A Happy Armitage New Year (Mismatched Mates #11)
Chapter 1 Calder
Calder
Hitting the gas even harder would get me home faster, into Jared’s arms sooner, and most critically, out of this car I’d been sharing with Nate for three of the longest hours of my life.
But if I went too fast, he’d stop complaining about his mate and instead start freaking out about the icy roads and the falling snow impairing visibility, and making those high-pitched noises that hit my enhanced hearing like tracer bullets directly to the eardrum. Decisions, decisions. Fuck me.
“…really wants to spend New Year’s at a fucking vampire bar?
I mean, seriously? I appreciate that Ian wants to do something special as a couple instead of hanging out with the pack, but playing pool and ringing in the year somewhere there won’t even be any human snacks?
He calls that special? I mean, unless you count me as a human snack using the other possible meaning, and fuck that noise… ”
I liked Nate. I really did. He made up for his high-maintenance, high-volume personality with a kind heart, admirable skill with magic, and—though they’d both deny it with guns to their heads—his position as my little brother’s unswervingly loyal best friend and closest confidant.
They didn’t seem to know they were best friends.
I wasn’t going to be the one stupid enough to tell them.
I’d pay money to watch someone else point it out, though.
Or…I could trick someone else into pointing it out.
Nate’s mate Ian might be dumb enough to take the bait if I timed it right.
He wasn’t actually stupid, I’d learned, but he did a decent impression of it a lot of the time.
Well, I’d put that idea in a drawer for later in the winter, if we got snowed in and I didn’t have anything else to keep me entertained.
If they all started yelling at each other, I could escape outside indefinitely no matter how cold it got.
My shifted form could take arctic temperatures without blinking.
“…also made some unnecessarily rude remarks about how I used to go clubbing too much, and that I ended up drugged by the Kimballs because of it, but he’s such a hypocrite, because before he and I…”
Nate’s pitch and volume were both hitting the stratosphere, and he didn’t seem inclined to notice anything around him—like the grinding of my teeth, to choose an example at random—so I pushed my foot down a bit.
The speedometer ticked past 50, too fast even by my standards on these curvy forest roads and in this shitty weather, especially since Nate had a puny little human body that wouldn’t survive a crash at speed.
But…Christ. Three hours.
Three fucking hours. The next time we needed to go somewhere together, I’d make sure he wasn’t in the middle of a fight with Ian.
Of course, if they weren’t fighting, then Nate would’ve spent the whole drive talking about one of his usual favorite topics: Arik’s annoying personal habits (many), or how he felt about the color of the new exterior paint on the pack house (not blue enough), or, if I got really unlucky, Ian’s dick (I already knew a lot more than I wanted to about Ian’s dick, and so did anyone who’d ever been Nate’s captive audience).
Everyone expected me to dislike Nate because he’d been sleeping with my mate way back when, and yes, I’d been jealous for five minutes when we first met.
But he couldn’t be what Jared needed as a lover.
And he’d extended forgiveness, friendship, and help when that was what we both needed.
So I didn’t have a problem with him, aside from the motormouth.
Besides, he was pack. Nothing else needed to be said about that.
Although pack or not, I could pull over, make strategic use of the roll of duct tape in the trunk, and stash him in the back seat. Ian might object loudly when he found out about it, but even he couldn’t take me in a fight.
Anyway, he’d secretly understand. No one could live with Nate and not want to duct tape his mouth at least once a day.
I never wanted to duct tape Jared’s mouth.
No one’s mouth had ever been that perfect, so why would I cover it up?
And when he talked to me, I loved every second of the sound of his voice and every word he chose to share with me, his wry sense of humor and his thoughtfulness. But he also knew how to just…be.
Quietly. And calmly. And sweetly. So fucking sweetly.
He saw himself as such a big tough guy, but I knew exactly how soft and sweet my mate liked to be when he let go of all the expectations he’d been piling on himself since he first started competing with his alpha cousins as a kid.
In private, in our bed, under me and with my knot buried in his pretty body…
My foot had started pressing down despite my best intentions, the car whipping around the corners, pine branches smearing past in a blur of drifting snow.
