by Lisa Ladew
“Bye,” Leilani whispered, watching them disappear down the path.
“Hi,” a rough voice said. One syllable with so much emotion in it. Leilani jumped to her feet and ran down the path to meet Jaggar, unable to stop herself. She was safe anywhere as long as she was with him, even on the Path of the Wolf. She slammed into him and he wrapped his arms around her, bending his face to hers. They kissed softly. Her body heated immediately, with a fervor that was unfamiliar to her. How it should be. She pulled back from him and looked up at his face, running her fingers over it. “Your line,” she breathed. “It’s gone.”
He caught her hands and kissed every fingertip. “You can see.”
She smiled. “I can see in the meadow, yes.” Her smile slipped. “I’m sorry for leaving you. That was a horrible thing to do. I regretted it as soon as I got here.”
Jaggar half-smiled and cocked his head to one side. He still looked dangerous, even with the smile on his face, and she was glad for it. She was coming to love his nature.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I can understand why you did it.” He touched her face. “Your skin shines here, and your eyes are so very beautiful. This place makes you whole. And happy?”
She could only nod, even if that hadn’t been true for the last few days. Right at that moment, happiness burst through her, filling her like a helium balloon with a never-ending stream of bliss. She did belong with the wolven. She did belong with her mate. They would figure it out. He’d jumped off a cliff for her. He’d forgiven her. Someone like that could make it through anything, and that was someone she wanted to spend her life with. Her mate. The word took on new meaning and she captured his face between her hands, kissing him again, harder, with more… urgency. She wanted to start their new life that minute. She was ready.
She ended the kiss and pulled shyly away from him, looking into his eyes. They were a warm dark brown that adored her. He smiled at her and licked his lower lip once, as if trying to catch her taste.
Oh, he made her want him so bad. She pulled at his hand, not trusting herself to stay still with him for one more minute. Besides, she wanted to show him the meadow. “It’s right out here, come.” They walked down the few feet at the end of the path holding hands, Leilani pressing close to her mate. The catamount’s snarl filled the meadow, startling her, making her jump.
“Oh,” Leilani said after a moment, dropping Jaggar’s hand, knowing that was what the catamount didn’t like. “That’s the catamount.”
Jaggar frowned, then gathered up her hand again. The resulting snarl scared her and she pulled away from him. “Please, Jaggar,” she whispered. “If she doesn’t like it, there must be a reason.”
His face smoothed and he nodded once, then faced her simply, staring at her, only her, not even looking around. She smiled at him, her heart sinking that she wouldn’t be able to touch him, to kiss him, in this safest of safe places, but at least they could talk. At least she didn’t have to be scared of time-travel she didn’t want or of a mind that didn’t obey her.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Strangely empty,” he said at once, his face serious. She could see the deep thoughts behind his eyes and wished she could soothe them. He reached out to touch her hair, pushing a bit of it behind her ear, but as soon as he touched her, the snarl came again.
Leilani pulled back from him, eyes wide, scared of what he would do. He looked up and around at the meadow, turning in a circle. “I want to talk to this catamount,” he said. Her heart almost broke at the tone in his voice. She loved him and she loved the catamount too, and did not want to see them at odds with each other.
Her breath caught at the thought and she half-turned, hiding her face from him. Love? She rejected the notion swiftly and mercilessly. Love was for someday in the future, not now. Love had little to do with what was between her and Jaggar. He adored her. She felt the same way about him. But there was no choice involved and she wouldn’t pretend there was. So love was off the table for now. She could not handle love for him or from him so soon. It felt… too big, too scary, too all-encompassing. She wouldn’t believe it if it came so soon.
Could she accept him as her mate without loving him? Accept him on faith alone?
“Lele?” he said, his voice soft, his eyes searching hers, his expression compassionate.
Her heart melted toward him a bit more. She could.
“I’m good,” she said, composing herself and facing him. “I don’t want you to fight with the catamount. She’s been good to me.”
“I won’t fight. I won’t argue. I have a few questions, that’s all.” He was already heading away from her, toward the right path, looking back at her questioningly.
“That’s the one,” Leilani said quietly. He motioned for her to follow and they headed that way, being careful not to touch each other. They entered the path, but before they had gone far, it was clear that Jaggar’s cat and the catamount were deep in conversation, sitting together at the end of the path, their tails twitching alternately, their heads together.
“Never mind,” Jaggar said. “The beast will tell me later.”
“You can talk to him now?”
Jaggar shook his head. “Only a little, but I’m determined to figure it out. It’s time.” He turned on the path, reaching to take her hand, remembering and pulling back only a moment before he touched her. He frowned again. Leilani hated to see it, so she hastened her steps to get in front of him.
They entered the meadow. “This is where Evie was for twenty-nine years?” he said.
“Yes,” Leilani said, happy at the change of subject. “Come see her office.”
She practically skipped that way, happiness settling in on her again. So she couldn’t touch him? She would live. They would talk. There would be plenty of time for… touching later.
She entered the office through the opening where a door would be and smiled at him as he walked inside. His eyes were on her, his face still dark, his expression unreadable. “Harlan has kept it exactly like this,” he said.
