Page 45 of Haunted Nightmares
Smoke Screen
ZEPHYR
Pacing the dirt floor of Lorna’s tent, I wring my hands and keep checking the clock.
I haven’t done anything but pace and check the time since we got back and it’s stupid of me because the second the sun goes down, I’ll know.
As a matter of fact, I’ll have my very own alarm blaring in my face when that happens and the last several hours will have been for nothing anyway.
“Sit,” Ana sighs from across the room, sharpening her sickle sword with a stone as she watches me. “You know what’s going to happen, there’s no reason to waste your energy.”
Shaking my head, I only move faster. “Exactly. I knowexactlywhat’s going to happen and I have way too much energy because of it.”
“He comes, he yells, you explain, you both come. Together, re-mated. Simple.”
Her thin dark brow lifts when I stop and stare at Ana briefly, a smirk spreading across her super pretty face as I do. “Really?”
She shrugs one shoulder and keeps sharpening her weapon.
“You didn’t see him, Ana, not until he came outside. Gods, he was just so… sobroken, so desperately vulnerable. That is not my mate, not the king of the entire race.” I mean, it was my mate, my fated one and our ruler, he’s just deep in the throes of mourning and grief, and well on his way todying. And I couldn’t let that happen, not when I can put a stop to it.
It wasn’t time to, not yet, but after Wraith took me—tookIris,I guess—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay away from him much longer.
I’d only been back on this mortal plane for about three weeks when he first saw us heading to the apothecary. Two weeks and four days to be exact and my instructions were very clear that I was to have no contact with my dark prince, my king, for at least another week, and even then it wasn’t preferred. If the powers that be had it their way, I wouldn’t have any contact with Wraith for another six months because that would have been sufficient enough time to do what they needed me to do.
Lucky for me, I’m a quick study and managed to get a handle on things within the first three days.
It doesn’t mean I won’t have any consequences for speeding up a plan I had no part in orchestrating, though.
Oh well.
It gutted me to see how my mate looked, to see how his body was deteriorating, and speaking with him showed Wraith’s mind wasn’t far behind.
And that made me even happier that I sent Branoc—the raven, and my familiar—to him when I did. There’s no telling how Wraith’s madness would have progressed if he had literallynothinganchoring him to this world. Unfortunately, I think that’s why he found me so quickly when we’d tried so hard to keep me hidden.
Branoc doesn’t contain my entire spirit like he thought but he does have pieces of it so the bird could keep watch over Wraith and soothe him when he needed it. And it kept me completely up to date on what was happening with my beautiful mate, and I’m sure that’s what drew him to me again, inadvertently blowing my own cover.
“Who do you think will arrive first?” Ana stabs her sickle sword into the wooden table she’s sitting on then picks up a dagger to begin sharpening that. “Lorna, Nate, or the crazed King? My gold staters are on Akhenaten. He’s going to bepissedover all the rules you broke and beings you defied in the name of love.”
She isn’t wrong about that.
Nate and Ana—Akhenaten and Anat—were sent back with me for the very reason of keeping Wraith and I apart.
Ana has been far more lax in her position of protection but that has less to do with me and more to do with the fact that she pissed off a few gods herself and got stuck on guard duty, and she absolutely resents the hell out of it. So she doesn’t really care what I do as long as I’m working on my purpose for being here and not getting myself killed for it. Which is also how I convinced Ana to take me home to see Wraith.
We’ve become pretty good friends, though, and even if she has a tendency to go from zero to sixty in no time flat, it’s been nice to have a female I can say that about after spending my entire life either alone or surrounded by dicks. Literally and figuratively.
Nate on the other hand, I’m not sure I can say the same.
He takes his role very seriously and has since day one but he’s a bit of a sourpuss because of it. Always sticking to the rules, following them to the letter, never straying from his mission. Nate has kept me safe because of it, sure, and he’s a huge part of how we found that troll in the first place but his concern fordoing everything he’s told means there’s absolutely no breathing room.
And it also means he has a big fat stick up his ass when it comes to Wraith.
Because my mate not only disregards the rules, he makes and follows his own and that’s only if he bothers with them at all.
With a sigh, I continue wearing a path in the floor as I move from one end of the room to the other.
“Then again…” Ana points her dagger at me as her vibrant red eyes twinkle with mischief. “Your mate is a Descendant, one who shares the blood of Xenith—blessed thanks be to the Creator—so he could poof his way here faster than Nate’s legs will carry him.”
