Page 31 of The Baby Hex (Mori’s Mementos #2)
Teddy
Venal Claudis wasn’t home, but I let myself in through the back door anyway. While the GGB wasn’t anywhere near as friendly as the Starscale worlds, plenty of folks didn’t lock all their doors. As luck would have it, Venal left his garden door open and in I went.
“What are you even looking for?” Ni chimed into my thoughts over our mating link.
My mate was worried, and I didn’t blame him.
If he had been on his own, I wouldn’t have slept well either.
The sooner I figured out where this prick was the sooner I could pull his mother’s location off his tongue.
He probably wouldn’t give it up easily but then again, I’d think even less of him if he did.
“For something to calm Mori down. He’s one more secret away from losing his shit.”
“That makes me nervous,” Ni said and in my mind’s eye I saw him biting his lip.
Ni was pregnant again. He was still in his first trimester, but we hadn’t found the right time to tell Mori the good news with everything that was going on. We thought for sure he’d figure it out when Ni didn’t argue that he and Zinnia shouldn’t come help out too.
“This place is too clean. It’s like he’s barely here or his mother comes to clean it, but it doesn’t smell like a shebear,” I told him over our mating link.
“You mean he hired a maid? Shouldn’t you know these things? Your grandparents were like really rich like that, right?”
“Can he afford a maid?”
“I don’t know, alpha,” Ni said and bit his lip again.
“Go take a nap or something. There’s no use in stressing out about me. He’s a bear.”
“With magic,” Ni reminded me.
“Othoni,” I whispered his full name. “Babe. I’m still a dragon.”
“I know but if he hurts you, I’m going to have to leave the baby with Marsin and go kill him. I’m not going to have a choice in the matter. My jaguar has already forced his way out and is sharpening his claws.”
I let out a long, slow breath. Yep. When I got my hands on Sharon Claudis, she’d better hope that I’d calmed down by then. No one stressed out my pregnant mate and got away with it. No one took me away from spending time with my kid and got away with it.
Ni fell quiet and our daughter, Zinnia, babbled her baby talk over the family link.
I listened to her prattle on as I searched from room to room, finding very little of interest. I searched through drawers and closets.
Tapped on walls and stomped across floors to ensure that there were no hidden compartments for Venal to hide out in.
When I reached the kitchen, I checked the fridge.
It was fully stocked but on the bottom shelf was some hamburger meat turning grey.
“COW!” my dragon chimed off in my thoughts reckoning back to our days on the Starscale worlds.
Zinnia laughed and babbled ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ over the family link making Ni chuckle too.
I grabbed one of his sodas and shut the fridge.
Ni scolded me over our mating link, but I ignored him and popped the top.
He made me come all the way to the GGB because he couldn’t convince his mother to butt out of his life.
At the very least he owed me a soda. Hell, if the meat wasn’t going off inside the icebox, I might’ve rummaged around for a snack.
“Snack? Yeah. We should,” my dragon said, stretching out his long wings inside his inner sanctum.
I shrugged. I needed to search the pantry and cabinets anyway. Inside, I found mostly the normal non-perishables and good selection of unopened lube. Guy figured he was going to get lucky a lot more than he actually did was my guess.
I leaned back against the counter and opened a chocolate chip protein bar. Something scraped against wood and I jerked my head up expecting to see the home’s owner standing in front of me. Instead, I was greeted by a chair scooting away from the table on its own.
“Ni, you seeing this shit?” I asked careful to use our mating link and not the family link so that the baby didn’t hear the curse word.
“His mum is a witch,” Ni said. “Maybe it’s on a magical timer to make people think he’s home when he’s not?”
“Maybe,” I said, watching the chair slide across the kitchen and bump into the fridge.
A second later, another chair followed it.
Then a third. Then the last one. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Behind me a cabinet opened, and a bag of apples rolled out and onto the floor, landing in a cascade of thuds.
I hopped up to sit on the counter. If this was supposed to be scary, the caster had missed their mark.
Chairs and apples weren’t frightening. Zinnia did more magic than this before breakfast most mornings.
I didn’t even have to clean this shit up.
The potatoes were next to thud out of the pantry and shimmy into the kitchen. They mingled with the apples and rolled around here and there until they fell still in vaguely familiar shapes. I squinted and my dragon shifted my eyes to his. With his sight the word HELP was as plain as day.
