Except the mate magic. I thought only the wolves had this fated-mate insta-romance chaos.
I did not like chaos. Chaos reminded me too much of my pre-Alfheim life. Of the abuses of my father, and the near-universal horrified reactions to my presence exhibited by every single mundane I came across. The dramatic screaming. The running away. The inability to consider and ask questions. To not judge.
Sort of like the elves and Ellie’s concealments.
“Frank,” she said. “I don’t think you’re okay.”
My knuckles had turned bright white. The steering wheel creaked.
I let go. We drove along the road with my jittery hands hovering over the wheel. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She slowly exhaled. “I know why you say that,” she said.
I grasped the wheel and turned toward the lake. “What?”
“Say that you’re sorry. You say it because you're huge and strong and expecting everyone who sees you to run away like terrified toddlers.”
She was correct.
“You expect me to run away the first moment you accidently slip your self-imposed rules for how a mundane man is supposed to be.”
She was correct about that, too. I knew how I needed to act.
“Not your rules about how a man should act—those are great, by the way. You’re what I hope Jax grows up to be.”
“Jax’s upbringing isn’t up to me,” I said.
“Yes, it is. You’re a part of his life. So are Arne Odinsson and Magnus Freyrsson. Lennart Thorsson too, now that he’s Jax’s mate’s soon-to-be stepdad.”
This time I did glance at her.
“Seer, remember? Some things are so obvious I don’t need my stone to spell them out for me.”
And what did that mean for us? Me? I didn’t ask. I kept my mouth shut. No need to be desperate.
“Your rules for action aren’t the problem, Frank. It’s your rules for being.”
I had one set of rules. “Action and being are the same thing,” I said.
Ellie returned to staring at the road. “Not when you’re being for the sake of others.”
“Still the same thing,” I said as I turned off onto the small service road that led into the lake’s peninsula. This way, I could park close to the cottage and out of sight of my cabin, so as not to confuse Maura into thinking I was home.
“The month you spent trying to break my concealments? I spent that time wishing for an excuse not to miss you. To be over you and to be okay and maybe somehow force the cottage to take me somewhere I wouldn’t see you every day. Because I did, Frank. I saw you with the kids and the wolves and the elves. I took pictures of you hoping I’d find something in the layers of your life that told me to stay away.” She shrugged. “Mostly that’s why I took pictures.”
She’d been nearby the entire time I was looking for a way through. But I knew that. We’d crossed paths several times. Each time I’d apologize for not remembering and promise to do better. Then she’d cry.
I parked in a small clearing closer to her cottage than to my cabin. “Mostly?”
“I like taking pictures of you.” She tipped her head to the side. “You’re big and handsome and exactly what I want.”
I wasn’t. How could I be? I was the stitched-together son of a mad scientist. I was forged from the parts of others. “Me” wasn’t a singularity the way it was for a man born. And I certainly was not handsome.
She shook her head as she pulled the door handle. “I love you, Frank Victorsson,” she said. Then she was gone, out the door, walking toward a cottage I didn’t know—nor could I explain—any better than my own self.
The dichotomy of threat returned to my gut. My mate loves me swirled with My mate walked away.
And once again, I had no idea what to do.
Chapter 12
“Ellie!” I followed her through the trees toward the cottage.
The white pompom on her yellow hat bounced along like a snowball in the air, out ahead, about ten paces up the trail.
“Ellie!” I called again.
She stopped next to a huge, crooked cedar. The tree leaned a little more toward the lake with each storm but it continued to stand. It had its ways, the tree, and it did just fine.
We were under an umbrella of melting snow and the occasional drip hit the ice with more of a splot than anything twinkling or angelic. At least the mate magic had calmed down and wasn’t sparking around my hands anymore.
“Ellie,” Two paces away, maybe three, and I reached out.
She vanished. Gone. No signs. No footprints. Nothing, as if the cottage had called her back. Except we were a good five to six hours from sunset.
