Amethyst Storms (Primordial Protectors #1)

9. Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Alex

I’d never liked being stuck in bed, not even as a child. The promise of Saturday morning cartoons that typically kept most kids quiet had always promoted me to frustration and tears. It wasn’t that I couldn’t appreciate a good show, I could, mostly, well, sort of anyway. I could if I had something else to occupy my hands and thoughts. With my head still feeling like someone was using it for a tetherball, thinking about anything was limited to necessity, which meant that I only did it when Ionus asked me a question. My fingers were restless despite the throbbing that still sent pulses of pain radiating across my shoulder and down my arm. I’d really fucked myself up, and for what? In the end, my soul had railed against leaving while my heart had pounded so hard that there had been a moment when I’d feared I was having a heart attack.

I’d understood, the moment I’d turned around and started heading back, that it was a panic attack triggered when I’d traveled too far away from my mate. Now I was beginning to suspect that I’d been reacting to his dragon’s fear and the panic he’d felt when he’d realized that I had left. That was a tangle of emotions I never wanted to experience again, not when they’d slammed into me harder than the stone I’d tried to break with my head. The echo of his despair still lingered, but I knew nothing about dragons and had no way of knowing if he was deliberately projecting, or if this was all part of the mating bond. Hell, I knew nothing about mates outside of what little I’d read about them which hadn’t been much, when you considered that I’d never expected to have one. It wasn’t just a lack of expectation, it was a lack of longing, too. Call it a case of terminal contentment, but I’d never wanted more in my life than the freedom to explore every rockface, cliff and cave I encountered and the opportunity to daydream my nights away around a campfire, stars twinkling overhead while I swung in my hammock.

I could smell that he wanted to mate, and my body desired it very much, but my rebel heart and adventurous spirit did not want to be claimed. I’d never felt so conflicted. The one person I’d always gone to for advice, my Gramps, was over a hundred miles away. I wish we could be face to face for this conversation, with a plate of his infamous double chocolate peanut butter chip cookies between us and a couple glasses of ice-cold milk, but I guessed I’d have to settle for a phone call once my dragon left my side to make lunch.

Or perhaps I could hasten things along a little. Huffing, I rolled onto my side as carefully as I could manage, not wanting to jostle my shoulder. “Being stuck in bed sucks,” I grumbled, pushing at the pillow to make it a little more comfortable.

“How is your pain?” Ionus asked.

“Cookies would make it better,” I blurted, flashing him my brightest smile.

He raised an eyebrow at me and snorted. “That seems extremely random.”

“Maybe.”

He nodded, but I could see the skepticism in his eyes, too. “There are no cookies in the kitchen. I will have to place an order. What kind would you like?”

“You can’t buy them, but I can give you the recipe.”

“Of course you can.”

“Do you have a notebook?”

“I am sure I can find something for you to write on,” Ionus said as he gracefully slid off the bed without jostling me.

While he went in search of paper, I spotted my backpack and retrieved my phone, glad to see that wrapping it in aluminum foil and putting it in a plastic bag had kept it safe from the water. I was just tucking it under the pillow and settling back in to watch a YouTube video compilation of the craziest Family Feud answers when Ionus returned and handed me a pad of sticky notes with plastic still clinging to the side, like he’d just opened them.

On them I printed in tiny, neat lettering, the ingredients list and the recipe, along with a smiley face at the bottom. Now that I’d started thinking about those cookies as more than just a possibility, I truly craved them and the chance to feed a few to my dragon. I didn’t have a lot to share with him. Gramps and I tended to keep our lives simple. It made it easy to pack up and go on an adventure whenever the mood struck one of us. I had recipes, though, mostly for things that could be cooked over an open flame, though I’d never tried making brontosaurus burgers before, which was probably what it would take to fill my dragon, especially after what I’d seen him cook the night I arrived.

Pleased with myself, I passed it off to him with a little wave and waited a good ten minutes to be sure he wouldn’t return anytime soon. When I heard nothing but silence and the television, I allowed myself to relax and shove my hand beneath the pillow. Gramps was at the top of my contacts list, and after my call to him the other day he answered on the first ring, the anxiety in his voice ringing through loud and clear, despite the distance between us.

“Why aren’t you home yet?” Gramps asked rather than say hello .

“There’s a little problem,” I hedged, before sighing as the big problem between my legs twinged, reminding me that I wasn’t going to be able to continue ignoring my heat for much longer.

“With you there are never any little problems,” Gramps replied knowingly. “There are only giant catastrophes and epic disasters.”

“This is both.”

