Page 9 of A Very Armitage Christmas
I had a mate to deal with.
That wiped the smile off my face.
***
We found Nate finishing up the wards around the pack house, adjusting a line of rock salt and muttering to himself. Ian made a beeline for him, with me, Jennifer, and the rest of the world dropping completely off his radar in a second.
I shook my head and kept walking. I’d never seen Ian so happy, and Nate was the best brother-in-law a guy could ask for, in spite of the weird passive-aggressive messages he wrote on all the pack house’s coffee mugs when he got pissy. Still, it was so damn strange to see Ian like that. He'd turned into a sap.
Then again, so had I.
And my mate wasn’t there. I’d expected him to be working on the wards with Nate, the both of them trying to one-up the other like usual.
I’d expected him to be pitching in to fix his own damn mistake.
Getting angry all over again wouldn’t help anything. But Iwasangry, and Arik fucking off to God knew where to sulk, or whatever he was doing, didn’t help. I’d seen the hard, closed-off look on his face when he and Nate and Ian showed up with the zombie, but even after eight months of living with him…yeah, I’d have been lying if I said I could interpret it. Nothing good, though.
I tuned in to the mate bond, trying to get a bead on his location.
Upstairs in the pack house, as far as I could tell. I followed the little tug of the bond into the house and up to the room Arik and I shared. It felt like a string tied somewhere inside my rib cage. Usually I loved it, that reminder that he and I couldn’t ever be separated, even when apart. That Arik was mine.
Right then it irritated me.
Arik wasn’t in the bedroom, but I could scent him, and I could feel the bond pulling us closer.
The bathroom, then. My anger spiked. Only my mate would slope off to take a fucking bath when everyone else had to spend the night killing the zombies he’d raised out of our fucking herb garden.
But when I opened the door, ready to shout at him, I didn’t find him in the bath.
Or at least, not taking a bath.
He’d shifted into his bobcat form, and he’d curled up in the bottom of the dry bathtub, with his nose tucked in and his tail wrapped over his face, with only his tufty ears poking out.
He looked miserable.
I loved his tufty ears. Fuck. That plus his obvious unhappiness nearly did me in.
But no. I was the fucking pack leader. I had zombies attacking my people — my responsibilities, every last one of them, from tough-as-nails Jennifer down to the new baby who’d been born three weeks before.
“Arik,” I said, trying to sound as stern as a pack leader ought to under the circumstances. “You can’t hide in the fucking bathtub while we clean up your mess.”
Literally. If nothing else, I needed him out of the bathtub so I could use the shower. Macheteing zombies had left me…yeah, I could smell myself.
One of his ears twitched, and he curled in on himself a little more tightly. His tail stayed over his eyes.
“Arik.” Nothing. I tried listening to the mate bond, hoping for some hint about what the hell I was dealing with here. Sometimes I could get his emotions through it, and occasionally even a whisper of his thoughts, when he’d opened himself up to me. The rest of the time, he kept his private feelings private, only letting me in on them when he chose to speak them aloud. I could live with that. I did live with it, every day, and hopefully for the rest of my life.
But right then…yeah, not so helpful. And he was locked down tighter than he’d ever been.
I wanted to yell. I wanted to shift too, into my much, much larger alpha wolf form, and pick him up by the nape of the neck like a kitten and shake him until he yowled.
If I’d been Ian and he’d been Nate, maybe I would have. But for all Arik’s bravado, and for all his ability to take care of himself — and he could be scary as hell — he was ten times as fragile as my twinky, whiny, one-hundred-percent human brother-in-law.
And I’d just killed Taft for the second time.
My fists unclenched as the light dawned, probably a little belatedly.
Arik had known the body he’d brought back to the pack house was one of Taft’s pack.
