Page 49 of Lost and Bound
And this wasn’t something an outsider should witness.
I turned away.
“Don’t go anywhere, Jared,” Calder said from behind me. Like I had anywhere to go, but it still surprised me. “Sit down. Have a sandwich. Arik’s going to get his shit together any second now.”
“Fuck off,” Arik murmured, sounding a little watery.
I turned back in time to see Calder give him a gentle cuff to the ear. “Watch it. Same rules, kid. Say whatever you want to those other assholes—”
“—but don’t cuss out the asshole who cooks you dinner and keeps a roof over your head,” Arik finished for him, with a soft little laugh. “Yeah. Only I made those sandwiches. And this is my roof now. So suck it up.” Arik ruined the effect by pressing his face back into Calder’s chest and wrapping him in a tight hug, squeezing him so hard his arm muscles went rigid. “I missed you so much.”
“Yeah, me too,” Calder said. “Come on. Let’s sit down. I’m starving. Tell me some of what you’ve been up to for the last fifteen years, shit. And tell Jared the rest of your plan to prove he’s him.”
And that was how I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor, with Arik on my left in the same pose and Calder sprawled on my right, and the giant plate of ham sandwiches on the floor in between us in easy reach of everyone, with Arik telling Calder tall tales of his adventures before he met Matt—tales that were a little too funny and a little too light on detail to be completely true, in my judgment. I thought he was probably hiding most of the worst of it, trying not to make Calder feel even guiltier than he did—but even the not-worst set my teeth on edge in some places.
The door opened ten minutes in, when we’d eaten about half of the sandwiches. Matt walked in and stopped, frozen and expressionless. And then his shoulders dropped, and he sighed.
“Figures,” he said. He shot Calder a wary look, and me an even warier one, but when he looked at Arik, his lips twitched up in a helpless smile.
Shit, my cousin was whipped. Good for Arik. And, as I glanced back at the mate in question…good for Matt, too, because the light in Arik’s eyes couldn’t be anything but love.
“Come sit down,” Arik said, patting the floor between him and me. “I saved you a sandwich.”
“Bullshit, you just hadn’t gotten to it yet,” Matt shot back, but he came over to our weird little picnic area anyway.
And hesitated. Because of me, no doubt.
“For fuck’s sake, sit down next to your cousin and chill the fuck out,” Arik said. “I told him first, because I hate it when people talk about me when I’m not around,” that said in a pointed tone, “but I was thinking about it on the drive. He’s probably him. If he isn’t him, physically anyway, then that piece of shit Hawthorne somehow transferred his spark from one body to another, which is, one, magic I want to get my fucking hands on, and two, way too much fucking trouble to bother with. Either way, maybe he’s physically a weird clone, but I doubt it. And mentally he’s almost certainly the same. So sit down and eat a goddamn sandwich.”
Matt sat down, his knee brushing mine, and ate a goddamn sandwich.
Calder shifted position a little, casually leaning so that his arm was behind me. His hand landed on the small of my back, and he massaged in slow circles, his fingers dipping under the waistband of my jeans.
When I took a deep breath, it went all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, unconstricted, for the first time since I could remember.
Chapter 13
Who Needs a Spleen, Anyway?
“Yep, definitely a missing spleen,” Arik said with—in my opinion, anyway—unnecessary satisfaction, taking his hands off of my bare torso and sitting back on his heels. “I think he took half your liver, too. That grew back,” he added in response to my look of horror.
“Is the spleen growing back too?” Nate asked, from his perch on a mossy log a few feet away from where I lay on the damp earth getting chillier by the second.
We’d come out to the woods to do Arik’s ‘examination,’ because he claimed the trees would help. That sounded nuts to me, but Nate hadn’t argued—and Nate argued with everything.
Arik turned and shot Nate a condescending, disgusted look down his nose. “Do you even know what a spleen is?”
“It’s an organ that—does—it’s important to—of course I know what it does!”
“No, you don’t. You don’t know what it is, where it is, or anything about it. I don’t know how a warlock can be so ignorant of basic anat—”
“You’re the healer, not me!” Nate had a finger raised, ready to shake it at Arik, and he’d sat straight up. Arik had his hands on his hips.
Christ, how did Matt and Ian live with these two?
“Who gives a shit what it does,” I hurried to interrupt, “and no, Nate, it doesn’t grow back. Right?” Because I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure about that myself. My liver had, though…but they did that? Okay, I had no fucking clue either.
“No, it doesn’t grow back,” Arik said with a put-upon sigh. “The liver regenerates, yes, but it’s the exception. Organs don’t just magically reappear, and yes, haha Nate, pun not intended, shut the fuck up. Even werewolves don’t grow things back that wouldn’t grow back in a human. They just do whatever healing’s possible a lot faster.”
