Chapter 4
Reva
“I’m sorry, what?” Frannie squawks. She’s the full picture of surprise, jaw practically on the floor as she gapes at me and then turns her attention to stare at the stranger we’ve just freed from his chains.
Meanwhile, Kit’s blinking rapidly. I can practically see his brain whirring away in real time as he takes in my revelation.
Yeah, join the club, buddy.
“Y-your mate.” He pushes his chestnut hair off his forehead, where it immediately flops back into place.
“I think so, anyway,” I reply. Now that I’m faced with trying to explain how I just seem to know that’s what’s happening here, I’m coming up blank. Kind of in the same way that I know the sky is blue, or that the sunset over the ocean is beautiful.
“He, er, accidentally touched my skin and now I can feel a second heart beating. I’m fairly sure it belongs to him. That’s not actually why we came here, but we could do with a first aid kit if you’ve got one handy.”
Despite whatever he might be feeling, Kit doesn’t hesitate to gesture us through to the kitchen.
I’m momentarily distracted by the line of incredibly shiny mirrors sitting on his bookshelf that weren’t here the last time I was.
But I push down my urge to stroke them, scrunching my nose at Kit’s knowing smirk as he sees exactly where my attention has landed.
He pulls out an industrial-sized first aid kit from under the kitchen sink and thwaps it onto the table, gesturing for the stranger to take a seat.
I tug the sealskin from beneath my coat and place it on the back of a chair before turning to the stranger and inspecting his cuts. Kit eyes my skin, his eyebrows all but disappearing into the thick, dark curls that tumble artfully across his forehead.
“So, your mate, eh?”
I carefully dab at the nasty cuts on the stranger’s wrist. “Is there a way of checking? A test or a swab or something we could do to check that I’ve not suddenly developed a heart condition?”
Humming under his breath for a moment, Kit then leans down and presses his ear to the stranger’s chest. “Two heartbeats.” He shrugs. “Can you, uh, feel anything different about him?”
“Like I’d met him before or known him in a previous life?” I ask, then give a slight nod. “But that’s not too different from how I felt when I first met you.”
Kit’s smile is instantaneous and it makes my stomach flip over. “Me too, sweetheart. Me too.” He glances at the stranger. “Is it the same for you?”
When he looks at Kit blankly, I continue to clean the cuts before adding a witch-made salve that boasts that it can help to heal broken flesh.
“I don’t think he can understand you,” I explain. “He seems to understand Valmorian, and I’m pretty sure he can’t speak at all.”
“Right.” Kit nods a few times. “Does he at least have a name?”
“I would think so,” I reply. “I just don’t know it.”
Turning back to the stranger, I’m pleased to see the lacerations are already knitting themselves back together.
“What’s your name?” I ask him in Valmorian.
The stranger holds his hand out while I stare at it with a confused frown. He then gently tugs my hand toward him, tracing squiggles onto my palm. I frown, glancing at his face as he continues to nod down at my hand until I pay attention to what shapes those lines are forming.
My cheeks flush at the intimacy of a stranger cupping my hand and tracing shapes onto the delicate skin of my palm. I’m not used to soft touches and gentle looks. In general, there’s not a lot of room for softness in my life.
Which sounds horribly sad now that I think about it.
As he continues to keep up the slow strokes of his finger on my arm, I slowly cotton on to the fact he’s marking a pattern.
Not just any pattern, either.
Words.
I’m less familiar with Valmorian written down than spoken, so I have to focus on the sensation of his soft fingertip as he repeats the same motion over and over.
“Hello. I’m Aster,” I repeat, grinning down at him as his face lights up in excitement. “You look beautiful with your hair like that.”
Oh.
My free hand goes self-consciously to the mess of tangles around my shoulders and upper back, and I let out a little snort of disbelief that this is the first thing he’d choose to say to me. “You charmer.”
He grins up at me, eyes sparkling.
“Are you from Valmoria?” I ask.
“I grew up close to it,” he replies. “My mother was from there.”
Huh, so did I. “And did you used to speak to her like this? By writing on her skin?”
Another head shake and he spells out a more complex sentence that takes me three attempts before I can get it all.
“You weren’t always this way?” I repeat. “How do you mean? You weren’t born without the ability to speak?”
He gives a single nod, his amber eyes boring into mine before scanning my face as though he’s cataloguing my features.
“Someone did this to you?” I ask, sharing a horrified look with Kit and Frannie before returning my focus to Aster.
He nods again, and my stomach bottoms out in horror.
“Who would do something like that?” Frannie mutters.
And what have I got us involved in?
Kit clears his throat, giving me a strange look I can’t read. “And this is not the thing you need help with...?”
Frannie snorts from where she’s rooting through Kit’s cupboards, looking at his collection of tea.
“So you’re here because—”
I quickly fill him in on the events of last night while Kit slumps into the seat beside me.
“So, I want you to look after my skin for me,” I say. “Just for a few days, until we see if that guy comes back and starts causing trouble.”
That sends Kit off into another fit of blinking. I don’t think it’s lost on him exactly how big a deal it would be for me to leave my skin with him. It’s a bit like carving out my heart and giving it to him for safekeeping.
My mother is no doubt screaming at me from the other side of the world, telling me I’m being the biggest idiot.
But right now, keeping my skin with me is the bigger risk.
I pick it up and hesitate for just a moment before holding it out for Kit to take.
“You’re sure?” His dark eyes bore into mine, and my stomach tightens.
Nodding tightly, I thrust my skin at him again. The moment he touches it, a blast of raw sensation hits me.
Kit sucks in a sharp breath, his eyes boring into mine.
Thu-thud. Thu-thud. Thu-thud.
