“Yeah,” Nate breathed out.
My eyes popped open. Yeah? Yeah, like he loved me too and only had one syllable’s worth of talking in him after getting completely fucked? Or did he just mean that…yeah, I loved him, and he knew it?
The mate bond gave me a fuzzy sense of happiness and satisfaction, which helped. But I wondered if he really needed me the way I needed him.
Probably not. I needed him a whole hell of a lot, after all. Hard to believe he’d be able to love me as much as I loved him.
And that was okay. Especially when he squirmed around under me, getting comfy in the pillows, making those happy little Nate sounds that meant I’d given him exactly what he wanted.
Maybe I couldn’t afford to buy him the extravagant Christmas of his dreams, but at least I could do the physical labor. And then fuck him into oblivion after.
Trying not to jostle him too much where we were still tied together, I fumbled around and grabbed the edge of the blanket, hauling it over both of us and rolling a little to the side so I could lie down without crushing him.
That earned me a sleepy little, “Mmm, Ian,” and a duck of the head to kiss the hand I had wrapped over his chest.
Okay. I could live with that.
I’d started to drift off myself, a smile on my face and my knot still solidly wedged inside my mate’s well-fucked body, and what the hell could be better than that, anyway…
“Nate! Nate, get the fuck out here! I need to talk to you!”
My eyes popped open, and Nate stiffened out of his relaxation.
Arik. Oh, Jesus. If our brother-in-law needed Nate urgently in the middle of the evening, that only meant one thing: he’d fucked up something magic, and he hoped Nate could help him fix it before Matt caught on.
Well, fuck.
Chapter 2
Arik
The cold didn’t bother me, even with my breath pluming the frigid air, but waiting on Nate to move his lazy ass definitely, definitely did.
Especially when I wasn’t sure what might be coming out of the forest at any moment. And Matthew had a pack council meeting, but that wouldn’t last forever…for once, I hoped they droned on and on for another hour or two. If Nate and I could sort this out before Matthew stepped outside and noticed something was up, that’d make my life so, so much easier.
I glanced up at the moon. Yep, still just a sliver hanging high in the sky, with wisps of cloud starting to obscure what little light it gave. Still the perfect phase for necromancy, which flourished in the death of the old moon and the rebirth of the new, a magical tipping point for the delicate work of crossing the line between life, death, and undeath.
A line I hadn’t meant to cross tonight. I mean, it was December twenty-third. I wasn’t much for the family holiday bullshit, but even I wouldn’t be crass enough to purposely raise the undead two days before Christmas, not when Nate had gotten so fucking excited about the idea of decorating and cooking and making it a thing. I meant to make hiding upstairs my thing as much as possible, and if anyone suggested I sing, there might be blood.
But I could do my small part for goodwill for all men and not bring rotting bodies up to the surface to join the party.
At least, no rotting bodies had been my plan.
Fuck, what was Nate doing in there? I could smell him, and I knew he was home.
I sniffed again, and my nose wrinkled in disgust.
Ugh. Ian was there too. And they were…
“Nate!” I shouted again. “Get Ian’s cock out of you before I come in there with a pair of pliers!”
I barely caught the sounds of Ian’s outrage through the walls, and in spite of how time was ticking, I laughed. Needling Ian never got old. Inspiration struck.
“Or maybe a pair of tweezers?” I added, still yelling. “You know, since pliers might be bigger than necess—”
The door flung open, and Nate appeared wrapped in a bed sheet, his hair tousled and his cheeks and lips bright red. “Will you shut up?” he hissed.
I wondered if I looked like that after Matthew fucked me. Interesting thought, and my cock gave a little twitch of interest, but I had to deal with first things first.
“Once you get out here, I will. Get dressed, for fuck’s sake.”
Nate made a face and slammed the door again, but surprisingly, he appeared again in less than a minute, his jeans and boots and a t-shirt on, zipping up his jacket as he shut the door again.
“What, no Ian?” I asked, hoping I hid my relief. Ian usually followed Nate everywhere like a lost puppy.
