Page 20 of Iced Heat

“Selatris?” Xav called out. “Are you here, sweetheart?”

I pulled on my pants and silently wished I grabbed my shirt too.

“The baby?” I blinked at him. “Why would they send their baby here?”

“Trouble would be my guess, but we’d have heard about it,” Xav said, still sprinting toward the back of the house where the mewing was coming from. “Grab my phone. 2802 is my passcode.” He grabbed the cloth we used for dishes earlier and wiped clean his chest and stomach before tossing it to me to do the same. No one wanted to run headlong into an emergency covered in my jizz.

“I bet the bad guy would think twice about grabbing us then!”My dragon sounded off into my thoughts.“Touch me and touch my jizz! That’s what you get for fucking around with my matingmoon!”

“Shit. I guess we are the real deal,” I laughed, repeating the 2802 to myself. Heat made it difficult to think but I managed to hold on to the number and get into his phone. All his texts were from Liatris asking if Sealtris was here. I put the phone to my ear to listen to the voicemail.

“I hate to do this, Xav! Did the baby come to you? We fell asleep and I woke up to the sound of a door. You knowmysort of freaking door. I caught a glimpse as it was fading away but couldn’t grab it. I swear the damn thing wasn’t even up to my knee!” Panic danced through his words and he took a deep breath on the recording. “I don’t think he knows that many places to go! He’s not at the Starscale house! I had Sunny check! Besides trying to find you I don’t know what he’d do! Please pick up the phone! Please pay attention to the flight link! I’m so sorry --- but the baby!”

“XAV!?” Panic cut through me at the thought of any baby roaming the whole existence with the magical ability to open doors to go wherever he wanted. “Is he here?”

“He’s here!” Xav called back. “I’m moving the dryer. Poor guy’s stuck back there!”

I cringed as the dryer slid across the floor carving into the tiles. Xav wasn’t fucking around when it came to his god baby. I sprinted into the bathroom to see him cradling a lion cub to his chest. My heart melted and the room cooled down ten degrees. I fumbled with his phone and had to ask for his passcode again but Liatris was already texting his relief. He felt us find him over the flight link.

“I guess he missed you,” I sighed, looking at the cub now purring in his arms.

“I missed you too, buddy, but you can’t go running around like that! You could get hurt.”

The baby was too young, of course, to understand the consequences of his actions but I still swore silently. All that fighting over my house with Daliah and I was going to end up living on a Starscale world anyway because I couldn’t see taking Xav away from the cub.

I watched, fixated, as he paced the kitchen, comforting the baby before opening the fridge and trying to find something the baby might want to eat. Thankfully, in lion cub form, he was old enough to eat some ground beef. He licked it up in tiny bites from Xav’s hand.

We hadn’t had the baby talk yet. Before Xav showed up at Glitter Bomb having kids was something I thought I’d always eventually do. When I met my mate at some point. It was something that everyone did, right? It was what everyone expected, and I figured kids wouldn’t all be horrible. I was a fan-fucking-tastic kid after all. Now watching Xav with Selatris made everything inside me ache. I wanted a baby. I wanted to have a baby with Xav. Maybe it was the heat talking. Maybe it was some primal draconic instinct pushing itself forward, but I didn’t care. I’d have his baby if it was the last thing I ever did.

Chapter Eleven

Xav

Liatris apologized five times when he arrived right as the baby finished up his ground beef. Selatris wasn’t any worse for wear. He had shaken himself up a bit by coming through behind the dryer, but no harm had come to him. I opened my mouth to tell him it wasn’t a big deal but that wasn’t true. For us, it was a minor inconvenience but for them their baby had run away without leaving a clue to his whereabouts behind. That was the big fucking deal. Pondering it made me want a cigarette, but I held off on lighting up. I never smoked around the baby.

“I’m not even sure how to keep him from doing that,” Liatris said, leaning back against the edge of the kitchen table clutching his cub to his chest.

“I didn’t even know he could do that,” Selt said, his brow furrowed together.

Selt was a fighter at heart. He’d defend Liatris and their cub against the whole world if he had to but this was something no amount of pent up rage or fighting prowess would help.

“I never thought about it before,” Liatris sighed. “It does make sense that he can do it. It’s not like he hasn’t seen me do it a hundred times over. Hell, you can do it too now, alpha.”

“GPS bracelet or something,” Sequin offered up.

“If he’s within range of the measurable universe that would work,” Selt nodded.

“The older he gets the more places he’ll know,” Liatris frowned.

“Hey,” I said, bumping my shoulder against his. “It’s not like he’s going to be a baby forever. Sooner or later, we’ll be able to talk to him about it.”

“Until he’s a teenager and you can’t ground him,” Sequin said, and I shot him a dirty look. Now wasn’t the time to bring up future problems.

“Hey, that’s a you guys problem too,” Selt pointed out. “You’re learning how to cast them too.”

“Well, shit,” Sequin frowned.

“I’m just glad he’s okay. At least if he’s casting to go to people he knows, he’ll be safe,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back to the positive side of things. Liatris was in therapy for everything that happened right around the time he met Selt. I went for a while too but unlike Liatris, I expected people to be shitty. The council hadn’t done anything other worlds hadn’t tried before. They failed at it, but their tactics weren’t anything new.

---