by R. E. Butler
“Hiya kids,” she said. “Do you need menus?”
All three shook their heads. She tucked the menus under her arm and took their orders: glazed ham for Treasure, meatloaf for Kevin, and pot roast for Brian.
“We’ll need an apple dumpling and a piece of peach pie to go,” Kevin said.
“No problem,” she said with a smile before walking away.
Treasure settled back in the booth and took both their hands. “I picked the cake design.”
“Oh? What’s it going to be?” Kevin asked.
They’d told her to pick whatever design she wanted.
“Chocolate cake with strawberry filling, frosted blue with pink snapdragons.”
“Snapdragons?” Brian asked.
“I was looking online last night for flowers with the word ‘dragon’ in the name, and there are actually a good number of them,” she said. “But most of them would have to be ordered and they’d be expensive. There are already snapdragons in the flower beds, plus the Ashland Nursery has a lot of them.”
“Cool,” Kevin said, making a mental note to research dragon-named flowers so they could order some special for her, perhaps to go in the currently empty flower beds around their home.
While they waited for their food, they talked about their day. Treasure owned her own business making custom wood furniture. She had a website, which she used to showcase her finished pieces. One day when she was fourteen, she’d been practicing throwing her dragon-fire in her human form, with her fairy wings flapping against her back. She was attempting to light a piece of wood on fire on the ground but missed entirely and hit the side of the barn. The fire had flashed over the wood surface and left an interesting pattern behind. After apologizing to Rhett for the error, they’d moved farther from the barn and tried different pieces of wood to see what her fire could do to them. She called the ability ‘fairy flame,’ and spent a lot of her time mastering the technique. She could scorch an entire piece of wood, or pinpoint the flame and burn an imagine or word into it.
Kevin had learned how to cut metal and weld from Rhett, and he made custom forms for her business. She was so good at the flame work that she’d gone to college for woodworking and had a shop behind their home for her projects. She’d made all the cabinet doors for the kitchen and bathrooms, as well as the headboard for the king-sized bed in the master suite.
“The bridal shower is Saturday,” Treasure said after Cherie appeared with their food. “I thought Sunday we could spend the day in the house and put everything away.”
“Of course,” Kevin said. “The couch is supposed to be delivered Saturday afternoon, so Bri and I will get it set up.”
She smiled at him. “Do you guys realize that in a month we’ll be married and mated? It seems like a month is a long time, but we’ve been together for years so it also feels like it’s hardly any time at all.”
“I think when you really want something, time goes slow,” Brian said.
She wrinkled her nose. “Time is dumb.”
Kevin laughed. “It most definitely is.”
They ate and talked about the bridal shower and what needed to be done at the house in order for them to be ready to move in on their special day. After paying the check, they grabbed the desserts for Rhett and Lisa and headed to the parking lot. Kevin waited in the truck while Brian and Treasure said goodbye to each other, turning the music up loud enough that he couldn’t actually hear what they were saying.
They worked hard not to get jealous of each other when it came to their mate. Treasure loved them both equally, and they each had things they shared with her that were special. He coveted the times when the two of them would snuggle up on the couch and watch old sci-fi movies and eat a giant bowl of buttery popcorn. Most of their time together was as a trio, with Treasure the sweet center of their universe. Since so many pride members were in shared matings, he and Brian had gotten a lot of advice when it came to how to handle jealousy.
“What are you thinking about?” Treasure asked after she buckled in and waved at Brian.
“Jealousy.”
She looked at him with raised brows. “Are you?”
“Not really, sweetheart,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze as he backed out of the parking spot and headed to her house. “I was just thinking about how we’re not the first shared mating in the pride, so we’ve got the benefit of the other groups’ knowledge on how to deal.”
“I think it might help that we were younger when we first met, and we grew into our relationship. If we were all adults at the beginning, we could’ve had a different set of issues.”
He agreed. “I’m glad you came into our lives when you did. We’re lucky.”
“Very much so.”
He drove down the driveway to their home and swung around the back to where her workshop sat. The red barn had double doors that she could open to let in fresh air. They’d built the workshop first, so she would have a place to do her woodworking, and then they’d started on the house that they’d be calling their permanent home in a month. After giving her a few kisses goodbye, he headed back to the barn to drop off the desserts for Rhett and finish up the mowing.
He enjoyed working on the farm. There was always something new going on, and different times of year meant different projects. Several pride members worked for Rhett, including Kevin’s father, Grant, and Jericho, a bear shifter.
After finishing up for the day, he checked in on Treasure and headed to the farmhouse for dinner with Brian, Rhett, and Lisa. By the time he made it back to the room he shared with Brian, he was exhausted. He and Brian had shared a bedroom for years. They had their own beds, but had to share a bathroom, which neither of them minded. Brian worked odd hours as an EMT, so Kevin often had the room to himself, as he did tonight. He settled in bed and grabbed his tablet, searching online for flowers with ‘dragon’ in the name. There was a knock at the door, and he called for whoever it was to come in.
