Page 15 of A Very Armitage Christmas
“Why aren’t you making fun of me for being such a heavy useless lump, or something?” I still sounded slurred, like I’d been drinking too much and hit my head on a telephone pole. Not that I’d done that before, or anything.
“Would it make you feel better?” Nate asked breathlessly, shifting his arm to get a better grip around my ribs.
Love still poured through the bond and through every point of contact between our bodies. It almost felt like it was healing my wounds a little, even though I didn’t think it worked that way. “You make me feel better.”
Nate made a muffled sound, and I tried to look down at his face. The motion lurched us both off-balance, and he had to dig his feet in and push me back upright. “Don’t fall down now, you heavy useless lump,” he said, his voice a little choked. “I can’t carry you.”
“I can, though.” Matt, loping toward us and meeting us halfway. “Heavy useless lumpis what I’m going to call you from now on, Ian.”
He wrapped an arm around me from the other side, actually holding me up, and the three of us made much better progress back toward the house.
“Everyone okay?” I asked.
“A few bites. Arik’s got it under control.” Pride in his mate glowed in every word.
With Matt’s support, I could look around without falling over, and I turned my head a little to take in the carnage. I could see why he’d be feeling proud of Arik. Maybe it’d all been the little shit’s fault in the first place, but whatever magic he’d come up with to end the problem had been incredibly effective. Zombies littered the ground everywhere, but — not a twitch. They were down for the count.
The fucking Santa had fallen into a deflated heap, with three dead zombies on top of it.
Fuckers.
Nate and Matt lowered me down by the side of the house, propping me up against it. Andy sat a few feet away, with Arik muttering and waving his tattooed hands over a nasty bite in his leg. Matt jogged off again after I gave him a nod, heading for a few of the pack who were limping our way.
And Nate settled down by my side, taking my hand and leaning his head on my shoulder. I rested my head on his, closing my eyes and inhaling the scent of his hair. He always smelled so good.
“I love you so much,” Nate said quietly, without even a hint of his usual sarcastic edge. “So, so much. Please don’t be stupid next time. I need you around to put up the rest of the Christmas decorations. I can’t reach the higher branches on those trees out front.”
His curls tickled my cheek and lips, and his hand fit so perfectly in mine. “I love you even more. So I’ll always be stupid if I’m protecting you. Sorry.”
Nate squeezed my hand.
He didn’t need to say anything else.
Chapter 5
Nate
“Okay, so this is why I hate necromancy.” I dropped my rake and desperately tried to scratch my nose with the side of my arm.Fuck. I couldn’t touch my face, not after touching…everything I’d just touched. Even with gardening gloves, I felt tainted. “I mean, I could make a long, long list of everything I hate about necromancy. The stench, and the body parts, and the body parts that smell incredibly fucking bad, and did I mention —”
“Yes, you mentioned,” Arik snapped, pausing in raking up bits of bone to glare at me. “More than once. Every fucking second we’ve been out here working, in fact.”
He hadn’t even tried to get out of clean-up duty, maybe — for once — realizing he’d acted like a little shit and needed to make up for it. The bigger, stronger members of the pack had loaded the bodies up, taking a few trips with several old pick-up trucks to ferry them back to the cemetery they’d crawled out of. They were still working on that, leaving me and Arik to scoop up the bits that’d fallen off. We had an enormous trash barrel, two rakes, and a mutually bad attitude to work with.
It wasn’t the most efficient clean-up operation ever, honestly.
“It bears repeating,” I growled back. “Keep in mind, I could go inside and bake Christmas pies and leave you out here to do this alone, and no one would blame me. Not even Matthew.”
Arik’s cheekbones flushed brick-red, and he scraped his rake over a pile of small zombie bits with more force than strictly necessary.
Tempting as it was to ditch him, get inside out of the just-below-freezing weather, and sit down with a hot cup of coffee, I sighed and got a good grip on my rake too. Ian and Matthew were off hauling large zombie bits. The least I could do was haul small zombie bits.
Was that some kind of larger metaphor for our relationship? Was it even a metaphor, seeing as this wasn’t the first time, or even the second, that we’d had to get rid of a bunch of bodies together?
Something to ponder while I tried to scrape stray rotting toes out of the mud.
And ifthatwas some kind of metaphor for my life, then even coffee couldn’t help me.
Arik and I both looked up at the sound of a car engine coming down the long drive from the road.
