Page 85 of Old Secrets

I giggled, as Jake enjoyed plying me with food whenever I turned around, often irritating Desmond with his fridge raids. I suspected Desmond postured to get Jake standing up for himself a little more, as the enforcer played at backing off whenever Jake was able to stand firm and growl a warning.

Desmond toed lines with my mate, making sure Jake could stand up for himself while not forcing him to stand in a dominant position.

I had no idea what the end goal was, but I appreciated that Jake recoiled a little less and wasn’t stressed with his little displays in the Desmond household.

When Jake needed affection, someone stepped up, and I already saw results in the first day of our stay.

I’d have to find some way to thank the Shadow Pope later.

With a smile, I captured Jake’s hand in mine and said, “I was worried I might be like a cuttlefish, doomed to drop over dead after having an entire litter of children, leaving Jake to be a beleaguered father of a bazillion foxes, all just like me.”

My mate scowled at me. “Cuttlefish again?”

Across the living room, not far from the rest of my family, Desmond laughed.

Viola joined me in giggling. “I can understand where you might get that idea, but no. You’ll go forth and multiply, albeit you’ll go forth and multiply every thirty to fifty years on average. You might go back into your reproductive cycle again earlier, but that depends on your mate and how persistent he is about wanting another litter. After your first litter, you will find yourself blessed without cycling. You’ll know you’re entering your reproductive cycle again when you have to worry about menstruating again. We’ll have another litter in a few years.”

I braced for the worse. “How many survive?”

“One or two of six to eight. We lose most of them in the first week, and we give them their rites and bury them—and we don’t tell our children how many siblings they would have had if life were a little kinder to us. They know if they meet others like us they won’t be able to have children.”

“Like my family. My parents are the only ones who can have children.”

“That’s right. We’re a generation younger than your parents, and our generation is the absolute last able to have any children at all. But your wolf gives the rest of us hope. I’ll be sending my children out to hunt unmated wolves, as your wolf is good for you—and we can cope with the issue of the wolf spirits.”

That led me back to one of the cases connected to Greenwich: little Jacob. “Were you the one who killed those men in Pennsylvania?”

She smiled. “Caught me, did you? How’d you guess it was me?”

“You killed like a fox because you are a fox—and the forensics team identified the bodies hadn’t been killed in quite the same way as the other cases. Did you rescue Jacob?”

“In a way. Greenwich was hunting him, and I shifted to my fox and sent him scurrying out of the area, playing as a bigger, meaner predator. I meant him no harm, but I needed him to leave so I could deal with those hunting him.”

“And the gunfire under the bridge?”

“I started my hunt as a human, and I staged the shooting in such a way where someone might believe a small child might be the one hunted. Then I herded my victims into the gully and finished them off there. They deserved their fate—and I have spoken with your Inquisition about my kills. It turns out I will be receiving a nice check for my efforts. We’re also being paid for the time we had you as an infant, keeping you safe from Greenwich.”

“Thank you.” At a loss for what else to say, I stared at where my parent and family still wept, converged around Jaden. “Why aren’t they swarming you, too?”

“Oh, they will eventually. Jaden is better at the emotional stuff than I am. I’m the cold-blooded killer of our pairing, and he’s the sensitive heart, much like your mate is the sensitive one. We tend to partner up that way. It makes for a better relationship, especially over the years. Jaden suggested I be the one to teach you because we’re alike in spirit. We did plenty of crying over you, although it’s unlikely you remember that. We’d given you enough formula for you to be properly fed, quite possibly for the first time in your life, so you’d slept while we’d worked through our feelings on it. We’ll have our turn as well, but right now, they need us to be calm so they can become calm.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen them?”

“Millions of years. We don’t count the passage of time much. We’ve been awake for a few thousand years. This era was too interesting to sleep through. Your parents are going to want and need help with their next litter, I’m sure. We’ve been briefed on the abuses they’ve endured, and we know more about how to be parents than they do at this point. And when you have your first litter, we’ll be around to help as well. The first years are the hardest and the longest. Infancy is painfully long, and it’s quite difficult to hide, so we have to move around often. But I think you’ll be fine. This area is large enough you can spend a few months in each roost with little risk of people clueing in. Or you can put the infants in our care while you’re out and about. There are ways to handle it. Once they’re old enough, they do grow closer to a human rate, albeit slower.”

I once again braced for bad news and asked, “How old should our children be before they date?”

“Once infancy is over, fifteen to sixteen years is usually old enough to reach general maturity. We’re slow growing and hormonal, but I joined with Jaden fairly young. You were plenty old enough to decide for yourself what you wanted to do with your life. Think of it as battling your hormones for longer than normal, especially once your fox resurfaced. You and your mate haven’t done anything wrong. You just went through adolescence twice, once as a human, and once as a fox—and that’s enough to rattle anybody. Your children won’t have the same problems because you’ll be there to surface their foxes when they start human adolescence, so they’ll be mature by an appropriate age. We target eighteen for ours, and it works well enough—and we falsify their birth certificates after they start departing their infancy stage. We’ll teach you how to do it, and I suppose the Inquisition will help as needed. They seem willing to accommodate our circumstances. They’re going to check over our paperwork to make certain we won’t be scrutinized later. They’re used to dealing with people who live for longer than humans.”

Well, we’d have to do a lot of talking about it, but her answers offered some comfort. With luck, we wouldn’t have as much of the grief and healthy children. But, if we followed the sad history of my kind, we’d deal with it for the sake of those who survived. “I’m not going to handle losing any of them well.”

“None of us do. We have a lot of support. There’s two hundred of us scattered around the United States, and we all go through it—and that is excluding our children, who have been warned they won’t be able to procreate without taking steps. But I think I’ll set my little ones off to hunt wolves. The wolves I’ve seen so far are fine specimens, and they might be able to handle us at our worst.”

“They don’t deserve us at our best if they can’t handle us at our worst?” I guessed.

“Exactly so. And don’t look so alarmed, Jake. I promise you, the best is yet to come, and you’ve had your fill of the worst of it. If we have any say into it, you’ll find your days full of joy—and fox teeth, if you don’t happen to jump high enough when Karma wants something.”

Jake laughed, and to my relief, he relaxed beside me. “I think we’ll be fine.”