“Help who?” I asked just in case I was dealing with a ghost. This would’ve been a great time for Ni to be here. He saw spirits and when he touched me I saw them too.
The apples and potatoes jiggled around until they spelled out M and O.
“Mori!” Ni sounded off in my thoughts loud enough to make me flinch and cover my ears. “THAT’S MORI!”
“What?” I asked over my ringing ears.
An R appeared a second later.
“TEDDY! Ask him where he is? He’s not answering me over our link! Something’s blocking it!” Ni said, his inner voice shaky.
Zinnia started to cry, and my heart broke in pieces as it did every time she cried. I ached to hold her but forced myself to push the emotion away. If Mori was in trouble I had to save him. It would be a toss up between Ni and Xenos on who killed me first if something happened to him.
“Mori? Where are you?” I asked but the apples and potatoes only finished making the I with the biggest potato as the dot.
“Mori?” I tried again.
“ZIGMORE!” I bellowed his full name.
A potato flew across the room and I had to duck to keep from getting smacked in the face. Yep. That was Mori.
“Where are you, man?” I asked, staying low in case he wanted to toss another potato.
“Oh, my fucking gods!” Daliah chimed into my thoughts and my brain almost exploded at my sister actually listening to what was happening on the family link.
“Track his phone and stop yelling! You woke me up from a dead sleep with that baby crying like that! Stop torturing my niece and track his phone!”
“On it!” Ni said without missing a beat.
“Dude? Mori?” I kept calling out as if his ghost could hear me.
“Ghost? If Mori’s a ghost he’s dead!” my dragon said, sitting up on his haunches.
“No, if he’s a ghost he’s over there with Dern,” I rolled my eyes. “We’d have heard all the spirits eat his murderer if he was dead.”
“Shit! Teddy! TEDDY!” Ni yowled inside my head. “HE’S AT SHARON CLAUDIS’S HOUSE!”
Shit! Shit! Shit! Leave it to fucking Mori!
I tossed the half-eaten granola bar into the trash and sprinted out the back door barely remembering to shut it behind me.
Ni rambled into my head, demanding that I save his best friend right this second.
It took me a few tries to calm him down but eventually I got him to text me the address and turned on my location.
“Thank Frost for Feral Moonscale!” I whispered under my breath as I brought out my wings and flew up to the top of the nearest apartment building to shift fully into my dragon form. Feral ensured every building in the GGB could hold up to the weight of a shifting dragon.
Ni’s panic threatened to overtake me but once I was in the sky my dragon knew what to do.
There was no room for panic today. There wasn’t even room to be pissed off at Mori for not at least letting me know he entered Sharon’s house.
He should’ve known that we weren’t the only ones using the Other World Gateway Network to travel.
Houses didn’t stay empty and shebears were some of the most territorial folks I ever met.
I landed where her street made a T with the crossing street and shifted back to my human form.
I laid there in the crosswalk for a long moment waiting for the heaviness of having scales to pass.
Shifting back and forth quickly always messed with my head a bit but now wasn’t the time to ponder the big mysteries of the universe like why I had ‘phantom’ scales for hours after I shifted back if I didn’t remain in dragon form for long.
I didn’t bother to knock on Sharon Claudis’s front door and she hadn’t bothered to lock it behind her.
She must’ve arrived home and found Mori inside her house.
The living room looked like a disaster area with all the furniture moved this way and that.
A trapdoor in the middle of the room stood open and a tall, broad shebear lorded over it.
She snarled when she met my gaze and somewhere below two people yelled for help.
One was Mori but I didn’t have a damn clue who he’d met up with before he broke into her house.
“What are you doing?” I sighed, already exasperated with this woman.
“What am I doing?” she laughed. “Do Moonscales often just wander into the homes of strangers and ask such questions? That’s not how we do things in the GGB!”
“Well, in Moonscale London we don’t knock out windows because we think we own the splooge that comes from our son’s junk,” I rolled my eyes.
“So crude,” she laughed. “Your mum would’ve knocked you upside the head. Lotus didn’t put up with such dirty talk.”
“You clearly never heard my mum burn the Sunday roast, huh?” I laughed too as tension mounted in the air of Sharon’s living room. “Did you actually know her? You look a little young to have gone to school with her.”
You couldn’t really tell the age of a shifter by looking at them but sometimes you could flatter people into not being assholes or at least flirt and catch them off guard enough to knock their lights out.