by Jeff Hale
I discovered something over those few days. I loved Darien—had loved him since that night he’d take me out on his motorcycle and the events had happened that had led to me embracing my shifter heritage. I was slightly depressed over the discovery, feeling as though I were betraying Aerick somehow, but I had loved—still loved—Aerick too, and had loved him first.
I still wasn’t ready for a lifetime commitment, and Darien, true to his word, wasn’t pressing the issue. I still hadn’t said the words to him, those three little important words. It was bad enough to feel them, know that I had for longer than I had realized, and that if I had just been a little less rebellious against him, we might have been together sooner, might have saved ourselves some hurt. But then I wouldn’t have had Aerick, and I wouldn’t give up my time with him for anything.
Darien’s back finally finished healing, helped by the salve Olin had applied, but he would have permanent scars from that woman’s whip. They were narrow and jagged, striping him from the top of his shoulder blades all the way down to his calves. He’d lucked out that the burn around his neck had not scarred. I had made him hold still one evening while I counted them; there were twenty seven lash marks. Add to that the small scars left by the spikes and the shuriken, the entry and exit scars on his stomach and back from Aerick’s ice blade, plus the tiny ones from the wolf’s bane coated silver buckshot he’d taken that night in my stead, surrounding the newly added symbol. All in the last year, and all but the symbol because of me somehow.
He asked me, when I got done cataloging them all, if the scars made him less attractive to me. I smiled at him, placed a kiss on each of those marks.
“No,” I said, “they only make you more beautiful to me. Remember, chicks dig scars.” I laughed softly.
“Not all women do,” he replied, frowning slightly.
“I’m not all women.”
We were lying on the sand on the small beach below his father’s villa, me making the attempt to get a bit of a line free tan and force Darien keep his hands to himself at the same time, when my cell phone rang. I rolled, reaching for where it lay on the blanket, and gave Darien a stern look to behave when I saw the call was from my mom.
“Mom! Hey, what’s up?”
“You are still coming here for Easter, right?” she asked, her tone sweet even though I knew she was covering irritation. Easter for my mother had always been more than bunnies and colored eggs.
“Shit!” I had totally forgotten about Easter and calling my folks, and Easter was in—I checked the date on my phone—one day. “Sorry, Mom. I got sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked. Yes, Kris did say that you had gone to Europe to see Darien, that you had finally given up on that Aerick.”
“Kris? You talked to Kris?” I hoped Kris hadn’t mentioned Darien’s disappearance; it wasn’t something I wanted my mother to know about. “How is she doing?”
“She’s here, Kat, remember? You were both coming here for Easter? And she’s fine. Now she and Matt are here and we’re just waiting for you.” There was frustration in her tone, but it was mixed with anticipation; she hadn’t seen me in a few months. “Easter is tomorrow. You’re still coming, right?”
Darien was grinning impishly at me, listening in on the conversation. I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Alone?”
Subtlety wasn’t her strong point, and she had always approved of Darien.
I gave Darien a look and he nodded at me. “No, Mom, not alone. Darien will be with me.”
“You two are getting along?”
“If you are asking if we are together now, Mom, then yes, we are.” See what I meant? No subtlety at all. “We’ll try to get a flight out as soon as possible, hopefully, give Darien time to say goodbye to his dad.”
“You two are with his father?” my mom asked, concern in her voice. “Well, I don’t want to take you guys away from his family for Easter if you want to stay there…”
Darien was shaking his head.
“No, it’s okay, Mom, I think Darien is ready to leave Europe anyway, he’s been here for quite a while now.”
“All right, sweetie, I just don’t want his father to be upset—”
“He won’t, Mom, sheesh, quit worrying, Stefano—Darien’s dad—will understand. Anyway, love you, Mom, I gotta go if we’re going to try to get out of here today, see you soon.”
Once she had hung up, I pulled my bathing suit back on, standing and gathering up the blanket, shaking sand off of it. “You have my mom totally won over, you know that?” I said to Darien.
