by Tia Fielding
“I can’t even tell what the old color was supposed to be. What do you guys suggest we do?” Derek tilted his head.
“It’s something pale, but it’s… not nice. I think we could paint it now. Have it look nice. Don’t they come put the new windows in next week?” Cal asked as they started back toward the house.
“Yeah, next Wednesday, I think.”
“I have my phone, if you want me to call Mikael and ask about the painting?” Kit asked eagerly.
Chuckling, Cal nodded. “Yeah, call him and ask him and whomever wants their say to come over and discuss it, maybe?”
“Okay!” Kit made the call, and within fifteen minutes—enough time for Cal to tire and go sit on the steps—Mikael, Noah, and Maxim arrived, followed by the teenagers.
“You guys didn’t have to drop everything for this,” Derek objected.
“Nah, it’s fine. We were talking about the house back when we painted the roof. What are you guys’ thoughts on a color?” Mikael asked as everyone sprawled on the grass Derek had mown the other day with a cheap old mower Mikael kept as backup on his farm.
Derek sat to give Cal something to lean on, and hummed thoughtfully. “Are there any traditional colors you’d suggest?”
“Yeah, we know about the red,” Kit pointed at the outbuilding that had been reduced to a small woodshed and a space for either storage or maybe an emergency garage if they ever got a vehicle. Most of the building hadn’t been salvageable, despite their best efforts.
“Well there’s now this yellow that’s made in a similar way to the red. The colors can be somewhat controlled, so it could be lighter, bright yellow or a slightly darker one,” Mikael explained.
“I’ve seen many colors on houses here. Blue and gray ones, too. The only thing that seems to be same in most houses like this are white corner boards,” Maxim added.
“I think blue or yellow?” Derek asked Cal. Then he looked over the pile of boys and grinned. “Kit? Preference?”
Kit pushed his way out of the pile and panted happily, more like a fox kit in human form than Derek had seen before. It was so obvious he was happy here.
“Either works for me!”
“Yellow, maybe?” Cal said tentatively.
Mikael had dug out his phone and got up, coming to show them pictures. “Something like this?”
There were surprisingly many shades of yellow. “I like it,” Cal said and Derek nodded.
“We can figure out the shade once we have the paint,” Noah added, stretching on the ground where he’d stayed with Maxim.
Kit tried not to be obvious about his ogling, and Derek could tell the other boys hadn’t noticed, but he was pretty sure Maxim had. At least, from what he knew about the silent Russian, Maxim wouldn’t tease Kit about it.
“It will be smart to paint now. We need to paint the boards around new windows anyway,” Maxim said thoughtfully.
“He’s right. Might as well do all the work at once.” Derek nodded. Then he turned to the boys. “So, would you guys want to earn some pocket money?”
Mikael looked thoughtful, because all the tasks around the farms were always done by group effort. He allowed Derek to express his idea anyway, probably because it was Derek’s house, as much as it was any of theirs, since the Council had bought it in Mikael’s name.
“What do you need?” Anton asked in an eager tone.
“Well, we all know we can’t paint the house until it’s been cleaned up a bit. We need to scrub off the old paint and make sure there’s no moss or anything anywhere. All dirt needs to come off, but we need to do it gently,” Derek explained, and Mikael relaxed, going back to sit with Maxim and Noah.
“What’s the catch?” Kit asked, grinning.
“There isn’t one. It’s just not the nicest of jobs. I certainly don’t want to do it, but if you guys volunteer for it, I can pay fifty euros each and that’s your money you can do whatever you want with,” Derek told the boys.
The thing was, the boys still got pocket money from their parental units. The wolves from the alphas and Kit from Cal and Derek, obviously. Even Anton, who was the oldest, got some money from Mikael and the other older men in their house. It wasn’t much, though, and Derek knew they’d do a good job.
“I’m in,” Anton said, smiling.
“Yeah, I think we all are,” Nico added, looking at his pseudo-brother Jude who nodded.
