Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,56

bit of the conversation, and it sounded like it was winding down. “Yeah,” Colin said. “Okay.” He nodded and paced in a small circle. “That works for me. I’ll tell Jonah. Maybe he should get there sooner to help with the magic shit. No one but me knows he’s here, so he can leave without being noticed. Uh-huh. I need to go, dude. They’re going to wonder where the fuck I am. Yeah. Text me.”

He hung up and then stood there, holding the phone and looking at me oddly.

“What the fuck are you staring at?” I snapped. “And where did you just volunteer me to go?”

“Back to the Armitage territory,” he said. “To help them prep. Matthew thinks Hawthorne Junior can set up some kind of magical trap. Catch our pack as we step over the Armitage wards and pin us all down while we, and I quote, ‘deescalate the confrontation.’ Where the fuck did he learn to talk, anyway? Like, he went to the same high school I did.” Colin shook his head. “You’d better get going. Do you have a car?”

I stood, resignedly stripping off my shirt again and rolling it up to go in the backpack. Not for the first time, I wished there was a way to shift and keep my clothes somehow.

“It’s parked in the old campground.”

“We’re supposed to leave here at three AM.” He lit up his phone’s screen and glanced at it. “It’s one-thirty now. So you have that much of a head start.”

That wasn’t much, especially if I was going to have to try to set up some kind of magical booby-trap, with no planning, and with Nate as my partner in crime, gods help me.

But I had to know. Matthew did like to solve problems peacefully, if possible. Of course he wouldn’t want another potential pack war on his hands, this time with Parker’s pack and possibly half of the rest of Nevada.

Which was obviously more important than what Parker had done to me. Of course it was. To Matthew, there wouldn’t even be a comparison. Objectively, even, given the lives at stake, it wasn’t a comparison. Not that I was all that objective.

That lump in my throat had only grown bigger, but I forced out, “Why didn’t Matthew want you to kill Parker? Does he want to ‘deescalate’ with him, too?”

Colin laughed, shaking his head. “No, dude. He told me he’d kill me if I got to Taft before he could. Something about, like, beating him to death with his own spinal column? I guess the way Taft cheated in the fight the other day must’ve really fucking pissed him off, or something.” My mouth dropped open, and the pants I’d just pulled off my hips fluttered out of my fingers to the ground. Colin didn’t seem to notice. “I’m heading back to the house. I’ll see you in a couple of hours. Good luck.”

With a mock-salute of a couple of fingers at his temple, Colin turned and jogged back up the hill, through the pines and out of sight.

The way Parker cheated in the fight…or something. I stuffed the pants in the backpack, arranged the straps, and shifted.

I didn’t want to hope that something was me. But I ran a little faster on my way back to the car.

Chapter 14

Break on Through to the Other Side

Getting out of the Kimball territory was as easy as getting in. By two I was on the highway heading east, straight for the Armitage territory. I knew I needed to conserve my strength for later, but I put a little burst of magic into the car. Not exactly an illusion, like the one I’d used to obscure the license plates, but a little something to confuse any cops with a radar gun into thinking I was going the speed limit.

Not that speed limits were much of a thing out here in the boonies, but the Kimballs owned half the police around here. And I was short on time.

At least I wasn’t getting tired yet. I’d slept most of the day, and I was still wide awake.

More than wide awake, since my brain was running in circles like a meth-addled hamster. Somehow I’d gone from working with Jonathan Hawthorne, to being the Armitages’ prisoner they wanted to kill, to escaping, to now going back to the Armitages voluntarily.

And somehow I’d also gone from enchanting Matthew with the intent to help kill him, to being stuck to him like superglue, to saving his life, to