Why did I feel so fucking heavy? Like I needed to lie down.
Not here. Gross.
I wobbled, and then through it all I felt my mate, more clearly than I’d ever felt him before. I hadn’t realized how much of himself he must have been holding back, or protecting, maybe, until there weren’t any barriers at all. The bond glowed with reds and golds and blues, and it rang like resonance in a crystal glass. Nate’s energy, flowing through the bond to me, unfiltered and beautiful and filled with so much emotion…more than I’d ever thought someone like him could have for someone like me.
It hurt, like the soul-deep equivalent of cleaning out a wound with rubbing alcohol. Stinging and burning and healing all at once.
How had I wondered if he really loved me? My wounds didn’t matter. All that mattered was feeling that, for as long as I could. The world spun in front of me, snow and corpses and sunlight and trees, like a kaleidoscope. My whole body throbbed with pain and with bliss all at the same time.
Nate skidded to a stop in front of me, flinging himself down on his knees and taking my face in his hands. His fingers felt small and cold against my skin. He was pale and disheveled, with his hair flying in all directions, but there was no blood on him. No wounds. I’d kept him safe.
“I’m a mess,” I mumbled. I blinked at him. Both of him, for a second. My vision cleared, and he resolved into one lovely Nate. “Shouldn’t touch me.”
Nate’s beautiful dark brown eyes gleamed, catching a glint of the dawn and lighting up like something out of this world. “You’re my mess,” he said. “My alpha. My —” He choked and cleared his throat. “I love you. And now Arik needs to heal you, so I can beat the shit out of you for being so fucking reckless. I love you. Come on, let’s get you up.”
Somehow Nate got his shoulder under one of my arms and helped me stagger to my feet, grunting with the effort and nearly collapsing under my weight. He didn’t complain or bitch at me, just steadied me until I could put one foot in front of the other.
“Why aren’t you making fun of me for being such a heavy useless lump, or something?” I still sounded slurred, like I’d been drinking too much and hit my head on a telephone pole. Not that I’d done that before, or anything.
“Would it make you feel better?” Nate asked breathlessly, shifting his arm to get a better grip around my ribs.
Love still poured through the bond and through every point of contact between our bodies. It almost felt like it was healing my wounds a little, even though I didn’t think it worked that way. “You make me feel better.”
Nate made a muffled sound, and I tried to look down at his face. The motion lurched us both off-balance, and he had to dig his feet in and push me back upright. “Don’t fall down now, you heavy useless lump,” he said, his voice a little choked. “I can’t carry you.”
“I can, though.” Matt, loping toward us and meeting us halfway. “Heavy useless lump is what I’m going to call you from now on, Ian.”
He wrapped an arm around me from the other side, actually holding me up, and the three of us made much better progress back toward the house.
“Everyone okay?” I asked.
“A few bites. Arik’s got it under control.” Pride in his mate glowed in every word.
With Matt’s support, I could look around without falling over, and I turned my head a little to take in the carnage. I could see why he’d be feeling proud of Arik. Maybe it’d all been the little shit’s fault in the first place, but whatever magic he’d come up with to end the problem had been incredibly effective. Zombies littered the ground everywhere, but — not a twitch. They were down for the count.
The fucking Santa had fallen into a deflated heap, with three dead zombies on top of it.
Fuckers.
Nate and Matt lowered me down by the side of the house, propping me up against it. Andy sat a few feet away, with Arik muttering and waving his tattooed hands over a nasty bite in his leg. Matt jogged off again after I gave him a nod, heading for a few of the pack who were limping our way.
And Nate settled down by my side, taking my hand and leaning his head on my shoulder. I rested my head on his, closing my eyes and inhaling the scent of his hair. He always smelled so good.
“I love you so much,” Nate said quietly, without even a hint of his usual sarcastic edge. “So, so much. Please don’t be stupid next time. I need you around to put up the rest of the Christmas decorations. I can’t reach the higher branches on those trees out front.”
