Chapter 22 Raven
Raven
I’d never been so cold in my life. The jacket Maverick gave me before we left Starfall was warm with down filling, but even that couldn’t keep the cold at bay. How was the incubus not cold? He wasn’t even wearing a jacket!
I tried not to stare at the way his muscles filled out his sweater, but it was hard to focus when he looked so damn hot.
Then his words sank in. He was proud to have me as a mate. Me, a mediocre witch with unstable magic and potentially a demon king for a father.
Yeah. I’d buried that revelation so deep not even a truth spell would find it. Zane’s eyebrows shot up as the memory of the demon’s voice fluttered across my mind. Stars, had my shield fallen?
“How long have you known?” Zane stared down at me with a mix of concern and surprise.
“Known what?” Ignorance was my best defense, I decided while shivering some more. Play dumb. It usually worked.
“That Nymon is your father.”
“My father?” I repeated, still playing dumb.
Zane swore and pulled me into his arms. His body heat soaked through my jacket, and I sighed with pleasure before the surrounding forest vanished in a vortex of magic.
We ended up back at the cabin to find a furious bear stomping around the spacious living room. Once I’d finished retching, I searched for Alar-dick and Kai, but they were nowhere in sight.
“Where the fuck did you take her?” Maverick yelled. “It’s fucking minus ten degrees out there!”
“Calm your tits, care bear.” Zane rolled his eyes. “She’s cold but still in possession of all her extremities.”
Maverick ground his teeth some more before snatching me away from the incubus. I noted how Zane looked pained for a moment before he straightened and walked over to the kitchen area of the open-plan living space.
I took in our new surroundings. The cabin was basic but clean. From the plain furnishings, it appeared hunters used it as a base rather than it being a family vacation property. Maverick hadn’t said who owned the cabin, but I assumed it was a family member.
Zane pulled open a few cabinets and inspected the contents of the fridge. He removed a bottle of beer and popped the cap before swallowing a few mouthfuls.
“We need to talk,” he told Maverick. “Our mate has been hiding things.”
“Hiding what?” Maverick frowned. I cringed, knowing full well he’d be mad I’d kept quiet about what the demon had told me. It wasn’t like I was deliberately withholding information. It was more that I’d been in denial.
I mean, who wanted to hear their long-lost father was the demon king?
Not me.
I preferred to picture my absent father as a sweet, kind mage who’d died in a tragic accident before my birth.
Being part-demon would endear me to nobody. It also made me question everything. Did Adam know? Was this why he’d gone to such great lengths to keep me off the magical community’s radar? Was my demonic heritage the reason demons kept popping up in my life?
Stars above. I had so many questions and no answers.
At some point, I’d need to have a conversation with Adam, but it could wait until after we’d found Rasmus. The vampire was my priority.
“You may want to sit down for this,” Zane said, serious for once.
“Just spit it out, incubus.”
“There’s a freezer full of game in the outbuilding,” Alaric announced as he trudged in from a rear entrance with a stack of logs in his bulging arms. Goddess save me, fate was doing her best to provoke me with all these sexy males.
Maverick inhaled sharply and grumbled under his breath.
“Behave, little mate,” he whispered in my ear. “I will not let you distract me from what the incubus is trying to tell me.”
“You know the fish boy only eats fish, right?” Zane pointed out as Alaric dropped the logs in a basket next to the fireplace. I silently prayed someone would get the fire going. Maverick’s body heat was helping to defrost my frozen limbs, but a roaring fire would finish the job.
And also add some much-needed ambiance to our temporary home.
“I spotted some salmon in there,” Alaric replied. He stacked some logs in the grate and then cast a spell. Flames burst up the chimney, and I sighed happily as heat spread out into the room. “But the merman might have caught his own dinner. I saw him jump into the nearby lake.”
Alarm caused my magic to flare. “It’s freezing!
He might get stuck under the ice!” I still had nightmares from watching a human movie where a demonic kid called Damien pushed someone into a lake and they got stuck under the ice.
Oh my goddess. If I had demonic heritage, would I turn into a dead-eye psycho like the demon child?
Zane snorted. “He’ll be fine, pet. He’s a merman. How do you think they cope when they swim in the depths of the ocean? Wear wetsuits?”
I huffed. “Excuse me for showing some concern for another being.”
“Zane, fucking tell us what you know before I throw you in that lake,” Maverick snapped.
“Such a grumpy daddy bear,” the incubus taunted before he sighed.
