Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,44

Christmas gone grotesquely wrong. Pale, sunken cheeks, lips even fuller than usual and swollen from Matthew’s kisses, and lank hair hanging in damp blond clumps.

Well. If I’d wondered whether Matthew really wanted me or only wanted me because of the spell, that question had been answered.

I brushed my teeth again and went back to the bedroom, carefully ignoring Matthew’s prone form — though I listened for his soft snores, now weirdly paranoid that he was going to die just from my thinking about it.

Nate’s jeans were beyond disgusting after being grubbed around in a mixture of dirt, tree detritus, and Matthew’s blood, so I snagged a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt out of a drawer in Matthew’s dresser. The clothes hung on me like sheets on a scarecrow. I did what I could with rolling and tucking, and then I bit the bullet and looked at Matthew again.

I had to decide what to do. I couldn’t kill him. Obviously, since I’d gotten all squeamish and been turned into an idiot by this stupid fucking spell I’d put on us, that was off the table. Also, why go to the trouble of healing him earlier only to kill him now? I was sure I could come up with two or three more justifications, but those would do.

That left — what? Lie down and go to sleep myself and wait for whatever happened tomorrow? The past twenty-four hours had been an epic shitshow, and I knew Parker wasn’t just going to give up and go away.

Particularly since he’d shown up with the Kimballs in tow. After losing their pack shaman and their pack leader in the same night, the Kimballs weren’t going to give up their feud with the Armitage pack. They’d be out for revenge. Between their anger and Parker’s determination to get me back, the Armitage territory was going to be under siege. Hopefully Ian was on the case, but he struck me as less of an investigator and more of an instigator. I wasn’t brimming with confidence.

So: go to bed, deal with whatever Matthew did when he woke up, deal with Ian and Nate and the pack council…terror warred with anticipatory exhaustion warred with anger. But what other choice did I have? I couldn’t leave. The spell was still binding me to Matthew, and I’d get sick myself, given that my magic was low enough to leave me vulnerable until I got far enough away, or Nate got distracted enough, for the draining spell to break.

Unless I took the spell off of him and then left.

My heart gave a stagger and lurch and then started to pound triple-time.

Unless I took the spell off of him.

I glanced sideways at the open window, a square of blackness with the whole world right beyond it. There were Armitage pack members patrolling the woods out there, I had no doubt. And by now, Nate would’ve put wards on the territory boundaries.

But they didn’t know my shifted form, they didn’t know my real scent, and I was quick and clever and quiet in a way no wolf could ever match or anticipate.

It all depended on whether or not I could draw enough magic to undo the spell without alerting Nate.

Good thing I liked a challenge.

I perched on the edge of the bed, my hip pressing against Matthew’s thigh. The contact was grounding in ways I didn’t want to think about, especially when I was about to give it up permanently. My heart gave another painful lurch, but I ignored it, and I gingerly laid one hand flat on his chest. His heart thumped under my palm, and I spread my fingers, feeling the texture of his chest hair through the thin cotton of his white t-shirt, feeling the banked power of his muscles. I closed my eyes and went inward.

The strand of spell that bound us was twisted and frayed, damaged by my time spent without using magic to maintain it. No wonder it was so fucked-up, to use what any shaman would have recognized as a technical term. Undoing it wasn’t terribly complicated, but it would take a steady, slow, measured application of magic, and if I ran out of reserves before I finished? Well, fucked-up would be worlds better than what would happen then. We could both go insane, or both die. Or some fun combination. We could end up bound even more tightly than we were now.

Examining my own store of magic wasn’t easy without pulling on Nate’s draining spell,