“Well it’s my house, but sure,” Kit sniffed, making the other boys pile on top of him with shrieks and laughter.
Cal smiled at them and glanced at Derek. They were still sitting next to each other and Cal bumped his shoulder to Derek’s. It meant something like good job, Derek knew without words.
“You should probably wait until they come and change the windows because that’ll create some mess of its own, but if you can do it right after they’ve done the installing, we might be able to do it all within a couple of days,” Mikael said in a thoughtful tone.
“If the weather holds,” Noah added. “We’re not that deep into the autumn yet, but it’ll come sooner than we think.”
Derek grinned. “As long as we get new windows before it snows, I’m good.”
“We should have a while for that.” Mikael flashed him a smile. “Here’s hoping for October at least.”
They ended up deciding to make a work party out of it. There was apparently a Finnish word, talkoot that meant people coming over to someone’s place and getting something done together without payment. Except of course, Mikael had explained, that if it was say, a guy living alone and needing the help, then he’d buy beer and pizzas or something like that for his friends. If it was a family, then maybe everyone would get fed by the homeowner after the job was done.
Derek and Cal decided that they wanted to feed everyone, so the next day, there was a brand new coal grill in the yard and then soon after, a delivery van brought them a couple of new picnic tables.
“All on the Council’s buck, don’t worry.” Noah grinned at Derek and Cal who were a little bit speechless. Then again, they’d agreed to pay for anything they’d need so… here they were.
The window company came on Wednesday, so they decided to give the boys a day to clean the mess left behind and to scrape the loose paint off. On Friday, they were having talkoot, if the weather held.
It did, and the autumn day was surprisingly warm, starting from mid-morning. Derek felt good, Cal was healthy, Kit seemed happy and was starting to get a handle on his crush on Noah, and… everything was fine.
Around midday, people from the Jarvela farm—including the wolf pups—had congregated in Cal and Derek’s yard. The rumble of an SUV signaled the last helpers arriving.
Joonatan jumped out of the driver’s seat, grinning at Mikael who went to greet him. A pretty woman with some serious curves got out of the passenger’s seat and went to open the back door. In quick succession, she got three kids, all under five, Derek thought, out of the car.
The wolf pups all ran to greet the human kids and Derek smiled. Yeah, he knew how the Council could’ve taken this. If somehow Joonatan’s family, after they’d found out about wolves when Joonatan had seen Jude’s accident and subsequent involuntary shift early in the summer, would’ve been a problem, the Council would’ve eliminated them all somehow.
Derek had always had mixed feelings about the Council. Sure, they kept shifters out of the limelight, but they also took care of problems. Sometimes, those problems were humans who had seen too much and if they happened to have kids, well, sometimes those kids became collateral damage.
“Derek, you okay?” Kit asked, touching his hand as he came outside.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He glanced at Kit. “Where’s your dad?”
“He’s coming, he couldn’t find the shirt he wanted to wear for the painting.”
They were all dressed in their most ratty clothing for the job they had ahead.
Kit went to the other boys who were talking to Joonatan now. Anton wanted to be a mechanic and wou
ld be apprenticing with Joonatan, starting in a couple of weeks’ time.
The kids, all six of them, were rolling in the grass or running around—depending on how well they could move. Joonatan’s wife was sitting next to her littlest, the one who couldn’t walk yet, and smiling at the others when they went to rummage through the bag of toys she’d lifted out from the car.
“Hey, did I hear a car?” Cal asked as he finally surfaced from the house.
“Yeah, Joonatan brought his family, too,” Derek said, smiling as he nodded toward the kids who had found a soccer ball from the bag.
“Oh,” Cal said in a weird tone.
Derek turned to him and saw something horrible happen in Cal’s expression. Cal blinked a few times, then bolted back inside.
“Cal?” Derek called after him.
“Derek, what’s wrong?” Noah jogged to him, alerted by the tone of his voice.