“Oh, what the fuck, let me turn the stove off and sit down before you have me burning up half my dinner.”

“What are you making tonight?”

“Chicken fried steaks with mushroom gravy and a side of roasted carrots,” he grumbled. “And I’d prefer them both unscorched.”

“Sorry.”

“Uh huh, now what did you do?”

“It’s not what I did, exactly…well, it sort of is, because I found Satan’s Shaft like I told you the other night, but I, um, I also sort of found my mate.”

“You don’t sort of find a mate. You either found your mate, or you found someone who is playing games with you. Which is it?”

“Umm, it’s,” I sighed and decided to back the story up a little and let Gramps make up his own mind. “I tried to leave yesterday. I could see the light shining over the water and knew I’d found the way out, but instead of being happy all I felt was crushing misery and dread. I turned around. Underwater. I didn’t even pause to swim the rest of the way to the surface. I couldn’t. I needed to get back to him.”

“Well, that answers that question,” Gramps said. “He’s your mate.”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t sound happy.”

“I’m going into heat,” I blurted.

“Thus, the catastrophe coupled with disaster.”

“Pretty much,” I whined. “Gramps, what am I gonna do?”

“Well, kid, you’re either going to let your mate fuck you or you’re going to spend the next week up to your neck in ice water.”

“G-gramps… H-how…” I stammered, my thoughts a scrambled mess.

“How did I know that was how you spent your heats?” Gramps asked. “Simple. I saw the ice bags in the trash and put two and two together when no midnight margaritas magically appeared on a silver tray in the living room.”

“Ugggh.”

“No use groaning about it now,” Gramps said. “I doubt you have time for it anyway since you tend to wait to reach out for help until you’re already dangling by a couple fingertips. Did you at least leave yourself enough time to drive home?”

“That’s the other issue.”

“Oh, there are more issues. Joy. Okay, I can see that I’m not going to get back to my dinner anytime soon, so I’m going to crack open a hard cider and put my feet up while I listen to how you’ve complicated an already fucked up situation further.”

“Pretty sure my car got impounded.”

“Ya coulda waited until I’d gotten the damned cider out of the fridge for fuck’s sake,” Gramps griped.

Through the phone I could hear the hiss and the snap of the metal cap being pried off the glass bottle and the rattle of it landing on the counter.

“Sorry, Gramps.”

“No, you’re not. If you were sorry you’d quit doing this shit, but you won’t. You walk around with blinders on, stepping into all kinds of shit, then have the nerve to call me up with that panicked wobble in your voice, whining that everything stinks. Well, you have really done it this time. You have stepped in a steaming brontosaurus turd. Now what are you going to do about it?”

Despite the seriousness of the question he’d posed, my brain locked on to what he’d said about a brontosaurus turd, and I found myself grinning and wishing I could tell him about dragons, because holy shit, he hadn’t been that far off the mark. Were dragons bigger than brontosauruses had been, or a better question, was Ionus bigger than a brontosaurus? I was going to have to ask him that when I had the chance.

“Alex, I’m waiting.”

“For what, Gramps?” I said, still thinking about brontosaurus turds and if they made toilets that could handle that shit, literally. Oh my god, did Ionus have a specially made toilet? The one in the water closet was so ordinary, just like the one in the room he’d first put me in, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have a titanium one somewhere, or even an adamantium one. How cool would it be to have a toilet made from the same material as wolverine’s claws? At this point, even knowing that it was fictional had little meaning to me since dragons were supposed to be fictional, too, and now one wanted to mate with me.

Oh my god, he wanted to mate with me.

“Alex!”

“You can turn your pans back on now, Gramps,” I groaned as I dropped a pillow on my head and the phone. “I won’t keep you from your dinner any longer.”

“It’s not my pans I was asking about,” he snapped, using his you are one second away from being sent to your room for the rest of your life voice.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I whined. “I didn’t fully believe in the whole mate thing until I couldn’t leave.”

“And now that you know it’s real?”

“I kind of feel like my life is over.”

“Why?” Gramps asked. I couldn’t hear him moving around, or anything sizzling, so I knew he hadn’t fired up his dinner again.

I felt bad about keeping him from it, but I was so grateful to have him on the other end of the phone. Maybe by the end of the conversation I’d know what I wanted to do. That was the hope anyway.

“I couldn’t go anywhere, Gramps,” I explained. “There was a whole beautiful cave with glittering sunlight streaming in, and I turned around. I never got to see it. I’m never going to get to see anywhere else now. No more peaks, no more caves, no more discoveries, nothing.”

“And you know this how?”

“I just told you how.”