His curls tickled my cheek and lips, and his hand fit so perfectly in mine. “I love you even more. So I’ll always be stupid if I’m protecting you. Sorry.”
Nate squeezed my hand.
He didn’t need to say anything else.
Chapter 5
Nate
“Okay, so this is why I hate necromancy.” I dropped my rake and desperately tried to scratch my nose with the side of my arm. Fuck. I couldn’t touch my face, not after touching…everything I’d just touched. Even with gardening gloves, I felt tainted. “I mean, I could make a long, long list of everything I hate about necromancy. The stench, and the body parts, and the body parts that smell incredibly fucking bad, and did I mention —”
“Yes, you mentioned,” Arik snapped, pausing in raking up bits of bone to glare at me. “More than once. Every fucking second we’ve been out here working, in fact.”
He hadn’t even tried to get out of clean-up duty, maybe — for once — realizing he’d acted like a little shit and needed to make up for it. The bigger, stronger members of the pack had loaded the bodies up, taking a few trips with several old pick-up trucks to ferry them back to the cemetery they’d crawled out of. They were still working on that, leaving me and Arik to scoop up the bits that’d fallen off. We had an enormous trash barrel, two rakes, and a mutually bad attitude to work with.
It wasn’t the most efficient clean-up operation ever, honestly.
“It bears repeating,” I growled back. “Keep in mind, I could go inside and bake Christmas pies and leave you out here to do this alone, and no one would blame me. Not even Matthew.”
Arik’s cheekbones flushed brick-red, and he scraped his rake over a pile of small zombie bits with more force than strictly necessary.
Tempting as it was to ditch him, get inside out of the just-below-freezing weather, and sit down with a hot cup of coffee, I sighed and got a good grip on my rake too. Ian and Matthew were off hauling large zombie bits. The least I could do was haul small zombie bits.
Was that some kind of larger metaphor for our relationship? Was it even a metaphor, seeing as this wasn’t the first time, or even the second, that we’d had to get rid of a bunch of bodies together?
Something to ponder while I tried to scrape stray rotting toes out of the mud.
And if that was some kind of metaphor for my life, then even coffee couldn’t help me.
Arik and I both looked up at the sound of a car engine coming down the long drive from the road.
“They can’t be back yet,” I said. I put a hand at my forehead to shade my eyes and squinted down the driveway. The zombies had mostly congregated at the back of the pack house. From where we stood off to the side of the large house, it looked like most of my candy canes had survived. I couldn’t see any cars, though.
Arik stared in the same direction and cocked his head. “That’s not them. That’s a way beefier engine.”
Gods, sometimes I got so sick of being the only person around without supernatural senses — or any knowledge of cars. “Who’d be coming to visit us? Oh, fuck, what now? Do zombies drive? If a zombie’s driving that car, you’re on your own, brother-in-law or not. I’m going to barricade myself in the kitchen with the kids and eat pie until the fucking new year.”
“You haven’t made any pie yet, and I’m not convinced you know how,” Arik retorted.
My mouth opened and shut a couple of times as I tried to get a handle on the twenty different insulting responses to that running through my head �
�� starting with wondering how someone who couldn’t take care of an herb garden without raising a whole cemetery full of the undead had the nerve to criticize my domestic skills, and ending with telling him I’d have made the fucking pie if I hadn’t been so busy raking body parts, thank you Arik’s necromancy. Before I could get my thoughts in order, a car came around the bend. A black convertible with the top down, something classic-looking, but I couldn’t see more than that at our distance.
“Two people,” Arik said, leaning forward a little. “An older guy driving, and a woman with really, really red hair in the passenger seat. Wow, nice. That’s the fucking Kennedy car!”
“I don’t fucking care about Kennedy or his car, as long as his reanimated corpse isn’t in the back seat,” I snapped. “Who are they?”
“They look sort of familiar,” Arik said slowly. “I’ve seen them before. In that photo —” Arik broke off, his voice cracking. He went white as a sheet and turned to look at me, his green eyes blown wide in something like panic. Panic? We’d had a plague of zombies, and whoever was in this car was worse?