Nate clumped down the steps. “He’s sulking over the tweezers thing.” He ducked his head to try to hide his grin, but I caught it anyway. “Besides, he’d much rather not know whatever it is you’ve done this time. Unless he needs to?”
I hesitated. Yeah, maybe, but…Jesus, I really wanted to handle this myself without getting a pair of overprotective, overdramatic alphas involved. They got so worked up over a little necromancy.
“Not yet,” I hedged. “Come take a look first.”
Nate followed me around the side of the cabin and into the woods. I headed for the area behind the pack house, where a large garden had gotten larger since Nate and I joined the pack. We both grew herbs for a variety of rituals and spells, and I’d made friends with the forest on the Armitage territory, convincing it to help me clear another half-acre for the purpose, with the young trees loosening their roots to allow me to transplant them gently, and the bigger trees shoving their roots up through the ground to shift a couple of bigger boulders and fallen trunks so I could get those out of the way. I’d also tapped into the life forces of the forest that afternoon, hoping to stimulate some extra growth in the garden despite the freezing weather.
“What am I going to be looking at?” Nate asked, with offensive — but, honestly, understandable — wariness.
“Remember how I was going to try to keep the garden a little more active even though it’s winter?”
“Yeah, and? It didn’t work? Seriously, Arik?” Nate demanded, a note of exasperation creeping in. “You got me out of bed on a freezing-cold night to come look at some wilty hyssop?”
“It worked.” I cleared my throat and bought a little time by climbing over a fallen tree branch, pretending that took my concentration. I could’ve just leapt over it like the bobcat I was, but I needed a minute. Nate scrambled over with even less grace, and his oof as he bonked his shin wasn’t a pretense. “It worked really well. Half the garden was half-dead. I…summoned life back into it.”
“Well, great. We can put landscaping on our list of services on the website. Maybe you can start mowing lawns, too. Can I go back to bed?”
“That’s beneath the dignity of a pack leader’s mate. But we should hire Luke out to mow lawns without a shirt on.” Ian’s sidekick Luke, a mountain of a werewolf with very little to say, had a jaw-dropping set of pecs and abs.
Nate stopped, turning his head to stare at me. “That’s actually — I’ll put that on the website too. I think the property taxes are past due.”
So was an explanation, and Nate had to get one before we got closer to the scene of the…accident. “So, all the plants came back to life. Even though they were basically dead. It was really strong magic. Bordering on necromancy, even though it shouldn’t be quite the same thing for plants.”
Come on, Nate, come on, make the connection, don’t make me say it…
When it twigged, he stopped again, suddenly, his foot still in the air.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, with feeling. “Arik, no. Come on. What else came back to life?”
I crossed my arms, looking casually into the forest, because I couldn’t quite look Nate in the eye. Was this…shame? Not a feeling I had a lot of experience with. And I didn’t like it at all. I had a friendly rivalry with Nate, that hadn’t always been so friendly. He wasn’t my friend. “As far as I know, only a couple of rabbits? And maybe a deer. And…possibly a bear. It made a lot of noise in the underbrush. I think it
followed the rabbits.”
“You think.” Nate’s flat tone knocked those uncomfortable feelings into overdrive. He shouldn’t be fucking disappointed in me. He shouldn’t have expectations that could be disappointed. “You think there’s an undead bear. Maybe right behind me in the bushes, just for example?”
“I think even you might notice that,” I snapped, discomfort pushing me into defensive mode. I recognized it, but I couldn’t seem to stop it. “Are we going to work on fixing this, or are you going to stand there and be a bitch about it?”
“We?” Nate’s hands flew to his hips, like they always did when he was getting ready to really lecture someone, usually Ian. It was funny when he aimed it at Ian. He glared like he wanted to bore holes in my face. “We? All of a sudden we’re a we when you fuck up and need someone to help you hide the evidence before Matthew finds out?”
“You’re the pack warlock,” I said. Not sulkily, I’d deny it to my dying day. “It’s your job.”