“Ellie!” I roared. The cottage was just up ahead, closer to the lake and behind the thicker stand. If the cottage closed, I still had a moment. I could still—
My mate magic flared up around me like one of the firenadoes Ellie had seen in Australia. I stopped and thrust out my hands as if to hold off ghosts as the flare coiled around me, then outward in little arms to the spot where Ellie should have been.
She hadn’t vanished. I felt her—the mate magic felt her—but she was just out of reach as if she’d rounded a corner. I knew she was nearby but I couldn’t see to touch.
My screaming racoon? He was back. But this time, he was screaming because he’d already ridden the raft over the falls and his calm river downstream had become a black hole.
I was lost again. Lost in my own shock and fear, and my own navigation of the chaos. Lost in need and desire because even though I thought I’d trained myself to not let my emotions flow easily—that I’d added enough locks and dams to even out those rushing rapids—I wasn’t nearly as good at that part of living as I wanted to believe.
The need to hit a tree roared up my spine into my arm. A bellow rose in my throat.
The mate magic dust filled the cracks in my control and were about to blast past my façade of civility.
Because that’s what it was. A façade. Yes, I had my ways of living, my code, but deep inside I was still that screaming child in a monster’s body who awoke in my father’s lab. Still that trauma. Still that pain.
Circumstances can be transcended, but they do not go away.
What was worse? The fact that I understood I was breaking apart, or the actual breaking? The watching myself implode, or the imploding? All because the mate magic swirling around my body carried a need as strong as breathing that I could not satisfy.
My air. My life. My angel. All things that I could not, should not, would not saddle Ellie with. Yet here I was with those wishes coiling around me like a whirlwind made of my own psyche.
I understood, yet I was utterly confused.
Why did I think this would be easy? Hope that after playing the odds with the universe, my good numbers had finally come up? I was a fool. But I’d already established that. I was a fool in love.
By all the pantheons of all the magicals everywhere on Earth, that mate magic tornado hurt. It burned like my morning cold, and like that cold, only Ellie’s touch brought relief.
You know, the exact opposite of a trickster god’s irritation.
My back stiffened. My senses heightened. And I immediately held out my arms in a defensive posture.
Nothing had changed about the woods. The snow continued to crackle and snap as it melted under the late afternoon sun. Birds chirped. Squirrels scurried and a small band of whitetail deer watched me from a respectable distance into the trees.
Yet for some reason the thought of tricksters overrode my Ellie implosion.
And yet there was nothing here out of the ordinary. The lake sloshed just beyond the trees. A few cars rumbled by on the road behind me. The animals acted in their animal ways. None of them seemed startled.
No response from Ellie, whom I was sure was still just out of reach. I yelled her name again.
Somewhere, in the trees between my truck and the cottage, someone giggled.
“Ellie!” I ran toward the cottag
e. Maybe if I got inside the gate, her concealments would cancel whatever spell hid her from me.
Cold wind slapped at my face and melting snow sloshed under my boots. Twigs snapped. A crow screeched as if it, too, had been startled by a trick neither of us understood. Magic wisps coiled around the trees and pushed through the brambles until I…
… crossed a threshold. Punctured a bubble. Ran through a barrier or veil or some other magical layer so thin I didn’t see it until I was literally inside it.
Elven magic announced itself. It shimmered like the auroras and it danced around them and their works as if fully willing to take responsibility for what it did. But this… this was just like the membrane I crossed the first night I entered Ellie’s cottage. This snuck in red and green, and tooth and claw. It was alive and living.
Hiding Ellie. Goading me to run.
A fae had set out a trap.
I inhaled, trying to right myself against this new, bountiful veil magic that felt more joyous than the malevolent carapace that had been manipulating St. Martin.
An elf manifested directly in front of me. His black eyes widened and his gray ponytail swayed. He gasped and touched his hand to his lips. “It worked!”
