Shadow Of A Mate (7 page)

Jay’s movement became more frenzied and Kyle roared until he ran out of breath as Jay swooped down and bit him, teeth clamping on to his neck. He came hard and fast, shooting inside Jay but his cock didn’t deflate, he was still hard and aching.

Kyle rolled them again, flipping their positions so Jay was back on the bottom and thrust through his orgasm, blind to anything but his pleasure and giving Jay the same rush. With Jay’s teeth in his neck, he pounded into his mate until Jay pulled him down on top on him and hot liquid splashed over his chest.

Gasping for breath, Jay released his bite, but Kyle stole it again in a kiss. He teased his tongue along Jay’s purring at the familiar taste. He slowed his thrusts until he rocked gently against Jay.

Despite just coming Jay stayed as erect as him. Jay bucked against him and sighed into their kiss. It was like coming home.

Unfortunately breathing required air and the kiss had to end. Kyle’s eyes fluttered open and his gaze connected with Jay’s. He was never one for poetry and pretty words, Jay was much better at that than him, but right then he was inspired enough to write a sonnet. Jay was like the sun and Kyle just revolved around him, basking in his warmth and beauty.

He kept the slow rhythm as sweat ran down his back and hair clung to his face. He stared down at Jay in wonder as his mate flung his head back and arched beneath him. He still couldn’t believe how lucky he was. Jay was his.

They came together this time, crying out and locking stares. They saw each other at their most vulnerable, most open, and Kyle sighed as the mate bond throbbed with energy, tying them closer together as it fed on their emotions.

The high and afterglow faded far too soon. His thoughts turned dark as he remembered the reality awaiting him. The reality where Jay was dying, leaving him again.

No. No witch was going to take this from him.

“Kyle?” The note of worry in Jay’s voice was at odds with the relaxed, cuddly state Jay was in, running slow caresses over Kyle’s back.

He didn’t answer Jay, simply shook his head and tried to dispel the bleak voice in the back of his mind. No matter how hard he concentrated on the here and now, something kept dragging him back to the fact that this was a dream.

“Kyle, stay with me. Please. Don’t go, not yet.” Jay grabbed at him, but Kyle was swept away in a river of doubt and fear. He furiously tried to cling on to Jay, but his hands slipped right through Jay’s body like smoke.

Kyle groaned as he felt someone shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, we’re getting ready to descend.” Tryst’s voice in his ear didn’t improve his mood. He blinked, looking around to find himself back on the plane, far away from Jay.

All he wanted to do was go back to sleep and be with Jay again. He had no idea if any of it was real, but that didn’t matter. Nothing could touch them or hurt them in a dream, Jay was safe. Wasn’t he?

So why did he seem so scared when Kyle left?

The mate bond was a mystical thing not many people understood and apart from when Jay had saved him from a hunter it had remained stubbornly quiet. He’d put it down to them being young and not having had time to really connect with a crisis around every corner.

That it pulsed like a living thing now in his chest contradicted that.

If the bond was so vibrant then as far as Kyle knew either he or Jay must have reached out to it and used it as a bridge. He knew he hadn’t for fear the feedback would hurt Jay.

So Jay must have.

Tentatively he reached up to his neck, scared to hope.

But when his fingers drifted across indented, tender skin, he could have wept.

Jay was alive. Aware.

Kyle closed his eyes and traced his fingers over Jay’s claiming bite mark over and over again. Every time he touched it, the bond vibrated happily.

“Holy fuck.”

Mack’s gasp drove his attention out of the window to the landscape below and his relaxed, relieved moment of happiness disintegrated. He’d been hoping Logan’s map was wrong or exaggerated. They were still high enough that they couldn’t make out details of the landscape below, but the general layout, green land and blue water and so on could still be discerned.

“Where exactly are we heading?” Tryst sounded like he could already guess, but needed confirmation. Kyle wanted to know as well. The ground below looked like it would be challenging at the best of times, let alone under a tight timeframe.

