My Enemy, My Mate (Complete)

Chapter Three

I sighed a little and sat down the knife in my hand, carefully formatted the question I had in my mind.

"How did you and George meet?" I asked finally.

Lynda smiled brilliantly. It was clear that she was remembering when she and her mate had met for the first time and she was remembering it fondly.

"Well, George and I met in a park," she said. "I wasn't a member of this pack at the time, but I was in the city for a week or two. We were both runners and it was very early in the morning. There was a full moon that night, so I guess we both had the same idea to take a morning run to blow off some excess energy."

I nodded. The day of the full moon the whole pack, even the pups, seemed energized. We were given an absorbent amount of energy, which I always assumed was because the change took so much energy and then we would be running as a pack nearly the entire night. It always seemed to give all of us a weird case of attention deficit for the day and almost nothing got done.

"I wasn't paying attention, big surprise there." Lynda laughed. "And I actually managed to run right into him and knocked us both flat on our backsides."

"How did you know he was the one?" I asked eagerly. Maybe everyone experienced the mating pull differently?

"It felt... it felt like my whole sense of gravity had changed," she explained. "Like everything in the world suddenly pulled me to George – like he was the Sun. That was just from a touch, before he marked me later that day."

"Later that day?" I asked, shocked.

It's not unheard of to mark immediately, but most couples now wait a few days to get used to each other and talk a little before they mark and especially before they mate.

"It had to be that day; we really had no other option. There was a full moon that night."

"I don't understand what the full moon had to do with it though."

Lynda looked at me a bit startled. She opened her mouth once before shutting it again.

"Do you mean no one has explained the mating ritual to you?"

I furrowed my brows. This was a bit like the "sex talk" that I supposed normal parents had with their human children.

"Well, I know that when you meet your mate there is an irresistible force that pulls you together. Then, in order to finish the mating process you have to bite each other and - and you know..."

She laughed a little at the last part before turning serious again.

"That is true, Rosemarie. But what you failed to mention is this: once two mates find each other they have to mark one another before the next full moon. Then they have to mate before the full moon following that to complete the ritual."

My eyes widened. How had anyone failed to mention this to me in my twenty-one years of life?

"What if they don't? I mean, what if the two mates fail to mark each other before the first full moon after they meet?" I tried to keep my voice as calm as possible.

"I haven't seen it for myself, because the draw for the mates is so strong they usually don't wait long. In fact, I don't ever want to see it for myself. All I know about it is what I have heard."

"What have you heard?" I asked, terrified.

"Well, I have heard that that one or both of the mates die. Usually the female comes down with a fever as the day of the full moon approaches. By the time the sun rises the next day she is suffering from delusions. The female either goes crazy or dies. Sometimes she does both. Then the male usually follows his mate into death. Not many can stand the death of their mate."