Page 39 of The Dragon's Stone Hearted Mate
It wasn’t Clarence or any of the men who interrupted our kissing. It was the strange woman who both seemed in and out of place lingering in the kitchen doorway of the restaurant. She cleared her throat and asked when she might see Torvan.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, ma’am,” Clarence said.
Fire exploded inside me! How dare he tell her what she could and could not do inside my restaurant? She had more right to be here than he did!
“Who is she?” I whispered to Rho. “I’ve never felt so protective of a woman.”
“She is Torvan’s mate. I don’t think she remembers her name but that’s who she is. I also think fate has played a cruel joke on her and your twin. I believe Patrica and her goat mate maybe her parents unless you know another lynx and goat pairing nearby.”
I fought off the urge to facepalm and reluctantly pulled away from Rho’s warm body. I was erect but everyone was politeenough not to comment about it. One look around the room was all it took for my dick to calm down. This was the only chance I was going to get to lay my brother to rest in peace.
“Lay him to rest in the Pit where he belongs and don’t let him come back until he learns his lesson,”my dragon chimed off into my thoughts.
“Let her talk to him, Crilus,” I said without explaining the newcomer to anyone else. Clarence could bitch later or take me to his little janky, overcrowded jail with the drug dealers, if that’s what he wanted to do. For once, I wasn’t going to be the golden retriever. I wasn’t going to think about what the good of the many was. This time I was going to think about what I wanted and what I wanted was time alone with my mate. I wanted to begin our lives together without Torvan’s wraith hanging over my head. Hell, maybe I’d live in Heartville with the triplets and our little rock dragon babies could grow up in the fields of food Teal spoke of so often from his childhood.
“Are you sure? Do we even know who she is?” Crilus asked and glanced at Mori as if the spirits had warned him about her.
“Let her in,” Mori sighed. “Perhaps, if she had been able to arrive sooner this would’ve ended differently.”
“That still doesn’t decide the fates of those three,” Clarence said.
“You were willing to kill my brother but you’re trying to keep them alive?” I asked, disbelief filling my cells.
“Not all off them. The omega bear wasn’t around when Georgie convinced Torvan to hire a hitman and the fox, well, he’ll probably never see the free light of day again either way,” Clarence sighed. “Morvan, I did not enjoy arranging the death of your brother. The information we gathered since his death doesn’t change that. I make the choices that I can live with just like the rest of you all do. I could live with him being dead but not with you being dead because of his carelessness and cruelty.”
“I’m glad he’s not dead,” Rho said, hugging me from behind.
His fingernails glowed a pale pink under the crystal fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen. I put my hands over his and tried not to think too hard about what came next.
“Let her in,” Clarence finally sighed at Crilus and the elf moved to do so.
The woman disappeared into the freezer and for a moment time stood still. Torvan was having his moment. He was seeing her for the first time as this version of himself. This was torment. It had to be. She was about to be reborn to the woman who killed him and either he would be forced to roam Earthside as a lost spirit or be accepted back into the soul family and sent to spend endless days in Frost’s Pit. The place wasn’t exactly extinct human hell. It was a place of rehabilitation for souls that took one too many wrong turns when they moved amongst the living.
“I think he’ll be accepted back into the folds of his soul family,” Mori announced breaking the silence.
“Why’s that?” Clarence asked.
“Because Morvan is safe. The assassins are taken care of, right? You’re not going to let them roam the streets trying to kill him for money, vengeance, or whatever game they’re playing. He might not have killed them but he stopped Morvan from dying even if he didn’t remember that’s why he was sent back as a spirit most of the time,” Mori explained, leaning one hand on the metal prep table I leaned on when Georgie first showed up toting his gun.
“Then why is he still here?” Teal asked.
“Because he hasn’t had his chance to say goodbye to you,” Mori sighed. “That’s what I’d come out to tell you all when I found you with your hostages. His door had shown back up in the freezer. Whatever needed to happen, happened. Something shifted.”
“Why was he still yelling to get out then?” I asked.
“Because you’re out here,” Mori frowned. “I’m not saying he’s a good guy even now and you’re not obliged to give him closure but as someone who had a recently dead man show up in his bedroom to tell me something he never got around to saying while he was alive, take it from me, you should find closure where you ---” Mori hit the floor.
“Fucking Postcard Men,” a bear who smelled an awful lot like Mori swore from the doorway.
Chapter Twenty
Mori
My head was going to hurt later but I came to after a blur of blues and greens standing before a grove of trees. Were the Postcard Men hiding behind them? Dern hadn’t told me that the guys were trees. Then again, it had probably been quite a while since he last saw them. Had he forgotten that they weren’t human in the way he and I recognized humans?
“You thought we forgot about you, huh?” Dern’s voice reached my ears and for a long, drawn out moment I thought perhaps I had actually fainted back in the kitchen, and this was just some brain damage induced dream.
“Don’t look at me like that!” He said, his Appalachian Wolf Pack accent was as thick as ever even though he wasn’t born there. “I didn’t know I’d come here either. I didn’t even consider it as an option. Apparently, the old geezers wanted to ensure Ormund and I actually rested between lives. They were none too thrilled that I sent you a postcard before it was time for you to be yanked out of your body and brought here. They like to have the element of surprise, but you started to think you were going crazy and I felt bad about it all.”