He took the blanket from me as we headed up the steep path to the villa. “Not my fault.” He chuckled.
“Yeah, I think my mom just has a thing for shifters.”
He just laughed. “I should hope so considering she married one.”
“Yeah.”
My dad was a rakshasa, someone who had been a shifter when they were alive and had since been turned into a vampire, although a specialized vampire. Rakshasa clung more to their shifter roots, but forgetting they were vampires was stupidly dangerous.
Da had been in a very bad automobile accident when I was a baby, had been damaged severely enough that even his shifter healing wasn’t going to cut it, and the friend he had been with, already a rakshasa, had done whatever it was that vampires do to turn someone into a vampire. Since my father had felt it was unfair to my mother to now be married to a vampire, he had just let her believe he had died in that wreck. She hadn’t even known he was a shifter.
After Aerick had taken me to Las Vegas to protect me from a bunch of vampires that wanted me dead, Da had shown up to help protect my mom, and subsequently had made his existence known to me. He and my mom were reunited now, living in Oregon, and that was where we were going to spend Easter.
Stefano was very understanding when we told him we were going to spend Easter with my mother. He was just happy that Darien had been returned, and I got the distinct impression that, much as he loved him, he wanted Darien out of Europe as quickly as possible. Rather than make us take our chances with commercial flights, he arranged for his private plane to take us to Oregon.
He took me aside while Darien and Alex were putting luggage in the car. He gave me an odd, almost fatherly look, before saying, “Katelyn, dear, promise me you will look out for him?”
“Darien? He’s a big boy, Stefano, he’ll probably take offense to me trying to protect him.” I rolled my eyes and grinned.
Stefano gave a short laugh, then his expression turned serious. “He’s more than able to take care of himself physically, but that boy has a world of hate and anger and pain in him that started when he wasn’t much older than you and I don’t think has ever entirely gone away. So much happened when he was younger, so many things he couldn’t control…” He reached towards me, touching my hair briefly as a sad expression crossed his face. “It wasn’t easy being what he is, at the time he was born, and I’m not referring to being a shifter.” He dropped his eyes to the floor, sighed. “Some of it I know has to do with me, the rest… that’s long forgotten and I can’t change any of that now. Sasha, she had a way of bringing him to heel, cooling his emotions. He was a different man when he was with her. When she… died… his mother and I thought we were going to lose him too. We have Alex to thank for pulling him through that.
“But you, you have the same effect on him that Sasha did. You make him feel worthwhile. He loves you, Katelyn, just like he loved her. He’ll do anything for you, and that will let you keep him in line, keep him from losing himself again.”
“I love him, too, Stefano,” I said, feeling wetness well up in my eyes. “I’ll do my best to keep him safe for you.”
“Thank you, Katelyn.” He pulled me into a relieved hug. “And have you told him yet? What you just told me?”
“No, I’ve been too scared to,” I admitted guiltily.
“He needs to hear it, dear. Do it soon.”
I just nodded at him,
wiping a hand across my eyes, then I turned to give Darien and Alex a bright smile as they came back inside.
“Everything’s packed,” Alex said, looking from me to Stefano, not missing the forced smile. “We ready to go?”
“Yeah. Let’s give Darien and Stefano a little bit of privacy to say goodbye.” I leaned in, gave Stefano a light kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Stefano. We’ll keep in touch.”
He nodded at me, then turned to his son. I shooed Alex out of the villa, following right behind him, and climbed into the back of the mini limo, Alex settling on the seat across from me.
“It’s okay, you know,” Alex said, shrugging slightly.
“What is?” I was confused.
“I reckon you love him. It’s okay. I might not like it much, but he’s my best mate, so if you don’t love me, at least you love him.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I left it as simple as possible. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay with that? Really okay?”