The sound of a male laughing from somewhere far off came to them both and Jaggar growled at the sound, getting close to her.
“It’s ok,” Leilani told him. “It’s your friends, Canyon and Timber. They aren’t here in the meadow.” She waved him over to look behind the filing cabinet. “But this door let me go in their office. They couldn’t see me, but I could see them.”
Jaggar stared at the door for a long time. She could see his thoughts spinning, his inner wheels turning, as he weighed all the options that might come from going through that door. He was so much like Eventine in that regard, always weighing and measuring everything, following actions to all possible conclusions. As someone who had rarely had the luxury of a clear and well-functioning mind, she liked that about him so much.
He stepped forward and put his hand on the doorknob, opening it slowly, then he stepped through and looked back at her. She smiled at him and followed him eagerly, watching the clock in her mind as she stepped over the threshold. The hands spun, going from little and big hand pointing down, 6:30, to little hand pointing up, and the big hand pointing down. 12:30.
Canyon and Timber were behind their desks. Trent was on the screen, heading past a trailhead, four wolves following him, two carrying newborn pups in their mouths, the last one with the box of antibiotics in his mouth.
“Uh oh,” Timber said. “Trent’s got another friend.”
A cat showed up on the screen, a black cat, sticking its nose right into the camera, raising one paw. Not a big cat, just an ordinary housecat. It was all black except for a bit of white on its chest and the tip of its tail, plus a tiny splotch of white on its left shoulder, like a renqua. The camera fell eye-down, and all the screen showed was dirt.
Canyon and Timber looked at each other, then Timber burst out laughing. “Wade’s not going to like this.”
Canyon pulled a bowl of cereal out of his drawer. Nope.
Jaggar shook his
head, but he was smiling slightly. Leilani hadn’t seen him smile much and she liked it, even if it did look like he didn’t get much practice at it. He drew close to Canyon and first waved a hand in front of the male’s face, then took a swipe at his cereal bowl, but his hand passed through it. Canyon didn’t flinch, but he did cradle his bowl to his chest as he shoveled in a huge spoonful.
Canyon’s voice echoed in Leilani’s head. I miss Jaggar.
Timber threw something small at him. A pen maybe. It clattered off the wall behind him. “He’s got a mate now. Your sorry ass is gonna have to find one soon, so you can get together for pinochle on Friday nights.”
Jaggar moved past them, then motioned to Leilani. She forgot she wasn’t supposed to touch him and moved right up in under his arm, like she fit there perfectly, which she did. Jaggar smiled again, this time at her, and her stomach flipped over. He kissed her on the forehead, then he looked up. “No catamount disapproval,” he said softly.
“Oh,” Leilani breathed. He was right. Which meant she would get what she wanted after all.
To know him. To really know him.
Her mind wouldn’t let her examine the possibilities, but her body was way out ahead, already flushing and blooming and wanting what she’d never had.
He pulled her out of the little office area and toward the break room.
28 – Jaggar’s Office
Jaggar led Leilani through the maze of shelves in Canyon and Timber’s massive office. The bunker, they called it.
Leilani headed one way, while he headed the other. She kept ahold of him, but for a very different reason than she had been all night long, he thought. She pulled at him. “There’s a break room this way,” she said.
“But my office is this way.”
“Your office…” She thought about it and her face lit up. “Do you think we can get to it?”
“Let’s see.” They skipped through the door, with only light pain behind his eyes. The tunnels were empty. He scented deeply, reading the traffic that had been through there in the last twelve hours. Only Burton, Canyon, and Timber. Good. He led her to the left, then pushed in through his office door. This place held good memories and bad, but it was an integral part of who he was, and he would not hide that from his mate. Something had changed between them. Every time he thought she would turn away from him, she turned toward him instead, which was what had given him the courage to do what he had done, to leap from the train trestle, fully expecting her to know it, and to find a way to bring him to the meadow. She’d witnessed some of his darkest moments and still accepted him, and he refused to let her face her feelings alone, after he’d seen hers.
“This is it,” he said, opening the door so she could go inside. He closed the door, then leaned against the wall as he watched her pick her way over his things, smiling softly, remarking to herself occasionally. She touched everything on his pin-neat desk, then opened his filing cabinets, and ran her hands along his computers. She went to his bookshelf and took out volume after volume, flipping through pages here and there, reading a few lines before she put the books back.
She turned to face him, then caught sight of his recliner and the blanket and pillow on it. “You sleep in that?” she said.
He shrugged. “Sometimes. I don’t sleep a whole lot, actually.” Ever since he’d been in the military, he’d rarely slept a full night, choosing instead to nap, hating the feeling of being “away” from his right mind for so long. The nature of his beast and his work did that to him too often.
“I don’t like to sleep either,” Leilani said, looking away from him, her voice soft. “The drugs they gave me made waking up scary. It would sometimes take me hours to remember who I was.” Her tone was matter of fact, but the words staggered him emotionally. Leilani made her way back to his desk and picked up a piece of paper. He pushed off the wall to get close to her and read it over her shoulder. The last thing he’d been working on, before they’d found Leilani and he’d been suspended.