“Yeah, and you’re the pack shaman and the pack leader’s mate, so it’s even more your job, and arguably it’s also your job to report anything like this to Matthew immediately.”
“Are you finally admitting I outrank you?”
Nate went bright red, and his mouth flopped open. “You — I’m saying this is your problem!”
“Right, because it’s above your pay grade. Fine. I agree,” I snarled. “I don’t know why I bothered coming to get you in the first place. It’s not like you’re any good at —”
“Above my pay grade?” Nate screeched. “Like any of us get paid anyway. You’re talking like this is some kind of business we’re running, or at least one that actually makes money, and not a half-trained shaman fucking around with —”
“Half-trained? You’re fucking one to talk! At least I have some train—”
“Arik, fuck!” Nate dived at me, tackling me to the ground. I tried to throw a punch, getting a glancing hit on his ribs, but he muttered a few words and lightning sprouted from his fingertips. I pulled power to defend myself against his attack — and realized he wasn’t hitting me back. He’d sprawled himself over me and shot his magic over my shoulder.
At something behind me, that snarled and thrashed and let out a horrible high keening as Nate’s finger lightning hit it dead-on.
I managed to scramble up, turning over to get a better look and getting halfway out from under Nate. Chest to chest, we both stared at the twitching, smoking thing a couple of feet away.
“Last I checked, bears don’t wear wrist watches,” Nate said, his voice high and shaky.
We both turned our heads, our eyes met, and we dissolved into helpless laughter. Nate collapsed, his shoulders shaking.
I levered myself up and offered him a hand, and we both inched a little closer. Definitely a human of some variety, definitely dead quite a while…but not so long that it didn’t have most of its flesh left.
“I think that might be one of —” I broke off, nausea rising up so quickly I had to swallow hard. I couldn’t say the name of the alpha who’d kidnapped me, then come back to try to take me again after I escaped the first time. Matthew had killed him, ripping him to pieces with his bare claws. I’d thought I’d mostly gotten over it, but the name stuck in my throat.
“The, uh, Nevada pack,” Nate said softly, with unusual tact. Gratitude rushed up to replace the nausea. Also more shame. Fuck, I hated that feeling.
“I’m really sorry I hit you just now.”
Nate shrugged. “No big deal. I mean, if you hadn’t had a zombie about to eat you, I probably would’ve tried to get in a hit or two myself. Understandable mistake.”
Not really. “It’s not a zombie,” I said automatically. Zombies had to be raised using a certain kind of magic that put them under the control of the caster, and I was so sick of people not knowing the difference. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear it coming. Or smell it.” I wrinkled my nose at the stench of decay rising off the thing on the ground. The cold helped, but only subzero temperatures could’ve totally killed that smell.
Heavy, pounding footsteps echoed through the forest behind us. Well, at least I’d gotten my head out of my ass enough to hear Ian coming.
“What happened?” he demanded as he skidded to a stop next to us. “I felt your magic, Nate.” And then he saw it. And smelled it, too, by the look on his face. “Arik, what the fuck did you do?”
“Why are you assuming this is my fault?” I snarled, as self-righteously as I could manage under the circumstances.
Ian waved a hand at me, encompassing everything about me, it looked like. I sighed.
Yeah, okay. That was probably fair.
***
We got back to the pack house as the council meeting ended and the councilors spilled out the back door — just in time for Ian to dump the still-twitching revenant on the ground at their feet. Three of the councilors stopped dead, staring down at the body.
Matthew came out the door next, still smiling and glad-handing one of the older councilors, a stubborn old goat who always disagreed with anything Matthew wanted to do on principle, because Matthew was less than a thousand years old.
I stared at my mate’s handsome face, his dark hair and stubbled jaw and broad shoulders, his air of confidence and competence and easy strength — all the things I’d come to realize I might not be able to live without, even if I wanted to. And I willed him silently not to hate me. Not to be disappointed in me.
I’d never have admitted it out loud, but that scared me more than anything.
