The bite on his shoulder throbbed with pleasant warmth. Yasmin hadn’t repeated the marking, and he had once again restrained himself from reciprocating the brand.
If he did that, it would seal their bond in permanence, and they’d be tied together for eternity. His dad’s cutting words lingered in the back of his mind, but one look at Yasmin’s blissful features obliterated them. She wasn’t a gold digger after his money.
Hell, she probably had more wealth than him. Everything in his personal hoard had come courtesy of his father or been donations and gifts from relatives and family. He’d personally gained nothing.
Despite having nothing to offer Yasmin but himself, he wanted her, and he didn’t even know why.
Something about her called out to his soul and stirred memories of holding her hand on the beach, making sand castles, and playing with the jaguars in his father’s sanctuary. Would she still like those things?
“You haven’t asked why I didn’t mark you in return.”
“Huh?” Yasmin rolled onto her side and blinked at him.
“The mating brand.” When he gestured to his shoulder, Yasmin flushed.
“Yeah, about that, I’m sorry. Like really sorry. I didn’t mean to, and I guess I figured you knew it was one of those lost-in-the-moment things, which is why you haven’t done the same.”
He forced a grin despite the painful stab burrowing into his chest with each word. “Yeah. Yeah, I sorta figured, but thought I should ask.”
Relief flooded Yasmin’s features, adding to the crushing tightness in his chest. “Good. This is fun and all, but I’m not exactly ready to be bonded for eternity. I mean, you live here, and that’s a long way to try and keep a relationship intact.”
“You could always stay on the island,” Javier suggested, testing the waters and her interest in remaining with him at all.
“Stay on the island? I’m between semesters at school. If I don’t return in a month, my classes will resume without me, which kinda sucks since I’ve already put a few years into this whole degree thing.”
“Oh.”
“Plus, I have friends and a job in the states. A really awesome job.”
A job she’d never mentioned before since he hadn’t bothered to learn anything about her or even have a real conversation at length. “I get it.”
While he understood, Yasmin continued to chatter. Light and excitement danced in her eyes. “It’s really neat. BioWare is hiring me to voice their new star captain, and Bethesda contacted my agent about a role in their next Elder Scrolls game.”
“I get it,” Javier said, although it took all his grace and willpower to murmur the words in a gentle voice. “That’s cool. I mean, you’re going to be a voice acting star now with a lineup of gigs like that.”
“Yeah.” Yasmin’s wispy smile broadened. “It’s been my dream. Don’t you have a dream job?”
He didn’t, which was precisely the problem, as his dad would say.
“Nah, not really.” He shrugged in an attempt to play it off as nothing major. “I help in the office sometimes, so that’s likely where I’ll end up in a few years once my folks wanna retire or whatever it is they wanna do.”
“But that isn’t what you wanna do.”
“Not really, but it’s what I will do. Only option, really.”
“Well, what are you good at?” she persisted. “Everybody is good at something. Your mom does photography, your dad creates billionaire empires out of animal sanctuaries and resorts, my dad writes some badass video game scripts, and my mom can make a yard look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon when she’s not busy designing sexy romance covers.”
“I can’t draw more than a stick figure.”
“Heh.” She chuckled and propped her head up on her hand. “Okay, so an artist you are not. But c’mon, there has to be something you’ve always wanted to do.”
“Living on a tropical island hasn’t introduced me to many options,” he said.
Her smile turned into a frown, lips pressed together in a thin line. “That’s not really a great excuse, you know?”
“Now you sound like my dad. Anyway, what are we doing about this?” He pointed to his shoulder and drew the topic back to the partial bond between them.
“I dunno. Let it fade I guess, right? I mean, we’re both in agreement that it was my fault and not intentional. Or a good idea since we live worlds apart.” She ducked her head sheepishly and hid her face beneath her abundant, wild curls. “You don’t want it, right?”
“Yeah,” he lied. “The sooner it’s gone the better.”
“Great. Um… this isn’t going to mess up our friendship, right?”
Friendship. The word closed an iron fist around his heart and squeezed. “What? Nah, why would it?”
“I dunno. I’ve never really done the friends with benefits thing before. It was… really nice reconnecting with you again, and I don’t want things to be awkward these last few days ’till I leave.”
“When are you leaving anyway?”
“Four days.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “You gonna see me off when I go?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there. I wouldn’t dream of letting you go without a goodbye.”
Chapter Seven
Javier’s last four days with Yasmin passed too quickly. He had engineered every excuse he could to spend time with her, from taking her and her friends out with Phoebe to the hippocampi lagoon to leading them on a personal tour of his dad’s aviary. They’d even gone on a five-mile hike.
Sometimes Yasmin slept overnight, and those memories were burned into his heart and mind. For her final evening on the island, she’d stayed in her own bungalow, and he’d laid in bed without sleeping, dreading the coming day.
With a few hours to spare until Yasmin was due to depart the island by ferry, Javier set his alarm and drifted to sleep.
Then bright light flooded his face as his father yanked open the curtains. “Rise and shine, Javier.”
