Chapter 4
Eran
Guardians of Glitter Bomb Territory
I arrived home in time to see Diamond hugging Bernard like she wanted to squeeze out his eyeballs.
For a second, I wondered if she’d squeeze me like that.
I shook my head to bat the thought away before my cat forced the question out of my mouth because that dragoness smelled like she might gobble me up in one bite. Might gobble us all up in one bite.
“Did another ghost thing happen?” I asked, leaning in the doorway, taking in the boxes and bags that were mostly Bernard’s things. His parents had helped him and Nashen move most of the hissy lynx’s stuff from his family home into the house they were moving into.
Nashen glared at me from across the room where Bree sat with her long arm around his shoulders.
I waved and smiled because what else was I supposed to do?
Nashen hissed at me and I fought off the urge to facepaw.
Then I opened the fridge and tossed him a danish and he caught it.
Then, of course, he hissed again before taking a bite.
The truck was running a few minutes behind because Bernard’s parents had stopped at Sandy’s to pick up some meatball subs for everyone. It was a bit early in the morning for them, but I liked the sentiment. I thought about volunteering to start carrying boxes down but Diamond spoke first.
“We need more of a plan than to just wait on Clarence,” she said.
“He has us over the fire,” Nashen said from across the room in between bites of pastry.
“Pras won’t do anything unless Clarence tells the story.
Clarence thinks he has to tell it in some magnificent way.
I think he’s just putting it off. Pami’s locked in there with him and Ferrick.
So we can’t even figure out how to banish her and the hummingbird ladies at the farm swear they saw Sharon Claudis the other day.
So we’re up to our necks in fucking ghosts and Clarence is trying to control the narrative. ”
“Who else knows the narrative, though? Except maybe his mate? Pras knows but that’s the whole point. He wants Clarence to acknowledge it,” Bree said.
“Pami hasn’t gotten back out has she?” I asked.
Out of all them she scared me the most because I couldn’t figure out what her game was.
Power? What villain goes for generic power?
It was too cliché. If that was her MO whoever the elven ‘Frost’ was needed to drag her away and eat her or whatever Frost did to bad people.
Spank them? Make them pick up trash on the side of the highways?
“Juda spanks them and he watches,” my cat laughed inside my thoughts.
Yep. Once Bernard and Nashen were settled into their new home I needed to get laid. It might be time to whip out Pheromone Swap again.
“Ya think? You’re daydreaming about some old ancestral fogies spanking bad guys. That’s a really big paddle and Juda’s wearing a corset!” my cat chimed off into my thoughts. He was the one who added Juda in a corset but I didn’t point that out.
“Eran?” Bernard turned to face me.
“Huh?” I said.
How much of the conversation had I missed?
“Will you go down and help Dad and Pop set up the truck ramp? I’d go but Nashen gets extra hissy when I’m not around,” Bernard said.
“Yeah no problem,” I said. “I guess my brain cell hasn’t come back after being squashed out.”
After the ramp was set up we formed an assembly line to get the boxes and items down quickly.
As more shifters showed up it became even faster.
Nashen and Bree stayed on the sofa because neither Bernard nor Diamond wanted them lifting anything heavy.
Bree protested a little but was happy to keep Nashen company and share his pastries.
I stayed down on the street handing off the boxes to Bernard’s sire who stacked them neatly inside the truck. It kept me far away from Nashen. I didn’t know what about me upset him so much but stressing out a pregnant carrier wasn’t on my to-do list.
“Everyone is having babies. Bree. Nashen. Medwin. When do we get to have a baby?” my cat asked as if we had a line of omegas waiting for us to knock them up.
I got what he meant, though. I’d been extra careful not to conceive out of mateship.
I didn’t care what other people did. Some folks like my friend, Jade, even made it a habit of adopting children who needed homes to fill the void, but single parenthood wasn’t for me.
Not that I didn’t want to spend all my free time rearing my kittens.
I would when the time came. I just wanted to share that with my true-mate.
Plus, I’d seen how badly chosen mates could go.
Then again. Plenty of people had been murdered by their true-mates.
Once everything was in the truck, I went back up to double-check things. Yeah, Bernard could’ve done it, but we’d made pretty good roommates before Nashen was pregnant. That worked because we’re both independent but also considerate.
I didn’t take my car out of the parking garage if I was going somewhere local.
Walking was good exercise and most of the places I wanted to go were within walking distance for me.
Going out to the farm was different. Though, I almost hated to take my cherry red Frost Pickup out to that place.
It was always so dirty. I’d already booked a morning appointment at Franny’s Fur Salon because just thinking about it got dust in my white fur.
The truck cost a pretty penny when it was new twenty years ago but had held up well with routine maintenance.