He smiled at me, and there was only the barest trace of sadness. “I’ll have to be, won’t I? Just remember, Katie. I’ll still be anything you need me to be.” He glanced out the car window, to where Darien was opening the door to the villa. “I love him, I do, but I know him much better than you do. He’ll drive you into my arms soon enough, even if it is only to cry and then go right back to him.”
I didn’t have a chance to respond to him since Darien was opening the door and sliding onto the seat next to me. He leaned forward and tapped the privacy glass to let the driver know we were ready, then settled back down next to me, putting his arm over my shoulders and snuggling me into him.
We hit the airport a little while later and were on the plane and flying out within a half an hour after that. Alex settled down with a bottle of vodka he’d charmed out of the attendant, and his laptop. I wasn’t sure if the vodka was going to do him any good, but at the rate he was chugging it, he might at least get a buzz for a short while.
Darien dragged me back to the small private room at the back of the plane. It held a desk, television, minibar and a long bench seat that folded out into a bed. He flipped the bed out and then drew me down to it. We spent most of the plane trip there, where Darien tried to make up for our separation over the last several months.
At some point I must have drifted off into actual sleep, because after a nebulous dream in which I was in the water searching for something, that ended in sheer panic, I woke in a semi-seizure, unable to breathe. My back arched, fingers clawing at anything I could grab hold of, my feet kicking as I tried to drag in a breath and couldn’t.
“Kat! What’s wrong?” Darien asked, alarmed. His arm had been one of the things I had tried to grab hold of.
I turned frantic eyes to him as I struggled, one hand going to my throat to try to indicate the problem.
“Shit!” He pulled me to sitting. “Alex!” There was a thump, the sound of feet and Alex burst through the door.
“What’s wrong?” Alex demanded, looking at me as I jerked in Darien’s arms, then at Darien.
“I don’t think she can breathe! I don’t know what happened, she just woke up that way!”
“Well bloody fucking find out!” He gave a little exasperated shake of his head, then tapped his temple with two fingers.
The edges of my vision were starting to become a little hazy from lack of oxygen when all of a sudden I felt something stir in my mind. It was emotion—concern, fear, question—and it was coming from Darien. I could feel Alex in there as well, feel the same things coming off of him, and realized that it was the same kind of thing that had happened that night Darien had caught Alex and I kissing and we had both felt his reactions to it.
I tried to broadcast what I was feeling, that my lungs seemed to refuse to work for some reason, that I just could not inhale, that I had woken from a dream feeling this way. There was confusion from both Darien and Alex for a moment, then a sudden sense of realization from Darien.
His hands came up to my face, holding me still as he forced me to look into his eyes, bringing his face right up to mine, our lips almost touching. I felt myself begin to relax as he stroked my cheek and whispered, “Breathe, baby, breathe, it’s okay, you’re safe now, I’ve got you.”
Some tenuous line broke somewhere and I dragged in a long noisy breath, my whole body collapsing against Darien in relief as I did so. I lay across his lap, doing nothing but breathe for the next few minutes. Alex’s hand reached out to briefly move my hair out of my face, but he yanked it back rather quickly.
“You gonna be all right?” he asked me, hesitant.
I nodded, still not sure about trying to use enough air to talk.
He smiled at me, protectively. “We’re almost there. The attendant said another forty minutes.”
“What time is it?” Darien asked, one hand stroking my back in soothing motions.
“A little after nine p.m.,” Alex said.
“On Sunday?” Darien’s tone was perplexed. Sunday was Easter. “We’ve been on the plane for over twenty four hours?”
“No.” Alex chuckled lightly. “It’s still Saturday, time zones, remember? Oregon is ten hours behind Greece.”
He was right. In the worry over Darien, and the distraction of Alex, I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that we had jumped almost half a day ahead when we’d flown to Greece. Alex headed back out to the main cabin, leaving me and Darien alone again. I pushed myself up off Darien’s lap, feeling perfectly fine again, if a little shaken over the incident.
