Chapter Twenty-two
Patrick
Of course, telling himself to go to bed and even going so far as to make up a nest of blankets and cushions on the sofa before he lay down was all well and good, but Pat found it a chore to actually nod off. Every little noise snapped him awake from a restive doze, usually nothing more than a car rolling down the street, a raccoon in the trees outside, or Ethan turning restlessly in the master bedroom above his head. He’d snap awake, eyes scoping the dark shapes of the living room until his wolf categorized the noise, and then it was the same work as he tried to calm his body and mind all over again.
Pat finally drifted into a deep, exhausted sleep sometime in the early hours of the morning, the sky still dark but the hour late. He did not awake again until a phone started ringing shrilly from the other room.
Pat stumbled around, trying to locate the source of the nose, finally unearthed a dusty phone from under a pile of junk mail on the kitchen counter and snarled a, “What?” into the line. Pointed silence greeted him before his mother replied.
“Did I wake you, sweetheart?”
Pat groaned and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to work some semblance of deference into his tone, “Late night.”
“Ah, well, I figured since it was already after ten you’d be awake.”
He checked the time on the microwave, shocked, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in so late. He pulled the phone away from his ear and cocked his head, listening to the rest of the house, unsurprised to find himself alone. He tuned back to his mother in time to catch her next words.
“I was hoping you could come over a little early this afternoon. I didn’t want to bring it up before Christmas, certainly not—well, the pack’s already started showing up for the full moon tonight, and there’s something we should really…but…”
Pat frowned at the uncertainty in his mother’s voice. He needed to find Ethan and talk to him about what had happened the night before, but he couldn’t ignore his alpha’s summons, not just because she was his alpha, but out of concern for whatever had Teagan Clanahan worried: it had to be serious.
So, even as he regretted agreeing to it, he said, “I’ll be over in half an hour.”
“Good.” She hung up without saying goodbye, and Pat hurried to get cleaned up and changed into clothes that didn’t smell like Ethan.
He flung open one of the bedroom windows once he was dressed, even though it was cold and spitting rain against the bug screen—better a little cold and damp later than the soured smell of their failed coupling—and then he left.
Teagan had downplayed the chaos descending on the pack’s den: cars already lined both sides of the street, and Pat didn’t need werewolf hearing to catch drifts of noise as he was forced to park one street over and walk back. He wasn’t even to the door when his youngest sister threw it open to greet him, appearing in a sea of children shouting for his attention as Roisin pushed aside seven and eight year olds for a chance at hugging him first.
“Patty!” she squealed, squeezing him until his ribs creaked and he had to cough out a laugh or risk asphyxiating. She let go of him, grinning, and Pat realized with a start that somehow she’d closed the gap in their heights while she was at college. She’d cropped her ruddy strawberry blonde hair too, which gave her a sharp appearance, softened only by the delight in her eyes as she asked him where he’d been.
“Working. It’s been…”
“Complicated,” she filled in for him.
Pat nodded. He patted the heads of second and third cousins as he followed Roisin into the house, where it was even rowdier inside than it had appeared from the street. The whole pack didn’t meet up for every full moon, but since this moon coincided so closely with Christmas, they had shown up to run together, and he knew that more members would trickle in before dark fell. Tomorrow there would be a big holiday breakfast and gifts exchanged with the kids.
Roisin started to pull him towards the big family room, but Pat stopped her.
“I have to talk to Mom. Is she in the library?”
His little sister nodded and darted in for another quick hug and left him to skirt the edges of the crowd. Even so, he was stopped by a dozen different pack members, blood relations or otherwise, wolves he hadn’t seen in months who were eager to hug their pack beta and ask him how work was going, which meant he’d been in the house for close to an hour by the time he made it to his mother’s library. He shut the door behind him, cutting off the edge of the clamor, with a sigh.
Teagan Clanahan sat curled up in the window seat overlooking the backyard. She turned her head, pale eyes that were a perfect match for his own watching as he crossed the room. She patted the seat next to her, drawing up her feet to make room for him to sit down.
“You’ve been busy,” she said, not a question. “Will your mage be joining us tonight?”
Pat shook his head. “You said there was something important?”
Teagan sighed and turned back to the window.
“Mom?”
“I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“It sounded serious.”
“Vector showed up half an hour ago. He said you’ve been looking into a vampire problem?”
“It’s complicated. We’ve run into some resistance.”
Teagan nodded. “I don’t want to worry you when you have something big going on with work.” She patted his hand absently.
“It’s fine,” Pat protested. “Whatever you need me to do.”
She slid to her feet. Teagan wrote something on a post-it note and handed it to him
“What’s this?”
“It’s the name of a vampire. I don’t know if she’s still alive, let alone connected to what you’re doing, but she used to live in Seattle. Your Great-great-great grandfather and the other alphas supposedly drove her out when we settled the accords.”
“This isn’t what you wanted to talk about this morning,” Pat replied, glancing at the name—Hania Sirola—which meant nothing to him.
