Chapter Nine
V ine was off to Kazuya’s house on Tuesday. Jenn, Sable, and Ivy were all at work today so that she could do some self-care with a clear conscience.
She got out of the car, holding the present for Mao in her hand. She walked up to the house, removed her shoes, and smiled as Mao greeted her.
“Miss Vine, you are looking well.”
“Thanks, Mao. I have this for you. It’s a thank you from Meeda.”
He took the bag with curiosity. Kazuya came in smiling.
Mao took the bottle out and frowned. “What is it?”
“Meeda’s heat. She figured since you caused it, you should have it.”
Mao’s shock was evident. “What?”
Kazuya chuckled. “You have a mate.”
Vine shook her head. “He doesn’t. He’s bound to you first, and he was only doing you a favour to offer her the blood. So... he doesn’t.”
Mao looked at the purple, blue, and teal swirling in the bottle. Gold flashes were frequent in the bottle. “Her heat.”
“Yeah, it was just starting, so she got rid of it.”
Mao took his phone out and tried to call. “Damn it. Why isn’t she answering?”
“She went to the islands. She can distract her body with water and sky. That requires the islands.” Vine chuckled. “That’s where they work when they are filming for their new swimsuit lines. Meeda is the model.”
Vine lifted her phone and brought up the videos, turning her screen to show him.
Meeda frolicking in the sand, building a sandcastle, windsurfing, diving, scuba diving, snorkelling, and then the silhouette of her taking off a silky wrap and diving into the water with the wide tail waving at the camera before she disappeared into the waves.
She laughed and put her phone away. Kazuya stared. “So she’s an omega.”
“Yeah, she’s a bit muddled, but yes. Dark elf, pixie, mage, omega, it’s all in there.”
Kazuya nodded. “Right. Shall we see to you first, and then we can discuss this more thoroughly?”
“Nothing to discuss. She hit the water as soon as they got there and has travelled two hundred miles in the last day and a half. Whatever Mao is eating did her some good.” She smiled brightly. “Shall we?”
Mao was standing, staring at the bottle and looking like he wanted to howl in frustration.
When they removed their clothing and washed, Kazuya said, “That was a little cruel.”
“She’s lived her entire life waiting for someone to hold her.
One male does, pats her on the head, and indicates that she was a favour to his boss’s female friend.
” Vine scrubbed her front, and he took care of her back.
“We are lucky she didn’t completely go insane. Nothing for her is ever quite right.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was offered blood in the shadow domain. All she could drink, but she had to drink from the dead or tortured. She associates her feeding with someone else’s pain.
The first person she found who could have been a mate took off.
The second person patted her on the head and offered to let her bite him again if it wasn’t inconvenient for his boss. ”
Kazuya sighed. “He’s been with me for one hundred twenty years. His demon ages very slowly. Sex is something that he engages in occasionally, but he doesn’t have the normal drive of his people.”
“Probably why he’s lived so long. Did he bottle it?”
He snorted and finished his smooth strokes of her back and thighs. The water sluiced over her, and he walked her to the edge of the pool.
He stepped in and sank, and then he rose up on his tentacles and took possession of her again. He eased them into the depths and kissed her. Breathing for her came later.
When he lifted her out of the water, he was smug, and she was sleepy. He had repaired the damage that the attacks had left behind. All of them.
She looked at the octopus hickies on her legs and snorted. “How many more treatments do I need?”
He smiled. “This was the final one. You take to the pressure healing very well. I was able to go deeper than any other healing.”
“Oh, right. About that. Why did you—”
“Because it was part of the injury. Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“I think I did, but I am pretty sure your tentacle got tired.”
“I will flex it later. The exercise was good for it.” He chuckled and rinsed them off before sliding a robe over her shoulders and wrapping it around her.
He dressed second, and she had to ask. “So my voice has been fixed. Either that or you have a strange fantasy life.”
He laughed. “It wasn’t my intention to choke you with it, but when your eyes got dreamy, I just had to see what you could take.”
She made a fist and punched him in the ribs. “No lady likes that kind of a surprise. Living out hentai scenes isn’t my idea of fun.”
He smiled, and they went to have tea. Mao brought it in and paused. “Lady, how badly did I screw up?”