“Damn, I wish I knew what caused that,” I muttered unhappily.
“You had a dream, right?” Darien probed.
“Yeah, I was underwater for some reason. I think I might have been looking for something. Then all of a sudden I became really frightened and I woke up and couldn’t breathe.”
“Like you were drowning?” The expression on Darien’s face was unreadable, as though he were watching for my reaction to his words.
But he was right; it had felt like what I imagined it must be like to drown, to not be able to inhale for fear of filling your lungs with water. I shivered. “Maybe, yeah. You know, I like swimming as much as the next person, but I’ve always had a problem with being totally submerged, makes me claustrophobic.”
He stared at me a moment, face still devoid of emotion, before smiling suddenly and shrugging. “I think I heard somewhere that dreaming that you are drowning is quite common, like the falling dream. Maybe it just seemed so real to you that you had some sort of psychosomatic reaction, like when you dream you hit the ground and it sometimes feels like someone just dropped you onto the bed.”
“I’m sure you’re right, it just freaked me out a bit.” I looked around the little room, at the mess we’d made of the bed. “We better get this all straightened up before we land.”
We touched down at the private airstrip in Tillamook a little bit later. Once again I had called ahead to let my parents know we were almost there, and once again there was a car waiting. It seemed my life recently was nothing but airplanes and waiting cars.
My father’s home wasn’t in Tillamook proper, but in another small town a few miles away and right on the ocean: Netarts. We headed west, then southwest out of Tillamook on the old Netarts highway before turning onto Whiskey Creek Road, then left onto another private drive that wound around through the trees for a bit before opening onto my father’s property. All of my father’s rakshasa pack had homes scattered up and down the Oregon coast, although they used the home of the former pack leader, who had gone missing and was presumed dead last fall, as a communal meeting spot.
My mother met us at the door, first pulling me into a tight hug, then fawning all over Darien. I was never sure what it was about Aerick that had set her so against him, other than the fact that he had whisked me away to safety but hadn’t let me let anyone know for fear it would alert the vampires, so my mother had thought I was dead for almost twenty four hours.
She looked goo
d, my mom, better than she had in years. Her bright blonde hair was shoulder length, the ends feathered, her blue eyes happy and alert now that she was almost a year sober. She was the same height I was, her figure still trim, and just as busty; I had inherited it from somewhere after all.
She had turned her attention to Alex finally, giving him a hug as well. “Katelyn didn’t say you were coming too, Alex.” She threw an admonishing grin my way. “But I should have expected it. You three are all pack, yes? So you tend to stick together?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alex returned, smiling.
“I assume you and Darien have been tearing up Europe the last few months?” So help me, my mother winked at him.
“You could say that.” Alex waggled his eyebrows at her and I could have kissed him for letting her continue to believe that nothing out of place had happened.
“Well, come in, all of you.” She stood aside so we could move past her, then shut the door behind us. “Kat, you know where your room is. Why don’t you have Darien take your things up there while I show Alex to the extra guest room. Matt and Loch are talking business, and Kris is in the family room watching some television.”
I just about choked on part of her words. She’s putting Darien in my room? With me? Not that I minded, but we weren’t married and I was sure she would have stuck him in a room with Alex. My expression must have showed on my face because my mother just sighed patiently.
“Katelyn Amber Shaughnessy, I am not as prudish, or dimwitted, as you seem to think.” She patted my cheek. “Honey, can you honestly tell me that if I put him in a separate room, one or the other of you isn’t going to be sneaking down the hall anyway? Besides, you’re going to be twenty in three months, you’re a grown adult, and this way you can both face me in the morning without giving me guilty face.”
I squashed down the desire to just melt into an embarrassed puddle on the floor. This was my mother after all, and back in the day when she’d been a teacher, Sex Ed had been one of the subjects she had taught. That she somehow managed to balance religion and open-mindedness about sex was something I didn’t understand, but I guessed I should just be happy for it.
