Page 29 of Captive Mate
It was weird, because that wasn’t how it’d worked before. I was good at washing that man right out of my hair, to grossly misuse a really awesome musical number. After what Parker had done to me, I’d felt more lingering disgust over that shaman watching than over Parker himself. Yeah, I was furious, and yeah, I wanted revenge and would never forget how it felt — but I didn’t feel dirty. Once I washed enough to get his lingering scent off of me, I was clean. His touch couldn’t stain me. He didn’t have that power.
Matthew apparently did. I didn’t feel dirty or tainted. But I felt different, changed, like everyone would be able to look at me and know I belonged to an alpha. Like I would know, even if no one else could see it.
Any shifter who came within ten yards of me would know, anyway. One shower wasn’t going to remove the scent of that much come.
I lingered in the shower, but at last I had to get out and deal with reality. The bathroom was pretty spartan — not surprising, since Matthew didn’t strike me as someone who wasted time on the small luxuries of life; I mean, the guy drove a used Prius, he clearly didn’t have his priorities straight — but I managed to find a clean towel in a cabinet, a new toothbrush in a drawer, and some Q-tips in a small cup on the pitted blue-tiled countertop by the sink.
Clean ears. Fuck. Clean ears were highly underrated.
I stepped out into the bedroom with the towel wrapped around my waist. Matthew was still snoring. I stood and stared down at him for long minutes. Gods, he was handsome. And strong. And broad and tall and muscled, and everything an alpha ought to be. I could kill him here and now. Nate probably didn’t realize how skilled I was at using the little trickle of magic he'd left me. He thought I couldn’t get away with anything, what with a guard definitely sitting outside the room listening.
And they’d had quite a show. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I wouldn’t have cared so much if whoever it was had been listening to Matthew force himself on me; that would’ve been par for the course. But they’d heard me moaning like a slut. And that — well, that wasprivate.
Anyway, I could definitely get away with killing him. A tiny bit of magic to make sure he didn’t wake up, and then slit his carotid artery with one of my claws. Quick and easy. It’d take a little work to keep the wound open until he bled out, given his enhanced alpha healing. The sheets and mattress would be soaked. Maybe his dark blue eyes would flicker open and fix, glazed and empty of everything that made him who he was. He’d be choking and gurgling and…
Bile rose up in my esophagus, and I gagged and fled for the bathroom again.
I spat a mouthful of slime into the sink and then straightened, wiping away some of the steam to look at myself in the mirror over the sink. Dark bags under my bloodshot green eyes, like Christmas gone grotesquely wrong. Pale, sunken cheeks, lips even fuller than usual and swollen from Matthew’s kisses, and lank hair hanging in damp blond clumps.
Well. If I’d wondered whether Matthew really wanted me or only wanted me because of the spell, that question had been answered.
I brushed my teeth again and went back to the bedroom, carefully ignoring Matthew’s prone form — though I listened for his soft snores, now weirdly paranoid that he was going to die just from my thinking about it.
Nate’s jeans were beyond disgusting after being grubbed around in a mixture of dirt, tree detritus, and Matthew’s blood, so I snagged a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt out of a drawer in Matthew’s dresser. The clothes hung on me like sheets on a scarecrow. I did what I could with rolling and tucking, and then I bit the bullet and looked at Matthew again.
I had to decide what to do. I couldn’t kill him. Obviously, since I’d gotten all squeamish and been turned into an idiot by this stupid fucking spell I’d put on us, that was off the table. Also, why go to the trouble of healing him earlier only to kill him now? I was sure I could come up with two or three more justifications, but those would do.
That left — what? Lie down and go to sleep myself and wait for whatever happened tomorrow? The past twenty-four hours had been an epic shitshow, and I knew Parker wasn’t just going to give up and go away.
Particularly since he’d shown up with the Kimballs in tow. After losing their pack shaman and their pack leader in the same night, the Kimballs weren’t going to give up their feud with the Armitage pack. They’d be out for revenge. Between their anger and Parker’s determination to get me back, the Armitage territory was going to be under siege. Hopefully Ian was on the case, but he struck me as less of an investigator and more of an instigator. I wasn’t brimming with confidence.
So: go to bed, deal with whatever Matthew did when he woke up, deal with Ian and Nate and the pack council…terror warred with anticipatory exhaustion warred with anger. But what other choice did I have? I couldn’t leave. The spell was still binding me to Matthew, and I’d get sick myself, given that my magic was low enough to leave me vulnerable until I got far enough away, or Nate got distracted enough, for the draining spell to break.
Unless I took the spell off of him andthenleft.
My heart gave a stagger and lurch and then started to pound triple-time.
Unless I took the spell off of him.
I glanced sideways at the open window, a square of blackness with the whole world right beyond it. There were Armitage pack members patrolling the woods out there, I had no doubt. And by now, Nate would’ve put wards on the territory boundaries.
But they didn’t know my shifted form, they didn’t know my real scent, and I was quick and clever and quiet in a way no wolf could ever match or anticipate.
It all depended on whether or not I could draw enough magic to undo the spell without alerting Nate.
Good thing I liked a challenge.
I perched on the edge of the bed, my hip pressing against Matthew’s thigh. The contact was grounding in ways I didn’t want to think about, especially when I was about to give it up permanently. My heart gave another painful lurch, but I ignored it, and I gingerly laid one hand flat on his chest. His heart thumped under my palm, and I spread my fingers, feeling the texture of his chest hair through the thin cotton of his white t-shirt, feeling the banked power of his muscles. I closed my eyes and went inward.
The strand of spell that bound us was twisted and frayed, damaged by my time spent without using magic to maintain it. No wonder it was so fucked-up, to use what any shaman would have recognized as a technical term. Undoing it wasn’t terribly complicated, but it would take a steady, slow, measured application of magic, and if I ran out of reserves before I finished? Well, fucked-up would be worlds better than what would happen then. We could both go insane, or both die. Or some fun combination. We could end up bound even more tightly than we were now.
Examining my own store of magic wasn’t easy without pulling on Nate’s draining spell, but I did it carefully and ran some calculations.
I could do it. I was sure I could do it. And if I failed at this, after all the failures I’d stacked on top of each other over the past weeks, well — I might as well just give up and go climb on Parker’s knot, since it would prove I wasn’t any fucking good for anything else.
Unraveling the spell between us wasn’t too difficult, though it took a little while. I tried not to remember that Nate or Ian could walk through the door at any moment; I couldn’t let my concentration slip. Once the untwisting was done, I started to gently detach the strands from me and from Matthew, one at a time, and alternating so that the remains of the spell wouldn’t go out of balance and snap in one direction or the other. First me, then Matthew. Then me, then — not Matthew, because the strand linking his emotions to mine was fuckingstuck. I tugged a little harder. Matthew stirred and let out a small pained sound. Fuck. I fed a little more of my rapidly dwindling magic into him to keep him quiet. Sweat beaded on my hairline and gathered in the small of my back. My clammy hand was leaving a damp patch on his shirt.
At last it came free, and then the rest followed in quick succession. The spell withered in my inner sight, shriveled, and blew away like dirt on the wind, vanishing into nothingness.
