Chapter Eighty-Seven Well Worth the Mate
For a moment, I’m too shocked to do anything but stare at Jude in awe. He must feel the same way—in fact, I know he feels the same way, since I can sense it deep inside myself. Also, he’s gazing right back at me with the same awestruck look I’m sure I have on my face.
“Clementine,” he whispers. “Did we just…”
“Did you just what?” Luis asks, poking his head out from under the table to check out what’s going on. When we don’t answer, he turns to the others. “Did they just what?”
I ignore him because right now I have something much more important to do. “I think we did,” I whisper to Jude.
His whole face softens in that way I’ve only seen once before, in the dance hall. And then he reaches for me.
When he takes my hand, several of the nightmares on his skin crawl off of him and straight up my arms.
Jude tries to grab them back in alarm, but something tells me I have nothing to be worried about, so I shake my head at him. “Just wait.”
We watch—Jude a lot more warily than I—as they make their way up my forearm to my biceps. They don’t settle on my skin like they do with him, but they also don’t try to arrow inside me like they did with some of the others.
Instead, they wrap themselves around me like a hug, spinning and twirling until they find their perfect spot.
Jude’s eyes go wide as he watches the whole thing unfold. Once they finally settle, he murmurs, “They can’t hurt you anymore.”
“I don’t think they want to hurt me,” I counter, and I realize that I’m leaning into him. That just his presence alone is a magnet I have no desire to resist.
“Holy shit,” Luis says as he finally figures out what just happened. “You’re mated!”
“We’re mated,” I agree.
“That’s totally badass,” Mozart breathes, her eyes wide and starry. I recognize it because I feel the same way.
And though we’re in the middle of an important, save-our-asses activity, we take a second to accept congratulations anyway. Because a moment like this only happens once in a lifetime, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
Remy’s the last one to congratulate me, and when he leans in for a hug, he murmurs, “See, Kumquat? I told you you were going to be just fine.”
“You knew?” I ask, surprised.
But he just shrugs in that mysterious way he has as he steps away.
I narrow my eyes at him, wishing that I could see useful things about the future like he obviously does, instead of this bizarre past, present, and future thing I’ve got going on.
What good does it do me to have to figure out who is with me in the present day and who in the room is actually from the past or future? Like the witch making her potions over— I freeze as I realize the witch is gone.
Which isn’t a big deal, in and of itself, but so is the hotel employee putting jam on the shelves. Not to mention the teen vamp from the future who likes to use this as a make-out spot. They’re all gone.
I turn back to Jude, who smiles at me as he goes back to sorting nightmares. There’s only one of him—but there’s only ever been one of him. Not to be sappy, but I can’t help wondering if it’s because he’s my mate. He’s my past, my present, and now my future in a way that no one else is or ever will be.
He hands me several more nightmares, and I slide them up my other arm as I turn to look at Luis. And nope. He’s still got three people—baby Luis, present Luis, and a very dim future Luis. For a second, I flash back to that moment at the dorm, when I saw him bleeding out from that chest wound. But I tamp it down, block it out. Because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that right at the moment, so I have to let it go.
“You okay?” Jude asks as he pulls two more nightmares out of the tapestry and passes them to me.
I loop them around my biceps as I answer, “Yeah. I’m actually really good.”
After the last few days—the last few years—it’s a strange feeling. But it’s a nice one.
A couple of minutes later, Jude hands me close to a dozen more nightmares—now that he’s been doing it for a while, he’s really getting the hang of it. But the faster he goes, the faster I run out of room on my body, too.
But then I remember the idea I had earlier, right before the mating bond kicked in. I don’t have a clue if it will work or not, but considering how well the nightmares are currently responding to me, I’m inclined to try.
I turn back to Jude and closely watch what he’s doing to unravel the tapestry. After I have a pretty good handle on it, I take two of the nightmares he’s given me and hang them in the air in front of me. And do my best to weave them together.
They bind to each other, but it’s not easy, and it’s definitely not pretty.
“What are you doing?” Mozart asks, getting close enough to watch but still leaving a wide gap between her and the nightmares.
“We’re running out of space. I’m trying to weave them back together—and doing a shit job of it.”
“Want some help?” Remy asks, moving close enough to actually touch the nightmares.
“I don’t know if they’ll respond to you,” I tell him.
“It’s worth a shot.” He waves a hand, and I watch in amazement as the two nightmares weave perfectly together.
“How’d you do that?” I ask, shocked. Even Jude pauses what he’s doing long enough to check out—and obviously approve of—Remy’s handiwork.
