All practical and quick, no dithering or panic.
Except from me.
I managed to get out of the way, stumbling over to the side of the house and leaning up against it where I wouldn’t impede anyone doing anything useful, which seemed to be everyone else.
Parker’s face swam in front of my eyes. I could hear his voice, low and mocking, telling me all the ways he’d use and hurt me.
He’d managed to do some of those things before I escaped from him the first time. Before he came looking for me, bent on doing it all again, only worse, because I’d defied him. I knew he wouldn’t have the same urges as a revenant. He wouldn’t even be able to speak.
It didn’t matter. I leaned against the wall and shook, reliving some of the worst hours of my life — and those hours had some stiff competition.
The meaty thunk of a heavy blade striking made me jump, and I came out of it enough to see Luke the were-mountain dragging away the two parts of the revenant, a machete in his other giant hand. One down, seven to go. Nate came back down the stairs from the back door carrying a big bag of rock salt, muttering something about really, really being sick of having to see things getting their heads cut off.
“I’m leaving the head on the Christmas turkey even if everyone thinks it’s gross,” he grumbled. “No, fuck that, I’m getting a ham. Are you coming?” he shot over his shoulder, and then disappeared around the side of the house.
Finally alone, I slid down to the ground and leaned my face on my knees.
I’d help him. In a minute. I needed a minute.
It turned into a lot of minutes, while I hyperventilated and squeezed my eyes shut so tightly I saw spots.
Nate could manage without me. He probably wouldn’t even notice I hadn’t come to help.
Chapter 3
Matthew
Searching the woods for zombies shouldn’t have been a good time, but it beat the hell out of sitting in yet another fucking meeting. Just one more reminder of how Ian always got to have all the fun, the bastard. He was so lucky I’d been born first and groomed for this bullshit instead of him.
I shouldn’t have been thinking of it as fun, of course. Pack leaders didn’t get to have fun, and they didn’t think zombies were a nice change of pace from listening to ancient, cranky Stephen — who’d already been old as dirt when he sat on my dad’s council — drone on and on about how we needed to put more effort into making a profit off the junkyard we owned. And pack leaders definitely didn’t whoop with satisfaction as they swung a machete at exactly the right angle and speed to send a zombie’s head flying like the world’s grossest golf ball.
I might’ve grinned, though, since no one could see. If Ian had been there, maybe I’d have whooped a little, since he wouldn’t have given me that This is beneath your dignity and it’s making me doubt your leadership look I always got from everyone else when I dared to let loose a little tiny bit.
But Ian had gone the other direction, leaving me with Jennifer, who was taking this so fucking seriously, and Mark and Andy, her nephews, who didn’t have a sense of humor to start with.
The head sailed through the air, nailing a giant tree trunk dead-on with a sound like a baseball bat demolishing a ripe watermelon.
Fucking nice. I really wished Ian had seen that. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him.
“Hey Andy!” I called. “Clean this one up!”
A stifled groan from behind me made me grin again, safe in knowing I’d taken point and no one was looking. Okay, fair enough. Being the pack leader had a few definite upsides.
“That’s four we’ve killed now, plus the one back at the pack house,” Jennifer said, coming up to stand next to me while Andy jogged ahead to take care of the body. “Three more out there, unless Ian’s group took care of them already.”
A crunching in the underbrush and a low, ugly moan made that seem less likely. Jennifer and I got our machetes up and ready, and a moment later another zombie shoved its way through the low-hanging branches of a pine tree.
For a second, I froze. It was Taft. Parker Taft, the motherfucker who’d — I couldn’t even think about what he’d done to Arik without blinding, red-tinged rage obliterating the rest of the world from view. I’d killed him once, ripping out his spine with my bare hands. This time a more distant approach seemed best, since what was left of his flesh hung off what bones he still had, and the smell nearly bowled me over. I wasn’t even sure how he was ambulatory without his backbone, but somehow he’d managed to crawl out of his grave and shuffle and weave his way back to me.
