Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,60
well with Sam Kimball, who’d complained a lot about Matthew’s lack of tells.
Much as I hated to agree with that asshole Sam, may he rest in not-peace, in that moment I shared his frustration.
Was Matthew angry with me? Murderous? Bored? Who could tell?
Whatever he was, I couldn’t begin to deal with it now. “Have you talked to Colin? How far away are they? And I assume you’re sure they’ll be crossing the boundary here?”
The faintest trace of…something…passed across Matthew’s face, and one of his hands twitched at his side. “They’re on their way. And yes. Kimball said this was the point they’d chosen. This is one of the less obvious places. They were planning to take us by surprise.”
You’re welcome was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back. No, fuck it. “Well, you’re welcome,” I snapped.
Both of Matthew’s fists were clenched now. “Kimball would’ve called me anyway,” he gritted out.
“Nope,” I said, popping the p as obnoxiously as possible. “He wouldn’t have.” I could feel my own claws pricking at my fingertips as my anger started to mount. Why was I so determined to get credit for something I barely cared about anyway? I should’ve just waited it out at the Kimballs’, assassinated Parker, and made a run for it. “That was my idea.”
“I guess I’m lucky you and Colin Kimball are so close.” If the sarcasm had been any heavier it would’ve crushed us both like a landslide.
Matthew turned away abruptly, snagging Ian’s attention and leading him off to talk to a group of councilors on the other side of the clearing — and dismissing me completely in the process.
Fuck. Alphas. Fuck Matthew. Fuck.
I turned and quickly knelt back down again, adjusting the position of a candle that didn’t need to be adjusted so that I could pretend that was what I meant to do all along.
“We should create the salt circle now,” I said, my voice a little too rough.
To my surprise, Nate just nodded without comment, and we each took one of the big bags of rock salt that had been sitting off to the side and headed closer to the territory boundary.
It was a beautiful night. The rain was still holding off, though the air was getting damper and chillier by the hour. I hoped it kept holding off until we were done with the salt; dissolved salt circles were a fucking bitch. They could still hold power temporarily, but the amount of magic that needed to be fed into them increased exponentially the soggier they got. There was some nerdy chemistry researcher up in Oregon who’d been studying the relationship between magical force and chemical bonds as expressed in equilibrium equations; I’d read one of his papers online one time when I was bored. All I knew was that it sucked when it happened.
Nate looked up at what could be seen of the moon and the stars through the gathering clouds and the feathery branches above us as we crossed the clearing and headed a few yards north. He tripped over his own feet, and I reached out without thinking and caught him by the arm, keeping him from face-planting. He glanced around himself a little shiftily, but Ian was still engaged with Matthew and the council, planning what to do once we trapped the attackers, from what I could tell — or how to deal with it if trapping them failed.
“Would he really get pissed at you just for letting me touch your arm?” Typical controlling alpha bullshit. Not that I cared about Nate, but…yeah, all right, I cared if another mage was stuck with an overbearing dickhead mate with nowhere to go. Fine. I could admit it.
Nate laughed a little. “No. He’d be pissed at you and assume you were trying to hurt me, and then he’d get all worried, and then we’d end up not setting the salt circle until the Kimballs were already here. I don’t think asking them to wait would go down so well, you know?”
That startled out a laugh of my own. “Yeah, ‘Excuse me, Bill, stand still for a second? No, a couple feet to the left. Perfect.’”
The silence that fell after Nate’s answering chuckle was almost…companionable.
We started at the same point on the circle, back to back, and went around in opposite directions. I used a little flare of magic to create an illusion of a perfect circle drawn in a pale glow on the ground so we could follow the line,