Remy shrugs. “Nightmares and dreams exist outside of time,” he explains. “So people who can exist in the spaces between time tend to be able to handle them a lot more easily than people who don’t.”
“Is that what you do? Exist in the spaces between time?”
He grins. “That’s what we do, Clementine. It’s not just me.”
“Yeah, well, I think I’m going to have to disagree considering you can weave nightmares a hell of a lot better than me.”
“Maybe.” He reaches to take a nightmare from Jude, but in what may be the strangest thing I’ve seen today—which is saying something—it literally races away from him so fast that it ends up slamming into the wall across from us. “Or maybe we just have different roles to play here.”
He nods to the two strands he’s already woven together. “Pop a couple more nightmares up here and let’s see what we can do.”
I do as he asks, then watch in astonishment as he weaves them together as easily and better than any tapestry artist. But when Jude moves to hand him several more nightmares, they run away from him and circle me instead.
Remy shoots me an I told you so look as I grab them and hand them to him.
“What picture are you weaving?” Izzy asks from where she’s keeping a safe distance—whether from Remy or the nightmares, I’m not sure.
“I’m not,” he answers. “It’s doing that itself.”
“You’re not making the picture?” I ask, surprised.
“I’m a time wizard, not an artist.”
His answer only makes me more curious, because it reminds me of what the tapestry could do before it broke. I’ve never seen anything that could change pictures at whim like that.
“Hey!” Mozart says suddenly. I glance her way and realize she looks completely relieved. “That creepy feeling I’ve had since we got here is gone.”
“What creepy feeling?” Simon asks, looking confused.
“Like someone’s walking on my grave.” She shudders. “Gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
“There was a teenage vamp in here for a while,” I tell her. “He’s been bringing a different girl here every five minutes since we showed up. You’re pretty much standing on his favorite make-out spot.”
She jumps about ten feet to the left. “What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I take a couple of bright-turquoise nightmares from Jude and pass them through to Remy, who adds them to the tapestry. For the first time, I understand why the chricklers are so many different colors. Because every nightmare is a different hue.
I want to ask Jude what some of the really fun-colored nightmares are. I imagine they’re the milder ones—walking out of the house with no pants on or being attacked by a chipmunk—but I’m afraid he’ll tell me it’s the opposite, and I don’t want him to ruin it for me.
So I take a yellow one and slide it over to Remy, who weaves it with a pink one that’s already in the tapestry as I answer Mozart’s question.
“Because it’s crowded in here and there’s nowhere else you could have gone. Plus, he disappeared a little while ago, so I figured you were solid.”
“How long ago was that?” Remy asks.
I take several more nightmares from Jude and wrap them around my waist as my arms are getting full. “A few minutes ago, I guess.”
He raises a brow. “How many minutes ago?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
He doesn’t answer, just watches me steadily. And then it hits me. “You think Jude’s and my mating—” It’s still so new that I trip a little over the word. “You think that somehow did something?”
Again, he doesn’t answer, just takes the black-and-green nightmares I hand him and weaves them into the tapestry.
“I don’t know, Remy. That’s pretty egotistical, isn’t it? Thinking our relationship can affect time and space like that?” I ask as Jude hands me a beautiful scarlet-colored nightmare. “I mean, it’s important to us. But to the world? I don’t think—”
“I guess that depends on what your powers are, doesn’t it?” he interrupts, waving a hand at the tapestry he’s weaving. Instantly, the colors rearrange into a more pleasing array.
“I mean, Jude’s the Prince of Nightmares, so maybe what he does is important. But I’m just a manticore.”
“Do you know any other manticore who sees ghosts?” Remy shoots me a mild look as I hand him more nightmares. “Or who can see the past and the future the way that you can? Or who—”
“What are you trying to get at?” I ask, because I’m exhausted and have a bunch of nightmares draped all over me. While I really want to know what Remy thinks, I also want to get this show on the road.
“He’s trying to say that you’re not just a manticore,” Jude says, resting a comforting hand on my shoulder before going back to unraveling. “There’s something else going on with you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Remy lifts a brow, a wicked gleam in his forest-green eyes. “Remind me again, Clementine. Who’s your daddy?”
“What the fuck did you just say to her?” The nightmare Jude was in the middle of unraveling suddenly shoots across the room, sending everyone else into duck-and-dive mode. And just when we’d finally gotten Luis out from under the table…
Remy laughs, holding up a hand in a no-offense-meant gesture. “I’m just saying, your DNA comes from two different sources, Clementine. Half is manticore, half is…”