Free Devil's Mate (The Tribe MC: Chase of Prey Book 1) by Heather West Page A

does?”
    “I can see it on you.” She didn’t bother saying that she could read his aura.
    “Why does it bother you to use your magic?” he shot back.
    “I won’t bother asking you how you know that it does.”
    “Good.” He drummed his long fingers on the table. The coffee shop was mostly deserted, but there were a few people clinging to the corners, working on their laptops or reading books, and he didn’t like having this discussion with people near them but he knew there wasn’t much else she could do.
    “All my life, I’ve been special because of my magic,” she admitted. “It’s too big for one person to control, or at least it’s too big for me to control. I don’t really want it, either, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I’m special for having it. It’s like nobody cares what else I’m capable of. Even being a lawyer seems to be somehow connected to my family.” She clamped her lips together before she could say anything more about her family.
    “Why is it hard for you to control?”
    “After my mother died, my father didn’t want me using it. He thinks that her magic got her killed. Most people with magic are taught early on how to use it by their mother or grandmother, but I didn’t have that.”
    Sebastian was intrigued by that comment. Her mother and grandmother were both dead, but yet she had all the women of the Tribe around her, so how was it that nobody taught her to control her magic? Why was it nobody told her she was special for any other reason? That last made him angry. She was special! She was beyond special, not just for her magic, and if the people who were her family could see that, they didn’t deserve her!
    He jerked himself out of those thoughts quickly.
    “I just wish I didn’t have it.” She stared down into her coffee, her upper teeth sunk into her bottom lip. Her hands twisted on the table and her fingers pedaled with a heavy silver ring on her right index finger. Eventually she sighed and said, “I guess you think I’m foolish. Most people think I’m stupid for not wanting the great big gift, but to me, it’s not really a gift.”
    “It’s also a huge responsibility.”
    “I don’t think I can handle it.” Cara had never admitted that out loud. It wasn’t like she could go to her father or any of the other people in her Tribe and admit to them that her power felt too strong for her. If she had, they would’ve made light of the situation or taken great pains to assure her that it wasn’t, but nobody would’ve asked her why she felt that way.
    Her mother had had a huge amount of power and that had not saved her. If Cara was indeed stronger than all of the other women of the Tribe who might be Queen, how could she save any of them?
    “Maybe you just haven’t been taught how,” Sebastian suggested.
    “There’s no maybe to it, Sebastian. I have power that I can’t control and that I don’t want. I have never been told that it’s okay to want just what I do want and nothing else.”
    He reached across the table and took his hands in hers. The warmth of his hold immediately calmed her fears. “What you want is not so odd. You want to be yourself. It sucks when you have to deal with being whoever your family decides you have to be, or the person that everybody thinks you should be, just because they know who your family is.”
    How had he known that? She couldn’t have put it better herself.
    “Will you help me find these two rogues?” she asked.
    Sebastian sighed. “You said there are others who want to Hunt them. Why not let them?”
    “Because they don’t have anything to help them. They’re just ordinary people, and those wolves will tear them apart. That’s not fair. They don’t deserve to die that way. What’s more, you know the consequences of being bitten and surviving. I don’t want to meet one of the other Hunters in an alley some night just to find out that they’re also rogues.”
    She had loyalty to the humans,