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“We will train you, my love. You will become a fierce fighter. No one will ever be able to hurt you.”
I will keep every promise I make her, no matter what it costs.
Chapter Nine
Cari
“Ouch, take it easy, Cari Bear,” Luci teases as I throw a punch that she is unprepared for.
“Oh, shit. I did not mean to connect. I am sorry, babes!”
“Do not be sorry,” Gareth tells me as he comes to check on his wife. “You will not be apologizing during a battle.”
“Well, we’re not battling, we’re training. It is different.”
Before I can say another word, a gray blur shoots through the air, and I am slammed back on the ground. I grunt as the wind is knocked out of me. Glaring up at my sister Bessi in her wolf form, I smack at her snout playfully.
“Jesus, Bessi. You could have given me a warning.”
“No warnings will be given during a fight,” she says without words. I sigh and nod because she is right.
“You’re right. Everyone is right. I need to be prepared for anything,” I respond to her not needing the words now.
It’s been two weeks of training every spare moment. Not just with my sisters and their monster boyfriends, but with each other. I can speak to both of them without words now. It took a few days before they were talking back, a tool that could come in handy if we were ever in a fight.
I can touch them or one of the guys and feel what they’re feeling, see their memories, or get a glimpse of something still to come. I know Luci will be having a baby girl. And I know in three months, Bessi will be pregnant with pups, two of them.
If I try to use those powers for myself, I see nothing. It has frustrated me as I have strengthened the tool with my sisters or even Mayhem, yet I cannot see my own future. Mayhem says it is because my future is still being decided. He is wrong.
Mayhem is my future. He is that dark figure in all of my work, the thing watching over me at every turn. Being with him, having babies someday, that is my future. Nothing and no one, Azazel the Demon included, will take that from me.
“Calm down, my love,” Mayhem purrs after he pulls me to my feet, drawing me into the safety of his arms. “Let your mind slow down. Focus on just this task, just these moments. Do not fret over the future.”
“I am not fretting,” I tell him sharply. “Because I know what it will be. Even if I cannot see it, I can feel it.”
The truth is, I might say that he might have promised me that, but what if we’re both wrong? What if Azazel comes back and takes Mayhem back to Hades? What if he kills me to keep us apart? Can he kill a Demon? Can I kill Azazel if I have to?
“Enough for today,” he declares to the others, never taking his eyes off me. “Cari needs to refocus. Her thoughts stay troubled. It will cloud her choices during a fight if a fight does come.”
“Agreed. We’ll start again tomorrow. Come, wife, let me take you home where I can spoil you, my little warrior.”
Luci flushes as he eats her up with a hungry gaze, and with a shimmer of the air, they’re gone. He does that sometimes. Apparating, he calls it. With just a wave of his hand, he sends himself somewhere else. Luci says it feels sort of like being on a roller coaster in the dark.
“Can I learn to do that? Or is it for witches and mystics?”
“Apparating? Most magical creatures can figure it out. Shifters cannot,” he says with a grin at Edon and Bessi, who circle us in their huge wolf forms. “They’re too tied to the earth, I believe. You know I can do something similar. It is how I watched you that first night.”
Flushing as I recall he watched me get myself off, I shake my head. Sometimes I forget he’s a few centuries older than I am, speaking in a cadence before my time. Strange that it is the age gap that bothers me, instead of his being a Demon.
“On that note, we’ll be heading out. Back at it tomorrow,” Bessi tells me, rubbing her snout against my head before she follows Edon into the darkness.
It is a cool night with a cobalt sky full of stars overhead. A full moon lights up the darkness of the clearing we’ve been coming to for training. I sit down on the cool grass, sighing as Mayhem lies behind me, letting me curl back against his big, warm frame.
“This suits you,” he whispers against my shoulder as his tail smacks the grass softly. “Coming into being a Nymph. It shows your confidence. It seems to come to you naturally.”
Nodding my head, I snuggle against him, tracing a pattern of scars on his chest. “Once you told me what I was, once I started to understand it, it made sense. All the pieces of me, the parts that never fit anywhere else, they fell into place. I feel...well, I feel more complete now than I ever thought I could. Because of you.”
“You found those pieces yourself, my love. I was just here to bear witness to it.”