We’d met before, this elf and I. He was the one who’d helped me find Ellie’s cottage. The one who’d said he was Arne’s son. I’d mostly forgotten about him until now.
He extended his hand. “Hrokr Arnesson,” he said. “I knew that once you broke my semi-sister’s enchantments that I could rig a spell to extend that breaking to me.”
This elf stood between me and my mate.
I could backfill the holes in my life—my soul—with elven family connections. With helping raise my niece. With my calm and accepted life in Alfheim. But there was a price. An exchange, an offering of me so that I could stay a part of them.
It’s a good deal, as such deals go. I have community here. Family. But the mate magic swirled up into a vortex as if it was the living, breathing, about-to-break heart in my chest. It scoured my face. It raked my skin. It sandblasted my bones and all I felt was the bitter micro-bites of a life without Ellie.
I’d spent all of my pre-Alfheim days in that pit wailing and clawing and flailing as if I knew how to climb my way back into the sunshine. And now this elf had dropped a barrier between me and us.
Hrokr frowned and withdrew his hand, carefully wiping his palm on the black leather of his pants as if he’d just realized he’d offered me a filthy palm. He stared at his hand for a moment as if he really did believe he’d offered me a sticky, gooey handshake.
“Listen, Mr. Victorsson, my friend, I—”
He wasn’t looking at me, nor did I think he was aware of my feral cyclone of mate magic.
I had my hand around his neck before he could choke out the rest of his sentence. “Reverse the spell you used to hide Ellie.”
He blinked and opened his mouth as if I was actually choking him, and spread his hands wide to show compliance. “Sure, sure,” he said. “No problem.”
I loosened my grip.
“Well … there’s a slight problem.” He held up his hand with tiny gap between his thumb and forefinger. “The spell lines up her enchantments with mine in such a way that someone who’s broken one of the concealments—that would be you, big guy—can see one of us. It’s a wave crest-and-trough thing. So see me or see her, and we have business.” He shrugged.
I picked him up by his neck. He dangled off my arm, his hands gripping my wrist so he wouldn’t choke, and gargled out his words.
“You’re technically inside my concealments!” he gurgled. “Hurt me and you’ll stay the jotunn of Alfheim no one can bother to remember!”
He was lying. He had to be lying. “A Loki elf lies. How original.” I gave him a good shake.
“It was the only way!” he snorted out. “You’re the only one in Alfheim who cares enough about us hiddens and undesirables to help! Plus you’re the only one who broke one of the enchantments, so it’s not like I had a choice.”
I snatched his arm and whipped him around, arm pulled up and against the black leather of his hunting tunic, and pushed him face-first into the nearest tree trunk. “If she’s hurt, I will snap your neck,” I growled.
Violence is no longer my way, but my bulk and strength add credence to any threats, which are often more valuable than any actual violence.
“You will not.” He rolled his eyes. “What would Ellie say? All your big and scary-handsome won’t save you from that particular bit of bad behavior, now will it?”
I let go of his arm and allowed him to turn around, but I kept a grip on his wrist to keep him from casting spells. “I see magic, Loki elf. You try anything and I’ll smash every bone in your hand.” Even if he didn’t believe me, the threat still stood.
“Yes, yes, Victorsson smash. I get it.” He rubbed his wrist as he turned around to face me. “Will you listen now? Please? We don’t have a lot of time.”
I needed to keep my attention on the elf, but my body and soul cried out for Ellie. “What do you want?”
There had to be a way to tamp down the mate magic, otherwise Gerard and Remy would be utterly insufferable every moment Axlam and Portia Elizabeth were out of sight. Which they kind of were, to be honest. The extra wound-up tension was distracting.
I was not a werewolf. I could keep a grip on my emotions.
Hrokr sniffed and rubbed his wrist. “There are fae around. They don’t like me, and my dear father seems to be too busy to give a damn.”
“Why do you want my help?” The last thing I needed was to knowingly piss off the fae and the elves by helping a Loki elf, especially one who lived behind concealments. Because the elves put this Loki elf where he couldn’t bother anyone for a reason.