With a wince, he remembered that this was not his office anymore. His mind wanted to repeat his mantra, to take him to church, to take him away from the present and deposit him in some place where he was both more and less than the male he knew.
He resisted it. The beast was not with him. There was no pain, so if he used his mantra at that moment, it would be nothing but a crutch. A way to avoid reality. He’d done enough of that for a lifetime.
But facing reality came with a price. He saw no way out of the mess they were in. Anger surged inside him again, that familiar anger and bitterness that he’d felt his entire life, but this time he had nowhere to direct it but at himself. It was enough to make him clench his fists and turn away from his mate… for her own good.
“What’s wrong?” Leilani said, hurrying to him. “What happened to you? Why do you look so angry?”
He shook his head, not seeing any way out, knowing he had to make that clear to her. He pulled her to the recliner and sat her down, kneeling and bending his head to her lap, much like he’d done in the cabin after he’d bandaged her foot. “Lele, I have to tell you something.”
Her breathing came faster and shallower, like she was scared. He hated to hear it, hated to feel her anxiety in his own chest.
“Do you know what I did?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“That I killed Joel.”
Leilani sucked in a breath. “You what?”
“I killed him. I knew what he did to you as soon as I saw you both. I… I struck out at him. Or maybe it was partly the beast, or both of us together. I don’t know anymore.” He dropped his head into her lap again, and now the tears came. “I don’t know who it was or how it happened, exactly. I only know I would do it again, and so I’m guilty of it, completely and totally guilty. I’m going to be kicked out of the KSRT. I might go to jail. I won’t say I did wrong, but I will say I didn’t follow the rules, and so I have to pay.”
Leilani didn’t speak for a long time, and when her hands found his head, softly touching him there, his tears flowed harder. They wrenched out of him in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to cry since childhood. But he saw no way out, and the only thing he could do was mourn that. He’d stolen her future by avenging her past, and there was no changing that. He’d been wrong and he couldn’t fix it, wouldn’t fix it if he could. Sometimes wrong was all you had.
“We’ll stay here,” she said softly. “Me and you.”
He shook his head, knowing instinctively that wasn’t possible. Eventine was… different. It wouldn’t work for them. They were already borrowing time. “We can’t, Lele.”
“Then we’ll go back in time,” she said fiercely. “You can stop yourself from killing him. I’ll take you.”
He shook his head again, looking into her eyes. “The only way I won’t kill him is if he never does it to you, don’t you understand? I regret doing it, but I won’t be able to stop myself from doing it again, no matter how many times we go back in time.”
Tears tracked down her face as she wiped his away, staring into his eyes. “There has to be a way,” she said.
He shook his head ‘no’. “There isn’t.”
“I won’t believe that,” she said. “We’ll figure it out. I don’t care what I have to do.”
She leaned forward, grasping his face on both sides. “We’ll just leave. Even if you can’t get your job back, they have to understand why you did what you did, someone can convince them. We’ll figure it out, and then we’ll leave, me and you.” She didn’t know where they could possibly go or even how they would get there, but he would.
“Your sisters…” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know them. I won’t miss them. I’ve had my doubts about all of this anyway-” She broke off, staring over his head. “But I don’t anymore,” she finished softly. She looked at him again, her expression intense. He loved seeing the amber color of her eyes instead of that swimming silver. “You’re my mate,” she said simply. “I
go where you go, I do what you do. If we are with my sisters, great. If we’re not, great.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“Of course I can,” she said, her voice filled with fire. “I do.”
***
Leilani meant every word of it. She held her breath, watching Jaggar as he thought about what she’d said, doubt and dismay playing over his face. He was thinking about her sight, maybe, or about how she couldn’t seem to think or stay in one time in the Ula, unless she was holding onto him. He could be considering how hard it would be to be her mate. When they left the meadow for good, she would be blind again.
“I understand if you don’t want me,” she said suddenly, pushing the words out. “I’m blind, I’m unstable, I’m…” She trailed off, so many words playing through her mind, words that she’d always thought had fit her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Words like weak, sick, unhealthy, undeserving, wrong, bad. But back in the meadow, her mind clear and whole, she could almost see how that wasn’t so. How she’d been whipped around by a life that only could have been muddled through. Had she done the best she could? Even if it wasn’t very good? Had it still been her best? Maybe. Things were different now. She was different now. Maybe…
His face was stricken with emotion. He grabbed for her hands. “No, it’s not that. I want you so much.” He swallowed thickly and searched her eyes. “Like you said, we’ll figure it out. I wish you could see, but it doesn’t matter to me if you never can again. You’re my mate,” he said, almost like he didn’t dare to believe that she was, or dare to believe that it meant the same thing to her as it did to him.
“Mate,” she repeated, running her hand down his cheek. “I barely believed it yesterday, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“I barely dared to believe it,” he whispered. “Even though I knew it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m older,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re young. You’re innocent. You’re beautiful and thoughtful and sweet. Why would I get a mate so perfect?”