Chapter 7
Matt
Deejay did not get home from his meeting with the Triton King until after I fell asleep last night, and mornings are so hectic that I wasn’t able to ask about it, so when I get home from school with Jasper, Colt, and Kendall, I seek him out. Finding a snack platter on the island in the kitchen, but there’s no Deejay, and no Cary. Usually, Cary greets me right off. They aren’t in the kitchen, but I see them through the windows in the backyard, and head that way through the pantry into the mudroom and out the back door.
Deejay and the littles rest on a blanket under one of the large oak shade trees, snoozing. All of them. The sight of them triggers my aww-reflex, and I pull my phone out and sneak close to get a picture of the four of them. Deejay has his head on his rolled-up shirt, Alex laying on his bare chest, Eren curled in one arm, and Cary holding his other arm the same way the kid does mine when he sleeps with me.
I take a couple of pictures of the scene and send them to Deejay’s phone, which I hear buzz and then Deejay opens his eyes, making me regret sending the pics. “Sorry,”
I whisper apologetically as he looks up at me with a sleepy smile.
“It’s fine. We need to wake up anyway,”
he murmurs, barely audible, but enough that Alex stirs on his chest.
I step on either side of Deejay’s long legs and stoop to pick up Alex, settling him in the cradle of my arm, football style as I stand back up. Deejay’s affectionate smile when I stand makes my heart go badump again.
Not the time, heart.
Not that it will ever be the time. I’m sure when he looks at me, he sees another one of his sisters’ cast-offs, and while he loves his boys, that’s not the kind of love my mind is beginning to obsess over. And it is becoming an obsession. I really need to find another outlet for this pent-up...frustration.
Eren whimpers and suddenly pushes up on his hands, looking around before falling back into the cradle of Deejay’s arm. Deejay glances down at his son, smiling as bright orange flushes over his aura, a sign of joy that stems from love, I’m certain. He chuckles quietly looking back up to me. “I’m trapped.”
I snicker under my breath, stoop down and take Eren up in my other hand, putting him high on my shoulder so he can snooze in the crook of my neck, a place I’ve noticed the babies enjoy.
Deejay grins at me as he carefully extracts his arm from Cary’s grip, but I could have told him that wouldn’t work. Cary immediately wakes up, sitting up with whine. “Matt?”
he whimpers, looking up at me like I’m breaking his heart because my hands are full.
Deejay swoops in and gathers him up into a tight hug. “Hey, baby boy. I’m here,”
he coos softly, patting his butt the way he does Alex and Eren, the same way I do when Cary needs comfort.
Cary cuddles into his chest, but stares up at me, frowning the same way I do when I’m thinking hard.
“What’s on your mind, buddy?”
I ask, concerned about whatever has him thinking so hard.
“Jazz said I should call Deejay ‘Papa’ because he’s my new dad,”
he tells me, brows furrowed.
I exchange a glance with Deejay. We haven’t talked about adoption to Cary, though he told me that he’s already working on the paperwork to start the adoption process. “Deejay wants to be your new Papa. Would that be ok with you?”
I ask as Deejay gets to his feet with Cary in his arms, so that I can talk to him without looking down at him.
I prefer to get on Cary’s level or bring him up to mine when we talk to each other whether it’s a serious conversation or a silly one, and I appreciate that Deejay noticed this.
“I would have a new dad, and it would be Deejay?”
Cary asks for confirmation.
I nod. “That’s the way adoption works. He adopts you and you become his son.”
“Just like Jazz and Awex and Eren?”
he asks as excitement starts overcoming his earlier concerns.
“That’s right, and Colt and Kendall,”
Deejay adds.
Cary’s joy bursts through his aura as he hugs Deejay. “You’re my new Papa!”
he squeals happily.
Deejay grins with a burst of matching joy.
If I ever had any doubt that Deejay wanted to add another kid to his family, the explosion of pure joy that he and Cary share erases even the memory of it.
My main emotion is relief, honestly.
Cary will always have a happy steady home, and that is what matters.
I’m not going anywhere.
I’ve raised that kid to this point, I’m not going to abandon him just because he’s found a new and better father to adopt him, and I don’t think Deejay would want me to step back either.
If anything, Deejay has encouraged me to step in further, helping with not just the care of, but the loving and raising of Jazz and the twins too.
And he trusts me with them, which I noticed he doesn’t trust his kids to just anyone.
He even chose the best possible schools for them, which is why it takes me an hour to get everyone dropped off in the morning—the schools are not conveniently clumped together.
After Deejay and Cary have their moment, we head inside together so everyone can have their snacks.
I guess the conversation about the meeting yesterday can wait until we get everyone to bed and have a minute to ourselves.
“So, what happened yesterday?”
I ask as soon as I get Deejay alone in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine and pouring two wine glasses for us.
The Hub doesn’t have any laws about a drinking age, but Deejay defers to the State of Texas, which doesn’t mind a minor imbibing in the sight of their legal guardian.
I looked up the laws after the first time he offered me a beer with dinner, just out of curiosity.
“The long and short of it is that King Primus is innocent of wrong-doing except for sending the Djinn.
The Siren who tried to kill you was hired to do it, and the man who hired her is a brunet with long hair and possibly pointed ears.
A Fae or Elf or Orc...we couldn’t tell.