Jared. I wanted Jared now. My tainted blood, forever altered into something far more savage and distant from human than I’d been born with, pounded in my veins in a demand I couldn’t begin to sate alone.
Thanks to what had been done to me, my eyes never stopped glowing an eerie silver that disturbed the fuck out of me when I looked in the mirror, let alone everyone who ever looked at my face, but I knew they’d be twice as bright now.
My chest vibrated with a growl I couldn’t let out unless I wanted Nate to actually faint from terror.
“Watch out!” Nate squeaked, startled out of his monologue at last by a sharp curve in the road. “That tree’s halfway across the—oh my fucking gods, that was close!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him clinging to the oh-shit handle above the passenger-side door, mouth and eyes all round and panicked, and I’d have bet every single diamond I’d retrieved from that mine in Canada that he was mashing an imaginary brake in the footwell.
Out of the same corner of my eye, I caught the glint of our flashing headlights on the metal of a car bumper.
I hit my real, functioning brake with a bit more finesse, pulling us to a quick but safe stop on the side of the road.
The car jerked enough that Nate stopped talking for half a second.
But that was all. Not a full second. “What the hell, Calder? I didn’t mean you should stop. Fuck, are you going to kill me and leave my body in the woods? Look, Arik won’t be happy, because Matthew won’t be happy, because Ian won’t be happy, so you really ought to rethink—”
“There’s a car off the side of the road back there. Zip your jacket, shut up, and come help me check it out.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, sounding much more subdued. “Yeah, one sec. I need to grab my gloves out of the back seat.”
I’d already shut my door behind me, but I still caught every word—and his mumbled fears that we’d find someone in the car when we looked.
Yeah, I had the same fears. Hopefully it’d spun out at a low speed, they’d been conscious and called 911, and the cops had come and carted them off to Laceyville and left the car behind for a tow when the weather cooperated.
Or they’d been driving too fast and had died on impact. Or had bled out while unconscious. Or frozen to death—although that seemed a lot less likely given the timing, since I’d swear this car hadn’t been here when we left the pack lands a few hours ago and drove this route in the other direction.
I double-timed it back the hundred feet to the car and shoved my way through the snowy brush and debris between the road and its back bumper.
The sedan had run into the forest almost perpendicular to the road, and the front end had gotten stuck in the branches of a couple of large pines but missed the trunks of both, luckily for whoever might’ve been in the front seat.
There was a ditch, a gully, or maybe a cliff under the nose of the car; I couldn’t see how deep it was from here, only that it tilted down at a pretty steep angle.
My night vision surpassed a lot of people’s day vision, but I couldn’t see a fucking thing through the ice-crusted rear window.
A faint pitter-patter suggested heartbeats from inside, though.
With the wind through all the trees around me, it was impossible to be sure.
Hanging on to the rear bumper of the car with one hand to make sure it didn’t slide further down the slope, I reached over and broke off a pine branch that pushed against the driver’s side of the car, the crack echoing through the forest like a gunshot, and flung it over my shoulder.
“Jesus Christ, watch it!” Nate yelled from behind me. “Stop throwing trees!”
“Only a branch, and stay out of the way, then,” I grumbled at him, without a lot of heat. I’d told him to get out of the car to come and help, and he had, without even complaining about it. By Nate’s usual standards, mere random bitching counted as cheerful cooperation.
“That ‘branch’ was as big around as my leg,” he muttered, but then added, “I can try to use some magic to see if anyone’s inside the car before we start taking the trees down and breaking in.”
Bitching, but helping. Yep. That was Nate all day.
“I thought I heard heartbeats,” I said. “So yeah. Try to tell me how many, too.” The faint creak and groan of metal under strain, and the slight increased weight on my hand on the car’s bumper, was making me tense.
The car had started, ever so slowly, to slide.
I could overcome its inertia to pull it out, but keeping both it and me from going off a cliff together might be more challenging if it got actual momentum going.
Probably wouldn’t kill me, almost nothing would, but whoever was in that car would be toast. “No pressure, but hurry the fuck up.”
Nate grunted agreement and didn’t say another word. I did really like that about him. When it truly mattered, he stopped being such a whiny little princess.