He jerked up and shielded his eyes with one arm, twisting away from the blinding light of the noonday sun. “What the hell, Dad?”
“We’ve raised you to be better than this. You cannot sleep the entire day away like a lazy bum.”
“You sleep during half the day,” he grumbled back.
“I also work, which is exactly what you’re going to do today.”
“Dude, come on. I was catching a nap before Yasmin’s ferry left, that’s all.”
“Dude?” An incredulous raise of both brows made Teo look comical and offended. “Dude?”
“Uh. Sir. Anyway, I’m just getting a nap until it’s time for Yasmin to leave.”
“You can go down from the office when it’s time,” his father compromised. “I’m glad you took your mother’s words to heart when she asked you to show the young ladies around. But now that they’re leaving, you will start assisting me daily in the office.”
“Dad, come—”
Teo slashed his hand through the air. “This is not a negotiation. I have been patient, Javier, but enough is enough. I expect you to be dressed appropriately, and in my office in exactly half an hour. Understood? If you do not like it, you can live elsewhere and learn the difficult route of carving your own way forward through life.”
“Fine,” he gritted out, though he wasn’t yet sure if he was “fine” with his father’s decree or to leaving the island.
“You live a charmed life, my son. A life of privilege. You want for nothing, yet you mope around my island with no drive. Your mother and I have decided it’s time to kick you from the nest. What happens next is up to you.” And with that, the mighty Teotihuacan strode from the room. A few seconds later, the beat of powerful wings stirred the tree tops surrounding Javier’s bungalow.
Anger drove him from the bed and into the shower. He scrubbed his hair and muttered to himself about the unfairness of it all.
But was it unfair?
As the water pounded against him from the high-power shower head, it ma
ssaged the fury from his bones and left emotional exhaustion in its place. No longer fed up with his father, he emerged under the gloom of a deep melancholy for failing to see what everyone else had noticed all along.
Maybe if he’d gotten his life into gear months ago, Yasmin would have asked for him to seal their bonding.
Javier emerged from the shower to find his father had even laid out “appropriate” clothes for him. The old man must have done it before awakening him. As he dried off, Javier eyed the khaki slacks, white linen shirt, and brown leather dress shoes with disdain. He’d look like an exact replica of his dad in those, a younger imitation twenty pounds lighter and one inch shorter.
Was this going to be his life now? A carbon copy doomed to remain chained to the island?
No. He had to figure out what the fuck he wanted, and he had to do it soon.
Javier rubbed his temples with both fingers. No matter how much he tried to focus on the screen, administrative work eluded his interest and his mind would wander to everything else he enjoyed. Nothing was fun about math and lawyer jargon.
Then he heard Teo’s voice in his head. Work isn’t meant to be fun. Yeah, it was almost like Dad was right there, he could imagine the words so clearly.
His father wanted him to learn to monitor the many different departments and conduct spontaneous audits, but he’d spent most of the day zoning out on the security monitors instead like a total voyeur.
Then he’d spotted a guy lifting a wallet from a woman’s beach tote in the lower gift shop and felt immense pride once he radioed it in and security escorted the guy to the island’s jail. They had a small police department of their own with actual trained law enforcement since, technically, his father’s island was now its own little sovereign state where he ruled supreme over all within his domain. How he’d worked that out was anyone’s guess, but Javier figured money had to be involved. Lots and lots of money.
Then again, maybe nobody wanted to argue with a dragon about what he did with his property.
Sitting back again, he returned to his pile of financial documents, sipped coffee, and concentrated on what he should have been doing.
If he didn’t make some progress by the time his father returned from his business dinner off the island, there’d be hell to pay. He didn’t think they’d really toss him out on his ass, but part of him wouldn’t blame his folks if they did. He had been a bum—a lazy, leeching bum—and self-deprecation wasn’t going to fix that problem either.
Focus, Javier. Fucking focus, he chided himself.
Betsy rapped on the open door and leaned into his father’s office. “Would you like anything from the Surf and Turf, Javier? I’m calling in an order.”
The secretary had been an installation of the administrative compound for the past sixteen years, coming into employment a few years after his birth. He smiled at her. “Yeah. I’ll have the steak and scallops. Thanks.”
“No problem. Rare, right?”
“Yeah.”
She returned to her desk and phoned in their requests, ordering food for Javier and herself.
An hour later, the two guards on duty left on their lunch break, leaving Javier to fill in for them after stuffing his belly with good food.
“Your father is so proud of you, Javier. Every time you come to work at the administrative office, he boasts about what a great son you are for days,” Betsy told him.
“He does?”
“You can’t get him to talk about anything else.”
The door slammed open against the stopper with a bang, and a harried woman burst inside, her pale blonde hair sticking on end. The short pixie cut surrounded a pale face with a set of distraught blue eyes shimmering with tears.
“Please, I need your help,” she cried. “My son Dylan is missing. Is he here? Has anyone brought him in looking for me?”
“Oh, dear,” Betsy said. “No one has reported a missing little boy. Let me call security.”
“Security told me to come here!”
At that moment, a flushed security guard entered behind her. “She ran ahead of me. I wanted to bring her here for a report.”