Magic really fucking sucked sometimes.
My machete made a wet, disgusting sound as it slopped through his boneless neck and he slumped to the ground, lifeless. Again. I didn’t kick him, mainly because I didn’t want to have to clean my boots.
Fuck, what had Arik been thinking? He hadn’t been thinking, and that was the problem. I’d tried not to be angry when he and Ian and Nate walked up to the pack house with a zombie and tossed it down right in front of the council, and the effort was ongoing, but it made the vein in my temple throb a little to think about how goddamn hard I worked to keep this pack on its feet — and then my own mate did shit like this. Thoughtless, destructive shit that made my life and my job, basically one and the same, so much fucking harder.
“Have you noticed what direction they’ve been going in?” Jennifer asked, interrupting my spiral. “They’re not wandering randomly.”
I set the point of the machete down and leaned on it. “Yeah. I noticed.” They’d all been making for the pack house.
Or possibly for Arik, whom I’d left at the pack house. Neither option appealed to me.
“Are we sure there won’t be more?” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “I mean, we don’t know how far this spell reached. If it went past the territory boundary…” She trailed off into a shrug and a sigh, because she didn’t really need to spell it out. This forest had been under our control for at least a hundred and fifty years. Beyond that…well, there were plenty of humans, creatures, and assorted others who might’ve dumped bodies in the forest beyond our boundary. The local vampires hadn’t been quite so civilized before Charlie Fenwick came along and took over, just to start with.
“If there’s more, we’ll deal with it,” I said. “For now, six down, two possibly to go.”
We met up with Ian a few minutes later, and he confirmed he’d dealt with the other two. “Not fair,” he said cheerfully, apparently totally forgetting he’d been bitching about the smell before. He did reek, I had to admit. I tried to shift upwind of him a little without him noticing. “You got to do the fun part.”
“I knocked a head into a tree,” I told him, enjoying his scowl. “From like five yards away.”
“Pictures or it didn’t happen,” he grumbled, and bumped my shoulder with his, leaving a smudge of zombie juice on my jacket.
“Fucker.”
He grinned at me. “Asshole.”
We shouldered our machetes and headed back to the pack house, leaving Ian’s minions to clean up the mess.
I had a mate to deal with.
That wiped the smile off my face.
***
We found Nate finishing up the wards around the pack house, adjusting a line of rock salt and muttering to himself. Ian made a beeline for him, with me, Jennifer, and the rest of the world dropping completely off his radar in a second.
I shook my head and kept walking. I’d never seen Ian so happy, and Nate was the best brother-in-law a guy could ask for, in spite of the weird passive-aggressive messages he wrote on all the pack house’s coffee mugs when he got pissy. Still, it was so damn strange to see Ian like that. He'd turned into a sap.
Then again, so had I.
And my mate wasn’t there. I’d expected him to be working on the wards with Nate, the both of them trying to one-up the other like usual.
I’d expected him to be pitching in to fix his own damn mistake.
Getting angry all over again
wouldn’t help anything. But I was angry, and Arik fucking off to God knew where to sulk, or whatever he was doing, didn’t help. I’d seen the hard, closed-off look on his face when he and Nate and Ian showed up with the zombie, but even after eight months of living with him…yeah, I’d have been lying if I said I could interpret it. Nothing good, though.
I tuned in to the mate bond, trying to get a bead on his location.
Upstairs in the pack house, as far as I could tell. I followed the little tug of the bond into the house and up to the room Arik and I shared. It felt like a string tied somewhere inside my rib cage. Usually I loved it, that reminder that he and I couldn’t ever be separated, even when apart. That Arik was mine.
Right then it irritated me.
Arik wasn’t in the bedroom, but I could scent him, and I could feel the bond pulling us closer.
The bathroom, then. My anger spiked. Only my mate would slope off to take a fucking bath when everyone else had to spend the night killing the zombies he’d raised out of our fucking herb garden.