“Well, you were kind to her when no one has been, you held her when no one has, and you fed her when no one else has... and then she learned it was just because of me, or rather because Kazuya suggested that it would be good for you to do.” Vine smiled.
“So, in thanks for the offer of blood at a later time, she gave you the heat. Use it for a marathon jerk-off session or something. Don’t worry about her missing it.
She said another one is two months away. ”
Kazuya froze. “Oh, shit. Is she going to be all right?”
Vine swallowed through the lump in her throat and said, “I don’t know.
She can’t have the man she first identified, she can’t have Mao because he doesn’t want her, she can’t have a flier because it is incest for the pixies, and she’s looking for a mate.
Now she knows how to bottle the heats, but she should have been able to do that sooner.
I feel stupid for not actually asking her questions. ”
He asked, “What would you have asked?”
“How she survived what happened to her. I would have asked why she helped me, why she could keep my spirits up when they were tormenting her. She hid me for months. Brought me a book that let me conjure food right off. She made me the items I needed for conjuring. That was her base skill. The pottery.”
Mao said, “Did they abuse her?”
“Yes. I know that for certain.” She rubbed her forehead. “I figured it out later.”
Kazuya asked a question she rarely gave an accurate answer to. “How long were you there?”
“I think it was close to two years. Meeda was there before me, but she needed me to open the portal, so she had to wait until I had the skills. We stole and grabbed all the grimoires we could.”
Mao asked, “You didn’t have heats?”
“I was thirteen, so no.”
He paused. “How old was Meeda?”
“Fifteen, sixteen. She seemed so tall and strong, but she was waiting for something.”
Mao asked, “What?”
“Her wings. The day she could activate them, we left.”
Kazuya reached around and pulled her onto his lap. “What happened on that day?”
“She came in, staggering, covered with blood. Some was hers, and the rest had the colour of death. She told me that it was time to go. Could I make a portal? I said yes, and she picked me up carefully, walked to the window of the rotting tower we were in, and then she jumped. I screamed, but her wings snapped out and started humming as they pulled us through the air. She told me we had to get out of the city before the portal would be possible. I felt it. I felt the moment we crossed the threshold, then I opened the portal, and she dove into it. There was a wrenching, and I was pulled from her arms and thrown to the concrete that I had been pulled from. When I bumped into her at the Chamber of Commerce, she told me that she was younger than she is now. She had been pulled from a different point in time.”
Mao asked, “Where did she come from? Did she say?”
“Pirates had murdered her parents, and their ship had been sunk. She was hiding in it, and it was going under, but she could hear their engines circling. That was when the shadows grabbed her, and that is what she was returned to.”
He pulled out his phone. “What is her last name?”
“Akorin.”
He looked, opened articles, and gasped. “Oh, fuck. She was thirteen during the attack. It was the day before her fourteenth birthday. That is why they were there. It was a celebration.”
When Vine heard the date, she paused. “I have seen her a few times on her birthday. She doesn’t celebrate, and that is just sad.”
Mao grunted. “I hope she finds a good alpha.”
Vine said, “I hope she finds joy. She deserves to be held and cuddled and protected for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that she can protect herself, she shouldn’t have to always be on guard.”
She smiled. “Being a mage-omega is rough. Ready for battle, wanting a soft place to curl up. It’s a strange combination. I don’t think we were ever supposed to be. I think we were created to save us, and it is a strange thing.”
Kazuya frowned. “What created you?”
She smiled at him. “What created you? What looked at you and said that water would be your domain?”
He frowned. “The energy that runs through my people. The magic.”
“And where did it come from, originally? Who gave the power to your ancestors? Who gave them the options that would shape their children?”
He blinked, and Mao said, “The earth itself made the enhanced alphas this way.”
“The earth made me as well. It gave me the spark, and I shaped it to my survival. It learned from whatever made the elves so that it could shape its own children. The males were the early copy because it had plenty of you to use as a template. The females were done with caution. Omegas were generally avoided because we are emotional in the extreme, but the modern age has let us to use that emotion rather than confining us. The omega disaster that took out the school scattered the souls but left a vacuum for us to be valued and to grow. It turned omegas from pets into treasured assets, and that was a shift that modern males don’t appreciate.
They know they need us but don’t know why. ”
She picked up her cup and sipped her tea. They were both stunned.