, was a dark inferno. So hot that he was tempted to breach the ethical rules of his designation and warn Yakov. Because that intensity of heat? It came from a deep-seated rage. He’d never felt its like. You’d think the rage would repel him as much as the cold, but Theo’s rage was an intensely strange thing.
There was no ugliness to it.
Arwen still hadn’t figured out what that meant. Except . . . his grandmother’s rage was the closest he’d felt to what lived within Theo. Ena Mercant was Silence in motion, a woman who was ice to the external world.
Inside the family, however, they knew her love to be a blade unsheathed.
The first time Arwen had felt the rage within his grandmother was right after he’d turned five. It was the first time he’d seen his grandmother’s warrior avatar: a cold-eyed Valkyrie with vengeance in her heart.
“Grandmama,” he’d asked, staring up at her with scared eyes. “Why do you have a black storm inside you?”
She’d crouched down, put her hands on his arms, and said, “Because a person I believed I could trust did a bad thing to one of mine. That storm is my fuel. It drives me and sustains me.” Her arms wrapping around him. “Don’t be scared of it, Arwen. The storm will only ever rise against bad people.”
Who, he found himself wondering, did Theo’s storm rise against?
Aware of her eyes on him, he put down his mojito and returned to the question she’d asked about procreation contracts. “No bear would give up all rights to a cub they’d carried,” he explained. “Especially not a maternal bear, the ones who most often volunteer to give this gift.”
“No contracts?”
He understood her shock as only another Psy could. “Their society works differently from ours, is structured in a completely dissimilar way.” He felt an odd gentleness toward this woman who was a contained storm. “A pregnant clanmate is a pregnant clanmate, with access to all the usual medical services and clan resources. They don’t need to insure against financial strain with a contract.”