“No,” Gramps said, keeping his voice low and calm where mine had gone high and a bit hysterical. “You told me that you felt the intensity of the mating pull and could not leave your mate behind. That doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to go anywhere again or climb another mountain or go diving in another cave. It means that you found someone that you can do the things you love with, just like your folks did.”

“And look what happened to them.”

“Death comes for all at some point,” Gramps said. “I mourn their loss, but I can take solace in knowing that they were together and engaged in something they were passionate about when the reaper claimed them,” Gramps said. “You need to start doing the same.”

“They left me.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“It might as well have been,” I whined.

“Why?” Gramps asked. “Because they took the same risks we both have?”

“But they had me.”

“And now you have someone. Does that mean you’ll stop climbing, stop diving, and stop risking your life for the next amazing photograph and fossil discovery?”

“I don’t want to.”

“And neither did they,” Gramps said, his voice having taken on that shrewd tone he got whenever he’d discovered something I was struggling to keep from him. “But that’s what all of this is really about, isn’t it? You don’t want to do to someone what they did to you, so you are determined to have no one but me in your life. Sometimes I wonder if you’d even have me if I hadn’t raised you. A life of solitude isn’t what they’d have wanted for you.”

“Then maybe they should have stuck around to make sure I didn’t fuck it all up,” I said, sniffling a little.

My hormones were all over the place and no, even if I had my car and wasn’t at the mercy of the mating bond, I would not have had the time to make it home before my heat hit fully and left me writhing around on the front seat on the side of the road.

“Alex, it’s time to pull yourself together and focus,” Gramps said, his voice as sharp and hard as flint and steel. “I can tell by the way your mood is shifting all over the place that you are close to being lost in your heat, so you need to decide if you are going to accept your mate, or if I am going to stage a rescue mission.”

“R-rescue,” I stammered, trying to picture Gramps, with his long, bushy hair and braided beard, racing into Dragon City in his beast of an off-road pickup, chrome grill guard shining against the midnight blue paint as he barreled into town. Hell, his shotgun would probably be riding shotgun and who knew what kind of hell he’d raise trying to find me. Telling him to come get me would be like pouring jet fuel on a matchstick. The world would burn for days if I let that happen and no one, including my dragon, was likely to end up unphased.

“Okay, I’ll be there in less than an hour, you just sit tight, barricade the door and tell that mate of yours that if he touches you he’ll be missing digits.”

I could hear him bustling around, chair scraping, but the image that popped into my head, of a clawless dragon, forced a long, low wail out of me. “Nooooo. No rescue. You don’t need to come! You’re not cutting off my mate’s fingers!”

I heard him chuckle, and another scrape of wood on stone. I hoped that meant he’d sat back down again.

“I guess you’ve made your decision then.”

“He’s making your cookies,” I murmured. “The double chocolate peanut butter ones.”

“You’ll have to tell me if they turn out as good as mine.”

“No one’s will ever be that awesome, Gramps.”

Another chuckle, and the hollow thunk of his bottle against the table he’d carved himself. He must have finished his hard cider. “You just make sure that mate of yours knows that you have a crazy old grandpa that knows these mountains well enough to hide out in for years if he needs to. There’s no place he’ll be safe from me if anything happens to you and little chance of a posse catching up to me after I get through with him.

I could just picture Gramps trying to stare down my dragon and giggled a little because they were both fierce in their own way and in my head I couldn’t choose a winner. “I’ll tell him.”

“You make sure you do,” Gramps said. “And you call me when your heat is over and let me know that you’re okay. I don’t need any of the details, Goddess knows you can keep them to yourself, but I do want to make certain that he treated you right.”

“I hear ya.”

“Doesn’t mean you’ll do as you’re told.”

“I will, Gramps. I promise.”

“Umm-hmm, I’ve heard that before,” he grumbled. “Now, I’m gonna turn my dinner back on if you don’t mind and then I’m going to have another cider while it finishes cooking, and I try to figure out how the hell I could have raised a grandson as stubborn as me.”

“There’s your answer right there, Gramps,” I replied, giggling until I rolled and brushed the wrong part of my anatomy against the blankets and groaned.

“Take care of yourself, kid,” Gramps said. “Or better still, have your mate do it for you.”

He ended the call then, always getting in the last word. He’d settled me down, though, as much as my heat-addled brain would allow my body to settle. I still couldn’t smell cookies, but I could smell the scent that my body was giving off and felt the slick beginning to soak the insides of my thighs. While Ionus was in the kitchen whipping me up a treat, it seemed like my body was rapidly creating one for him. The only question now was how far I was willing to let him go after I let him lick it all away.