Logan glanced out of the window briefly before standing up and heading to Tryst’s chair, leaning over the leopard to point out of that window instead. “We have to land there on the outer part of the city because there are no other secured areas to do it where we wouldn’t be detected and probably arrested or end up victim to one of mother’s traps. The swampy area there, next to the beige stretch of land is the first part we need to get through. Mother spelled everywhere around her home for miles and miles so she’d never be caught vulnerable.”

Logan paused, letting them all soak that in and Kyle stared at the area Logan had described. “A few people have tried to get to her before now. No one made it through the swamp.”

“How can she spell a desert, swamp and jungle next to the city without anyone noticing?” Mack’s nose scrunched up. Leopard shifters weren’t fond of deserts.

“You grease the right people’s palms and you can get away with anything. I think the mayor is blaming it on global warming.” Logan frowned and pointed out another part that was coming into view as the plane ducked lower in its descent.

“And that’s the river with all sorts of magic nasties waiting in there. I remember one time a salesman somehow got through when she was renewing the wards and the magic was thin—it’s amazing what those guys will do for a commission—she fed him to her pet scaly monster. After that, she made a jungle of black trees and plants that sprout up out of the ground. It moves. Then there’s the river...at least I think it’s a river. It has a current, but it doesn’t go anywhere, only around the property.”

Kyle’s brain had reached overload point. This was getting more impossible the more informed they were. “Wait a minute. Your mother has a moat?”

Logan shrugged as if that was even remotely normal when Kyle glanced at the wolf. “What can I say, she likes the classics.”

Kyle looked out of the window. He could just about make out the cluster of dark tall jungle that Logan stated Katrianna’s house resided. Like Logan described, there was a ring of dark water surrounding a thick layer of dark, dangerous looking forest. Katrianna’s house was in there.

“You’ve got to be kidding me?”

There was no way they’d be able to get through all that and defeat Katrianna before the spell killed Jay.

“I never said this was going to be easy,” Logan told them darkly.

“Fuck easy, I was just hoping for possible,” Tryst spat, face pressed against the small aeroplane window.

The landing wheels finally touched down and Kyle watched with cool detachment as Merrick drove them into a hangar and
parked
the plane. The journey to even get to Katrianna was going to be much harder than he’d anticipated. But he wasn’t turning back.

This was his only hope of getting Jay back so any obstacle was either going to get out of his way or be mowed down and left trampled in his wake.

Mack and Logan were filling Rogo in on the area. The black lion shifter must have come out of the cockpit when they landed, no longer being needed to serve as a co-pilot. Mack was being his usual smartass self, joking that this was one of those medieval quests that turn into a great literary classic because everyone dies at the end.

Kyle didn’t find it funny this time. It was too close to the bone.

“If you don’t want to come, stay here,” he said harshly, getting up and grabbing one of the backpacks of provisions that had been in the truck with Rogo. He needed to get out of here.

Silence was his only answer as he made his way to the exit and popped the door. He shoved the heavy flap open and jumped out without waiting for the airport attendants to bring over the small staircase to disembark.

He was standing outside, dragging in air like a drowning man when Tryst joined him. “That was a pretty shitty thing to say, Kyle.”

Kyle’s breath escaped him in a sigh. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not me you have to apologise to. Mack didn’t mean anything by it, he’s just scared. We all are. We’re scared of dying in some horrible, painful way—we’ve felt what that bitch’s green smoke does to people, Kyle—and we’re even more scared that we might fail and Jay...”

Tryst didn’t have to say anything else. And Kyle was thankful the beta didn’t.

“I know.” He couldn’t say anything else. Kyle knew all of that.

There was a hell of a lot of guilt attached to that knowledge though. Was he doing the right thing, dragging everyone out here when he couldn’t offer them a way back? Sure they had all volunteered, but did that make it okay?

Another fissure of guilt festered in his mind as he wondered if he’d been so focused on helping Nikko, being strong for his parents and for Kane that he’d closed off the bond between him and Jay that should have warned him about Jay being in trouble when Katrianna attacked.

“We know what we signed up for. Just because you’re juiced up and going loco doesn’t mean you’re on your own. It’s you, me and Mack against the world, remember?”