No motive for why someone would hire a Siren of all people to kill you, or how they knew a Siren could get close enough to make an attempt.
King Primus is trying to find out the name of the person who hired her, but he thinks it's unlikely.
I expect within a week to receive a package with a peace accord and ally agreement between our two realms.
I’ll sign it and will officially have my first ally—The Kingdom of the Triton.
I wouldn’t have considered it, but King Primus apologized for acting rashly when he hired the Djinn and basically begged me to be his friend so that I wouldn’t curse him again.
It was...kind of funny.”
He grins widely at the end of his summary, a flash of deep blue satisfaction coloring his aura for a moment.
“While I can appreciate the outcome with King Primus, I’m a little concerned that someone hired a Siren to kill me a week after I moved to Texas.
No one but the family and Felixia knew I was with you.
I didn’t leave the house except to register for school until I started school that day.”
Deejay nods, the blue fading a bit replaced by his usual happy aura, with a single ribbon of forest green sliding through it.
“It is concerning. We’re going to try to pin down who did it, but we may not find out unless they make another attempt. To be honest, I’ve never been in a situation where someone was actively trying to kill one of my boys. If I knew who it was, I could curse them—well, I could try to curse them now, but curses are tetchy, and I already had one backfire on me yesterday. I wouldn’t want to risk it especially in connection to you.”
“You’ve said that before: that curses are tetchy. What do you mean?”
I don’t think I understand what he means by that other than that a curse might not work the way he intends it to.
He frowns in thought as he stares at his wine glass.
“Ok, I have a really good example of what I mean.
Before I was known as the Maledict, I was a bit loose with my cursing.
I was a software engineer, and I developed a social media platform.
It was good, but there was sort of a social media arms race going on at the time.
I wanted to win that arms race, and I probably could have done it without cheating, but I was on a time crunch because I wanted to start building my family as soon as I graduated from the group home.
So, I wove a curse around my two main competitors.
I wasn’t specific.
It was a general curse that their platforms would fail to launch successfully so that mine would be the social media platform of the decade.
One of my competitors died in a fire trying to save his life’s work.
It was a spontaneous electrical fire that killed him and destroyed the servers of his beta platform, the coding was also lost, and the backup servers were mysteriously erased.
Nothing of that man’s life and work remained. The other platform was designed and run by a company owned by this lovely couple that left the work of building the platform to their employees. They had a vision and hired computer and software engineers to make it happen. They went skiing in the alps one winter and randomly decided to never return. Their business went belly up; hundreds of people lost their jobs. It was awful.
“So, shit happens, and it might not be the curse that caused those tragedies, right? Well, I said in my curse, ‘the social media platform of the decade’. I launched it; it became the number one platform within two years. I sold it for billions, and at the end of the decade after its launch, another platform made mine obsolete. At this point, the thing that I made and sold is nothing more than a place for internet bots to talk to each other.”
Ah, I see. He didn’t limit the curse to non-lethal or devastating consequences, so it worked itself out however it wanted, probably the most convenient way. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be responsible for someone’s death. I may have participated in hand to hand combat sports, but I have never and would never kill someone. Not for any other reason than to defend the innocent, and even then, I would try to stop the person without killing them.
I have a violent streak in me a mile wide, but I’m self-aware and have always had a means of mitigating my enjoyment of the fight. I get it from my old man—he was a violent motherfuck too. Cary doesn’t seem to have inherited the same penchant, preferring to settle his disputes with words or tears if his words are ineffective. He’s surprisingly manipulative when he’s of a mind to be.
“Matt?”
Deejay asks, drawing my attention back to the conversation by settling his hand on mine.
My heart trips happily at the skin contact. His cool fingers feel wonderful on my always-hot hand, and since I apparently have zero self-preservation, I grab his hand and hold it. I know he isn’t making a romantic overture here, but I’m a selfish bastard and don’t want to let go of the illusion.
“I was just considering the implications of your magic. I think the best way to deal with the situation is for me to keep my guard up, keep learning everything I can about non-humans, and hope that the reminders that you’ve sent out to the non-human community about the power of the Maledict keeps the person targeting me in line. We perhaps need a more public show of force, but I don’t know what that could be yet.”
I just don’t have enough information about the new world I’m in.
“That’s a good plan for now. My curses are absolute. The non-human community is now hyper-aware that the Maledict has no mercy on his enemies because of the curse I put on the Djinn. The Hub was alight with the news that Primus and I were at odds and that I had forced his capitulation.”
As he talks, he starts rubbing circles in my skin with his thumb, making it difficult to not get distracted by the feel of his movement and the chubby it’s encouraging.
I really need to figure out how to end this crush I’ve gotten. I don’t even know if Deejay is attracted to men, and that’s not really a conversation he would have with me. But I’m just so selfish, and I crave his touch, so I linger here, holding his hand, and stringing this contact along for as long as I can.
“Matt.”
Colt’s sleepy voice causes me and Deejay to disengage as we turn to see him standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“What’s up?”
I ask, giving him my attention.
“Cary’s going to be sick tonight. He’s going to throw up on Jazz if you don’t go get him.”
“Did you dream it?”
Deejay asks as we both get up.
Colt yawns as he nods. “Yeah.”
Colt sometimes dreams of future events, so I take him at his word and head up with Deejay and Colt on my heels. I don’t relish the thought of dealing with a sick Cary, but I’m thankful for the warning.