Hrokr stared out into the trees. “Those two dryads? The ones who were sniffing around your cabin? They were looking for me.”
No, they weren’t, I thought. My gut said no, but I had zero evidence pointing toward another reason.
My gut also told me that Alfheim was about to get sprayed with the shrapnel created by several fae-involved bombshells.
“Why?” I asked.
He looked in the opposite direction, as if he thought the two dryads would manifest at any second. He inhaled. “I’m half fae.” He said it as if I was supposed to understand why I should care.
Tornadoes in a hurricane, I thought. “And I’m supposed to help you how?” I said. I might be almost seven feet tall, strong, and scary like he said, but if Oberon came calling, I’d be David to his Goliath. And Alfheim harbored not one half-fae slight to his Fae King honor, but two.
Hrokr here had just made his slight one of my problems.
He pouted.
“What do you want?” I asked again.
He ducked down and peered through a bush as if the two dryads were about to manifest out of the cold waters of my lake. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No,” I said.
He sniffed the air. “Could you ask Miss Ellie Jones if I could, perhaps, possibly spend a night or two in her library until Oberon’s goons go away?”
He wanted to hide in Ellie’s library? The one room the cottage had not even deemed me worthy of seeing? The room that wasn’t there but was?
“Absolutely not,” I said.
Even on a good day, the last thing the world needed was a Loki elf—and Hrokr here was clearly one hundred percent a Loki elf—hanging out in a magical fae library that charged up overnight.
His lip quivered. He was Arne’s size and build, with the same basic shape to his face, and the quivering lip was just too much. I snorted.
He grinned. “See?” He pointed at me again. “You like me! We’re friends! I helped you out. I helped the kids. All I’m asking is just a few days somewhere out of Grandpa’s reach.”
“Tit for tat, huh?” I said.
All the friendliness drained from his posture. His face hardened. “I might trick, but I don’t kill.” He huffed and slapped his chest wi
th his free hand. “Yes, I’m an aspect of Loki but I’m not Tov Lokisson! I’m not malicious for maliciousness’s sake. I’m me. I’m the protector of the vulnerable. That’s what my mother wanted of me. She asked me to be me. She did. I can’t do that if they take me to be fae.” He sniffed. “I don’t want to be fae. I want to be me.”
Crazy elf, I thought. But if there was one thing on this Earth I understood it was emotional turbulence. Calling that turbulence crazy never helped anyone.
Hrokr blinked. “So you’ll ask?” He must have read my face.
“It’s not my decision.” It was Ellie’s and the cottage’s. “Why didn’t you ask your father for help?”
Hrokr’s eyes narrowed and his belligerent, angry body language resurfaced. “Dad will break my breaking of my concealments,” he said. “He’ll make it so you can’t be bothered to remember me ever again.” He hiccupped as if the weight of his loneliness was enough to crush his spine. “I’m sooo boooorrrreeed,” he moaned.
How very Loki, I thought.
I grabbed his hand again. “You stay away from Ellie, do you understand?” No one hurt my mate. Not Hrokr. Not the fae. Not Arne or Magnus either, for that matter.
Hrokr pouted again.
One of the dryads appeared right next to my bicep. Displaced air rushed over us with an audible pop.
Hrokr screamed. I instinctively tried to swing us away.
She reached out and laid her hand on my elbow. I couldn’t move.
The dryad blinked from under her antlered helmet and smiled. “Well, well,” she said. “Isn’t this interesting.”
She reached out her other hand toward someone I could not see. Words I didn’t understand fell from her lips.
And we moved.
Chapter 13
The fae—who was not a mere dryad—grasped the arm of someone on the other side of Hrokr’s concealments, and…
I blinked. Hrokr shrieked like a rat skewered to a board. And we were in a pasture, in the snow still, but surrounded by sheep. Big, strong, magically-volatile New Zealand sheep.
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