Chapter Twenty Two
“Well, that’s nice. We have a new ally,” I tell Jaak.
He’s back in his human form and we’re outside of Toys ‘N Things now. The door barely hangs on its hinges in a lopsided drunk kind of way, not because of the magical toy battle we had with Mort but because I nearly ripped it off the hinges when I tried to open it to leave. Superhuman strength is going to take some getting used to, I guess. We just walked out into the late afternoon sun and it’ll be nightfall soon.
We spent longer with Mort than I realized, which is okay in my book. He needed us.
“We do and a useful one, even with his limitations,” Jaak says, raising a hand in a wave to Mort who’s standing in the shop front window and waving at us.
I wave back and smile at the sight of him.
He looks so different than when we first met him.
Smiling and happy. There’s a lightness to the Oculus that wasn’t there before.
We did that.
“He’s nice once you get past the stuffy librarian thing he has going on,” I say.
“Verily. We’ll do well to keep him close. This Carol he spoke of seems formidable.”
“She does and so cool.” I loop my arm through his and keep close to him.
The streets aren’t as full as they were earlier, not with how late in the day it is but that doesn’t mean we aren’t being listened to.
“You think we try for the Chamber of Commerce or wait for tomorrow? Mort did say they’d be gone by now. ”
“They leave at 3 on the dot. It doesn’t matter what business you have with them, if you’re even a minute late you have to wait till the next day. The bunch of bourgeois bureaucrats."
“Let me think.” Jaak rubs his jaw and looks up and down the street.
I take a second to look him over while he thinks about our next move.
He’s smaller now, but his human form is still big.
His size or lack of horns and fur aren’t the things I notice, though.
It’s the way he moves, how he holds himself, how no matter which form he’s in there’s really no difference to me.
He’s beautiful, beast or man. I don’t care which way he comes to me as long as he’s Jaak.
“If we decide to infiltrate the Chamber of Commerce now we might be caught. It’s difficult to say what wards they have. I might be able to detect enough but you are still new in your powers. I’d be far more comfortable if we had more time for you to settle into them.”
“Yes…settle is one way of putting it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it felt like I was strapped to a rocket going a million billion miles an hour,” I tell him. “Even now, I can still feel it. It’s not like it was before. I feel like I could pick up a car right now.”
He pats my hand. “Much of that is leftover battle lust. It will fade with time. It warms my heart to see how quickly you’ve taken to combat. You were formidable in there with the conjured giant.”
“It was just toys,” I tell him softly, deflecting the compliment he gives me. If Jaak notices I do it, he doesn’t let on.
“You ripped both of its arms off,” he says, making jerking motions with his hands. “You put your fist through its head. It was most impressive.”
I grin at the memory because I did do that. I was unstoppable. “Yeah, I guess I did, didn’t I?”
Jaak turns to me and pulls me in in a hug. He picks me up and twirls me around in a celebratory circle that has me giggling and clinging to him.
“You did. Your instincts are strong. There will be none that can stand against us in battle. Mark my words, Meadow. You will be terrible and awesome in your power.”
I don’t know if terrible can be used in a good way but when Jaak says it, I start to change my mind. Except…terrible…terrible…
“Wait. That reminds me. When you got hurt, I felt it.” I hold out my arm to look at it and don’t see anything, just a few pink spots where the wounds had been. “Are you healed?” I ask, craning my neck and trying to get a good look at him but I can’t with the long sleeves he’s wearing.
“I am.” Jaak puts me down on my feet gently and runs his fingers up my arm. “I did not think the Oculus would get close enough to wound me. You should have never felt this. I didn’t know it was possible.”
“I don’t understand. When we bonded I saw your memories, it felt like I was there with you,” I tell him and try to choose my words carefully, “I saw your childhood. It was lovely but there was a man with a coin. He wanted to make a deal.”
Jaak’s fingers freeze on my arm. “You went that far back?”
“I guess so?” He looks like he’s seen a ghost so I pull him off the sidewalk and away from a group of tourists paying way too much attention to us. I sit us down on a bench and put my hand on his knee. “Are you okay? Was I not supposed to go that far back?”
“I didn’t think you could.” Jaak lifts his eyes to look up at me. Warm brown, dark and soulful eyes look into mine and I see pain. “I thought that memory was lost. Even now when I try and think of home, I can’t remember it clearly.”
“You had a beautiful home.”
He smiles. “Yes, I did That I remember.”
“And your mother was a really good singer.”
