Page 16 of Her Eternal Mate

“Who’s we?”

“Me and my…oh, I didn’t tell you. Will and I got engaged very recently. It was a little hush, hush. We didn’t hold any ceremony or anything of the sort. It was just him proposing to me and me accepting his proposal,” I said, bracing for what was about to come next.

It came with such force as I had never imagined, a high-pitched scream of glee and celebration that nearly tore a hole in my eardrum. Maliha, after she finished screaming that everlasting shriek of ecstasy, finally said, “You have to tell me all the details. I bet it was magical. Will is such a fucking great guy, the absolute best of the best. You two have my blessing! Oh, man, when you have kids, I’m going to be an actual aunt!”

“Maliha, please let’s come back to the topic at hand. Will you come down and help us?”

“Consider it my engagement present to both of you,” Maliha said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Well, that’s that,” I said, looking exasperatedly at Will, who had heard the entire exchange from afar and was now giggling.

“She is one of a kind,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to retrieve our things from that resort. I trust that you’ll be able to pull this off.”

“Oh, right, the things at the resort!” I had completely forgotten the fact that right now, we were supposed to be on a mini-vacation. “I’m so sorry for running out on you.”

“I am not. If you hadn’t run, we wouldn’t have had that talk by the cove. We wouldn’t also have come across these soldiers. It’s good that you did that. It’s almost as if it was fated,” Will said, then leaned down and kissed me. His kiss was long and seductive, as if he was relishing the taste of my lips and the texture of my tongue. I kissed him back by coiling my arm around his neck.

“Kinda feels weird, doesn’t it? Kissing in such close vicinity to a corpse?” Will asked, chuckling to himself.

“Yeah, kinda, but no regrets,” I said, grinning back at him. “How are you going to go and come back?”

“I’ll manage. I’ll shift and travel as a wolf on the way. And I’ll come back with all our stuff in the car. I hope nothing’s happened to the car.”

“You mean the monstrously large Jeep. Don’t worry, it’s probably fine,” “I said, waving him off.

As he bade me goodbye and stepped out of the shed, I watched him go. He met with Maliha, who was just coming into the commune. The two of them exchanged remarks that I could not hear, but then Will pointed at the stables, and Maliha shook his hand. Then she skipped and jumped to where I was, toting her laptop bag at her side.

“What the fuck!” she yelled out right after she stepped into the stable. “I mean, I knew what to expect, but Jesus Christ, what the fuck. That man…his skin is blue, and not the dead person kind of blue. It’s like someone freaking put a lot of silver in his skin. Do you know that whole thing about people turning blue because they inject silver into their bodies?”

“What?” I was lost. Was this an actual thing?

“Yes. There’s an actual physical condition called argyria. It’s when someone has been exposed to so much silver that their skin turns blue, mostly by injection or some other form of imbuing. Look at this poor chap. His skin looks like that of some Dragon Ball Z character,” Maliha said.

It occurred to me that her remark was quite close to home. Of course, someone would inject a soldier with silver in hopes that they’d have a better chance against werewolves in battle. Is that why this foe seemed stronger than any other enemy that we had faced?

“Maliha, my friend, I need you to find the computing unit in this armor,” I said.

“First, tell me how you killed him. I’m not one for gnarly details or anything, but it’s sort of like necessary to ask in case this whole thing blows up and goes to court. I need to know,” she said.

“First of all,” I said, shaking my head, “nothing’s going to court. The only thing you do need to know is we killed him in self-defense. He came to attack us. We fended ourselves and killed him.”

“Holy shit, with what? Giant swords? Look at all the slash marks on his armor, the gashes on his skin. You lynched executed him,” Maliha said, fiddling with the armor and finding the input terminal.

“It had to be done,” I said. “Otherwise, Will and I would have been dead.”

“Well, I am glad that you’re alive. Aha! There’s the computing chip. Let me just plug it into my laptop and bingo! We’re in. Uh-oh, what’s this encryption? Haven’t ever seen this before. This is like quantum-level encryption,” she said, her face turning into a furrowed frown.

“Can you get past it?”

“I don’t think we need to. You wanted to find out who controls this person? It says right here on the login screen. Look.”

I turned the laptop towards me, and my jaw dropped as I read the name “Beckett Corp” written at the top of the login terminal.

“Blair?” I spoke out loud.

“I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis with that motherfucker. He’s the vilest person in this town, you know?” Maliha said. “He’s been involved in so many scandals and controversies regarding his pharmaceutical business, it’s no wonder he had to shut it down, and now look at what he’s doing. Creating mercenaries.”

“It’s more complicated than that, dear girl,” I said to Maliha.

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