“You have a mate! It would be leading this poor demon on! What if demons can see me? What if he isn’t trustworthy? What if he makes an advance on you?”
“I do. Mated for the Holidays doesn’t involve romping. He’s lived on a mountain by himself for most of his life. So he’s probably wondering if I’m trustworthy or not. If it looks like I can’t handle my own hit him in the head with something. Seems the only thing you can’t touch is the end table.”
“What is going on with that end table?” Vallis asked, pacing my kitchen. He paused and touched the wooden kitchen table. “It’s not a wood thing.”
“I keep my house cleansing kit in there,” I shrugged. “That’s the only idea I have on that matter but look, either we tell everyone and get help, or you have to pretend you’re not here and we go forward with this Mated for the Holidays thing. My carrier – the one who called before Grain showed up – won’t be happy either. He’s sure whoever they match me with will be a serial killer. Either way. Those are the options,” I said and sat the bacon, eggs, and toast on the table for him. I’d already eaten with Grain which was one of the most awkward meals of my life. Every instinct in me said it was rude to eat without feeding Vallis but he wanted time and teenagers weren’t exactly known for keeping their mouths shut.
“Besides,” I sighed, pulling out his chair for him when he didn’t sit down. “Maybe this Snow Demon will know something about curses or magic. Now, eat, please! I won’t have it said that I starved my mate on our first morning together.”
Vallis reached out and took my hand. I thought he might kiss it for a moment and inside my chest went swoony. Instead, he sat down and pulled me onto his lap. He ate with one armwrapped around me, holding me against him like I was the one who might fade away without notice. I knew as well as the next bear that astral projection didn’t last forever. Eventually even magic had to take a nap.
While he ate, I took out my phone and searched all the things we talked about the night before. I did find some vague superstitions about spirits knocking. Some sources said it happened at midnight while others said three in the morning. Midnight it was. Well, at least for Vallis’s version of the spell.
“Leave it to our luck to have our true-mate show up like this! We can’t tell anyone! We can’t tell Aiden Gilmore not to send the demon or he’ll ask questions! Preston would have questions and so would Mori once they got home!”my bear grumbled into my thoughts.
“I know this isn’t ideal,” Vallis said, picking up on my scent. “Believe me, I’d have loved to have met you under more normal circumstances. I feel bad for involving you at all, but Pami has to be stopped. It’s not just my life on the line. We’ve lived in peace for a long time. Haven’t had a war in eons and now she’s trying to make rules about who can use magic and how and she’s not our leader. We don’t technically have a leader. We’ve never needed one and we certainly don’t need her to take up the mantle now. It all started when her true-mate, one of my closest friends, Broug, died from overdoing it. It’s complicated. We’d been working on architectural spells for a long time. One night he tried erecting a building on his own and it was too much for him. So, she blamed me. Which is bullshit because Broug had more magic than I’ll ever hope to have. If I had his magic, I could escape---” Vallis swore under his breath and I shifted my position so that I straddled his lap, facing him. I needed to see his expression as he spoke about all this. Pami and Broug. Onedead and one dead crazy. I worked to keep all the ‘players’ lined out. Later, I’d write it all down. I’d need all the details I could get if I was going to solve this and save my mate’s life.
“I still can’t talk about it. You’d think now that I wasn’t in my body I could do what I damn well please!” he growled and I took his face in my hands. I leaned my forehead against him and let out a long, slow breath. It was so hard to think straight when I was this close to him. Sure, he was only here in spirit, but he was warm and muscular. His dick was hard underneath me from all the wiggling around on his lap I’d done. Maybe Pami -whoever she was- hadn’t counted on him ever meeting me. The true-mate magic didn’t play by anyone’s rules except for its own and sometimes, occasionally, it would ignore them too.
“Whatever we need to do we’ll do,” I said, staring into his dark eyes. “If it means, finding her and killing her, I’ll do it. I know I look like a friendly bear and I can be, but I’m also an omega bear in the prime of my life. I’ve been waiting for you, and I want a family and since she has you locked up that means she’s standing between me and my cubs and that’s never a safe place to be. You’re right about what you said earlier. This isn’t ideal but no one ever promised fate would be ideal. If that was promised it’d have a different name.” I thought about how all three of my parents met and where they’d come from. None of them had easy lives. None of it was nice and neat and comfy. Still they found each other and I liked to think they were happy now. I blinked hard, trying not cry. Not only because I feared we wouldn’t save him in time but because of the lives my parents survived so that I could be here now. Yeah, I was close to a heat cycle. Between trying not to cry and my unignorable urge to jack off last night it was undeniable.
“Mate?” Vallis said, his voice soft. “Where’d you go just now?”
“I.. It’s nothing. We have to focus on the here and the now and….”
“What was it?” he asked again.
“My parents. I have three of them. So you’re just going to have to get use to that. My Dad grew up out in this place where betas and omegas weren’t even considered people, and my sire lost his brother and my carrier… he did so much for his community against everything and…”
“Are they safe now?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“Trauma is inherited sometimes,” he said, moving my hands down to my lap and cradling my face in his big, warm hands instead. “It happens. It lives in our cells and all we can do is ensure we don’t fall into patterns that would make more bad things happen. I’m not saying that anyone deserves bad things. No one does. I wouldn’t even say Pami deserved to lose her mate even if she’s a megalomaniac now. I’m saying that sometimes when we’re afraid or we don’t know differently we let those feelings control us.”
“Are you a therapist?” I asked him.
“No,” Vallis shook his head. “I’m a lifelong reader but trauma is something well studied by my people. We’re not called the Fallen Star for nothing. Pami’s brother, Nashen, would probably have a better idea of how to explain it. Anway, we weren’t talking about me.”
“We were before I got distracted,” I reminded him.
“It’s normal to think about your parents right now. Your family is changing. We’re going through something difficult and it seems like they know all about that,” he said, still cradling my face. “And I know we’ll figure this out.” I sniffed the air. Vallis’s scent said he only half believed what he said but half-lit hope was better than none at all. “Hey, I mean it,” he said a second later when I still hadn’t spoken. “Before you opened that door for me, I didn’t. I’d mostly resigned myself to knocking until I died. I had no way of knowing if you were even alive and there was little chance of getting the right time and you being home. All that happened, though. It just goes to show sometimes if you grit your teeth and make enough noise something will change for the better. I know you don’t know me yet and have no reason to put your faith in me, but we’re going to get through this.”
“I have every reason to put my faith in you,” I looked at him through my tear-damp lashes. “I chose you in the Other World and most of the time I have good judgement.”
He laughed and I managed a little laugh too. I hated crying. Especially when nothing was wrong. My hormones had always hated me and…
“Hey! There is too something to cry about! Our true-mate is cursed and all the people who would usually help us don’t even know it!”my bear chimed into my thoughts.“That’s a whole lot to cry about.”
“You should finish eating. I’m going to work from the theory of what you eat goes to your body because it’s not falling on the floor. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just strengthens this you but either way, I have a feeling you’re going to need your strength.Plus, I have to call my carrier about this whole demon thing before he hears it from someone else.”
Vallis kissed my forehead as he had before I got up to answer the phone earlier. Part of me wanted to turn my phone on silent and do nothing but kiss him for a while. Was kissing a waste of time when so much was on the line?
***
It turned out that Vallis didn’t think so. I came back into the kitchen after talking to my carrier on the phone to find all the breakfast dishes washed, dried, and put away. He’d wiped everything down and the floor had that recently mopped look.
“How’d he take it?” Vallis asked, leaning his back against the counter.