But when I opened the door, ready to shout at him, I didn’t find him in the bath.
Or at least, not taking a bath.
He’d shifted into his bobcat form, and he’d curled up in the bottom of the dry bathtub, with his nose tucked in and his tail wrapped over his face, with only his tufty ears poking out.
He looked miserable.
I loved his tufty ears. Fuck. That plus his obvious unhappiness nearly did me in.
But no. I was the fucking pack leader. I had zombies attacking my people — my responsibilities, every last one of them, from tough-as-nails Jennifer down to the new baby who’d been born three weeks before.
“Arik,” I said, trying to sound as stern as a pack leader ought to under the circumstances. “You can’t hide in the fucking bathtub while we clean up your mess.”
Literally. If nothing else, I needed him out of the bathtub so I could use the shower. Macheteing zombies had left me…yeah, I could smell myself.
One of his ears twitched, and he curled in on himself a little more tightly. His tail stayed over his eyes.
“Arik.” Nothing. I tried listening to the mate bond, hoping for some hint about what the hell I was dealing with here. Sometimes I could get his emotions through it, and occasionally even a whisper of his thoughts, when he’d opened himself up to me. The rest of the time, he kept his private feelings private, only letting me in on them when he chose to speak them aloud. I could live with that. I did live with it, every day, and hopefully for the rest of my life.
But right then…yeah, not so helpful. And he was locked down tighter than he’d ever been.
I wanted to yell. I wanted to shift too, into my much, much larger alpha wolf form, and pick him up by the nape of the neck like a kitten and shake him until he yowled.
If I’d been Ian and he’d been Nate, maybe I would have. But for all Arik’s bravado, and for all his ability to take care of himself — and he could be scary as hell — he was ten times as fragile as my twinky, whiny, one-hundred-percent human brother-in-law.
And I’d just killed Taft for the second time.
My fists unclenched as the light dawned, probably a little belatedly.
Arik had known the body he’d brought back to the pack house was one of Taft’s pack.
Ergo, he’d known Taft would be wandering the woods too, undead and horrific and not gone forever the way I’d promised Arik he would be.
I hadn’t noticed when I walked in, too pissed and distracted, but the bathroom was cold. Fucking freezing, even. I crossed the room and shut the window over the bathtub, cutting off the flow of frigid air. Arik still hadn’t moved.
I could’ve forced him to shift back, no matter how much he’d locked down the mate bond. Being the dominant mate came with some privileges — privileges I’d never even come close to using, let alone abusing. I thought about it, though. If ever there was a time when it might be justified…
No. No, it wouldn’t be. That was frustration talking, and I’d promised Arik I wouldn’t be that kind of alpha. He trusted me not to be that kind of alpha. He could’ve taken off into the woods, masked his scent, and hidden from me.
Instead he’d come up here, to hide away in the bathtub.
Not exactly a good sign, shifting and lying in a cold bathtub, but I’d gotten this bathtub for him, installed it myself, grouting and all. Because I loved him. Because it made him happy to soak in a giant tub of hot water with the door locked and be a clean little cat on his own terms.
And he’d come here. Where he knew I’d find him. And left the door unlocked, even though I could’ve broken it down in two seconds. That had been a message, not a thoughtless omission.
Arik didn’t deal in thoughtlessness — with the possible exception of the occasional zombie.
Knowing Arik, that could mean he’d expected me to react badly, and he’d wanted to get it over with.
And that doused the last embers of my anger.
I bent down and scooped him up into my arms, cradling him against my chest. He’d have been a heavy armful for a normal human, but he didn’t weigh anything at all to me in this form, any more than he did in the other. I took him carefully into the bedroom and set him down in the middle of our bed.
He didn’t move.
Shower first, because Arik would probably prefer it if I lost my shit and screamed at him over getting in the bed with him tainted with zombie juice.
