Fated Souls by Becky Flade Page A

many ways to waste youth and wealth there. I’d thought the revenge would be sweet; it just made me feel emptier inside. So I came home and backpacked through the country, working odd jobs here and there, trying to make something of myself, trying to find somewhere I fit.” Aidan paused.
    “I found myself working on an Ojibwe reservation. I quickly became involved with a beautiful young woman there; her name was Tala, she was about a year younger than me, and we were stupid in love the way that children are. Her mother didn’t approve of me and to be honest the woman terrified me. I’d been working on the res long enough to hear the whispers about how Tala was descended from a long line of powerful priestesses and that her mother had the gift. Even though Tala respected her family’s history and culture and values, she didn’t shun modern life as her mother and many others in her community did. She thought the only way to keep her way of life alive was to merge it with modern society. Her strength, her intelligence, her humor, they reminded me of my mother.” He looked over at Maggie before adding, “In a completely non-creepy sense.”
    Maggie smiled. “I get that. Like a girl marrying a man that resembles her father in spirit because he makes her feel safe.” Aidan nodded before going on.
    “I was her first and even though I’d had sex before, she was my first in a very real sense. I felt like I had made love with someone. I figured we’d be together always and I asked her to marry me. She cried when she told me about the boy she was already engaged to marry. They’d grown up together and he was away at college on a scholarship. I was heartbroken and I said some cruel things to her before I walked away. I left the reservation that night. It took me more than six months to make my way back home.
    “When I arrived I had a letter waiting for me from Tala. She begged me to come back to her. Told me she had broken off the engagement and wanted to accept my proposal because she was lost without me. She also said she understood if I couldn’t forgive her, but that she thought I had a right to know that she was pregnant with our child.”
    “Oh, Aidan.” Maggie’s voice broke as she reached a hand out to hold his. He looked at her outreached hand before grasping it tightly in his own. “What did you do?”
    “The only thing I could do; I jumped on the first flight I could. Only I was six months too late. I found out that the boy Tala had been engaged to had a psychotic break at school. That he’d had a girlfriend there, a white woman who, between the culture shock and the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, he’d nearly beaten to death causing him to get expelled from college. He returned to the reservation only to learn the woman he believed was waiting for him no longer wanted him and was pregnant with a white man’s child. He killed Tala and our unborn child with her before killing himself.” Maggie gasped and clutched his hand harder.
    “I went to see Tala’s mother, thinking we’d share our grief, but she blamed me for both Tala’s death and what she saw as her family’s disgrace. She screamed at me in a flurry of words I didn’t understand and attacked me with her fists and nails. I left there, alone and hurting, just walking without direction and found myself standing in front of Tala’s tiny headstone in the reservation’s cemetery. I cried myself to sleep right there on her grave, wishing for death. That was the first night I changed.”
    “She cursed you?” Maggie asked in a shocked whisper.
    “It was either her or Tala’s spirit.” Aidan paused and looked into Maggie’s eyes before explaining, “Tala means wolf.” He continued, “I had no idea what had happened to me. I woke up in the woods outside the reservation, naked and freezing and covered in blood, none of which was mine, as I didn’t have a scratch on me. Not even the ones that Tala’s mother had given me the day before. I