It seems a third heartbeat has joined the party, and it’s pounding away just as hard as one of the others.
“Reva,” Kit croaks. He glances from my face to the skin he’s cradling in his arms like it’s something precious. He then rolls up his sleeve, revealing a small circular tattoo etched in gold on his forearm.
“You marked me,” he says in a low voice. Then his face breaks into the most unexpected grin. “A mate mark.”
My legs turn to jelly and I’d be a heap on the floor if I wasn’t already sitting down.
Have the two of us never touched before? I try to think back to handshakes or backslaps, or even hugs, but I can’t think of where we might have. Kit’s always been the perfect, respectful gentleman.
“I—” I shake my head. “What in the name of the Mother Ocean is happening here?”
“He touched your skin,” Frannie says with a thoughtful hum. “Is that how your kind form mate bonds, do you think?”
“I have no idea,” I reply. “It’s not something my mother ever talked about.”
And it’s not as though there are many of my kind milling about to ask them questions. If other selkies are anything like my mother, they wouldn’t exactly be forthcoming with their experiences, either.
“Maybe we should test it out,” I joke weakly.
“No, no, no.” Frannie shakes her head, holding her hands up, palms out. “I’m a one-ogre kind of girl. No offence, Ree, you know I love you, but I’m not into whatever messy thing’s going on here.”
Kit stares down at my skin in his hands, blinking until the glazed look fades from his eyes. He then gives a decisive nod, disappearing and then reappearing with a heavy wooden chest tucked under his arm.
Under my supervision, he carefully lays my skin inside the chest and flips the lid, fastening it with an ancient-looking iron lock that’s covered in unfamiliar sigils.
“It’s cursed,” he announces once my skin is already locked away. “No one can open it apart from you or me, or they risk the curse passing onto them.” Plucking a small, dull metallic key from somewhere, he hands it over to me.
“But Noush will be all right? My skin won’t get cursed from being locked inside there, will it?”
He gives me a mock affronted look and gently wraps my fingers around the key.
“Of course not. Now, I’ll put the chest in a safe place and then we can see what we can find out about mate bonds.
I’m sure I have something in my collection that must mention them.
We’ll sit, drink tea, and do some research. How does that sound?”
“Good,” I croak with a nod. More than anything, I need a moment to process what’s happening here.
Within ten minutes, Frannie’s made a pot of tea and Kit is poring over a book on mate marks that he just happened to have in his collection while I sit quietly, staring blindly at the tabletop.
This is not how I was expecting my day to go.
Another half an hour passes, and the cup of tea seems to soothe something inside me.
There’s no use panicking yet, not when Kit might be mistaken. Maybe I was confused by Aster touching my skin too, and I’ve got this entire situation twisted. It might—
“Here.”
Kit leans over the table toward me, tapping the open book. But the pages aren’t what catches my attention. His robe gapes open, revealing a slither of chiselled chest I can’t seem to drag my eyes from.
“I was right. They’re mate marks, see?” He rolls up his sleeve again and then gestures for Aster to do the same thing.
The two of them reveal their forearms. Aster’s wrists are covered in the thick bandage I tied for him, while Kit’s have smudges of ink all over them.
Both are wearing identical marks. A faded circle of gold, almost like a coin. Frannie joins me as I peer down at them both and see something I hadn’t noticed the first time Kit showed me. Probably because I got distracted by the three heartbeats pounding out of synch inside my chest.
“Is that... a seal’s face?”
“In cases where multiple bonds form, such as in species whose population has remained low, the bond mark typically forms in a way that’s reflective of the central bond member,” Kit reads.
“The mark starts off faded, but as the bond is accepted and strengthened, the mark and connection will reflect that.”
I can’t help but snort. It’s not just any seal etched into their skin. That’s the same face that peers back at me when Noush checks herself out in a rock pool.
She’s going to be insufferable when she finds out both men have her face tattooed into their skin.
“It’s definitely a mate mark, then?” Frannie asks, then shrugs as Kit aims a glare at her. “I’ve never seen one before either. We ogres are prolific breeders, but we’re not the kind of people fate shines down upon.”
“As I understand it, it’s more common in the shifter community,” Kit replies. “In the same way that true albatrosses mate for life, their magical counterparts do the same.”
“Seals don’t,” I reply. “The males breed with plenty of females, not the other way around. Some of them have harems, as I understand it.”
“Well then, maybe you take after male seals,” Frannie replies with a smirk.
“You’re not a seal, though,” Kit replies. “You’re something very rare instead, so maybe it’s an evolutionary thing—”
“You mean my kind would be less likely to die out if we have a harem of fierce, strong males to protect us?” I snort again but quickly lapse into silence.
In a way that would make sense. The way my mother lived her life wasn’t exactly conducive to producing plenty of pups. I was her little accident, one that she was more than happy to shove out of the nest as early as she could. For all she knows, I wound up as soup in a sorcerer’s ritual years ago.
It’s not how I’d want to bring up any pups of my own, although I’ve never been in a position to think much about it.
It’s still not something that’s on my horizon, despite suddenly having two males magically bonded to me.
One’s a total stranger I have a million questions for, who also looks like he might pass out at any moment. And the other is Kit, my friend and sometimes colleague. I’ve known him for a couple of years, and while I found him attractive, I never let myself think of us as anything more than friends.
Now things have turned on their head, it’s going to take me a minute to adjust.
I reach out to tug the book in Kit’s hands closer so I can glean something... anything, really, about mate bonds. Kit keeps his hand on it, smirking at me when it goes nowhere.
“To answer your question—” He glances up at Frannie for just a moment before returning his focus to me. “I can feel Reva’s heart banging away inside my chest, so I’m pretty sure you’re stuck with me, sweetheart.”