“Cal, something just triggered him, I think.” He gestured at the open doorway. “I gotta—”
“Yeah, go, we’ll handle this. Go find your mate,” Noah said.
Derek ran up the stairs and closed the door behind himself. He kicked off his boots and started to look around for Cal. When he couldn’t find him anywhere, he realized there was only one explanation.
He went to the bedroom to the side of the bed he couldn’t see from the doorway. Cal’s clothes, shoes included, were on the floor by the bed, with his shirt halfway under it.
Derek knelt on the floor and peered into the dark space.
“Sweetheart, whatever it is, could you please come back to me?” he said in a calm tone.
The cat made a half-threatening sound that cut off abruptly, probably because Cal pulled the reins as hard as he could.
“I’m not upset. I’m worried. Would you come here and sit with me on the bed for a while, then shift when you feel like you can?” He got to his feet and climbed on the bed, then settled against the headboard.
He hoped this strategy would help.
Listening to the sounds from outside, Derek tried his best to relax. This waiting might take a while.
The kids were giggling and squealing, a male voice said something that made others laugh. There were sounds of hammering when the guys put together their small-scale scaffolding to make the work easier and safer.
He’d closed his eyes when he felt the bed dip ever so slightly. He forced himself to keep his eyes shut and smiled
The cat came up and stopped by his hip. Derek opened his eyes and looked at the feline, not much bigger than an average housecat.
“There you are, sweetheart. May I pet you?” he asked, lifting his hand.
The cat leaned into his hip and Derek took it was a sign that touch was welcome. He petted the cat like he would’ve any stray cat he came across, and slowly Cal’s cat side started to relax a bit more.
“As much as I love you, sweetheart, would you let Cal out so we can talk through whatever just happened.” He scratched the cat under its chin and got a long purr in response.
Then the small body shuddered, and he had a lapful of grown naked male half on top of him.
“Fuck,” Cal said with such feeling, Derek chuckled.
“Okay T-shirt and boxers first, then talking,” Derek told him, and Cal got dressed.
When he was climbing back onto the bed, Derek opened his arms and after a second of hesitation, Cal moved close to him, pressing his ear against Derek’s shoulder as he cuddled in.
“It was the kids,” Cal said after long minutes of silence. “Joonatan’s kids.”
Derek thought for a few beats. “Human children?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know he’d bring them. I wasn’t prepared.”
Derek hummed and kept on petting Cal like the cat he was sometimes. They were both quiet for a while again, then Cal started to speak in a tone that told Derek he wasn’t fully in the bedroom with him, but reliving a memory.
“That last job they forced me to. It was a small town in… it doesn’t matter where it was. A human family living there had been hiking in the woods and….”
Derek made an educated guess. “They saw something they shouldn’t have.”
“I was sent in for backup. Just in case, just based on… seniority I suppose.” Cal tangled his fingers in Derek’s rattiest T-shirt and shook as he tried to control his emotions. “There were the parents, their teenaged daughter and their little ones, two little boys. They couldn’t have been more than three years old.”
“What were the orders?” Derek asked, knowing there were always orders.
Once he stopped trembling, Cal swallowed audibly. “To eliminate the witnesses if need be. To show them the shift and to… to see where it would go.”
“But something went wrong.”
“Yes.”
Derek squeezed Cal closer, feeling his sorrow fill the room like smoke.
“What happened?”
“I was the one shifting, I was the smallest there. The family had been taken to… to somewhere remote. I shifted. T-the daughter fainted, the mother screamed, the father started to pray like we were demons. The boys thought it was the coolest trick they’d ever seen.”
Cal’s tears were soaking into Derek’s shirt. “Then the mother tried to run. The newest enforcer lost it and shot her in the back. The dad attacked him, so the third guy killed him, too.”
“Oh God….”
“And the girl woke up to it all. I had to shift back, try to protect the kids, but just as I did, the new guy shot the twins—” The anguished sound that exploded out of Cal wasn’t anywhere near human, and Derek cried with him.
He didn’t have to ask what happened to the girl. Not after that.