Grant opened the door and smiled. “How was work?”
“Good,” he said, putting the tablet down. “You?”
“I was mending fences all day, so my back is killing me, but I’m not entirely sure that doesn’t have something to do with my age.”
“Well, that sucks, sorry.”
“Aches and pains remind us we’re alive. At least that’s what Dad used to say. What are you working on?”
“Treasure said she was looking up flowers with dragon names, so I thought I’d see about ordering some that we could plant around the house as a surprise for her.”
“Like what kind of flowers?”
“There’s a dragon iris, which apparently stinks to high heaven when it blooms, so that’s out. But I like this one called Dragon’s Breath.” Kevin flipped the tablet over and showed his dad the image. “And there’s a Dragon Wing begonia, too.”
“That’s interesting. I wonder if there’s a mountain lion plant?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know. I’ll have to look around. So what’s up?”
“Some of the pride males were talking about how females always get bridal showers, and that we don’t really do anything for the males. Aaron and I discussed it, and we wanted to suggest a guy’s night during the shower. We’ll go to Kickers, shoot some pool and have a few drinks, and celebrate your upcoming ceremony.”
“That sounds cool! As long as we can be back in time to help take the gifts to the house after the shower. We promised.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. And the night before your ceremony, all the males want to go for a hunt. Like a bachelor party, but no naked ladies.”
Brian laughed. “I’m looking forward to that.”
“Your mom wanted me to make sure that you guys know she wants to have a family meal together once a week. You can figure out which night works best for everyone’s jobs; maybe Sunday? The house won’t be the same without you two.”
Samantha, his stepmom, was a sweet woman and had been taking care of their family for a long time. They didn’t
believe in calling people by the word ‘step,’ so she was just Mom. Kevin’s own mother, a mountain lion female named Paula, had no interest in him or Brian, thanks to an ancient curse by the goddess who created shifters. Mountain lions were the only shifters who had a curse like this – the females poisoned the young females three times over the course of their childhood, turning them into beings who hated anything to do with love and family, and didn’t even recognize their own young. Brian was eight when Sam stepped in as a mom and mated Aaron and Grant, and although he wished he’d had a different childhood with a mom who loved him, he was thankful that Sam was there and loved them all as if they were her own.
“I kind of thought Treasure would want to move in here. Bri and I were happy wherever she wanted to be, but then she asked us to live on the farm. I think her dragon likes the openness of the land.”
The boarding house was in a heavily wooded lot; even though the backyard was clear, it didn’t give a whole lot of room for a big dragon to go flapping around. If she wanted to fly in the woods, she had to go high over the treetops.
“I’ll leave you to your research,” Grant said, rising to his feet. “Just wanted to check in and let you know about Saturday.”
“I’ll let Bri know. Goodnight.”
“Sleep well,” he said, then closed the door.
Kevin turned his attention back to the flower research, and after some more digging ordered seeds for the Dragon’s Breath and the Dragon Wing begonias. Then he put the tablet down on the nightstand and turned off the lamp.
Another day was gone, which brought them one more step closer to the day they’d get to officially call Treasure their mate and wife. She was already theirs one hundred percent, and they were hers, but the official piece of paper and the marks they were going to give each other would make it that much more special.
Twenty-nine days and counting.
Chapter Three
Treasure drilled the holes for the finished cabinets in the downstairs bathroom, attached the hinges and hung them. After carefully wiping them down, she sat back on her heels and smiled at the finished project. Kevin had made a metal template of a tree with hearts for leaves. The intricate pattern had taken him a long while to complete, and she was tickled with the finished results. She’d laid the template on the surface of each cabinet door and burned the open spaces with her fire, leaving behind the pretty design. She liked having something that she’d made in almost every room in the house. From the kitchen cabinets, which she’d flamed with a swirly pattern, to the headboard on the big king-sized bed in the master suite which she’d cut from a huge piece of oak. It weighed a ton, but it sure was pretty.
She took a few pictures of the cabinets and saved them to her website so she could upload them later. Then she gathered up her tools and turned off the light. As she walked out of the bathroom, her gaze caught on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the living room. She walked into the room and ran her fingers along one of the empty shelves. It was one of the first things she’d built for their home, so she’d have a place to store her cherished books. Aunt Georgette had owned many spell books, which she always called her ‘recipe’ books, and Treasure had taken several with her after her death. She wished she’d been able to bring every book with her, but she’d been in a hurry. And then she’d destroyed the house with fire, so that no one would ever know about the sweet fae who’d given her life to save her only niece.
Treasure sighed and turned away, but didn’t get far. She faced the bookshelf again, her mind flitting to the library in her parents’ home in the fae realm. Her father had been a scholar who collected books. She’d loved sitting in the library and looking at the old volumes while he studied. Like her aunt, Treasure’s mother had kept recipe books, but Treasure hadn’t had a chance to get them before she’d been sent to this realm. As she stared at the empty shelves, she thought about the books she’d seen in her father’s library. She knew she’d read about gods and goddesses in some of them as a child. The mountain lions had been cursed by the goddess who created them; the pride had a book of the history of their people that detailed the curse.
