Chapter 3 #2
He’d seemed like he was enjoying it during his time away, but by the time he got back and mated with Niall, he had been so excited to be back that he had formed his own little pack even farther up the mountain than the one his brothers ran as co-alphas.
Liam shrugged. “Not really, no. I actually sort of love my life. It’s a little lonely just having my brothers, especially since Rory moved up here, but I don’t think I’d be able to cut it in the human world all the time.
It’s like once you know magic like you guys and the dragons exists, you can’t unknow it. ”
“Maybe it’s because you have a little bit of that magic in your blood yourself.
” Keegan dished out pasta from a pot of water sitting on the stove and then added steaming hot sauce to the top of it to warm it back up.
A few meatballs and a spoonful of salad along with a piping hot piece of garlic bread out of some foil resting on the back of the stove completed the meal.
Liam really thought he could eat twice that much, but he wasn’t gonna be a pig, at least until Keegan filled his own plate. Then he was like, “Hey! Why do I get half of what you get?”
“Well, because I’m an alpha wolf and you say you’re just a dude.”
“Kee, that is not fair. I’m starving. I carried someone halfway down the freaking mountain. You just had a tiny baby strapped to your chest.”
“I would have carried the guy if you asked me.”
He stared. “I had it.”
“I know you did.” Keegan grinned at him. “So you want some more spaghetti, Mister Man?”
“Shut up, you dick, and give me some more fucking spaghetti and meatballs. Give me three more meatballs if there are that many.” He wasn’t going to be like an asshole about it, but he was hungry.
“There’s plenty.” Keegan hooked him up and they sat down and, well, basically they snarfed up the food so fast that he didn’t even really remember eating it.
It was just nom nom nom nom thump. He sat there after it was all said and done, blinking a little bit.
“Man, I’m sorry, I was about to expire.”
“That’s fine, Liam. You’re allowed to be hungry.”
Well, he hoped so, because he sure had been. “I hope Theo and the baby are all right. I hate not knowing. What do you think about him? He looks a lot like Fen, doesn’t he?”
Keegan nodded. “You know Fen said that there was some terrible problem with his pack, and that lots of them had left, but some of them couldn’t. All I can figure is maybe this is part of Fen’s pack?”
“If it was, how could Fen have just left them?”
“He wouldn’t have just left them. I mean, he obviously wouldn’t have known that there was a pregnant omega. It wouldn’t have been right.”
“I guess.” He chewed his lip. “Rory was clearly pregnant before the omega that had Gael, and Fen’s been here since and Rory got pregnant, so this is water under the bridge.”
“Right. No, you’re absolutely right.” This couldn’t be anything that Fen would know.
“And he did say he had pack members who ran off. I guess we’ll just have to find out.”
Keegan nodded. “I think, and I could be wrong, but I think what’s going to happen is I’m going to take the four-by-four back down to the pack.
I’ll talk to Fen. I’ll get a hold of your brothers and let them know you’re up here and then once we know things, I’ll come back and get you and Theo so I can bring you down to the main pack. ”
There was something about that that just didn’t ring correctly.
He knew better than to mention it then. It wasn’t like Keegan was going to harm Theo in any way, but he just didn’t feel like going down to Keegan and Jameson’s pack so Theo could live there was going to be a thing.
Still, it didn’t matter. They could argue about that later.
He was perfectly capable of snarling on Theo’s behalf. Perfectly.
Loyal came out and offered them both a tired smile. “They’re both asleep. Niall says they’re both going to be fine. They are incredibly malnourished and they need rest.” Loyal gave Liam a curious little look also. “He’s gonna need his mate. It’ll help.”
Liam didn’t even hesitate, because even if he wasn’t Theo’s mate, even if this whole thing was bullshit, if Theo needed him and Gael needed him, that was what he was here for.
“I’m going to head back down.”
Loyal shrugged. “He can stay as long as he needs to stay.”
“All right. I’ll call your brothers, Liam, and I’ll tell Rory. I imagine Rory and Fen will come up in a day or two to see Theo and see if Fen knows him.”
Liam nodded, because that was fine; he didn’t care.
He didn’t really care about anything right this second except for seeing Theo.
In fact, he just headed back toward the bedrooms like he knew where he was going.
Then again, he’d been following that same call for months now, trying to figure out how to get to it so…
He guessed he’d blown it a little bit. He’d let everybody put him off and make him wait, made everyone wait too long. He was done with that though. He guaranteed it.
Theo was sleeping hard, a second low bed next to him holding little Gael. The baby rested under Theo’s hand, looking so small and fragile that it made Liam’s heart ache.
Liam kicked off his shoes and shrugged off his overshirt before checking out his jeans to see how gross they were. He didn’t want to be nasty and climb in next to Theo naked, but neither did he want to infect the bedsheets with God knew what kind of dirt.
Niall wandered through, offered him a smile and a pair of soft sweatpants without either one of them saying a word, and then wandered back out. Like a ghost. Like a weird wolfy shamanistic ghost. Still, yay sweatpants.
When Niall ghosted back through holding a sweater, handed it off to him, he just had to laugh softly. “Thank you for dinner by the way, Niall.”
Niall gave him a happy smile. “I’m glad I could provide. When you wake up, maybe you’ll want some cookies.”
Was that an offer or a command? Liam just chuckled. “I always want cookies.”
“They’re good for the soul. Get some rest. I know you’re exhausted from carrying Theo down the mountain. I’m glad you found him. I know you’ve wanted to go up there for so long.” Those strange, silvery eyes watched him with calm, serious care.
That made his heart hurt, and Liam put his hand on his chest to try to tamp it down. “I have, and I feel like I’ve let him down. I feel like he was stuck up there all winter with nothing to eat, and it was my fault.”
“Oh, honey, if that was the case, the baby wouldn’t be alive. So he couldn’t have been up there that long. I imagine that what you felt was him crossing the mountains, trying to get here, like Fen did, and he finally just stopped at the dragon encampment because he was so worn down.”
What he said made Liam pause, and he wanted to ask a very specific question, because if anybody was gonna be the person to talk to about this, it was gonna be Niall.
He wasn’t only a healer, he was a shaman, a seer.
“He said something to me when I first found him about him knowing I would come, but then he said alpha, so was he talking to Kee?”
Niall tilted his head, hair sweeping his shoulders. “Perhaps he meant to say mate?”
“Why does everybody think I’m his mate?” Liam waved his hands in the air. “Rory is the wolf, not me. The rest of us talked about it, and we’ve never had even a little bit of wolfish tendencies. I mean how long have we known you guys? It can’t be that I’m a wolf.”
“I think the universe gives you what you need when you need it, Liam. Don’t look a gift wolf in the mouth. Now why don’t you lay down and get some sleep? You can have a shower when you get up too.”
He threw his hands to the sides. “Oh, you’re as bad as Adrienne used to be.
” Adrienne had been the seer before Niall.
She’d been the shaman for a really long time, and he had met her more than once.
She’d been a very vague old lady, always speaking in riddles, and the older Niall got, the more he was like her.
Maybe it was like a shaman thing, something they learned from each other or that they sucked out of the air this way of speaking in riddles and prophecies.
He’d watched that Matrix movie with his brothers once. Niall was like the oracle lady.
But Niall left him there, so he turned back toward Gael and Theo, who slept on, not even twitching as he and Niall had that conversation.
So after he changed clothes, sniffing his pits in the process, he stepped around the little bed holding the baby and lifted the covers so he could climb in next to Theo.
He was just not going to think about it right now.
He was going to sit down here, or rather lie down he guessed, and rest with the goal of keeping his—whatever Theo was—warm.
He would worry about the rest when he woke up.