CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Walt
Walt woke up feeling as cozy as a newborn pup, snuggled under the heavy plum-colored comforter on Elysian’s bed. Her sweet vanilla scent surrounded him. She wasn’t in the bed with him, which was disappointing, but he could tell that she was in the house somewhere, and that she was happy.
They were mated, he realized, shock mixing with his contentment. He hadn’t even known that it was possible to take a human as his mate.
Not that she was human. One thing he’d learned over the past three days, just about anything was possible once magic was in the mix.
He splayed out in the bed, enjoying the satisfaction of stretching muscles that had been coiled tight all through their white-knuckle drive through the town. He couldn’t wait to tell Raph that story, his brother was going to flip his shit.
Wait.
Walt sat up, the blankets pooling around his waist. He remembered his brother. But he remembered more than that.
He remembered sitting on the edge of a hotel roof with his brother, cracking open a bottle of beer with the handle of his pocket knife. Seven stories below them the hotel pool sparkled like something out of a fairy story, the string lights of the hotel restaurant reflecting off the surface of the water.
“Bet you can’t make it into the pool from here,” Raph said.
Walt snorted. “That wouldn’t even be hard.”
“Do it then,” Raph goaded.
Walt shook his head. “I don’t wanna spill my beer.”
“More like you’re afraid it’ll hurt,” Raph teased.
Mostly Walt was afraid that someone would see. The hotel was silent, most guests having long disappeared to bed. The restaurant was closed, the chairs all stacked on the tables and a heavy chain holding the door shut. But even so, someone cannonballing into a pool from seven stories up was the opposite of trying to blend in and keep their wolf shifter nature under wraps. They’d been lectured about it extensively on the drive down to Seattle—the two of them had grown up in the woods of Montana, where it was much easier to keep a secret.
“You jump if you think it’s such a great idea,” Walt shot back.
“Chicken,” Raph said, and clucked under his breath.
Walt hated how easily his brother could get to him. The trouble with being practically joined at the hip with someone was that they learned all of the buttons to push, the exact phrases that burrowed under your skin and stayed there until you did something stupid to shake them loose.
He put the beer down. Raph whooped.
Walt wandered to the kitchen, feeling like his stomach was filled with cement. He and Elysian were now mated for life, and while that was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him, it was terrible news for Elysian. Because she’d fallen in love with the person he’d been acting like when he had no memories, a sensible dude with all of the answers. If she had met the real him, a complete and utter hot mess, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day.
Julia and Elysian were at the table, heads bent over the grimoire. “In this context,” Julia said, “the word refers to ‘familiaris’ as in the domestic, the family. You didn’t summon your familiar, you summoned the person who is most intimate to you.”
“So the spell is to summon your…” Elysian frowned down at the book, clearly understanding but struggling for the right word.
“Mate,” Walt said.
Elysian looked up, happiness blooming on her face at his presence. Then she frowned. “Wait, are you telling me that we sent Doug and Willa off to search for their soulmates?”
Julia shrugged. “Maybe. That spell you cast was a Frankenstein’s monster, mirrored and bound and not even understood by its caster. I think we should just be grateful it worked and not lose sleep over it.”
“Easier said than done,” Elysian said, blowing out a breath. Walt crossed the kitchen, wanting to soothe away the frustration he could sense through their mate bond. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she tipped her head to rest her temple against his side.
“Yours is a wild magic, Elysian,” Julia said. She picked her scarf up from the table and looped it around her hair. “It may be a good thing that your power reserves are completely drained for the moment.” She gathered up her handbag and the empty serving dish she had brought filled with turkey the night before.
Elysian drummed her fingers on the table. “Do you still run that Latin class at the community center on Saturdays?”
“Yes,” Julia said with a small smile.
“I’ll see you there,” Elysian said.
“Oh, honey.” Julia leaned over and kissed her cheek, the folds of her scarf brushing against Walt’s side. “You’re not going to be here next Saturday.” She threw a polite nod in Walt’s direction, and made her exit.
A look of amusement touched Elysian’s face, and she laughed. “Oh.”
“What’s so funny?” Walt asked. He could use a laugh.
“My whole goal when I started this was to stay here. To stay with Annette. Not to have to go back to my mother’s house. But Annette’s gone. This house might be safe, or it might be on the radar of every hunter on the West Coast. At the very least, I need to leave for a while. Little Bobby will be happy to rent it out at market rates until Annette comes back.” She sighed. “I guess I’m moving back to Portland.”
The wolf inside him shivered with rage at the idea of her being so far from him. She was his mate, she needed to be with him. Or him with her, and he didn’t think he would survive long in Portland. He needed the mountain air.
“You could come to Montana with me,” he said. “My father owns a ranch.” He stroked the hair behind her ear. “There’s plenty of wildlife there for you to photograph.”
She tipped her head back to look up at him, eyes wide. “You remembered.”
“Yes. I guess we’re operating under fairy tale rules. Kiss the princess.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “Break the curse.”
“It wasn’t a curse,” she murmured.
“Not on me it wasn’t,” he said. “But there’s something you need to know.”
“Oh.” She put a hand on her chest. “You’re nervous. I can feel it. How…”
He pressed a fingertip to the bite-mark on the dip of her shoulder. It had healed overnight, the scar a perfect streak of silver against her olive skin. “We’re mates.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that we’re joined together for life. I don’t know how—I was always raised to believe that only two wolves could mate. Maybe it was the spell. Maybe it was the healing. Maybe I just wanted it so desperately the rules let me slip through.”
Her brows furrowed as she examined his face. “You sound sad about it.”
“You didn’t get a say in it,” he said.
“Turnabout is fair play,” she said. She turned in her chair, and held out her hands to him.
He grabbed them like he was about to be swept away and she was his life-line. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”
The whoop of a police siren cut through the air.