Chapter 2
Bennie
The Hemlock Wolf Pack, Star’s Territory
Two Weeks Later
For the last two weeks all Raziel talked about was this Alby guy coming in from Hemlock Mountain.
It was as if Aidan Gilmore called and gave him the information and my best friend started basing his whole existence around this guy coming in for a few months.
Alby was a wolf shifter who grew up on the Hemlock Mountain Sanctuary.
His grandfather was some hotshot healer who’d helped in wars here and there.
He was also very against dating from everything I’d heard about him.
While Mated for Mayhem wasn’t exactly dating, I figured we’d have to deal with Clyde and his mate at some point while Alby was here.
Well, if they could catch him and Raziel at home.
He’d planned the first full month of Alby’s visit down to a T.
He planned to take him to all these fun and romantic places.
I wasn’t sure how he was going to get any useful information for the research project if they never sat down together with nothing else to do.
You never really knew a person until you spent weeks doing nothing with them.
Though, nothing was sometimes preferred over Raziel’s constant need to stay busy.
Alby’s arrival was set for tomorrow. So today, Raziel had somehow roped me into helping him set up the finishing touches on his room.
He’d bought this big four poster bed that was more tedious than anything else to move up the spiraling staircase that Raziel insisted on building into his house.
Then he bought a mattress so big that it didn’t fit through any of the upstairs windows.
“Are you sure you don’t want to ask your dad for help?” I eyed the giant mahogany beast as it was loaded off the moving truck.
“It’s not about strength,” Raziel shook his head, examining the woodwork for damage and finding none. “It’s about strategy and physics. We got it covered. I mostly need you to be my eyes so that it stays balanced and doesn’t break down a wall.”
“I miss doing nothing,” my tiger chimed into my thoughts. “We could be at home doing it right now. We could lounge in a sunbeam. Maybe chase a frozen watermelon around the yard later if we get bored.”
I yawned. That sounded like a better plan than wrestling a bed up a spiral staircase but we both knew that’s exactly how I was going to spend my afternoon.
It wasn’t even that Raziel and I spent most of our time as teenagers together.
It was that one of the men who raised me was a priest of Frost and Alby was an omega.
To deny him top-notch comfort while visiting from far away felt like I was toeing the line of breaking some tenet of Frost.
“Maybe the fourth one because our families fought side by side. Definitely the sixth one about being kind to strangers. Plus, we’re in the same pack. So I’m sure there is something else too,” my tiger rambled on as Raziel, and I double-checked that all the doors were opened.
Then he hoisted the beast of a bed onto his back. I grabbed for the back end, but Raziel was already moving as if it was a backpack.
“Dragons,” my tiger rolled his eyes inside his inner sanctum.
I raced ahead of Raziel and climbed up on the banister of the steps.
Normally, I wouldn’t put my shoes on a handrail, but this wasn’t a normal time.
The next twenty minutes was a lot of ‘left,’ ‘right,’ ‘more left,’ and ‘lean damn it!’ Eventually the bed frame was up the stairs and into the hallway.
Raziel sat it down and looked around. He wasn’t as out of breath as I was expecting.
“That wasn’t that bad,” he shrugged, wiping his face with his shirt. “If I ever build another spiral staircase, I’m making it twice as wide.”
“We still have to bring up the mattress,” I reminded him.
“Eh, it’s flat. It won’t be as complicated. Let’s get it into the room.”
Thankfully for us and Alby, the bed fit perfectly into the room between the two nightstands Raziel had already set up.
I had a feeling that having me guide him up the stairs was merely a safety precaution because like most dragons Raziel had some sort of geometric sight for size and shape.
It always seemed akin to how I knew instinctively how to jump where I wanted to go.
“Can you start stringing up the bed curtains while I bring up the mattress?” Raziel asked on his way out the door.
The curtains were a soft green color that reminded me of fresh shoots of grass.
The whole room was done up in blue, greens, and browns as if Raziel thought his guest could only be comfortable in a room that reminded him of a forest. Maybe he could.
I knew plenty of wolves but never stopped to ask them what color pallets they needed to sleep on.
Then again, I’d been known to curl up as a tiger on the top of my industrial-sized draconic refrigerator.
So who was I to judge where people chose to sleep?
The question of why Raziel wanted to do Mated for Mayhem hung in the air between us.
He knew who his mate was. He’d known for a long time.
He remembered his past lives. Well, at least one of them.
I had never asked who he was back then and he never offered the information.
We all had past lives, and I figured it didn’t really matter what he did back then.
I was as judgmental as any other feline, but I only judged people on the things they could control.
Past lives didn’t fall into that category.
For whatever reason, Raziel had spent years dodging his true-mate response.
Now, it was almost like he wanted to punish himself for the sake of science or penance.
I wasn’t sure which one he was going for.
It wasn’t always easy to figure out what the guy was thinking, but then again, some thoughts are the sort a man kept inside of his own head.
After the bedroom was put together, we doubled-checked that we had all the foods Alby listed as part of his normal diet and his favorites.
Then we ordered half a dozen pizzas for our own late lunch.
I normally leaned more meat heavy than pizza, but carbs were better after a workout.
Going up and down those stairs without wings counted as a workout in my book.
Raziel scrolled on his phone, and I read the latest Alesky Mink book, The Trouble with Lion Dads.
It was sort of a backhanded commentary on how feline culture must’ve looked from the outside.