“What?” I demanded. “Where have you seen —” And then my tongue went all stiff in my mouth as I realized what Arik was talking about: the photo on the pack house mantelpiece.
“Matt’s parents,” Arik whispered, his face a picture of dread, at the same moment as I said, “Oh, fuck. It’s Ian’s parents.”
We’d never met them. Either of us, unless you counted my seeing them in passing when I was a kid and my father did some freelance warlock work for John. They stayed pretty isolated in their cabin in the mountains, with no phones and no internet. They went to the small town down the mountain to pick up mail and occasionally call Matt or Ian, but they hadn’t said anything about coming to visit, even though they knew their sons had acquired mates since the last time they’d been to the Armitage territory.
And now here we were, standing in a scattered pile of zombie bits, rakes in our hands, sweaty and dirty and literally cleaning up the scene of the crime.
And our mother-in-law and father-in-law, Janet and John Armitage, were merrily zipping down the driveway, expecting a wholesome holiday reunion.
Well, if anything could bring people together at Christmastime, it was family, right? And they’d brought me and Arik together. Together in fucking dumbstruck horror, at least.
“What the fuck do we do? Arik! What the fuck — should we run?”
“Run?”
“Yeah. Like, into the woods. Or maybe to Oregon. Or another continent.”
“Oh, gods,” Arik moaned. “Don’t tempt me. We could — we’re both pretty good at hiding trails with magic. We could be a hundred miles away before — shit, we can’t. Right? Can we?” he pleaded, his eyes wide.
I shot a glance back at the car, just pulling up in front of the house. “Too late. They’ve seen us.”
Ian and Matthew’s mom waved, her arm over her head, and flung her door open before the car even rumbled to a complete stop.
“Bobcats can outrun wolves when they’re being sneaky,” Arik said.
I grabbed his arm and hung on tight. “Don’t you fucking dare. You try that and I’ll turn you into a fucking throw rug! Humans can’t outrun wolves!”
“That’s the definition of a you problem,” Arik muttered, but he didn’t try to pull away. Honestly, I was afraid I might keel over if I didn’t have him to hold onto, and maybe he felt the same way. I drew the line at holding hands, though. Also, Arik might break my arm if I tried.
“Hello, boys!” Janet called out as she started to walk our way. Bounce, really. Jesus, who had that much energy? Oh yeah. Anyone who hadn’t spent all morning getting rid of a metric fuckton of ancient, filthy corpses. “Nate? Arik? Is that you?”
John got out of the car more slowly, and as he stood up I saw he was the spitting image of Matthew, plus thirty years. Not bad. If Arik had that to look forward to, then he’d be a happy man. Janet looked a lot like Ian, and not just the hair. She had freckles too, and Ian’s long, straight nose.
She was also the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen, even in mom jeans and a puffy orange jacket that should’ve clashed with her hair, but instead somehow looked funky and cool.
“Yes,” I rasped. And then, “Yes, it is!” That came out too loudly, making me sound like a fucking idiot.
Her face split in a wide, familiar grin. Ian had gotten that too, it looked like. “I’m so glad to meet you boys at la—”
“Watch out!” Arik called out, and she stopped dead, so to speak, staring down at her feet — her feet, plus one extra on the ground next to her boots, that looked like it’d been rotting for a few decades.
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh my,” she said. “Oh. Well. You’ve had an interesting day.”
I swallowed hard. Interesting. Interesting?
“Interesting?” Arik said.
Janet looked up. “Well, zombies are always interesting. Or were they revenants?”
Arik visibly brightened. “Yes! Thank you! I kept telling Matthew they weren’t zombies, but he didn’t listen.”
“Oh, they never do,” Janet said nonchalantly. She nudged the foot with the tip of her boot. “John!” she called. “Go check the garage for the snowblower. Matt and Ian left these two cleaning up revenant bits with rakes, of all the things.” She turned back to us. “Where is everyone else, anyway?”