Javier nodded to the man then stepped around the desk. “Slow down for us, okay.” He moved forward, hands up with his palms out. “Listen, I know you’re freaking out, but take a breath and start at the beginning for me. What’s your name?”
Gentle, with infinite care and patience, he settled one arm around her back and guided her toward the nearby couch. Betsy hovered close by.
“Lydia.” She sniffed and swiped at her wet cheeks. “Dylan and I were on the tram heading to the preserve. H-he loves birds, you see, so he was watching at the viewport while I was sitting down. But at one of the stops, a huge crowd swarmed on and we were separated.”
Javier pulled the radio off his belt and depressed the push-to-talk button. “Javier to Central. I’m going to need you to halt all incoming and outgoing movement between the islands and the mainland. A child is missing. Over.”
“Amber alert set,” the voice on the other end replied. “Can you give us specifics? Over.”
“One moment,” Javier said. “Getting the details now, but I want this island closed off and everyone on alert. No ferries in or out. No transport between islands. Kill the trams.”
“Roger that.”
He spent the next few minutes learning everything he could from Lydia about what happened. She’d ridden the tram back and forth for twenty minutes, checking each stop for her son before running for the admin building. Betsy sat beside her and held her hand with motherly concern while Javier stepped away to relay the necessary information.
“Child is male, six years of age, and forty-five inches tall. Sandy brown hair, blue eyes. Wolf shifter. Last seen in a black Minecraft T-shirt and blue swimming trunks approximately twenty-five to thirty minutes ago on the blue tram line.”
The security officer repeated everything back.
“Good. I want every shifter available assembled outside my office building in five minutes for further instruction. The rest of you begin the search for a boy fitting that description.”
While Betsy remained with Lydia, he hurried back to the security feed and pulled up the blue line, going back through the footage until he found Lydia sitting on the tram. Her son stood less than ten feet away with his face and hands pressed against the view window next to three other children. Playing at an increased speed, he watched as the crowd surged on and he lost sight of the boy. Javier rewound the footage and slowed the video down to replay frame by frame. At one point, a hand with a heavy silver band on the third finger settled on the boy’s shoulder.
Swapping to the platform camera at the same time did absolutely nothing. A large man with his back to the camera stood in the way of the doors, blocking the view. The next camera with a good angle was similarly blocked. The three men vanished with the crowd, their departure coincidentally timed with the disappearance of the boy.
Rewinding the footage again, Javier watched one last time.
The passengers spilled forward, but the boy remained hidden from view, lost within the sea of adult bodies egressing from the tram. When Javier moved to different security cameras and ran through their footage, he couldn’t find the little boy again.
They had more than a missing child; they had an abduction.
What the hell do I do now? Should I call Dad? Definitely should call Dad.
Two calls later, after leaving an urgent voice mail and equally desperate text on his father’s phone, Javier groaned into his hands. His mother had gone with him, and she’d also turned off her phone.
“Javier? Security team is waiting,” Betsy called, interrupting him. Javier hurried from the office and into the main room, but he paused by Lydia and crouched down in front of her. His heart slammed in his chest, but for her sake, he put on the cool and collected demeanor he thought his dad would display in the same situation. If only Dad were there to take over.
“Do you have anything of Dyla
n’s?”
“I have his hat.” She reached into her oversized tote. “He asked me to h-hold it while we were on the tram.”
“That will be perfect.” Javier took the black and green baseball cap and lifted it to his nose. Sweat mixed with coconut shampoo and sunscreen created a unique scent. “Mind if I borrow this?”
Lydia shook her head and blew her nose.
“Stay here with Betsy. I’m going out personally to help find your son. Betsy, do me a favor. If she has a photo of him on her phone, I want you to send it out as an administrative alert. I want every employee on this island to know what Dylan looks like. Even the people manning the gift shops and the food carts need to know.”
Outside, he moved onto the steps to address the group of security officers who gathered. They kept a number of shifters from varying species on staff as law enforcement and lifeguards, because nothing beat the mounted hippocampi patrols who traveled the island perimeter.
“It’s a confirmed abduction. Possibly two or three men working together,” Javier said. “I couldn’t see much over the security cameras, and we don’t have time to waste crawling through them if someone took the kid. I’ll assign one of the humans to that.”
Hyrum, a dark-haired hippocampi, crossed his enormous arms over his chest. “Did you let Teo know?”
“I shot him a text, but who knows when he’ll get it. Besides, we don’t have time to wait on him. I’m here, and this is what I’m saying we do. Everyone take a whiff of this.”
One by one, the guys passed the hat around and breathed it in, committing the boy’s scent to their short-term memories. Javier assigned each of them to an area to patrol, dividing them into pairs.
“Oscar, you’re with me. We’ll start at the tram station and try and get his scent there.”
A younger man stepped forward from the group, a startled but eager look in his pale yellow eyes. As the only gull shifter on the island, Oscar often received tasks related to patrolling by air. A few months ago, when there’d been a shoplifting ring on the island, he’d been integral to busting them.
Bitten by Magic: Agents of SAINT: Book 1 Page 6