I stepped out of the bathroom two minutes later, still a little damp but smelling like nothing but me. I climbed onto the bed with him, not bothering with clothes, wrapping myself around his furry little body and holding him close, stroking him between his tufty ears. I had no idea if wild bobcats liked that; I honestly didn’t even know if Arik did, since he usually only shifted to run by himself.
But I didn’t know what else to do.
At least a couple of hours went by before he stirred. First his tail twitched, and then he stretched his paws, and then, after a few more moments of lying still, he melted into his human shape, becoming long and lean and not furry at all. He uncurled and rolled over to face me, his long blond hair tousled and streaming around his neck and shoulders.
His green eyes never stopped amazing me, no matter how many times I got to look at them up close like this. They had depths like a forest in the summer, but a vividness that made me think of dragonflies or iridescent scarabs or hummingbirds: something flashing and inhuman and painfully beautiful.
Arik looked at me solemnly, without a trace of his usual attitude, which typically ranged from sardonic stoicism to acid, cutting sarcasm.
“Did he —” Arik stopped and swallowed hard. “Did he — fuck, I can’t even say —”
He didn’t need to say anything else. I knew exactly what he meant. For once, I’d gotten it right instead of flailing around trying to figure out what the hell was going on in his head until he deigned to shout it at me.
He rolled to his back, staring up at the ceiling.
Fuck that. I wrapped my arms around him again and yanked him against my chest, curling over him like a wall between him and the world. That was what I wanted to be, and sometimes he even let me. I fucking hoped this would be one of those times, instead of him putting up a wall between the two of us instead.
“I killed him again,” I said softly. “Permanently, this time. I hope? I mean, you’re the expert. But he’s definitely headless.”
Arik turned his head a little and peered at me from under his lashes. “You did it yourself? I mean, you did it. Not someone else under your command.”
“I did it myself. I promise. No question.”
He sighed, finally relaxing into my hold, and I dared to nuzzle his cheek and press a kiss to the angle of his jaw. I wouldn’t go for his mouth just yet. I knew better than to push my luck.
To my shock, it was Arik who turned into my kiss, pressing his mouth to mine and parting his lips for me in clear invitation. He let me kiss him breathless, until m
y cock dug into his hip and I’d lost track of everything else: zombies, wards, the pack…everything. Everything but the smoothness of his skin under my hands, and the soft glide of his lips and his tongue, and the sweet spiciness of his scent and taste.
He broke the kiss at last, pushing me up and off of him enough that he could slide sinuously down the bed, kissing my chest and stomach along the way.
“Fuck, sweetheart, do you want to — oh, fuck,” I gasped, as his mouth closed over my cock and his tongue worked the underside. I held myself propped up on my hands, my arms shaking, as he took me by the hips and swallowed me down all the way.
I let my head hang down so I could watch him.
Oh, shit, I couldn’t watch him — watch my thick alpha cock forcing those soft pink lips open obscenely wide, while his eyelids fluttered and he gasped and tried not to choke. I’d come within seconds if I watched.
And then Arik pulled off, flicking the head of my cock with his tongue, and tipped his head back to look at me.
“Use my mouth, Matthew,” he said, low and raspy, his voice already affected by the length of me pushing into him. My whole body shuddered.
“Use your — fuck, Arik, you can’t just say that.”
“Fuck my throat. Use me.”
Still looking me in the eyes, he pulled me in by the hips, taking me down inch by inch until my balls rested on his chin and his eyes watered from the strain. His throat constricted around the head of my cock, almost painfully tight, hot and wet and overwhelming.
I thrust into his throat, hard, and he moaned and choked around me, his fingers digging bruises into my hips.
I pulled back and thrust again, and again, hardly giving him room to take a breath, pounding into his stretched-open mouth and chasing the orgasm that had started to build in the base of my spine, pressure I couldn’t run away from.
Tears ran from the corners of his eyes, and he writhed under me. The slick, wet sounds of my cock shoving into his mouth and down his throat finished me off.
A Very Armitage Christmas Page 3