Chapter 18 – Observatory
Rex
“I thought we were going to the Scotland packs before we returned?” I asked my father.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and you know how your mother is about being together for the holiday,” he replied. Having grown up in a Catholic community in Mexico, my mother went all out with the Christmas festivities.
“I can’t wait for the Christmas tamales,” Wylder groaned longingly.
Our private jet was waiting on the tarmac for takeoff, but London had received snow, and one of the runways was still closed for cleaning. Nothing had gone according to plan. Dealing with official pack business had put us behind schedule. We had to postpone seeing the northern pack in England, the Ireland packs, and the Scotland packs.
“It’s not even a shifter holiday,” Storm scoffed.
“Your mother is human, and you’ve always enjoyed the festivities,” our father reminded her. “Why are you such a humbug now?”
“This entire pack tour is grating on my nerves,” Storm replied. “Something is wrong with mates and bonds, and no one is listening.”
My brother Lukas let out a long sigh. I felt terrible for him. Every female who had reached maturity was shoved under his nose at every pack we’d been visiting the last six weeks. “Dad, you can’t force these things to happen. If the Moon Goddess wants us to wait to find our mates, we should respect her wishes.”
“Lukas, you’re the future King,” my father replied. “And you’re twenty-five now… your mate is out there.”
“I’m a lycan. It could be a hundred years before I find my mate,” he clipped. “She may not even be born yet.”
“I’m not coming out on this embarrassing tour again,” Storm insisted. “They held an entire mating ball in Australia a few years ago. What next?”
“I don’t think my mate is on this side of the world,” Cynder complained.
“And where do you think he might be?” Ranger asked her.
“Hoping for anyone in particular?” Caspian grinned.
Everyone knew Cynder had a long-standing crush on our cousin Zane from Crescent Moon. When she turned eighteen and shifted, she asked her parents to take her shopping at Tameka’s Teashop, conveniently located in Crescent Village. She returned from the trip a few days later, heartbroken and sad.
“That’s enough.” It came out more forcefully than I had intended, but I knew Cynder was still nursing a broken heart, much like Ranger and Lukas. Poking at her wasn’t going to help anyone feel better.
I didn’t want to continue the tour, but I wanted to check on Maeve. I wanted to see the lochside home she had grown up in and ensure she was doing well. It had been over two months since I’d seen her. Her necklace was nestled safely in my pocket, and I resisted the urge to take it out and hold it. I knew Flaym might recognize it, and I didn’t want him to see it.
“Something smells good. What’s on the flight menu?” Flaym asked the stewardess.
“The Sunday standard,” she smiled. “Roast with potatoes, parsnips, and carrots.”
“Yorkshire pudding?” Wylder asked.
“Of course.”
After the inflight meal, I reclined my seat into the sleeping position and closed my eyes. Even in sleep, the little human haunted me. In the beginning, I had visions of her running through a forest andbeing chased by a black fog. Then, I was having visions of her with a white horse beside a lake. Last night, I had a vision of her brushing her long hair as she sat naked by a fire. She had her back to me, but something told me she was crying. When I tried to force myself to move closer in the vision, I woke up.
“Fuck, I need to shake her from my mind,” I told myself. I tried to force my mind to think of nothing as I waited for sleep.
“Rex… Rex… wake up,” I heard my father calling me, but I didn’t want to wake up.
The black fog danced around me, but at the end of the tunnel, I saw her. I saw her with him. His arm was wrapped around her protectively… and…
“Rex,” my father’s voice called again.
“NO!” I roared, and my eyes shot open to find my father and Storm hovering over me.
“What did you see?” Storm asked.
“The… the black fog…” I didn’t want to tell them that I was dreaming of Maeve. “Someone was trapped inside it,” I told them.
“Who?” My father pressed.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see her face.”
“Her?” Lukas asked. “What did she look like?”
“I don’t know,” I shook my head. I felt like I should recognize the male, but I only saw him from the side before I noticed her rounded belly.