He chuckles and drops his head but not before I see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “She was. If I think hard enough, I can hear her voice but only just. Every time I try to remember, it’s not right.”
I didn’t have any memories of my parents that I wanted to keep, none that would make me sad trying to remember them…but…but I do have Jaak’s now.
“Wait, I can show you. I can give the memory back to you. I remember everything, down to how it smelled.”
Jaak’s eyes widen. “What?”
“If this soul-bonded thing is deeper than what we had when you were in my dreams, and it’s more than when we were married and I was your anchor, why can’t I show it to you? You can see anything I want you to see, can’t you?”
He nods. “Yes, I can see everything.”
I bite my lip and try not to think about what everything means when it comes to the memories I carry. Jaak was there for the worst of it.
No need to get embarrassed that he might have seen you have a mental breakdown about the demon god cult, Meadow. Just play it cool.
“That’s, um, that’s great. Perfect, even. I can show you exactly what your home was like. You don’t have to try and remember, it’ll be like a movie night. I’ll show you what I saw and heard when we’re back home.”
“You would do this for me?”
I reach over and give his hand a light squeeze. “Of course, I would do that for you. You did, you’ve done so much for me, even before we really met. There’s nothing I’m not going to try and help you with, Jaak.”
Jaak reaches out and tucks a lock of hair behind my ear.
“Singular,” he says again and a second later I feel the brush of his lips against my ear.
The contact is quick, so light that it feels like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, barely there.
His lips are there and gone again from one breath to the next.
Still, my body reacts. Heat spreads through me like wildfire. Gods, I need this demon. Badly.
I want him.
I grab his shirt and pull him back to me before he can move away and I kiss him.
The second my mouth touches his it’s like I’m finally able to find my breath after surfacing from a pool of water.
I open my mouth to Jaak and that’s all the encouragement he needs before he pulls me up and into his lap.
My legs end up on either side of his thighs and I’m too drunk on the kiss to care that I’m straddling him in the middle of a strange town.
“Meadow,” Jaak whispers against my lips.
His hands are in my hair, fingers carding through and pulling to angle my head back.
He breaks from my mouth, lips trailing along my jaw and down to my throat.
He presses kisses to the side of my throat before I feel a light bite. I whimper and pull him to me.
I kiss him hard and press my forehead to his. For a second we’re both silent. The only thing that passes between us is our ragged breathing and I swear he can feel the pounding of my heart where we’re pressed up against each other.
“I think we should go home,” I whisper. We’re eye to eye now and I can see flashes of silver in Jaak’s eyes. His minotaur form is close. I wonder how close to the surface it is and it takes everything in me to not try and bait him to find out.
Jaak closes his eyes and nods with a deep breath. He inhales slowly and lets it out before he repeats it and gods why is even that turning me on? I press my hands to his chest and watch the rise and fall of it when he breathes in and out again.
Jaak opens his eyes and they’re brown again. As much as I love the dark, rich color, there’s a part of me that wishes they were silver if just to see him shift. To know that I was the one to do it to him. Not danger or the need to fight, but me.
“That would be best. I-I almost lost control,” he says and helps me get off his lap and onto the bench. “I can’t lose control. Not with you.”
I squeeze the arm of the wrought iron bench and give him a reassuring smile. “I can take it. I’m invulnerable, remember?”
“Meadow, no. You don’t want me like that. I promise that you don’t.”
I try not to feel disappointed at his words. I know why he’s saying them, he doesn’t trust himself around me. Not yet but that will change. I know it. It’s in that split second of knowing that I realize something else.
Jaak learned this from somewhere.
It wasn’t from his mother, not the woman that held him and sang over him. She loved him. Adored him. It was someone else. My grip on the bench tightens until the metal bites into my palm.
Who made him think this way? Who made him think he was a monster?
I stand up and barely notice the crack that punctuates my movement.
It’s only when I look down and realize that I broke the bench that I realize what I’ve done.
Oh my gods, I broke the bench. I look around frantically for somewhere to dispose of the evidence before anyone sees what I’ve done.
It's not like we’d be able to explain away my superhuman strength with a wrought iron bench suddenly coming to pieces in my hands.
Darn it, where’s a trash can when you need it? A recycling bin. Anything.
“Meadow, are you all right?”
I fling the metal bench arm to the side and into what I hope are just hedges and turn to face Jaak with a bright smile.
“Yeah, I’m great! Totally great. What about you?
” I ask just as we both hear the sound of glass shattering.
A man starts shouting a second later and I have my answer on the is it hedges or not question.
Definitely not hedges.
Oops.