Once Derek’s tears ran dry, he sighed. “When you got home you felt more safe as a cat.”
Cal nodded against his chest. “The cat muffled t-the memories.”
“But then I startled you.”
Cal tried to pull away, but Derek held onto him as much as he could. When Cal gave up and slumped back against him, Derek smiled with relief.
“You had just suffered an intense trauma. You know as well as I do that sometimes, traumatic things are worse if you’ve just shifted one way or the other. You shifted into your human form just to see something incredibly upsetting happen. I’ve never, ever thought you were to blame about my eye, sweetheart.”
Cal
The words were like a balm to his soul that he hadn’t thought he needed.
For one, he’d thought he was to blame, he’d deserved being without his mate for all eternity for hurting him. His mate deserved better, after all.
To hear Derek say he didn’t think Cal was to blame made the last remnants of that pain vanish. It had been lessening ever since he’d shifted back, but on some level he hadn’t believed Derek would truly forgive him.
“You forgive me?” he asked, his voice sounding smaller than it had any right to be.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Cal. Nothing. You don’t apologize for accidents.”
He could feel Derek leaning back, and then a strong, long-fingered hand forced him to look at Derek.
“Am I less of a mate because I only have one eye?” Derek asked, making Cal jerk back in surprise.
“W-what? No! Of course not!”
“Then what does it matter? I can deal with living with just one eye, Cal.”
“I should’ve not—” His words were cut out with a growl and a hard kiss that froze him to that spot.
Ever so slowly, Cal opened his mouth and then they were kissing. Cal let out a wounded sound and sank into the kiss, letting Derek dominate it, letting him put all his emotion into the act.
“I love you, Cal. You’re it for me, do you understand?” Derek looked into his eyes, still holding onto him so he couldn’t turn away. “The worst thing about losing my eye was losing you with it. I can live without one eye, but I can’t be happy without my mate.”
Cal nodded at the passionate speech. “Okay.”
“Okay
?” Derek grinned. “That’s it?”
Cal chuckled a bit wetly, tears streaming down his face. “It hasn’t been fun for me, either.”
Derek kissed him again, laughing into Cal’s mouth when they separated.
Once they’d cleaned up from the crying and were more presentable again, they went outside. Everyone was either working on the painting, entertaining children, or getting ready to cook.
“Hey Derek, do you want to come see how I think this grill works?” Dallas called from the said grill.
Laughing, Derek pecked Cal’s lips and headed toward Dallas.
Kit appeared at Cal’s elbow and peered at him. “Dad, everything okay?”
Cal leaned down and hugged the life out of his son. “Yes. Better than ever.”
Kit let out a giggle. “Okay, you can put me down now.”
“Never!” Cal growled and blew a raspberry on Kit’s neck like he had when Kit was a child.
The squealing alerted the children and soon there was a line of them, all waiting to be grabbed, swung around, tickled and blown raspberries.
Even the human kids got brave when they saw the pups—who they didn’t know were different in any way—do it.
Rider came closer, laughing at their antics and Cal’s mock annoyance. Cal glanced at him with little Jamie in his arms and raised a brow. When Rider nodded, Cal tossed the little boy to his alpha and soon there was a chorus of what Cal assumed was Finnish for Me, me, me, me! ringing from the choir.
They painted the house with muted, yet still bright yellow, then gorged on a truckful of grilled things, both meat and veggies.
“I forgot you were an ace with a grill,” Cal murmured at Derek, who seemed pleased.
“You remember,” he replied.
“Yeah, hard to forget the first decent barbeque I’ve had in years.” Then, something mischievous took over Cal and he leaned even closer to Derek and whispered, “I’ve missed your meat.”
Derek choked on air and then began to laugh, his cheeks delightfully red.
“I don’t even want to know.” Noah chuckled as he passed them.
“I think I’m gonna go stay with Anton tonight,” Kit said pointedly as he brought his wooden plate and utensils to the fire pit.