She had found someone… or she was going to find someone. I couldn’t tell if my visions were present, future, or just fucking with me. Nothing made sense.
She was going to have someone who would love and protect her, someone she would have children with. I wondered if he was human or a shifter from the Highlands Pack. I should have been happy for her, but I wasn’t. If she was pregnant, and it was a shifter, she’d have a fifty-fifty chance of dying during birth because she was human.
My stomach knotted, and I wanted to punch something.
“We’ll be landing in half an hour,” my father announced, and I inclined my chair to the upright position.
I thought about the vision and realized the Maeve I saw was heavy with child. I had just seen her less than three months ago. It wasn’t enough time to meet someone, fall in love, and appear in the last term of pregnancy. The Maeve I knew, the one who read romance novels, would want all the wooing and romance. And damn if she didn’t deserve it.
It was just after midnight when we returned home. Upstate New York was blanketed in snow, and my beast was itching for a run. I didn’t even bother taking my luggage to my suite, and headed for the kitchen. The smell of vanilla, butter, and sugar lingered in the air from all the baking.
Pushing the back door open, I stepped onto the snow-covered deck and shifted into my beast, leaving shreds of my clothing everywhere that was sure to annoy my mother. I scanned over the torn clothing, looking for the delicate gold chain of her necklace. Once I retrieved it, I tucked it into a flower pot for safekeeping until I returned.
A feral snarl left me, and I let the animal take over. We ran south, then east, and finally circled around to the northern part of the territory to the hot spring. I tried to avoid the northern woods because that’s where the spring was… where Maeve’s home was.
My beast jumped into the spring and released a low howl. The new moon was afew days away, and he wanted her again. The image of her with another man tore through me, and I knew I had no right to want her. A rustling behind me alerted me that my brother had snuck up on me.
His beast was as black as mine. The LaRue family genes had passed the inky black hair and blue eyes for generations, not just in human form but also in wolf form. He stepped into the spring and shifted before sinking in the steaming heat of the water.
“You going to shift or wash your fur in the spring?” He grinned.
I shifted and welcomed the soothing heat as I found a comfortable spot.
“You want to talk about it?” He asked. “And before you deny anything is wrong, just know, I already know.”
There was no way he could have known. I hadn’t even told Storm, and she was my twin. “What is it that you know?”
“You haven’t wanted to attend any gentlemen's outings in months.”
“So?”
“So?” Lukas questioned. “The primal need to mate and dominate is strong with Alphas. You don’t just go from Master Dom to celibate unless your dick or heart is broken.”
“I think it’s my dick.”
“What are you two doing out here?” Flaym asked, stepping out of the woods like he was tip-toeing through the snow. “Fuck, my balls are freezing out here.”
“We’re talking about Rex’s broken dick,” Lukas chuckled.
“We should discuss his frost bitten balls instead.”
Flaym quickly submerged himself to neck level and let out a sigh. “I’m glad we’re having this conversation. Who’s the girl?”
“Why does it have to be a girl?” I replied.
“The last time you went to The Sanctum with us, you brooded in a corner, spoke with no one, and fucked no one,” Flaym said.
“How would you know? You were occupied with two females.”
“I would have shared,” Flaym laughed.
“It seems his dick is broken,” Lukas chuckled.
“Lycan anatomy is different,” I dismissed.
“You’re not twenty-five yet,” Lukas said. “You still have a year or so to enjoy all the human females you want before you start knotting.”
“Man, do I have cock envy,” Flaym replied. “To be able to knot in human form instead of just wolf form. The women would be lining up!”
“Yes, because your happy ginger ass doesn’t get enough pussy already,” Lukas teased.
I remembered what had happened the night of the new moon here in the hot spring, in the soft patch of grass downstream from here, and again in her bed. I wanted to ask if his beast ever tried to knot Selena, but I didn’t want him growing more suspicious than he already was.
“Did it ever happen before you turned twenty-five?”
“What?” He asked.
“The knotting.”
