Chapter 8 #2
My heart wanted to melt at that declaration, but I couldn’t risk it. Not yet. “Who is she?”
“My twin sister, Yukiko,” he said.
Suddenly, I could breathe again.
He held out a hand and I allowed him to pull me back into his arms. He settled us back on the bed and with his arms and snakes wrapped around me, explained.
“Normally, a gorgon can communicate with their own snakes, but somehow the powers got muddled when my sister and I were born, and I got the snakes while she got the ability to communicate with them.”
“That sounds awful,” I said.
“It’s even worse when your snakes tell your twin sister that you’ve been ignoring your mate for years.”
Ha! I’d been right all along. The snakes did know I was his mate and they had been flirting with me.
“How could you have missed how they were constantly flirting with me?” I pulled up to a sitting position, so I could see his face.
He grimaced. “I thought they were talking with Yukiko. That’s what they do when talking to her. Only they’re not flirting, they’re just excited and full of energy. Probably because she can understand them and I can’t.”
“Oh.” Shit, was that why they’d been dancing? Not because they were excited to see me, but because they’d been talking to his sister?
“Turns out she can’t actually hear them from thousands of miles away.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Go figure. And no one thought to tell me this, so I had no idea they’d suddenly spotted our mate across the cafeteria. I still don’t get why they didn’t just drag me to you. They could have, you know.”
Hissies.
Time.
Flirt.
Vorzak.
Later.
I snorted.
“What?”
“I think they’re saying it was their time, not yours.”
“Why those selfish little bastards.”
I giggled. “I adore them. You know that, right?”
“You and Yukiko.” He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was pleased.
Though we didn’t consciously decide to skip our morning classes, I never made it to Art of the Poison Garden and Vorzak didn’t make it to Familiar Training.
Instead, we spent hours talking, discovering things about each other that we’d never known.
I shared about my parents, who had died in a car accident when I was five, and whom I had very few memories of.
I shared what it was like growing up in a care home for supernaturals outside London and how similar living at Blackthorn Academy was: surrounded by supernaturals, attending courses to master our powers, eating in a cafeteria and living in dorms.
As a ward of the Supernatural Council of the United Kingdom, I’d been guaranteed a spot at a supernatural academy. Since I had no preference, I’d chosen Blackthorn for its proximity to England and Ireland.
I shared that I usually spent my holidays alone, camping on the moors and in the forests of Ireland, exploring its caves and hiking its hills, the magic deeply embedded in its lands calling to me.
“Never again,” he growled. “You’ll never spend the holidays alone again.”
Hissy.
Kissy.
Holidays.
The Hissies agreed.
Family.
Together.
It was all I could do not to burst into tears at this declaration of love from all of them.
“What about your family? Tell me about your sister.”
So, Vorzak regaled me with stories of his Snow Beast father and Gorgon mother and the mischief he and his sister got up to when they were children.
“Hold on. She froze you with her gaze? Didn’t that hurt?” I demanded.
“Well, I am half snow beast, so no, but it did piss me off. I was even angrier when The Hissies refused to bite her in retaliation.”
I burst into laughter.
“It wasn’t funny.” He scowled at me. “The snakes hate the cold. I hate the cold. She knew that and still, she deliberately froze us. Then she had the nerve to apologize to The Hissies, but not to me! She actually told them it was my fault she accidentally froze them. She claimed I’d made her so mad, she just had to retaliate and they were just the unfortunate bystanders who got in the way of righteous revenge.
“She actually said it like that. Righteous revenge. So then, The Hissies bit me.”
Kiko’s.
Righteous.
Hissy.
Revenge.
Funny.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed so hard, I almost rolled off the bed.
One of The Hissies caught me and rolled me away from the edge, right into Vorzak’s arms. We then let ourselves get distracted for a while.
A long while.
When we finally rolled away from each other, gasping for breath once more, Vorzak told me something I should have known, but didn’t.
While I’d been sitting at Mikaela’s side, holding her hand, willing her to wake up after Zowen tortured her in the Shadow Realm, my mate was at ground zero where the battle for Blackthorn Academy was taking place.
He was one of the first snatched, right off the stairs as he’d been heading to the cafeteria.
He’d been flung into the Shadow Realm and because he was one of the first, he was also inside the Shadow Realm the longest of all the students and professors taken that day.
“It messed with my head,” he admitted. “I didn’t have a chance to fight or anything. One minute, I was here, the next, I was in the Shadow Realm. The worst part was that I’ve waited my entire life to hear my snakes talk to me and when I first arrived, I thought it was finally happening.”
“You heard the shadows, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “I didn’t know that’s what I was hearing. The whispers were so quiet, I almost didn’t hear them.” He fell silent.
“What were they saying?”
“It’ll sound hokey.”
“That’s okay.” I sat up and grinned at him. “I like hokey, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
He chuckled. “They kept telling me to hide, to be still, to hide in the light. I told them there was no light and they told me I was the light, which makes no sense, and that I should hide in it.”
“Is that how they said it? Hide in the light?”
“No, it was more like, ‘Hide inside your light.’”
“So what did you do?”
“I stayed as still as I could and focused on the memory of sitting in the garden at home with The Hissies spread out on the rocks behind me, basking in the feel of the heated rock beneath their skin and the sun beating down upon us. It worked until it didn’t.”
“What happened when it failed?”
“The darkness started creeping in. I was losing my way, forgetting who I was, forgetting my family, Yukiko, all of it, and then suddenly, Kasi was there. Her shadows wrapped around me and yanked me back to the Academy.”
I was suddenly acutely aware that I might have lost both my mate and my best friend on the same day, if it weren’t for Kasi.
Hissies.
Fight.
Bad.
Zowen.
Shadows.
That’s when it hit me. “You’re in Inner Beast Management with Mikaela.”
“Yes.”
“So you were in that battle, too?”
“I was, though I was no more successful fighting the shadows then. The only thing I can say is that I wasn’t taken a second time.”
“Well, then, you must have been better, to have avoided that.”
“Okay, maybe minutely better, but only because I had warning this time, since I was on the other side of the room when he first appeared. Still, it was a total disaster and the Hissies were pissed. They can’t bite a shadow or inject it with venom, so they felt pretty helpless.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think they’re not alone in feeling that way.”
“I know they’re not,” he said, pain in his voice, “because I felt the same way, and never more so than when you were taken from me, right in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing to protect you. Nothing to protect my mate.”
I lifted my head from where it rested on his chest, his heartbeat just below my ear.
I wanted to tell him that there was no need for guilt or helplessness, that I knew he would have helped if he could have, but I also knew that words would change nothing about how he felt.
So, instead of saying anything, I began to trace his tattoos with my lips, pressing kisses of comfort against his skin, following the tattoos down his arm, then back up his chest.
Eventually, I ran out of tattoos, but that didn’t stop me. I pressed kisses to his neck and his cheek, then his lips.
He allowed me to kiss him gently for a time, then he took over, devouring my mouth like he might die without it, rolling us so that he was on top again, his weight coming over me and making me squirm in delicious anticipation.
He lifted my hips, notched himself in place, then paused there.
“Vorzak, please,” I hissed, already desperate to have him again.
As if that was all he’d been waiting for, he surged forward and slammed himself home.