Revenants had nothing on the idea that Matthew might realize I was more trouble than I was worth.
I watched with my stomach sinking as his face went from friendly, to horrified, to absolutely blank, as the councilors all burst into some variation of What the hell is this?
“Ian?” he said, in that serious, intense voice he had sometimes that made me want to roll over and put my ass in the air and beg. The councilors went silent like someone had muted them. “Something you want to tell me?”
Please, please don’t immediately throw me under the bus…
“You should probably ask your mate. I’m just the lucky bastard who got to carry the zombie. And now I need another shower. Jesus Christ, that smells bad.”
I winced. Obviously too much to hope that Ian could have a little tact.
“Zombie?” said Jennifer, usually one of the most level-headed and sympathetic of Matthew’s councilors. She turned to Paul, her cousin, who could’ve passed for her twin, and they both came down the steps, bending identical salt-and-pepper heads to peer at the rotting body. “Only one zombie? That’s not usually how it goes.”
She glanced up at me with far too much sharp intelligence in her eyes. Shit.
“Arik?” Matthew’s voice was as neutral as his expression. “What’s going on?”
I looked up at him, starting to bristle. He only sounded like that when he’d gone into full-on pack-leader mode, blue eyes cold, analyzing the latest fuck-up and already calculating how to deal with it. How dare he use that tone with me? Like I was just another one of his pack problems, and not his mate.
It hurt. It hurt more than I’d been prepared for.
And I wanted to lash out at him. I had five or six sharp retorts on the tip of my even sharper tongue.
But I’d joined this pack voluntarily, hadn’t I? I’d asked Matthew for his mating bite, after making him wait a lot longer than he would’ve if the decision had been up to him. I’d chosen not to live alone anymore, and Matthew had chosen me first, hadn’t he? Of course, it’d only been six months since we mated. Early days. You could learn a lot about someone in six months that would change your mind.
Especially if that someone was me, and raised revenants in the garden.
I licked my lips and fidgeted, but I managed to look Matthew in the eye. “I don’t know,” I said, the honesty of it scraping my throat raw. “I drew some power from the forest to revive the garden. It didn’t — there were som
e unexpected results.”
Matthew’s eyes narrowed as he stared me down. “Unexpected,” he said flatly.
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but Paul spoke first.
“We buried — six?” Paul straightened up from his examination of the body and looked at Jennifer.
“Eight,” she said.
“Eight,” Paul agreed. “Eight of the enemy weres in the same place. If this one’s up and moving, there might be seven more.”
Seven more. Including…Parker, whose name I had trouble saying even in my own head. Sweat trickled down my spine as my fingers went a little tingly.
It didn’t make any sense. He was a lot less dangerous undead than he’d been alive, and as a revenant he wouldn’t be any more interested in me than he would be in any other living thing he wanted to eat.
But I could tell myself that all I wanted. Believing it, and forcing my nervous system to accept it, weren’t as easy.
I ought to be taking charge. This was my mistake, and Nate didn’t have the specific magical expertise to lay the dead to rest, even though he’d knocked this one on its ass. It’d be up again, though. It was only a matter of time. And the others would be getting hungry. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to make myself move, act, speak, do anything other than stand there woodenly and bite my lip to hold back the panic.
“Seven more,” Matthew said briskly, turning his attention from me completely. Dismissing me. “Ian, get Luke, Tony, and Megan, machetes all around. Fan out but stay close enough to make a dragnet, and go in from the south. I’ll take the north end. Jennifer, can you get Mark and Andy…” Matthew’s voice faded as the ringing in my ears intensified.
He wasn’t even asking me for help. No magic, no tricks. Just good old-fashioned beheadings, burn the bodies, move on.
He didn’t trust me.
I vaguely registered Matthew organizing getting all the kids and pack humans — we had a few, mainly female mates to overwhelmingly male werewolves — into the pack house, and telling Nate he was in charge of warding a perimeter around the pack house just in case. The council would be on guard.
A Very Armitage Christmas Page 2