The curse didn’t affect her personally, because she wasn’t a mountain lion and it didn’t harm the males. But Hope was a mountain lion female, and she’d been poisoned once when she was four by females who’d lived in King at the time. Fortunately, the females had fled town after that, so while she occasionally struggled with emotions, she wasn’t fully transformed into the emotionless creatures the curse had set out to create. Still, Treasure felt bad for Hope, and for the rest of the females who were under the curse. She wanted to find a way to break it.
But how did a person go about breaking a curse laid by a goddess eons ago?
Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it from her pocket to see a text from Lisa, asking if she was coming home for dinner. She answered back that she was nearly done and moved to put her phone away. But then she stopped and opened the photo app, scrolling until she found the pictures she’d taken of the mountain lion curse from the history book. She’d sent the pictures to Hope, and they’d spent many hours talking about what a bitch the goddess was and how awful it was for her to curse the mountain lions and then seemingly disappear.
The pages contained information about the goddess Hrixalda, her lineage, the shifters she’d created, and the events that led up to the cursing of the mountain lions. In essence, the females had grown jealous of the attention the males paid to the goddess and had tried to get other gods and goddesses to rise up against her. The plan had backfired, and in her fury the goddess had cursed the mountain lions. The females would poison every little girl three times during her childhood. By the time the poison was fully effective, the females would be almost like robots – emotionless, caring only for the continuation of their species, and not at all about love or family. They were so entrenched in the curse that they would go to any lengths to drive away any non-mountain lion females the males took interest in.
The poem, which she’d practically memorized by this point, stood out on the image:
As punishment for your jealousy, love you’ll know nevermore
To carry on this legacy, or deaths you’ll have to answer for.
Three by three to seal their fate, the hatred of all your males,
Only finding one’s Truemate, will thus remove the veils.
Hope wanted to set the females free of the curse. As far as anyone knew, only Hope’s mother Honor and a young female named Jilly had been released from it. Melody, who lived in Ashland, had been raised away from the King pride by her father and had never been cursed.
Treasure wanted Hope’s dream for the females to be freed to come true. In order for that to happen, she had to be able to get in touch with the goddess. She thought perhaps her father would have known how to accomplish that feat – which meant that the knowledge she needed to help her friend and the still-cursed females was in the fae realm, in her parents’ home.
She sent a text to Hope as she turned from the empty bookshelf and headed outside.
I have an idea.
* * *
Treasure stood on the front porch, watching for Hope. The last two weeks had flown by as she and her mates prepared for their upcoming special day. But today was a great day – Hope was coming from King and was going to stay in Rhett and Lisa’s spare bedroom. Treasure had always wanted a sister, and although she and Hope weren’t related by blood, she felt like they were sisters at heart. In addition to the fact that Hope was moving to Ashland, Treasure’d had a dream about her the night before that told her the female had made the right choice in coming to stay there.
Treasure’s sensitive hearing picked up a car approaching, and she peered down the dirt road, excited to see the dust clouds forming behind a car making its way to the farmhouse. She recognized the vehicle as the one Hope had gotten from her parents as a high school graduation gift. When Hope stopped in front of the farmhouse, Treasure raced off the porch, clapping and cheering, and when H
ope opened the door, the two friends embraced. Treasure was so happy to see her that even her dragon let out a happy trill.
“How was the drive?” Treasure asked as Hope opened the back door and pulled out a backpack, then followed her to the porch.
“Long but uneventful, so that’s good.”
“I have great news.”
“Oh?”
“I had a dream about you last night. Moving here was definitely the right choice.”
“Oh, good,” Hope said with a laugh. “I was waiting for confirmation from your subconscious.”
“Hey, don’t knock it. I’m prone to prophetic dreams, you know. Especially in the summer for some reason.”
“Because you’re a whackadoodle?”
“Takes one to know one,” Treasure said with a laugh.
“It sure does.”
Lisa opened the front door as the two climbed the porch steps. “You get more beautiful every time I see you, honey.”
Hope hugged her. “Thank you.”
Treasure became aware of a strange, nearly electric charge in the air. Hope froze in place for a moment, then strode to the edge of the porch. She leaned over and tilted her head.
“You okay, beastie?” Treasure asked.
“Bestie,” Hope corrected.
Treasure often mixed words up. Her mates and Hope always corrected her with a smile, never making fun of her for the often strange things she said.
“Bestie. Technically I’m right, though. You are a beastie.”
Hope planted her hands on the porch rail and leaped over. Treasure walked to the railing and watched as Brian and Kevin’s three cousins – Ben, Owen, and Nathan – walked around the edge of the house, took one look at Hope, and stopped in their tracks. Hope moved forward cautiously, coming to stand in front of the three males.
“Who are you?” Hope whispered.
The three males introduced themselves to her.