“That’ll wait, dearest.” She reached up and cupped his cheek, looking concerned as her eyes flicked back and forth between his, and Pat wondered just how rough he looked, knowing that he couldn’t hide anything from his alpha. Not just his alpha, his mother, the only one who’d ever looked into his heart and seen more than his dark moods and serious disposition, but a heart tender and too easily given away.
Someone, several someones by the sounds of it, started banging on the library door, and Teagan’s expression thawed a little as she rolled her eyes.
“Come on, everyone’s excited to see you,” she said, pulling him to his feet. “You were missed while you and your mage were away. It’s too bad he won’t join us.”
Pat nodded mutely. If he could just get through the next day and night without anyone asking impudent questions about his love life, then maybe Pat would survive this full moon without wanting to leap off a tall bridge. Time apart would give Ethan a chance to get himself in order too; Pat figured they could both use some time to cool off, process what had happened, and hopefully tomorrow they could have a more rational discussion about what was happening between them and what they should do about it going forward.
Feeling for once like the grown adult he purported to be, Pat followed his mother as she left the library and entered the chaos that was Pack McClanahan at full festive spirit.
Ethan
He shivered in the early morning air, cool and heavy with moisture. He hadn’t dressed for this, sitting on the stoup outside a dark and closed up magic shop, but he’d been in a hurry, mind blank from—he didn’t know what he felt, and that was precisely his problem. Ethan felt hallowed out: beyond confusion, keep going straight past disgust, do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred dollars.
The sign on the door informed customers that The Three Sisters would be closing early for the full moon and would stay closed through the holidays, welcoming their customers to return in the new year for brand new items and sales!
The door knocked into his back, tearing Ethan’s attention away from the dark mire of his thoughts, but still it felt like swimming through hardening syrup to force himself to stand and meet Lailana’s confused expression.
“Ethan?”
“I need—Edie.”
The blonde nodded and swept him into the shop. She slid the bolt back in the door and flicked off the front display lights.
“She’s upstairs.”
Ethan sank into one of the plush velvet settees next to the tarot table at the front of the shop, shivering as his body reacted to the space heater Lailana must have turned on—the air in the shop was still chilly but the heat curled tendrils across his skin. He stared at Lailana, searching for the words to explain what he needed, but that hallowed out feeling was like a chasm in his chest that he couldn’t cross, and he could see Ali curling up on the couch next to him, to make his gorge rise up in his throat. He feared that if he tried to speak, he’d finally lose it—his stomach, his nerve, his gods damned mind. Maybe Lailana could read all of this on his face, or maybe she just knew him well enough from five or six years of something he might have called friendship on a better day, just not on this day, this dreadful morning, in this bleak glooming.
“I’ll get her.”
Edie came downstairs a couple of minutes later without her sister. She crossed the shop on bare feet, still dressed in a long nightgown and a heavy brocade dressing robe belted loosely. Her dark hair hung down past her waist in loose curls and soft snarls, and her eyes—her eyes flicked over him in quick assessment that Ethan swore he could feel scouring down into his very flesh, hotter than the air from the heater, flaying into his secrets. If they could still be called secrets. He was grossly aware of the ghost sprawled next to him as though she belonged there, though Edie’s eyes did not linger to his right, instead they returned again and again to a point over his left shoulder, behind the settee. Ethan glanced back, expecting to see Adam, but there was no sign of the other ghost. There hadn’t been since Ethan went home the night before. Since…
But he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t bear to let his thoughts rest on what he’d done, the way he’d tried to use Patrick to drive the demons out of his dead. He could still feel the wolf inside him, from the bond, from the ache in his ass, and it made the bile inside him churn with self-recrimination enough to drown him. He knew that Edie had to be able to see it as well as she settled into the chair opposite. She tucked one foot under her thigh and pulled her nightgown closed against the cool air, sitting up straight and watching him with unblinking eyes while she waited for him to explain why he was there so early, in such a state.
Ethan had to swallow several times before he could make the words come. He reached out and grabbed the stack of cards, pulled them to his side of the table and with one hand smeared them out in a stacked line, broke it, pulled half together, then the other half, restacked them, sucked in a shaky breath while his fingers categorized the slick sensation of painted pasteboard.
“I need you to…”
A soft line creased her brow, another flick of her eyes; she reached for the stack and said, “I’m not sure.”
“I have to get rid of this ghost.”
“I wouldn’t want this for you. It won’t be easy.”
He looked up at her, head bent slightly in supplication. “I can’t keep on like this.”
Edie pressed her small mouth into a line and after one last hesitation, gave a sharp nod. “Very well. You know, I am glad to have met you.”
He grinned, mirthless. “Not sure why.”
She shrugged, a frizzy knot of curls slipping over her shoulder. “You were a very honest person. With yourself. Your desires. It was refreshing.”
“And now?”
“There’s honesty in this too; that’s why you’re here. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s begin.”