“You mean he hired a maid? Shouldn’t you know these things? Your grandparents were like really rich like that, right?”
“Can he afford a maid?”
“I don’t know, alpha,”Ni said and bit his lip again.
“Go take a nap or something. There’s no use in stressing out about me. He’s a bear.”
“With magic,”Ni reminded me.
“Othoni,”I whispered his full name.“Babe. I’m still a dragon.”
“I know but if he hurts you, I’m going to have to leave the baby with Marsin and go kill him. I’m not going to have a choice in the matter. My jaguar has already forced his way out and is sharpening his claws.”
I let out a long, slow breath. Yep. When I got my hands on Sharon Claudis, she’d better hope that I’d calmed down by then. No one stressed out my pregnant mate and got away with it. No one took me away from spending time with my kid and got away with it.
Ni fell quiet and our daughter, Zinnia, babbled her baby talk over the family link. I listened to her prattle on as I searched from room to room, finding very little of interest. I searched through drawers and closets. Tapped on walls and stomped across floors to ensure that there were no hidden compartments for Venal to hide out in. When I reached the kitchen, I checked the fridge. It was fully stocked but on the bottom shelf was some hamburger meat turning grey.
“COW!”my dragon chimed off in my thoughts reckoning back to our days on the Starscale worlds.
Zinnia laughed and babbled ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ over the family link making Ni chuckle too.
I grabbed one of his sodas and shut the fridge. Ni scolded me over our mating link, but I ignored him and popped the top. He made me come all the way to the GGB because he couldn’t convince his mother to butt out of his life. At the very least he owed me a soda. Hell, if the meat wasn’t going off inside the icebox, I might’ve rummaged around for a snack.
“Snack? Yeah. We should,”my dragon said, stretching out his long wings inside his inner sanctum.
I shrugged. I needed to search the pantry and cabinets anyway. Inside, I found mostly the normal non-perishables and good selection of unopened lube. Guy figured he was going to get lucky a lot more than he actually did was my guess.
I leaned back against the counter and opened a chocolate chip protein bar. Something scraped against wood and I jerked my head up expecting to see the home’s owner standing in front of me. Instead, I was greeted by a chair scooting away from the table on its own.
“Ni, you seeing this shit?”I asked careful to use our mating link and not the family link so that the baby didn’t hear the curse word.
“His mum is a witch,”Ni said.“Maybe it’s on a magical timer to make people think he’s home when he’s not?”
“Maybe,”I said, watching the chair slide across the kitchen and bump into the fridge.
A second later, another chair followed it. Then a third. Then the last one. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Behind me a cabinet opened, and a bag of apples rolled out and onto the floor, landing in a cascade of thuds. I hopped up to sit on the counter. If this was supposed to be scary, the caster had missed their mark. Chairs and apples weren’t frightening. Zinnia did more magic than this before breakfast most mornings. I didn’t even have to clean this shit up.
The potatoes were next to thud out of the pantry and shimmy into the kitchen. They mingled with the apples and rolled around here and there until they fell still in vaguely familiar shapes. I squinted and my dragon shifted my eyes to his. With his sight the word HELP was as plain as day.
“Help who?” I asked just in case I was dealing with a ghost. This would’ve been a great time for Ni to be here. He saw spirits and when he touched me I saw them too.
The apples and potatoes jiggled around until they spelled out M and O.
“Mori!”Ni sounded off in my thoughts loud enough to make me flinch and cover my ears.“THAT’S MORI!”
“What?”I asked over my ringing ears.
An R appeared a second later.
“TEDDY! Ask him where he is? He’s not answering me over our link! Something’s blocking it!”Ni said, his inner voice shaky.
Zinnia started to cry, and my heart broke in pieces as it did every time she cried. I ached to hold her but forced myself to push the emotion away. If Mori was in trouble I had to save him. It would be a toss up between Ni and Xenos on who killed me first if something happened to him.
“Mori? Where are you?” I asked but the apples and potatoes only finished making the I with the biggest potato as the dot.
“Mori?” I tried again.
“ZIGMORE!” I bellowed his full name.