“No,” Lukas shook his head. “You should be good until your twenty-fifth birthday.”
“Not even with Selena?” I asked, and he let out a low snarl, which surprised me.
“I’ve never been with Selena like that,” he confessed.
“What? Really?” Flaym sounded as stunned by this revelation as I was. We all thought they had and had just been using a condom to hide it from everyone.
Lukas let out a low, frustrated sigh. “She wanted to wait and make sure we were mates.”
“But you’ve done other—”
Lukas cut Flaym off with a growl. “We didn’t cross that line.”
“Now that she’s leaving, I suppose it’s good you didn’t cross that line.” This I knew from experience. One taste of Maeve, and I was still craving more.
Flaym looked surprised. “She’s really leaving?”
“To Paris,” Lukas nodded solemnly.
“What are you going to do about it?” Flaym looked alarmed.
“What the hell can I do?” Lukas said, sounding dejected. “I’m the last person on earth who’d be allowed to take a chosen mate.”
“You’re going to be the King,” Flaym said. “Change the damn rules.”
“One insult to the Moon Goddess and we could all go extinct again,” Lukas warned.
We finished our soak in silence and shifted to run back to the mansion. Someone had set clothes out for us at the back door, and I noticed the torn shreds of my clothing were gone. I shifted by the flower pot and slipped on the sweatpants. My hand reached into the pot and found the necklace just as I felt eyes watching me through the kitchen window.
My lips curled in a smile when I saw her. She never missed a beat. I quickly shoved the necklace deep into my pocket and pulled the t-shirt over my head. If there was a secret to unearth, Grandma Dori was always in the know.
“Grandma, what are you doing up so late?” Lukas greeted her as we entered the kitchen.
“Oh honey, I took a long nap this afternoon after all the holiday baking with your mother, Hazel, and Cassi,” she told us and continued shuffling around the kitchen.
“Are you making something?” Flaym asked with hopeful eyes when she retrieved a small bottle of honey.
“I’m just going to take this tea to Storm. She’s sleeping in the observatory and feeling a bit down.”
“Did she tell you why she was feeling down?” Lukas asked her. It wasn’t like our sister to show weakness.
“Honey, I don’t need to be told when something is bothering my grandpups. I can sense it.”
“I’ll deliver it,” I told her and took the tray. It wasn’t just a tray with tea. Grandma Dori had set an assortment of cookies, raisin bread, and fresh berries on it.
The observatory was modeled after the one at Crescent Castle. Grandpa Mac had it built for Grandma Cassi when they were first mated. It had a retractable metal roof that revealed a big glass dome. Growing up, we carried foam mattresses and sleeping bags up there to sleep under the stars, storms, or snowfall. There was something special about sleeping up there that made you feel like you were tucked inside a snow globe.
“Storm,” I entered the observatory and found her lying in the middle of the floor where several foam mattresses and blankets were already laid out.
“Grandma Dori had it sent up, in case anyone wanted to sleep up here tomorrow and watch for Santa.”
“She sent you some tea.” I set the tray down and stretched out beside my sister.
“I’m moving out to the cottage this weekend.”
“I heard.” I turned to face her.
The snow started falling in a flurry, and we remained silent. Looking into her blue eyes was like diving into my own. There was something she wasn’t telling me, and I knew she could see the truth in my eyes, too.
“When are you going to tell me?” She whispered.
“When you tell me your secret,” I replied.
She smiled sardonically. “I asked you first.”
I touched my forehead to hers like I had done a thousand times. “I have feelings for a human that I can’t have,” I finally told her. Closing my eyes, I continued. “I crossed the line with her, and now she’s all I think about. I have no desire to find my mate.”
“You slept with her?”
I opened my eyes, knowing Storm could see the truth. “I did.”
“It was Maeve, wasn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“Grandma Dori told me you had her necklace,” she said in a low whisper. “I saw the way you were looking at it last week when we left Seville.”
I nodded in acknowledgement. Not much got past my sister… or Grandma Dori. “What about you?”
