Free Kindred by J. A. Redmerski

will denounce your Lineage.”
    “I don’t care,” Isaac said coldly, as if he truly meant it, though the repercussion still wounded him. “An Alpha protects his own.”
    My palms were sweating and I had stopped breathing at some point, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything under the sound of my breath. But at those last words, the breath caught in the back of my throat just as I had thought it safe to let go. I swallowed hard. An Alpha protects his own. Trajan had said that once, the night I met him and Aramei in the cave. A hundred things went through my mind then, but the one I plucked out of the disarray, the one my rational mind chose to believe was the obvious: Isaac’s first and most important responsibility is to me. Alpha or not, Isaac’s loyalties are to me and while it makes me feel like the most important girl in the world, it also doesn’t feel right .
    Why do I want to be the reason that Isaac loses anything ? I’m not well-schooled in the werewolf history and how their principles, beliefs and customs work, but I know enough to know that Isaac is giving up everything for me.
    I don’t like it, that he feels such a responsibility to me. I don’t like it that I feel like a responsibility at all.
    After that day, after I had snuck quietly away from the bedroom door, I tried to talk to Isaac about it on many different occasions. I never let on that I had been eavesdropping so it was difficult to fish for answers about things I wasn’t supposed to know.
    But I never got much in the way of answers not coated by simple, unconvincing half-truths.
     
    “I’m taking you home as soon as it’s over,” Isaac says, looking over at me in the front seat of his car. We pull into the driveway and he kills the engine.
    “Fine by me,” I agree and go to open the car door. I don’t feel any better this time after the lightheaded spell. Instead, it seems to linger, just enough for me to know it’s there, but not enough to make me want to sit down and gather myself.
    Isaac comes around to my side of the car quickly and takes my hand.
    The Mayfair house is crowded, more so than I have ever seen and that’s saying a lot. I don’t know half of the people all standing around gawking at us as we make our way past the kitchen and into the den. They don’t gawk anymore because I’m with Isaac. They do it because I’m human.
    I wonder if Harry and I are the only humans. He stands off to the side near the staircase with Daisy in front of him, encircled in his arms. I’m surprised at how well Harry takes to all of this, how easily he accepts it. He and I hardly ever talk about it anymore, about his girlfriend and my boyfriend being werewolves (we talk about them all the time, just not in that way). Sometimes I wonder if he has a better handle on everything than I do. That he somehow fits into this secret world naturally, and I’m still a newbie working my way through the amateur stage.
    I feel like an outsider around everyone but Isaac and the few friends in our little group.
    The house smells richly of food: pot roast, buttered dinner rolls and maybe even some kind of pie. All I know for sure is that it isn’t helping the creeping sickness, which I react to instantly once the scent reaches my nostrils. I feel my throat retch a little, but I let out a deep breath and help myself farther away from the kitchen entrance. Isaac is beside me all the way and I notice as we approach the couch, those who had been sitting on it, as usual, move at once. I never look up from staring down at the floor. Honestly, I’m sure I’ll either puke, or pass out if I look at anything higher than my waist.
    Slowly, I lean into the softness of the couch. The back of my neck I feel is moist with a gross, prickling sweat, the kind I remember feeling right before I puked in school last year after getting food poisoning.
    This is bad.
    I don’t remember feeling like this with the flu. At first, when the symptoms were only mild, yes it