Mak took me home after work today. We were both silent in the big truck that suited him so well. I didn’t know what to say. This male has been the center of my world for almost a month. With just a few words from Theo, all of that changed.

Mak is assigned to me; it’s not like we have just found each other. No. It isn’t that. 

He reports to Cormac Jareth, the head of the Predatoi. Mak is both a warrior in the Adrastos forces and a demon hunter with the Predatoi. 

He’s very important. Too important to waste any more time protecting me from phantom threats. 

At least, I will still see him at class. That’s twice a week. Maybe, we can remain friends?

“Well…” Mak said. 

“W-well…” 

“You going to be ok?” he asked. 

I thought about it for a long while. Will I be ok?

“I’ll be fine. I’m tougher than I look.”

“That you are. You are to call me if you need me, at any time. Do you understand that?”

I nodded, but I’m not certain I believe it. Everything has changed in a blink.

I’ve worked for Theo for decades. Someone tried to kill me. I met Mak. 

I’m not so good with sudden change, you know? But at my age, adapting is the name of the game. 

“I’m looking forward to things finding a new balance.”

“I can still come by, pick you up, and drive you to class.”

I smiled. “It’s sweet of you to offer, but we both know you work twenty miles from where I live. The school is thirty—in the opposite direction.”

“Then you meet me before class, and we’ll grab something to eat. Or just talk. Or we meet on Fridays for dinner?”

“We can do that. I’d like that very much.”

“And no matter what happens, I know one thing—I’ve seen it.”

“Oh?” He was a strong seer. He’d told me that the first night he’d taken me out to eat. “What have you seen?”

“I’m a destined to protect you, Jume Woald. In this world or the next. Any world we’re in. I don’t take that duty lightly. I never will.”

“Forever?” I had no clue what to think or say or anything right now. 

“It will be. When the time comes.”

“I have no Rajni.” I blurted out my secret right there in the front seat of his truck as he pulled into the parking lot in front of the Humanities building at DU. “I know you’re not meant for me that way.”

“I know.” 

He was so calm about it. When someone knew they didn’t have a Rajni and it got out there, people freaked. Worried and afraid. We’re the freaks of nature, after all.

I have no doubt that if I ever tell Kellis, she’ll go completely ballistic. She’ll demand answers, want to find every seer in our city, anything to make it not true. To make a Rajni just appear for me, somehow.

You know how it is—mates are everything to Dardaptoans.

As if we can’t have fulfilling lives without a partner in this world. Well, what about those of us who go three or four hundred years before we find our mates? 

Theo is well over six hundred or so, and he’s just now found his Mickey. 

He has changed the entire way of life for all of us with some of his earlier rulings, after all. So why are we so focused on that?

“You…know?”

“I’ve seen that, too. I know you don’t have a Rajni. But you have a destiny waiting for you, and I’m meant to be a part of that. Someday. But for now…”

I was still trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. I’ll admit it: it wasn’t easy. “For now?”

“Aodhan Adrastos pulled me into his office today. I’m needed elsewhere. There are Redd Gothan gathering around the city. I’ve been assigned to help the Taniss Lupioux Alphas find and stop them. I’m going to have to direct my attention there. For a few years, according to what I’ve seen for my own future.”

“A couple of years?” Lupoiux again. They were such horrible, dangerous beasts sometimes. Not all, but enough to give me nightmares. “And then what?”

“And then…I don’t know. I just know that that’s how long this will be. It’ll be changes. For all of us. Every Dardaptoan in this world will be impacted. And I’ve seen one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You will play a greater role in it than you can ever imagine. You will change the world one day, Jume. Don’t ever doubt or forget that.”

I just stared at him.

This…this is something I never would have predicted. I’m not sure what I want to do now.

I can’t change anything. I can barely deal with my own life day to day—how can I change a world someday?