Free The Awakening: Aidan by Abby Niles Page B

me, I wouldn’t be so clogged up inside. She’d be taking on her fair share of the feelings too.”
    “Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, rejected shifters have only opened up one part of the Fewshon . This is not a circle, but a line with no outlet. A rejected shifter takes on both the female’s emotions and his own. Since the male has no way to get rid of the excess—no female to share the burden—the emotions back up with nowhere to go and eventually the victim is pushed over the edge, which is when a Bahrraj episode takes place.”
    “Does it happen only when she has a spike in emotions? Is that why it comes out of nowhere?”
    “From the shifters I’ve studied, it does seem to correlate to a spike in the mate’s emotions. It could be something simple like her watching a movie that makes her laugh or cry. However, I have found the more intense the emotion, the more the shifter is bombarded by it. You, however, are especially in-tune with your mate. More so than any other patient I’ve dealt with before.”
    “Why did it take so long for me have my first Bahrraj episode? Over the last few months, I noticed I was feeling her more, but I’d never blacked out.”
    “How long has it been since Ava rejected you?”
    “Six months.” He looked away. “To the day.”
    “She’s human?”
    “Yes.”
    Aidan knew that was one definite factor to her freak-out. Even though shifters lived among humans, they only revealed themselves to their human mates after marking them. While the bonding gave the gift of eternal love to a shifter and his mate, it also protected the shifter’s existence. Once marked, a shifter’s mate was incapable of verbalizing her knowledge of the shifter’s world. Perhaps Ava just wasn’t ready to learn the entire truth about the marks.
    “When did you actually bond to her?” Jaylin asked.
    “A week after we met. The night we kissed for the first time—our first official date.” A small smile played at his lips. “I’ll never forget the moment our lips touched. How perfect it felt, how I just knew.”
    Jaylin’s gaze strayed to Aidan’s before sadness stole across her features and she shook her head. “How long ago was that?”
    “A year. We were inseparable after our first date. So fucking in love. Then she was gone. I—I never imagined this would be the outcome.”
    “So you were bonded to her for six months before you told her about the shifter part of you? She never questioned the small circular bruises on her thighs?”
    Liam shook his head. “I tended to bite her there a lot. She thought they were hickeys. She even joked about it, saying at least she didn’t have to wear a turtleneck to cover them up. I let her believe that. You know how a shifter can worry about exposing our world to a human. For most, it’s an unfounded worry, but in my case, I guess it was a premonition. The night I planned to propose, I told her everything. She freaked out when I explained the marks and Anavrin and refused to have anything more to do with me.”
    Aidan clenched his teeth against rising anger. Liam shouldn’t have had this happen to him. A shifter was supposed to be secure in knowing that his human mate wouldn’t reject him. It was the entire purpose of the instinct—to find the one made for him, the one who would accept him and his world without reservations. And what had Liam been blessed with? The fucking one percent kink with the gift? It was bullshit.
    Yeah, he understood that it had to be hard to accept something that had only been reserved for fiction. Add in the Dea, Anavrin, and the eternal love bits and the human’s mind was completely blown. But still. The instinct was supposed to be accurate.
    “I don’t understand something, though,” Liam said, his brows furrowing. “I was Fewsed to her for six months and never had this overload of emotions. Why isn’t it still like that?”
    “Because her presence in your life kept you anchored. Talking to her, holding her, was a