“What happened?” I asked, sinking to my knees by the sofa. Obviously, he knew I was his mate. Why else would he show up dead here? When short on time I found it best to skip the small talk.
“I….” he tried but couldn’t get the words out. How long had he been wandering around as a ghost? Sometimes if spirits wandered around long enough, they lost their ability to speak in coherent sentences.
“I don’t think it’ll let me tell you. I --- I’ve been knocking for what feels like years. Whenever I remembered,” he said.
“Well, I’ve lived here years and I’ve never heard you knock on the door,” I said, reaching out to smooth his dark hair away from his face. He grabbed my wrist and looked at my hand as if it were some alien object. “You’re solid and I can touch you.”
“You…. Am I dead too?” I blinked.
No one ever died from jacking off too hard, right?
“No one is dead. I am merely…. Merely trapped. Not here but there,” he said, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure why he could pass through the end table but not the sofa or the floor. I wasn’t going to ask too many questions because for all I knew I fell asleep after jacking off and this was some sort of fevered wish fulfillment dream.
“No one is dead,” he said, sliding his hand down my wrist to hold my hand properly with our fingers entwined. I sat down properly on the floor and stared at him because what else was I going to do? Part of me wondered if I should call Grandpa and get him some medical attention but solid people don’t walk through tables. What if my true-mate had shown up at my door and didn’t know he was dead?
“No one is dead!” he said again. “Stop smelling so sad! It’s driving me crazy and I didn’t know that was still possible to do.” He scrubbed his free hand over his face. “I knocked and knocked. You can only knock on your mate’s door at midnight if you astral project but it has to be midnight where they are! It’s--- There’s so much it won’t let me tell you. I’m not a ghost. I’m here astrally. It’s the only way I can be here. It’s old magic. The knocking is anyway. It’s part superstition because so many of our true-mates are born on other worlds and not everyone can astral project. Hell, I couldn’t. Not in the beginning.”
“So someone has you locked up?”
“Yes!” he said and tried to say more but failed miserably.
“How do I keep you here with me?”
“Magic?” he asked, turning to face me.
Most of the magic I knew was from Grandpa Xenos and most of his magic involved soothing spirits or keeping angry ones away. Still….
“It was a joke, mate. I’ll stay as long as I can. Believe me, I’d rather be here than there. Anywhere other than there. If I get pulled back to my body wait on me. I’ll be back.”
“Where are you? I’ll--- I have a powerful family,” I said and felt dumb as soon as the words tumbled off my lips. “I have a magical family,” I said, trying to sound less douchey that time.
“In time” he nodded. “All in good time. For now, tell no one. I need to make a plan. Going without one may very well start a war! I need to rest. Lay with me?”
I crawled onto the sofa with him half expecting to wake up any moment now. Waking up would make sense. It would make a lot of sense if he couldn’t tell me about the curse because this was a dream and my brain wasn’t creative enough to invent a curse that could do this.
He pulled me close to him and rolled me so that I was between him and the sofa. He pressed his forehead to mine and stared into my dark eyes for a long, quiet moment but exhaustion pulled his eyelids shut. I should’ve offered him food, but I wasn’t sure if astral mates could eat or not.
“What’s your name, mate?” he asked.
“Lero,” I whispered.
“Vallis” he whispered back to me. “Vallis of the Fallen Star.”
CHAPTER TWO
Vallis
The Nightshade Bear Territory
I woke up with my mate sleeping on top of me. His comforting weight was so unlike the wooden box that pressed in on me from all sides. He was solid and real but softer, made of flesh instead of the splintering carcasses of dead trees. His breathing was easy and his sleep appeared restful unlike my waking thoughts. So many conflicting notions bounced around my skull that for a moment I thought I had a solid skull in my current ethereal form. Could I get a headache if my head was light years away on another planet? Knowing my luck? Probably.
Still Lero dozed lightly on top of me and that left something deep inside me content. My bear, of course, who was still curled in upon himself inside his inner sanctum. If not for him, claustrophobia would’ve been my undoing many months ago.
I couldn’t see Lero’s face because it was buried in my chest. One of his arms was wrapped around one of mine and the other cradled up and around my head as if he thought it might fall off. I had spent what I guessed to be the last two years knocking sporadically. At least that’s what Pami had said the last time she came to gloat. She came on the first anniversary of the curse and then the second one too. I’d barely learned to astral project by the first time she stood above me and gloated about how well her magic held and how much air might be left for me. The second time, I’d been knocking for a while. Though, knockingwhile trying to preserve an unknown amount of air isn’t easy. I never really thought I’d get lucky enough to knock at the right time with all three knocks falling within the perfect moment and not adding on any extras that would ruin the spell. Hell, I wasn’t sure I believed in the spell at all until the door opened and I saw Lero standing there smelling like sex and satisfaction.
He was tall-ish for a bear omega, and the width of his shoulders told me that he’d grown up in a well-fed area. His ears weren’t pointed but someone in the village was an elf of some sort. I smelled them while standing on his doorstep. That didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t sure anyone would actually see me. I was a bit surprised that Lero could see me at all. I only remembered the spell from an old nursery rhyme my grandad used to say all the time when I was but a cub. No one in living memory had ever gotten it to work. Now, I couldn’t even remember all the words. Only the gist of the rhyme had etched itself into my brain.
I held tight to Lero, knowing that at any moment I could fade and have to come back to him after my spirit rested. Of course, there was another possibility. My body could run out of oxygen and die while I was here with him. I couldn’t tell him that yet. I couldn’t tell him that until I had a way to fix it. I hated that my only possibility of escape was to bring all my troubles to my mate’s doorstep. It was selfish, but dying here under him was a much preferred fate than to dying alone of suffocation inside that buried prison.