She took a deep breath and let me see the pain in her eyes. “Also human,” she said. “I met him at Grandma’s favorite casino. We met for dinner a few times and took a motorcycle ride to Niagara Falls. I thought he was into me as much as I was into him, but he rejected me.”
“What do you mean rejected you? You said he was human.”
“I wanted to… well… to cross the line,” she told me.
I wasn’t sure I understood her clearly. Storm was beautiful beyond any shifter or human. There’s no way someone she’d be interested in would reject her.
“You mean to tell me he didn’t want to?”
“He didn’t,” she said. “He got angry and demanded to know how many lovers I had been with. He started yelling, telling me I had no respect for my future mate.”
“Mate?”
“Well, I’m sure he said, husband. It was really bizarre. He said there would be consequences for my actions.”
“What?” I snarled.
“Can you believe my luck?” She scoffed. “All of you guys are out here fucking anything you want,” she paused. “No offense,” she continued. “But the second I feel a real pull to someone and try to have sex, I’m rejected and shamed.”
“You felt a pull?”
“In the strongest and strangest way possible.”
“Do you want me to kick his ass?”
She laughed. Storm was perfectly capable of removing the air from his lungs or striking him with lightning, and she didn’t need me to kick his ass. Still, I wanted to hurt the fucker who hurt my sister.
“What are you going to do about Maeve?” She asked.
“There’s nothing I can do,” I told her, feeling my chest tighten.
“Do you want her?”
“Like I’ve never wanted anything more,” I closed my eyes and saw Maeve’s sweet smile.
“Screw it all,” Storm replied. “Lukas is going to be King, and Dad has him in a miserable corner with all this fated mate crap. I say you go find her and claim what your heart wants. At least one of us will be happy.”
The vision of her danced in my head. “I think it’s too late for that. I saw her in my vision with someone else.”
“Something about this is all wrong,” she shook her head.
“Maybe the Moon Goddess is testing us?”
“It could be worse,” she said. “We could be like Lukas.”
“What about me?” Lukas asked, pushing the door open and dropping on the mattress on the other side of Storm.
“We were just talking about all this pressure to find a mate,” Storm told him.
“Fuck, I think Dad is obsessed,” Lukas groaned.
“What’s Uncle Ares obsessed with?” Ranger questioned as he entered with Cynder.
“Finding our mates,” I grumbled.
Cynder laid down beside me, and Ranger took the spot on her other side.
“Dad said the French packsare talking about renting the Palace of Versailles and holding the largest mating ball ever,” Cynder told us.
“Maybe at the next event, we should all claim we found our mate and just take a chosen mate?” Ranger suggested.
“I’m sure Sol will like that,” Flaym snickered as heentered the observatory carrying a big tray loaded down with snacks. “Grandma Dori sent up more snacks.”
“Pass me a cookie?” Ranger asked Flaym.
“I didn’t know we were having a sleepover tonight,” Caspian mumbled, holding a pillow under his arm.
“Ranger thinks we should all pick a chosen mate and claim they’re our fated mates just to put an end to the hunt,” Flaym told Caspian.
“I’m down with that,” Caspian chuckled and reached for a cookie. “Alpha Volkov has triplet daughters,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
“I’m still holding out hope that Valaria will want me,” Flaym grinned.
“You might have better luck writing a letter to Santa,” Ranger teased.
“The Goddess needs to figure this out quick before I do something she won’t like,” Lukas said as he rolled onto his back and stared up at the snow.
“You guys, this really sucks,” Cynder’s voice cracked, and I knew it was starting to get to her, too. I heard a low sob, and Ranger wrapped a comforting arm around her before I could.
The seven of us had already slept on the plane, but the exhaustion from weeks of traveling had worn on us. We had all grown up together and spent countless nights under the glass dome of this observatory. There was comfort in being together with the people I trusted most.
We lay in silence, looking out at the falling snow until sleep finally welcomed each one of us.