“Most of them are dropping the bodies off at the cemetery,” I said. “Everyone up to it. All the kids are inside watching movies, and some of the parents are watching the kids. That just kind of left us.”
John pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and waved at us. “Nice to meet you. I’ll get the snowblower. Rakes are the stupidest possible way to do this. No offense.”
He ambled off around the other side of the pack house, presumably heading for one of the compound’s several garages, leaving us gaping after him. I hadn’t even known we had a snowblower. I bet Matthew and Ian didn’t either. Luckily. Ian probably would’ve tried to race it or something.
“Don’t take it personally,” Janet said soothingly. “He’s not very tactful. One of many reasons he didn’t last as pack leader, and thank God for that, because I hated it. I do yoga naked in the woods now. No one around for miles. Complete silence. And when John joins me, we can make love right there on the deck and howl as loudly as we want.”
Arik and I both stared at her. For once, neither of us had a single word to say. Janet and John. My mate’s parents. Making love on a deck. In the woods.
Naked. Howling.
My brain stalled out, stuttering to a complete halt like an overloaded snowblower.
Janet smiled at us, shook her head, and said, “Don’t be such prudes, boys. Really. Now, who’s responsible for the candy canes?” Arik mutely pointed at me. “Good for you, Nate. Someone around here needs to learn how to loosen up a little. Let’s get all the groceries out of the car and go inside and see the rest of the pack, and then you two can take nice hot showers and we can figure out Christmas Eve dinner, hmm? John can get Matt and Ian to snowblow the rest of this mess.”
***
Hot showers and fresh clothes — mine borrowed from Arik — later, we stood outside Arik and Matthew’s room, eyeing the stairs. Neither one of us moved to actually go down them.
Loud laughter and cheerful conversation and the squeaks and howls of tiny werewolf children echoed through the house. Apparently everyone had missed the pack matriarch, even if they hadn’t missed John’s incompetent leadership. Just in the half hour we’d been upstairs, the house had started to smell like pumpkin pie spices and apple cider and — was that what a home was supposed to smell like at Christmas? I glanced at Arik, standing there chewing his lip and looking like he was two seconds from diving out the nearest window. Yeah, no point in asking him. My childhood could’ve been a PSA about parental neglect, but his had been more like a horror movie.
A burst of static echoed up the stairs, followed by the scratch
y but recognizable sound of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas.
“Was he also dreaming about having detached fingers all over the yard?” Arik asked. His voice sounded tight and tense as hell. “Or an infestation of in-laws popping up out of nowhere?”
I looked at him for a minute, pondering the mystery that was Arik. I didn’t even know his last name, or if he had one, for that matter — other than Armitage, which he went by now. He’d never mentioned a parent of any kind. I knew he’d had a brother, sort of, and that was all I knew, because getting Arik to open up about anything personal was kind of like trying to open an oyster by tickling it. If the oyster could kill you for saying the wrong thing, anyway. A really, really dangerous and angry oyster.
“Hey, Arik?”
He glanced at me. “Yeah?” he asked. Defensively. Seriously? All I’d said was Hey, Arik. Not Hey, Arik, you raised a whole cemetery full of revenants, you’re a freaky cat shaman who tried to kill us all at one point, and your mother-in-law’s downstairs, how do you feel about that?
I cleared my throat. “I’m terrified too.”
Arik’s face twisted into a snarl, but his eyes looked so glassy and lost. “Like fuck,” he spat at me. “You’re — you’re normal. I mean, you — you’re a local, and you’re — you’re not —”
“Not what? Not a cat? Arik, my father cheated this pack, murdered Ian and Matthew’s cousin — you know, Janet’s nephew? And then tried to set them all up for a pack war with the Kimballs and get us all killed. And yes, you were in on that too, but not the way my dearly fucking departed dad was, okay? I’m human. And a warlock. At least you’re a shifter!”
“Fuck you, Nate,” he said, and turned his face away.
My mouth opened. Horrible, shitty, unforgiveable words rose up in my throat and tried to launch themselves off the tip of my tongue.
A Very Armitage Christmas Page 5