“I remember.” Kyle could really do with a hug, but even the thought of it ruffled his jaguar’s fur the wrong way.

Tryst touched his shoulder briefly.

It was as close as they could get safely while his new alpha powers were still up in the air. Surprisingly, no one had quizzed him on the plane about them, in fact that topic appeared to be being avoided rather avidly. He guessed they’d all steered clear after the way he’d almost gone after Logan in the truck.

Kyle didn’t have to turn around to know the others were getting off the plane. A three hundred and sixty degree awareness was always a good thing for a cat to have but since waking up and being enveloped in the bond there was a new level of ease around him he couldn’t explain. He still felt as if he were on a crates worth of energy drink and a bag of sugar but something was different.

“I dreamed of him,” he said quietly, not sure why he was telling Tryst this.

He was scared telling someone would make it not real.

Kyle touched the bite on his neck again, reaffirming that he wasn’t going crazy, that Jay did come to him in a dream but that it was still real.

“Was that after you passed out on the plane because of your senses being all out of whack?”

Kyle shot a surprised look at Tryst. “I may play the fool but I’m still a beta. It’s my job to know what’s wrong with my alpha. We didn’t know how to help, you didn’t want us to before, but we cleaned you up after you were out. You said Jay’s name once so we didn’t try and wake you.”

All traces of humour were gone and Kyle could see his beta was deadly serious.

“You did?” He’d wondered about that, there was no trace of the blood from his nosebleed.

Tryst nodded. “What kind of dream was it?”

“None of your business,” he rumbled, swatting Tryst when the beta grinned and made a girly
ooooo
sound. Another part of what Tryst said struck him. “Why didn’t you try and wake me after?”

The beta shrugged, blowing a stray strand of red hair out of his way.

Usually Tryst kept his hair short and trimmed, but with everything going on he’d obviously not had a chance and there was nothing that annoyed his beta more than long hair getting in his eyes. One time it had gotten too long while they were on a camping trip and the leopard had taken a hunting knife to the strands.

“Me and Mack figured that Jay might be talking to you.” Tryst’s eyes focused on his but his jaguar didn’t take it as a challenge and ended up looking like that creepy Chucky doll.

Kyle’s head snapped back. How did they know?

“With all the fucked up things that are happening lately, Jay’s managed to do some spectacular and terrifying things when he wanted to. And he’s never wanted anything as bad as he wants you.”

The bite mark under Kyle’s fingers was proof of that and he smiled smugly, for a minute remembering what they’d been doing in the dream.

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get gooey on me,” Tryst groused dramatically flicking another piece of hair off his face.

Mack’s scent got stronger as Kyle heard four sets of footsteps coming toward him.

Kyle dropped his hand from his neck. All he wanted to do was keep touching Jay’s bite but he couldn’t concentrate when he did. And he owed Mack his full attention when he apologised.

His other beta drew up short a few feet away, looking uncertain as to whether he would be welcomed. It hit Kyle like a brick to the stomach. His betas were his best friends. Like Tryst had said, them against the world.

“Mack, I’m sorry. I know you’re with me. If not for you and Tryst I’d never have gotten this far.” He wanted to haul the leopard into a hug, Mack was the more tactile of the bunch and seeing him standing there, a backpack at his feet looking all alone and like a chastised puppy, Kyle knew his words wouldn’t be enough. “C’mere,” he grouched.

He kept a hand on the bite mark and hoped it would work to calm his cat as he hugged his friend.

Mack released a relieved sigh and walked straight to him, taking deep breaths of his scent. It was an animal thing. Mack and his leopard needed to feel grounded.

Mack’s leopard had always been less self-assured than Tryst, which if someone were in a room with the two of them for any length of time would never believe. Kyle had known them all his life, though. The masks they all wore for the outside world didn’t work with each other. They’d seen him at his best and mostly his worst, but stuck by him and he’d done the same with them.

“Oh, never mind me. I just flew the damn plane,” Merrick bitched, shoving his way past with a grunt.

Kyle and Mack pulled apart and he rolled his eyes as the beta reverted back to the goofy idiot. “You want a cwtch, Merry?”