She slowly exhaled. “I know why you say that,” she said.
I grasped the wheel and turned toward the lake. “What?”
“Say that you’re sorry. You say it because you're huge and strong and expecting everyone who sees you to run away like terrified toddlers.”
She was correct.
“You expect me to run away the first moment you accidently slip your self-imposed rules for how a mundane man is supposed to be.”
She was correct about that, too. I knew how I needed to act.
“Not your rules about how a man should act—those are great, by the way. You’re what I hope Jax grows up to be.”
“Jax’s upbringing isn’t up to me,” I said.
“Yes, it is. You’re a part of his life. So are Arne Odinsson and Magnus Freyrsson. Lennart Thorsson too, now that he’s Jax’s mate’s soon-to-be stepdad.”
This time I did glance at her.
“Seer, remember? Some things are so obvious I don’t need my stone to spell them out for me.”
And what did that mean for us? Me? I didn’t ask. I kept my mouth shut. No need to be desperate.
“Your rules for action aren’t the problem, Frank. It’s your rules for being.”
I had one set of rules. “Action and being are the same thing,” I said.
Ellie returned to staring at the road. “Not when you’re being for the sake of others.”
“Still the same thing,” I said as I turned off onto the small service road that led into the lake’s peninsula. This way, I could park close to the cottage and out of sight of my cabin, so as not to confuse Maura into thinking I was home.
“The month you spent trying to break my concealments? I spent that time wishing for an excuse not to miss you. To be over you and to be okay and maybe somehow force the cottage to take me somewhere I wouldn’t see you every day. Because I did, Frank. I saw you with the kids and the wolves and the elves. I took pictures of you hoping I’d find something in the layers of your life that told me to stay away.” She shrugged. “Mostly that’s why I took pictures.”
She’d been nearby the entire time I was looking for a way through. But I knew that. We’d crossed paths several times. Each time I’d apologize for not remembering and promise to do better. Then she’d cry.
I parked in a small clearing closer to her cottage than to my cabin. “Mostly?”
“I like taking pictures of you.” She tipped her head to the side. “You’re big and handsome and exactly what I want.”
I wasn’t. How could I be? I was the stitched-together son of a mad scientist. I was forged from the parts of others. “Me” wasn’t a singularity the way it was for a man born. And I certainly was not handsome.
She shook her head as she pulled the door handle. “I love you, Frank Victorsson,” she said. Then she was gone, out the door, walking toward a cottage I didn’t know—nor could I explain—any better than my own self.
The dichotomy of threat returned to my gut. My mate loves me swirled with My mate walked away.
And once again, I had no idea what to do.
Chapter 12
“Ellie!” I followed her through the trees toward the cottage.
The white pompom on her yellow hat bounced along like a snowball in the air, out ahead, about ten paces up the trail.
“Ellie!” I called again.
She stopped next to a huge, crooked cedar. The tree leaned a little more toward the lake with each storm but it continued to stand. It had its ways, the tree, and it did just fine.
We were under an umbrella of melting snow and the occasional drip hit the ice with more of a splot than anything twinkling or angelic. At least the mate magic had calmed down and wasn’t sparking around my hands anymore.
“Ellie,” Two paces away, maybe three, and I reached out.
She vanished. Gone. No signs. No footprints. Nothing, as if the cottage had called her back. Except we were a good five to six hours from sunset.
“Ellie!” I roared. The cottage was just up ahead, closer to the lake and behind the thicker stand. If the cottage closed, I still had a moment. I could still—
My mate magic flared up around me like one of the firenadoes Ellie had seen in Australia. I stopped and thrust out my hands as if to hold off ghosts as the flare coiled around me, then outward in little arms to the spot where Ellie should have been.
She hadn’t vanished. I felt her—the mate magic felt her—but she was just out of reach as if she’d rounded a corner. I knew she was nearby but I couldn’t see to touch.
My screaming racoon? He was back. But this time, he was screaming because he’d already ridden the raft over the falls and his calm river downstream had become a black hole.
I was lost again. Lost in my own shock and fear, and my own navigation of the chaos. Lost in need and desire because even though I thought I’d trained myself to not let my emotions flow easily—that I’d added enough locks and dams to even out those rushing rapids—I wasn’t nearly as good at that part of living as I wanted to believe.
The need to hit a tree roared up my spine into my arm. A bellow rose in my throat.
The mate magic dust filled the cracks in my control and were about to blast past my façade of civility.
Because that’s what it was. A façade. Yes, I had my ways of living, my code, but deep inside I was still that screaming child in a monster’s body who awoke in my father’s lab. Still that trauma. Still that pain.
Circumstances can be transcended, but they do not go away.
What was worse? The fact that I understood I was breaking apart, or the actual breaking? The watching myself implode, or the imploding? All because the mate magic swirling around my body carried a need as strong as breathing