Mink talked a lot about kissing other lions as part of their culture and survival instincts.
The main character’s mate was a lynx omega who was as introverted as they came.
It wasn’t the kissing that his love interest had a problem with.
It was how he came home smelling and tasting like all the other lions.
It messed up the vibe of the house. Kissing lions were definitely part of the GGB culture.
More than once, I’d been mistaken for a lion and kissed.
Though, to be fair, my mom was a lioness.
Both of my parents died before I was old enough to remember them.
I was raised by my older brother, Ryder, and his mate, Slyvin.
Slyvin was a follower of Frost who worked tirelessly to this day trying to improve the lives of others.
He was the reason I spent so long at Hemlock Academy.
Ryder always teased I had more degrees than brain cells to store them, because every time I wrapped up an area of study it naturally led me to another one.
I still hadn’t settled down in a career despite having several degrees in medicine, social work, history, pack and group psychology, art, and of course, animal medicine.
I was also a certified midwife and was licensed to do security work in three territories.
There were others too but none common enough to be known by those outside of specific fields.
The way I saw it, was if I was going to live for a long time and couldn’t escape other people, I needed to try to understand them and how they worked in groups.
Mostly, I wanted to make the world a better place.
I’d only been back in the territory about a month when Raziel came up with his crazy idea to ask Aidan Gilmore to find him a mayhem match.
Before that I’d spent about two years living in the polar icecap region working alongside shifters whose ancestors were affected by climate change.
Sure, some of what the human non-shifters left behind still lingered, but we had it a lot better than those who lived directly during and after that time.
The only thing about up there was that a good sunning spot was hard to find these days.
“Is there anything I’m missing?” Raziel asked.
“Compassion for yourself,” I said without thinking and he kicked me under the table.
“Stop your Temple of Frost stuff and answer the question.”
“He’s your ancestor. You should be more concerned with what he had to say,” I laughed.
“But, no, I think you have everything for Alby. If you’re missing something, you’ll pick it up when he needs it or I’ll bring it by.
You’re not taking him to raise. He’s a grown ass wolf and if you’re saying he hasn’t thought ahead because he’s an omega, your carrier is going to come over here and scale you like a giant fish. ”
“No, I just..” he started and stopped.
“You can finish that thought if you want to. Believe me. I’ve heard it all before, Raz. I’m starting to think you’re trying to perform some sort of self-flagellation ritual here.”
“I… I need practice.”
“For self-flagellation?” I arched a brow, slid my bookmark in place, and put the book down.
“For the future. I need to get along with people who annoy me.”
“You think your true-mate will annoy you?” I asked him.
“Not him directly. His family.”
“Hmmm… Well, you did grow up with your siblings and cousins. I think you have that under control,” I laughed and ducked just in case Raziel decided to throw something at me. To his credit, he didn’t.
“It’s complicated,” he leaned back in his chair.
“Life is only as complicated as you let it be. You’re not the only one who has recalled their past lives.
There are records in the Temples of Frost and Juda of many shifters who have.
The Starscales keep whole records of lives.
I think you let it dictate too much. I know that you’re walking your own path, but I think you beat yourself up too much. ”
“It’s not about me. I made my whole last incarnation about me in a lot of ways, and it fucked so much up, Bennie. Seriously, everything. He’s still alive. My true-mate is still alive and remembers that. I can’t go anywhere near that man until I’m different.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you’re already different from your past life.
That’s the whole point of reincarnation.
You are someone different. If you’re saying you were selfish in your past life, you’re not now, Raz.
We weren’t raised to be that way. Selfish men don’t haul beds up spiral staircases just so someone has what he’s used to.
Especially, someone you’ve never met before. ”
“One day you’ll understand,” he said. “I just hope we’re still friends after that.”
“What? Were you Grady Moore?” I laughed, referencing a vampire who lost his mind and then kidnapped omegas hoping to get them pregnant via IVF to have a perfect vampire baby. He never achieved his goal and was taken out by the Hemlock Wolf Pack in the end.
“If I was, I wouldn’t let Alby come here. That man put his family through a lot. No Grady Moore references around him,” he said, narrowing a look on me that reminded me of his carrier.
“Hey,” I held my hands up. “You didn’t tell me that and I wanted to guess the most unlikely asshat so I was wrong.”
The doorbell sounded off and Raziel went off to answer it.
“You’re worried about him,” my tiger chimed off into my thoughts.
“A lot changed while we were gone. He’s… Different but I don’t know if it’s in a good way. It’s like he’s based his whole personality around whoever he was before,” I thought back to him.
“No. This is his way of centering his true-mate in his life even if he won’t just go off and have his true-mate response. If you ever pull this shit on me, I’ll shift your fingers into claws and go for your balls,” my tiger said.
My tiger didn’t have to worry about me avoiding my true-mate.
While I would never try something like Mated for the Holidays to find him, I wouldn’t actively avoid him either if information about his identity landed on my lap.
I believed in fate and that in the end whatever we decided on before this life would happen.
Sooner or later, we’d bump into each other.
It would probably be somewhere mundane like the grocery store, but I was okay with that.
I only required as many fireworks as it took to make my mate happy.
Outside of a full belly, a good napping spot, and some books to read, I didn’t require much in the way of material possessions.
Sure, they were nice, but I’d lived without them on the road before and would undoubtedly do it again.