“Tell us what?” Alaric’s head swiveled from side to side in confusion.
“The witch is half-demon.”
“What?” Maverick’s arms tightened around me until I couldn’t breathe.
“You heard me. Nymon, the demon king, is her father.”
Maverick shoved me back while gripping my arms hard enough to leave bruises. Alaric’s mouth gaped open, and Zane gulped down some more beer.
I glared at him. Talk about tossing a grenade into the room. I’d have told them all eventually. In my own sweet time. Maybe.
“Keeping secrets from your soul-bonded mates is unwise,” Kenji said from his spot on a chair in the corner. I jumped, not having noticed him. He stretched and yawned. “Especially not the fact that they have a demonic father-in-law. Yikes. Family reunions are going to be fun.”
Ignoring my asshole familiar and his unsolicited relationship advice, I chewed my lip while trying to figure out how best to defuse this awkward situation. It felt like I’d stumbled into a crazy daytime telenovela.
“How long have you known, Raven?” I noted Maverick’s use of my given name, rather than his nickname for me. Oh stars, he was angry. Really angry. Like so angry I wondered if he’d ever forgive me, angry.
I gulped. “Since a demon told me the night of the attack on campus. He called me princess and said my father had been searching for me for a very long time, and that he wanted me to come home, and a lot of other stuff I blanked out because it made no sense.”
“So if your father is Nymon,” Maverick gritted out, clearly unhappy about the fact his mate was a demon princess. And who could blame him? I was hardly delirious about it either. “Then who was your mother?”
“A witch called Ellora. Or so Adam told me. She died when I was a toddler.”
“Ellora Nightingale?” Alaric spoke up for the first time since Zane’s truth bomb exploded.
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Whenever I’d asked about my mother, Adam deflected and changed the subject.
The older I got, the more I realized it hurt him to think about her, so I stopped asking.
“Adam told me he and my mother had been soul-bonded mates and she’d been pregnant when they met.
He never revealed who my father was except to say he was evil and I needed to forget about him. ”
Zane smirked. “I think evil is an understatement, given he rules hell and has legions of demons at his command.”
“This must be why demon attacks have increased,” Alaric mused. “Nymon is sending demons through the portal to find Raven.”
“Yeah, but why is the portal magic failing? Ellora’s coven sealed it when she disappeared,” Maverick mused.
“They did?” I knew nothing about how and why it happened.
“Yes,” Maverick replied. “There was a rumor the demon king had taken her, but most mages and witches believed she’d died at the hands of her coven, although no charges were ever filed.
Everyone knew the witch who assumed control of the Nightshade Coven had issues with Ellora’s leadership, but when they cast the spell to seal the portal and keep demons out of the human realm, the Mage Council heaved a sigh of relief and forgot about Ellora. ”
“Nobody tried to save my mom?” I whispered, fresh tears welling in my eyes. Alaric threw me a sympathetic look.
“Not that I know of.”
My poor mother. Taken from her home by a demon and forced to be his bride. How had she escaped? Adam and I needed to have a chat when I got home. It was obvious he had been hiding a ton of stuff from me.
Maverick spun me around and cupped my face with his huge hands. “You should have told me the moment you found out, little mate. How can I protect you if I don’t have all the facts?”
Tears trickled down my cheeks. “I didn’t want to believe it,” I admitted. “So I refused to think about it.”
Kenji licked his butt and rolled his eyes at my misery. I hated my familiar at times. Why couldn’t he be more supportive?
“I believe in letting witches wipe their own asses,” he said while licking his ass. Gross.
“Don’t cry, little mate.” Maverick wrapped his arms around me, and I soaked up his heat and familiar scent. “I’ll keep you safe.”
“We’ll keep her safe,” Zane interjected.
“Oh, have you stopped pretending you didn’t seal the mate bond?” Alaric asked. Quick as a flash, Zane had him pinned up against the mantel, not caring if the blazing fire burned the mage’s ass to a crisp.
“I needed some time to figure things out, but yes. How about you, vanilla popsicle? Have you pulled your head out of your ass yet?”
Alaric zapped Zane with a spark of electricity, but the incubus just laughed. I guess he hadn’t been exaggerating when he claimed to have a pain kink.
“You know my father will want to leverage her if he finds out!” Alaric growled. Zane stepped back, still laughing.
“Then it’s time to take the bastard down.” The incubus smirked. “Just as well you have four powerful harem mates at your back now.”