Page 94 of Wishes and Research

Kenzie was a menace…and so was his Daddy.

I had every intention of telling both men that when a shocked cry echoed down the mountain and cut off my mental threats.

Fuck.

Picking up the pace, I held Paxton tighter and double-timed it to the portal. I didn’t like the quiet that had descended on the mountain and it didn’t take long for me to realize even the birds had gone silent.

“Is someone hurt?” Paxton held on tight as he whispered, but I could feel his worry, so I kissed his head and tried not to get him more worked up.

“They’re all drama queens. Someone probably got scared by a bug or a snake.” Fuck, someone probably got scared by nothing. I was overreacting. “Lorne keeps asking why he can’t bring the bugs home and Kenzie just tried to convince you that my hoard was sex toys. They’re not geniuses.”

They were a bunch of pains in the ass.

Well, except Alick and his mate…and Stefan was polite and hadn’t traumatized Paxton yet.

But my stomach sank when we broke through the trees and saw the two most rational members of our troop staring at something in shocked horror.

How big was the fucking snake?

The mages had to stop messing with shit.

“Oh wow, Daddy.”

Fuck…I’d have preferred a big snake.

“You didn’t tell me it was alive.” The awe in Paxton’s voice and the horror on everyone else’s face had my heart nearly stopping as I finally realized what I was seeing.

“Because it’s not supposed to be.” Great dragons above. The portal that had just been a stone circle my entire life, and for as long as anyone living could remember, was filled with a shimmering swirl that looked almost like the blue-black darkness of the deep ocean. “It’s not supposed to be.”

“What the fuck did the mages do this time?” Boyd’s growled-out question had half of us nodding in response without even thinking about it.

“For fuck’s sake. Most of them can’t figure out any spells beyond fucking with the flowers. It’s not us this time.” Carrick’s words started out with a bark but gradually quieted until he was almost whispering. “This was definitely not us this time.”

That didn’t make me feel any better.

“Goddamned fucking alien space portal.” Talon’s words echoed a lot of what was in my own head, but I kept it to myself.

“Um, if one of you guys had started randomly repeating old spells out of those books in the library, now would be the time to confess it.” Grady’s tone wasn’t quite as tense as everyone else’s but he was staring in shock the same as the rest of us.

“The old books mostly have recipes for weird stuff no one eats anymore and dirty stories about their love lives.” Stefan’s eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger as he inched closer to his mate. “Oh, by the way, if anyone from here has a mate that’s from here as well, they should really get a DNA test done before having kids.”

For fuck’s sake.

Paxton dropped his voice and whispered in my ear. “Everyone was naughty back then, Daddy. Not just your relative.”

Unfortunately, with all the excitement, he’d forgotten the better than human hearing part and everyone around us nodded.

“It’s probably fine by this point.” But it would explain some of the nonsense. “This is not fine.”

“I should’ve never let you guilt me into doing this hike, Kenzie. I just wanted pancakes on my day off.” Patterson, one of the random locals we’d picked up, was probably right to blame Kenzie, but Talon’s glare said he didn’t appreciate it. “How did you get me dragged into the apocalypse?”

Talon kept his thoughts to himself, mostly because we were all just staring stupidly at the portal and we kind of agreed with Patterson. We could’ve been standing there dumbfounded for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but we were all stunned silent as we took in the sight.

The portal was active.

Eventually, my brain started to churn again and questions started popping up.

“There was an earthquake about six months ago.” Something like that. “I…I don’t remember exactly. Does anyone remember the last time we actually did the usual hikes? I did the one at the beginning of the last school year.”

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