“We don’t have to go back to the house if you’re not up for it,” he said. “I called Matt while you were in the bathroom. Arik healed the mom’s injuries, everyone’s alive, and Amy’s got the baby and her brother sorted out. Mom’s still unconscious, but you know heavy healing magic usually leaves people exhausted for a while.”
“I have to go see them.” Ian’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth again. “No, I found them, I need to check on them. For me. To know they’re okay. You know I like babies and children fine in general, right? The pack kids. They’re cute. I’m just really glad their parents are the ones who have to be responsible for them. Everyone who’s interested in the continuation of the species, actually any species of life on Earth, should be glad I’m not responsible for them.”
Ian leaned in and kissed me again, this time on the lips. And lingered. “Same here, honestly,” he said as he pulled back. “I’m happy giving them all piggy-back rides and then getting to come back here, close the door, and not have to watch my fucking language all the time.”
“Are you sure?”
His grin took on a wicked edge. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’d rather pretend to knock you up than actually have to deal with real children. Besides, keeping you out of trouble is a full-time—”
I had to smack him for that, but I also kissed him, and it took me a while to get a shirt on.
Finally we stepped out onto the porch, both of us wearing pairs of my magical self-heating socks. The rest of me got cold within seconds. The snow hadn’t stuck too much, mostly lying in untidy heaps under the trees where the sun didn’t penetrate, but an icy wind swept down from the mountains where the snowhadstuck, and it made the nights fucking frigid. It was about eleven o’clock, and it’d only get colder until dawn. Ugh.
At least the pack house showed some signs of life and warmth as we pulled up in Calder’s borrowed car. There were lights on in half the windows, plus the Christmas lights along the roof and around the windows and strung through the trees were on. A handful of the pack’s younger people had gathered to drinkbeer and smoke and shoot the shit off to the side where there were a couple of benches and a fire pit.
Hard to believe most of them were only a year or two younger than me, although some were still in their teens. The Armitages, and shifters in general, didn’t bother observing legal ages for most things. If you were old enough to drive one of the pack’s old cars into town and convince someone to sell you a six-pack, then meh.
They all waved and called out hellos as Ian and I walked by, and for a brief moment I wistfully imagined simply joining them, grabbing a beer, and letting the actual grown-ups deal with the current crisis.
The door opened right as we got to the front steps, and my brother-in-law emerged, his hair now put back in a neat ponytail, his clothes, thanks be to all the gods, on his body, and his frown still exactly where I’d seen it last.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “You were taking showers, not…” His nose twitched. The frown became a grimace. “You should’ve taken another one. For fuck’s sake. Really?”
“I found them and got them home. I did my part. You’re the healer, as you like to remind me, so it’s not like I’d have been useful,” I snapped.
Gods, he was annoying. I could hit him with a bolt of magical lightning and run, snatch a beer from someone’s hand as I went…except that unfortunately, I’d become a grown-up somewhere along the way. Which meant I had to stay here and deal with him. Besides, he had dark shadows under his eyes; he’d clearly used too much magic at once, typical. He always forgot to take care of his own well-being when he was working. Healer or not, I’d need to harass him into leaving his patients under my watchful magical eye long enough to get a bite to eat and a hot drink.
Arik stared at me for a moment, opened and closed his mouth, and folded his arms over his chest. “Well, no, of course not,” he said. “But we always—your name’s first on the business cards—”
“Oh my fucking gods, can you stop bringing that up every time we—Armitage and Hawthorne sounds awful! We agreed! Everyone we asked agr—”
“—andyou’realways tellingmehow much more powerful your magic is. So you’re supposed to stay with me when we have clients, not fuck off to get fucked!”
Okay, he had a point about that. I’d needed the shower. And I wouldn’t have been much good taking care of the unconscious woman.
But maybe fucking off for almost two hours to get fucked had been a little thoughtless of me.
“I’ll take the overnight shift if you need me to,” I said, and Arik blinked at me as if he hadn’t expected me to apologize, even tacitly. “Because you look like shit,” I added.
A grin passed across Arik’s face so quickly I almost thought I’d imagined it, but his posture relaxed, and he uncrossed his arms. Good. He needed to unclench a bit or he’d have an aneurysm. I mean, with his history, nearly dying of exposure as a toddler, this had probably hit him like a baseball bat right to the PTSD.
Reallythoughtless of me. Damn it to hell. “Seriously,” I went on, my voice betrayingly awkward, “hammered crap. I’ll take over in a few minutes while you eat dinner, at least. But I need to check something out first. Did someone go pick up the wrecked car?”
Now that Calder and Jared had come back from the wilds of freaking Canada, of all places, with a suitcase full of uncut diamonds—something that might have been weird in most families, but that in our pack passed for normal in all waysexcept that it’d made us richer rather than poorer—the Armitage junkyard and mechanic shop weren’t the pack’s primary sources of financial support. But they still operated. We had one of the only tow trucks in the neighborhood. If the sheriffs had been the ones to find that car, they’d probably have called us to pull it out of the bushes.
“Yeah, Josh went and towed it out back, Matt said when I talked to him. Why?” Ian sounded incredibly puzzled. I didn’t blame him. By “we” had a tow truck, of course I meant someone else. Like Josh. No one who’d ever met me would suspect me of having an interest in towing cars, or any interest in cars, full stop, except wanting Ian not to drive them like a maniac.
I’d been thinking about this one in the shower, though, and on the way over here.
“Before Calder got the car pulled out enough that we could look inside, I used some magic to see if anyone was in it. But not only did I not find them, I didn’t find not-them, either.”
“You’ve lost me,” Ian said. “Didn’t not find them? What?”
“You get lost in the cereal aisle, you don’t count,” Arik said, rolling his eyes.
That was one of the things I really enjoyed about Arik. Not that he tended to discount Ian’s intelligence, to put it mildly, but that he never let an alpha intimidate him. To be fair, he’d grown up with Calder. Any tendency he had to be intimidated by other living beings had probably burned out of his personality around the fifth time the world’s scariest person had tucked him into bed with a cup of cocoa and a forehead kiss.
Some days I envied his childhood, fucked up as it’d been, which really said something about mine. To have had a genuinely loving protector like Calder? I’d have given anything.
