Covet (Clann)

if the world could actually contain witches and vampires, then why not shapeshifting kitty cats?
    “So this is a Keeper,” I said.
    “Yep,” Anne said.
    One of them, at least, Ron said.
    “Are there more like you?”
    Oh yeah. Too many, in fact. It’s why my family had to leave Palestine. The Keepers are overrunning the woods there and need to start spreading out before we attract more notice than we’ve already gotten. Heck, we’ve already been seen so many times in the area over the years that they named one of the high school mascots after us!
    I frowned at the panther. No, at Ron . “Why can I hear your voice inside my head?”
    Part of the Clann’s original spell, he answered. It allows us to communicate with descendants, or in your case partial descendants, when we’re in panther form. Very handy in times of war, I guess. Not that any descendants have bothered to include us in anything they’ve been up to for the last hundred years. And it works both ways, by the way. I can hear your thoughts too right now.
    Oh yeah? I thought, testing him.
    Yeah, he answered, and I could hear the smile in his tone.
    Cool.
    “Okay, this is boring,” Anne said. “Can we all go home now?”
    Fine, Ron said, lightly leaping down off the tailgate.
    “Sav’s riding with me,” Anne called out to his retreating furry backside, stuffing her bow and wrist device in the backseat of her truck again before hopping down over the side of the truck.
    I climbed into the front passengar side of her truck in silence, still trying to absorb the whole Keeper revelation. What the Clann had done to those families—putting a spell on their very DNA that continued to work on their descendants throughout the centuries—was some seriously hardcore old magic. Talk about fundamentally affecting someone! I could see why the Clann had done it, too. The Keepers would make amazing allies during a battle. So why had the Clann let that alliance fade?
    Ego, I finally decided. The Clann had gotten cocky, arrogantly believing their magic was more than enough in the modern world.
    What a shame, too. Now the Keepers were stuck with what they were, whether they were needed or not.
    “So what do you think?” Anne blurted out when she couldn’t take the silence anymore.
    “Um, I think…wow would be the word I’m looking for.”
    “Yeah. It’s definitely some heavy stuff. I tried to talk Ron out of telling you, but he was convinced it would make you feel less alone or something.” She rolled her eyes.
    “No, I’m glad he did. He’s right, in a weird way it does make me feel better.” I snuck a glance at her. “So I guess this is why you broke up with him?”
    She nodded, her mouth tightening at the corners. “I’ve had time to get used to the idea now. Especially after knowing about your…stuff. But when he first told me…” She shook her head, staring at the road through the windshield, the approaching lights of Jacksonville lighting up her face. “It was just way, way too much info to handle all at once. What kind of guy drops a bomb like that on a girl he’s only been dating for a few months?”
    “Weren’t you two together for like eight months or something?”
    “The key word being months . He wasn’t even supposed to tell me about the Keepers, much less show me! No one outside the Clann or the Keepers is supposed to know about it. But there he went, blabbing his mouth to me last year. Was it any wonder I freaked out?” Her eyes looked wild in the streetlights as we reentered the city limits and the pines were replaced with buildings again.
    “So you dumped him because he was different.”
    “No, of course not! You know I’m not like that. It wasn’t the whole shifter business itself that bugged me. It was the fact that he was dumping this major huge family secret on me! I mean, what if I’d taken it into my head to shoot a video of him shifting with my phone when he didn’t know it or something, and I put it on YouTube?”
    “Oh Anne. You wouldn’t do that.”
    “But I could have, for all he knew! Not to mention he was my first boyfriend and I was all of sixteen when he showed me. That is just way too heavy for a girl’s very first relationship. For all I knew, he was planning on proposing the week after that!”
    “So you broke up with him. Because he trusted you with his deepest, darkest secret.”
    Silence as we pulled up to a stoplight and waited for the light to turn green. More silence as we took off