It wasn’t a Moonscale Talon or anything like that, but I wanted a vehicle to last forever.
Mine already smelled like me and a new one wouldn’t.
I was about to pull out onto the street after waiting for everyone else to clear out when the passenger door opened and Jade slid inside.
“Didn’t bring the Wing today?” I arched a brow.
Jade drove a green Wing Minivan. Folks teased him a bit, but it fit his personality, though.
He usually always had a kid at home, and he ran the only ‘flyers only’ indoor playground for winged kids.
When it first opened some ‘unwinged’ parents were pretty pissed off that he would create a place that didn’t cater to their kids, but in the end, everyone shut up.
Most kids had plenty of indoor play places.
At most of those places there were no flying signs.
Jade ran into those a lot as a young, winged lion.
It stuck with him. So he fixed the problem when he got older.
It was winged kids only because a lot of the platforms involved weren’t safe for those who couldn’t fly.
“Eh, don’t want to have to go to the car wash,” he shrugged.
“Is Jondi still afraid of it?” I asked about his five-year-old adopted son.
“Yeah, and by the time the party’s over it’ll be time to pick him up from school,” Jade nodded.
“He still doesn’t like dirt either. Still won’t go out onto the playground.
They’ve stopped calling me on it. Doctor Harmel wrote him a letter excusing him for sensory issues.
I don’t know that it’s sensory but that got the school to shut up.
Thought I was going to have to cover Feral with mud and lock him in the room with my kid to get someone to pay attention. ”
“I’d have paid to see that from behind a mud shield,” I laughed.
Jondi was a kindergarten-aged otter shifter who washed up by the Moonscale Lake as a pup.
The search for his parents went on for months until it was decided either he was orphaned, abandoned, or wild born.
Over the years he’d been fostered by seven different families, most of them with at least one water dragon parent, but it never worked out.
It was hard not to be angry at the parents who couldn’t figure it out but I had never fostered a small child.
I had ‘fostered’ a set of teenage twins for a year until they were old enough to go to Hemlock Academy.
Both Sem and Jeo died when they went to fight Clarence’s war against the hate group.
I was barely out of college when they moved in with me and we were more friends that anything else.
I still sometimes wanted to kick Clarence while wearing a shoe made from his own scales.
“I feel that,” Jade nodded. Even this far away from Moonscale London almost everyone lost someone in that war or knew someone who did. “We have to cheer up before we get there.”
“Eh, cheerfulness is overrated,” I managed a chuckle.
“And you need to find a new roommate.”
I hated that he was right. I was a fully functional adult but sometimes that function included getting lost in my work and doing nothing else for days at a time until I realized I was a starving matted mess.
I didn’t need a particularly involved roommate.
Just one who made some occasional noise to bring me out of the crafting zone.
“You could come and stay with me and Jondi,” Jade suggested.
“I’m sure he’d love that,” I laughed. “Kid finally has some stability and you bring home a cat.”
“He likes his ‘Uncle Cat.’” Jade shrugged. “More than I can say for Bernard’s guy. He looked at you like you were going to eat his kittens.”
“I don’t know what I did to him in a past life for him to hate me like that but I hope it was worth it,” I said as we pulled out onto the highway. “Honestly, I think I’m going to play with Pheromone Swap for a few weeks after I’m sure Bernard is settled in the new house.”
Jade arched a brow at me and then pulled his long, mid-back length hair up into a ponytail.
Most of our friends and family forgot but we messed around during college.
It never got serious because life pulled us in two different directions.
We made great friends but meshing our lives together so intimately was never going to work out.
“Like I said, you could come over and hang out with me and Jondi,” he said again.
I definitely missed that hint the first time around.
I pondered it for a second. We were older now.
It might be different. I still worked too much and Jade still wanted to save the world.
We’d found our niches and he was right. I was one of the few people Jondi tolerated in his space.
Was it time to grow up and settle down? I could do worse than Jade and we already knew what we hated about each other.
“Can I think about it? I mean I have to pay out the lease anyway,” I said, buying time.
“I was inviting you over to play house not to marry me,” he laughed.
“Yeah, but we had three pregnancy scares in college. My sperm like your eggs too much,” I laughed. “So, playing house might not be a game for long and we’d have to think about how Jondi would feel if we tried and it didn’t work.”
“You’re going to be a great dad someday, Kieran Ruffin Forticaine-Milton, and a great mate for someone too, but it’s not gonna be me, huh?”
“You are a great dad and the same for the last part, huh?” I laughed.
We were quiet for a long stretch of highway.
“Friends still?” he asked when we got close to the farm.
“Forever,” I nodded.
I lost track of the times we’d ‘broken up’ or ‘fallen out’ and had that conversation. Jade and I were definitely better as friends even if we were both lonely, horny cats.