“Never seen one.” Jude wasn’t at all convinced they were real. Vampires and the rest were all flesh and blood. But ghosts?
“Lucky you.” Mack drained his beer.
“Wait, you have?”
“Only as a…” He tilted his head as though Jude should understand the missing part of the sentence. “I ambled past a deserted cabin one night. Ghost was hanging from a tree asking to be pulled down. I bolted because I didn’t want to get the life sucked out of me. I went back in daylight. Place felt weird, but I didn’t see anything.”
Jude was doing his best to keep his mouth shut, but not doing a great job at keeping the shock off his face. “How different are you, when you, you know?”
“Stronger, faster. Better sense of smell.”
“And the ability to see ghosts. So there’s nothing up at North?” But it hadn’t been a ghost that had killed Morris’s cow.
“Nope. Though plenty of tales get told while downing a bottle of liquor.”
Jude was very tempted to ask what else Mack had gotten up to as a teen, but their meals arrived, and for a few minutes the conversation died. The diner was relatively noisy as people talked to each other and made comments at the TVs. It was the kind of place where it wasn’t easy to overhear a conversation in full.
Mack broke the temporary lull. “What about you? You had fun at North.”
Jude swallowed. “I don’t let loose very often. Cities, well, there’s a lot of electrical things.” And he didn’t want to get into the details about what had gone wrong or why he was here.
“Are storms all you can do?”
Jude laughed and picked up a fry. “I can charge phones, cars. If there’s ever a blackout, I don’t need a generator. But there’s a fine balance between powering a circuit and overloading it.”
“The sign above the Whisky Riot hadn’t worked in five years, and then you show up.”
Jude shrugged, then picked up his burger and ate a few bites. Mack watched him. The silence between them thickened.
“You still owe me an explanation. You aren’t telling me something.”
There were plenty of things he wasn’t telling Mack, but he nodded. “Do you remember the kiss?”
Mack frowned, his eyebrows drawing close, but his eyes were bright. “I can’t be expected to remember every witch I kiss.”
How many witches had Mack kissed? Jude pressed his lips together. Where were all his pretty words now? His clever apologies? “Something happened.”
The frown deepened and erased all traces of humor. “You did do something to me.”
“No, I didn’t. Or at least it wasn’t deliberate.”
Mack’s foot snaked behind Jude’s calf to stop him pulling away as the bear shifter leaned forward. “What did you do?”
Jude wanted to escape, but when confronted with an angry bear, the best thing to do was remain still, wasn’t it? Or was it run? He couldn’t remember. His appetite vanished, and his mouth went dry. Jude remained frozen.
“Spill it or I’ll tie you to a tree like bait so I can get a look at the creature.” Mack’s voice was low, and if he’d been saying something nice, it would’ve been seductive.
“I didn’t know it would happen.”
“What would happen?”
He had no idea how to say “You’re my familiar!” when Mack wasn’t his anything. “What do you know about familiars?”
Familiars. Mack took a deep breath and remained calm. He wouldn’t crush the beer bottle. Jude had better not be suggesting, or even hinting, that is what had happened. His lips tingled at the memory. That tingle traced through his blood and made something else react.
“Familiars are cat or dog shifters.” By cats and dogs, Mack meant shifters like lions, panthers, wolves, and coyotes. Familiars were not bears.
“They can be any shifter,” Jude corrected.
Mack leveled a glare at Jude.
Jude held his stare and swallowed. “Even a bear, apparently.”
Mack shook his head. “No.”
“It happened.”
“You made it happen.” But he knew enough about familiars that it couldn’t be forced. It was random. What were the odds that the right witch would turn up in his town and kiss him?
“Really?” Jude leaned forward. “You think I wanted this? I came here to find the thing. Not to get bound to you.”
“And what’s wrong with me?” Mack didn’t want to be a familiar, but he’d thought there was something between them at the bar, before the kiss and the accusation and the fight.
Jude studied him. His gaze slid past Mack’s skin and stripped bare his soul. Mack blinked and looked away before Jude worked some kind of magic on him. More magic.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. But now we have this bond and we have to work out what we’re going to do with it. Usually the bond is cemented.”
“I know how it’s cemented.” He growled. They might have done that accidentally if Jude hadn’t thought him the cow mutilator and tried to electrocute him. He couldn’t deny that he wanted to get Jude into his bed. But the rest? Having a mate and of being bound to someone, that wasn’t right. Especially as he didn’t get a choice and was supposed to submit to the will of his witch. Nor did he like the idea that the desire was no longer his own and it was magic doing his thinking. Had it been magic, the lure of his witch, that had made him want Jude that first night? He didn’t know. “If you don’t want this, and neither do I, then that’s not a great idea to take it further.”
Jude picked at the label on the beer bottle. “It’s not that I don’t want it. It was unexpected.” He flicked a glance at Mack, naked desire in his green eyes.
Jude was still attracted to him.
As much as his body liked that idea and wanted to explore it further, he wouldn’t tie himself to a witch. “No.”
“The bond would give us both new abilities.”
“Still no, because I’m not surrendering my life to you.” Mack finished his beer. “I’ll help you
