Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

this?”
    “More than willingly. It was my story. I was the lead, I wouldn’t even share, for fear of being scooped. That night, I was supposed to meet a bear shifter who’d lost a friend to the abduction ring and had some information for me.”
    “A bear,” he said, biting off the words. “A bear shifter, one of the most dangerous kinds of shifters.”
    She nodded, watching him carefully in case he made a move to slam his head into the bars again. His muscles had all gone tense and hard, like he’d be happy to thunk her head into the bars. She understood the cause, because she’d seen inside his soul. He had a protective streak a mile wide.
    Except when it came to her. With her, it was as wide as the ocean itself.
    It scared her even as it sent a thrill through her. Nobody had cared enough to want to protect her for a long time, except maybe for Rick, and even with him, the story always came first.
    “Anyway, moving on,” she said, “Susannah picked that night to tell me about the baby. I was thrilled for her and she was so happy and her boyfriend was so happy, and I guess she decided to just put everything on the table, so she told me she was a shifter. A fox shifter.”
    Brennan nodded. “This made you unhappy?”
    “Not that she was a shifter. I thought that was kind of cool, had a million questions for her. But my mind couldn’t get past the fact that she’d hidden it from me, for all those years. She’d known she was a shifter since she was thirteen years old—and for four of those years, she’d hidden it from me. Her best friend.” She shoved a hand through her hair, frustrated, wanting him to understand. “We’d lived together, and all that time she never trusted me enough to share her deepest secret with me.”
    “It hurt you.”
    “It nearly broke me,” she admitted. “I had a childish temper tantrum, to be honest. Yelled at her that she wasn’t my friend, how could I trust her when she clearly didn’t trust me, that kind of thing. I hadn’t slept much in weeks, on the track of that story, and everything just exploded in my skull.”
    “You left for the meeting?” Brennan asked, his clear green gaze holding sympathy and something deeper. Shared pain. Of course. Corelia and the baby.
    She nodded. “I did. The last thing I ever said to this woman who was closer to me than any sister could have been was that maybe I should just move out and leave them to be one big, happy family.” She felt the hot, bitter tears slide down her face but didn’t bother to wipe them Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    away.
    “She died thinking I hated her.”
    “No,” Brennan said. “She died knowing you loved her. Friends and family argue and fight, but it means nothing. It’s human nature. Love isn’t perfectly patient or kind or sunny. Love is volatile and tempestuous and forgiving.” He leaned forward. “She forgave you, Tiernan, probably before you ever made it out of the house. The woman you describe would have done no less.”
    A boulder the size of one of Yellowstone’s bison suddenly lifted off of Tiernan’s heart, because he was right. Susannah had never held a grudge, even when Tiernan ate the last yogurt or forgot to give her a phone message or screwed up in the hundreds of different ways a truth teller, overwhelmed by the demands of living in society, could screw up.
    She belatedly realized she was using Brennan’s term for her, and wondered if accepting his identification of her talent meant accepting that it truly was what he said. A Gift, instead of a curse.
    But she hadn’t told Brennan the rest of the story. Maybe he, too, would look at her with the same disgust she’d felt for herself since Susannah’s death.
    “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t warn her about the kidnapping ring, even though she’d just told me she was a shifter,” she said quietly. “I ran out, angry, to go to my meeting, and I didn’t tell her.”
    The tears blurred her vision now, and she had to wipe them away with the corner of Brennan’s sleeve.
    “By the time I got back to the apartment a few hours later, ready to apologize for being such an ass, she was gone. I never saw her again.”
    “They captured her,” Brennan said, the lines on his face deepening.
    “They captured her. The next time I saw her was three weeks later on TV when she was in a fight with half of the Boston Paranormal Special Operations unit. She was so strong, Brennan—she threw one of