Mate Claimed

She saw, in Eric’s eyes, that he knew that time would come. But not today.

“Open it up for me, Son.”

Jace sighed, took a small, round disk from his pocket, and touched it to a blank space in the door. The disk, Iona saw, had a Celtic knot design on it, but she couldn’t discern any place on the door the disk fit. To her, the door looked like an unbroken surface.

A ponderous sound like gears grinding filled the little hall, and the door slowly slid back into the wall. Beyond it was, indeed, a vault.

Eric led the way inside, flicking on lights as he went. The vault was long and narrow, taking up the rest of the space under the house and heading toward Nell’s side yard.

The room was lined with shelves and niches, though, unlike in a bank, only one had a door with a lock. The rest of the shelves were open and held boxes and small glass cases, with no organization that Iona could see.

Eric gestured for Iona to look around. Jace waited unhappily at the entrance, arms folded, as Iona strolled through in curiosity.

The collection looked like a jumble. Iona took one box off a shelf and found inside a clump of little plastic dolls with large eyes and tufts of long purple hair. She started to laugh. “Trolls. I used to play with these when I was little.”

“Cass liked them,” Eric said.

Iona put the box back, wondering why on earth they’d been stored in a vault.

The next box she pulled out was lined with velvet and held about two dozen uncut diamonds.

Iona nearly dropped the box. “Eric. Where did you get these?”

“I forget. When was that, Jace?”

“Eighteen eighty-two. From Africa. Grandfather traded for them—he never went there.”

“Traded with who?” Iona asked.

“Some lion Shifters,” Eric said. “They needed resources more than diamonds, and a safer place to live. My family helped them out, and they gave us a handful of stones.”

Iona quickly set the box back into its niche. “What is all this?” she asked, waving at the shelves in general.

Eric stood in the middle of the room, as nonchalant as ever. “Things our pride and clan have acquired over the years. Some have sentimental value, others more.”

Iona browsed another niche and found an egg decorated with jewels and gold filigree set in a delicate gold holder. Holy crap. “Do the other Shifters know you have this down here?”

Jace answered. “All Shifter families have a vault. Their pack’s or clan’s most prized possessions are stored there, kept secret from humans. Secret,” he repeated with a severe look at his father.

“She needs to know exactly what her construction company needs to do for us,” Eric said. “I want her to understand why it’s necessary.”

Iona looked around in still more wonder. “You’re saying Graham and his Shifters have this kind of stuff too.”

“We all do,” Eric said. “Shifters live a long time. We watch the world change and see that the value of most things evaporates. But some things endure.”

“And some of this,” Jace interrupted, “is from clan wars.”

“Clan wars? You have clan wars?”

Jace snorted with laughter at her amazement, and Eric answered. “We used to. After the Fae-Shifter war, when we found ourselves free of being fighting slaves for the Fae, our dominance fights began. Shifters being Shifters, we couldn’t help but battle it out to see who’d be in charge.”

“Fights between species, and between clans,” Jace finished. “Bad fights, over which clan would dominate the others. We stole from each other, killed each other. In quieter times, we traded with each other, but there weren’t many of those.”

“But…” Iona looked around, bewildered. “If you have loose diamonds hanging around in a box, why do you say Shifters were starving and dying in the wild? Why let humans put you into Shiftertowns?”

“It’s complicated,” Jace said.

“It is,” Eric broke in. “Jace is the clan historian and our keeper. He knows all the nuances. The simple explanation is—it’s hard to buy bread with an uncut diamond. If humans knew we had something like that, they wouldn’t stop until all Shifters were eliminated, and they had the diamonds.”

“Not to mention the Fabergé egg,” Iona said.

Eric nodded. “Not to mention the Fabergé egg.”

“Given to you by Fabergé?” Iona asked, joking.

“Yes,” Eric said, perfectly serious. “What you’re looking at are long-term solutions. We were starving and dying because we were fighting each other and turning feral, mates were scarce, cub birthrates were low. We came to Shiftertown to save ourselves. For now. We keep these things for what comes next.”

Iona remembered what Cassidy had said to her the other day—that Shifters saw their stint in Shiftertown as a short blip in their history. They’d use their stay in Shiftertowns to right themselves, then they’d go on.

“No wonder Graham is so cranky about having to move here,” Iona said. “That’s got to be tough, to require all his Shifters transport things like this, without the humans being the wiser.”

“Exactly,” Eric said. “It’s why he doesn’t want to double up with my Shifters. We could share houses in a pinch, but never vaults. The secrets of each pack, pride, and clan need to remain hidden.”

But members of families and clans could move in with each other, already knowing what the clan as a whole had stored, Iona realized.