Free Jace by Sarah McCarty Page B

lost. “Weres don’t leave.”
     
    WERES don’t leave.
    Three words said with such acceptance and the grief of one who mourned a death. Three words that marked the differences in their philosophies. Three words that emphasized the cultural chasm between them. It wasn’t that he was vampire that upset Miri. It wasn’t that her pack would ostracize her for marrying him, which, alone, would cripple most wolves. What had shaken Miri to the core was not that he had left her, but that he could. One security a wolf always had was a pack to come back to and a mate always at his or her side. Wolves lived to find their mates. Sometimes lived hundreds of years before they did. Once they found them, according to the wolf lore Derek had shared with him, they would never know loneliness again. A mate was the other half of a soul. An inseparable other half. He remembered how he’d kissed Miri and smiled that day before he’d left. He’d been looking at her, thinking how beautiful she was and how wonderful it would be to come back and find her waiting. Derek had been quite explicit in that tidbit of were mating when Jace had thought to ask, after Miri’s disappearance.
    Once bonded, werewolves could not conceive of separating from their mates, and they suffered physically if they did. Miri had grown up secure in the belief that once bonded with her mate, he could never leave her. But she’d bonded with him, and he’d left her as easily as he would have any human woman, comfortable with the parting because he’d known he would return. He touched his finger to one of the white lines of strain bracketing the sides of her mouth, eyeing the drop of blood on her lower lip. The smile he’d meant to be shared must have seemed so cavalier to her, mocking even.
    “My leaving really shook you up, didn’t it?”
    Her gaze ducked his and her lips pressed together, flattening the drop of blood. She was embarrassed about how she’d been back then. “That was my fault. I was naive and I didn’t think.”
    Neither had he, too caught up in the passion and miracle of finding the woman who fit him. He’d just wanted to clear everything out of his way so he could be with her. In his rush he’d just managed to trample all over her giving nature and make her ashamed. “And I didn’t know.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Yeah, it does.”
    He wiped the smear of blood from her lip, remembering the unique taste of their blood together, thinking of his child out there somewhere, her only protection being that, supposedly, no one knew who she was. The fragility of Faith’s safety drove him crazy. She should be at the Circle J, protected by her family, surrounded by love. Not out there somewhere facing Lord knew what. Miri shifted against him. A long hank of hair fell over her face. Jace smoothed it back, using the pressure of his hand to keep her cheek against his chest, holding her to his warmth. “I never thought to ask if matings were different for weres.”
    “Whereas I’ve lived my life knowing the fickleness of vampires.”
    Of that he had no doubt. The other thing he’d learned from Derek was the deep-seated prejudice most weres felt toward their companions in immortality. One of those prejudices was the ludicrous belief that vampires couldn’t be faithful. “I guess, to you, it looked like I fell right into the stereotype.”
    “You left.”
    She kept holding that fact out like a talisman.
    “I won’t leave you again.”
    “Yes, you will.” Her hand opened over his chest as the pain left. “You won’t be able to help it.”
    Her gaze didn’t waver from his, the deep brown of her eyes near black in his night vision, devoid of the softness he was used to seeing there. A shiver shook her. Damn, she was getting cold. No matter what he did, her body temperature kept dropping. “We can fight about the semantics of that statement later.”
    “When it’s dark?”
    He forced a smile. “That’d be preferable to now.”
    She