Always Choose Dare

Chapter 8 - Research

I watch as confusion crosses her bewitching face before it washes over with defensive anger. She grips my mother’s ring, holding it protectively, as if she cherishes it. Her actions speak as though she actually has a personal, meaningful connection to the person who gave it to her — my mother. The sizing enchantment my mother placed on it means that only she could be the one to have gifted it to Star. This makes me want to find out how my mother was capable of crossing into this realm. The only possible way to find this out, though, is to somehow convince my mate to have a conversation with me. I look at her face pleadingly, but I can tell it's of no use.

“Please, Star,” I beg, the broken sound unrecognizable to myself.

Her eyes soften for just a second before they return to an icy glare.

“Johan, please see these men to the curb,” she requests, then turns around and hurries away.

I’m not going to lie and say that it’s fine with me. In all honesty, I feel as broken as I did the night my mother disappeared - maybe even more so considering the fresh opening of that wound combined with the sexy walk away of my mate, her right hand held high with her middle finger extended. If that means the same thing in this realm as it does in ours, then I’m sure she isn’t going to want to talk to me anytime soon. But the facts remain: my mate is leaving me, and she possibly knows or knows about my mother.

I try to remember as much about the night my mother disappeared as I can to try to figure out how she could have come to the fourth realm. I had been playing downstairs with my father when suddenly he turned away from me. He shifted into his lycan form, something one only did indoors if facing a threat. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. My father tore through the castle, making his way to my parents’ room. When I made it to the doorway, he was frantic, searching the space repeatedly, doing his best to catch my mother’s scent to track her, but he never found it.

Years later, I asked my father to clarify what had happened. He told me about my mother’s lineage, part werewolf and part fae. The fae genes had been dormant in her family for hundreds of generations, but had surfaced during her birth. She was gifted with light magic, and when combined with the magic of her werewolf lineage, it enabled her to see glimpses of the future. He believed that this gift was the reason she had been taken.

My father told me that the day he met my mother, she had one such glimpse. When she had placed her hand on his, her eyes glowed for a moment, then she pulled away and didn’t see my father again for nearly a week. When they met again, she told my father that to be with her, he would need to strengthen his heart, because they would only have a short time together before she would be taken. My father vowed to protect her, but she insisted that he could not stop this act of fate. Furthermore, she explained that he would need to focus on his love for their future son to be able to bear the separation.

When I asked why he didn’t do more — hire guards, build more defenses — he just shook his head and said that my mother had told him that it would be pointless, that nothing of that sort would stop this fate. As I had sat and pondered what he had told me, I remembered what my mother had always told me before we parted: “My love for you is strong enough to cross all the realms.” She had always spoken of making every moment together important, as if there wouldn’t be more moments ahead, like our time had a limit.

My father knew! He knew that she was going to be taken, and yet he still chose to be with her. He chose to cherish his time with her, even in the face of losing a future with her. His circumstances were similar to mine — accepting a mate with the chance of losing her, or losing her before ever actually having her by rejecting the bond. Here I am, the dumb@ss who just rejected his mate because of just the possibility of loss. Or rather, tried to reject.

Fu(k, I messed up!

I look at Marek, who is standing by with his hands in his pockets, ankles crossed, and an expectant look on his face.

“Are you coming to the conclusion that maybe you acted too impulsively back there?” He asks with that knowing look he gets.

Asshole!

“Let’s see you do better if you find your mate before we deal with Sid! Until then, shut it! I know I made a mistake; now I have to figure out a way to fix it!”

“What I don’t understand is how the bond didn’t break,” he says thoughtfully. “Is it because there’s no magic in this realm? If that were why, then how would you feel the bond in the first place? If you felt the bond, you should be able to sever it,” he pauses pensively before continuing. “And how do we explain that you were given a human mate when they were supposedly no longer gifted as mates by the gods? None of this makes sense!”

He throws his hands up in the air and looks to the sky as if the gods will speak to him directly.

“Let’s go back to the library and see what we can find. It’s midday already. Once it’s dark, we’ll come back here so I can track her,” I reply.

Marek is right. None of this makes sense. The gods stopped giving humans to magical beings as mates when they split the realms. So how do I have one? When I never found a mate, my father consulted the healers. Their best guess was that since my mother was part fae, I could potentially have a fae mate. At that time, I had chosen not to go to the sixth realm in search of a mate. Instead, I chose to live as a Balance Keeper without the concerns of a mate, to which my father repeatedly objected. He told me many times that having my mate was more important than anything. I just thought he was seeing things through the tainted lens of his loss.

Marek and I enter the library and find the librarian. After turning in our borrowed books, we explain that we aren’t looking for fictional stories, but instead need something used as a reference or a historical text. She walks us to the back of the library and shows us the proper section. There are old books that make reference to what she called “mythical beasts”. I had to stifle my laughter when Marek rolled his eyes at the term! Once she finished showing us the different books in this section, she returned to her post by the entryway while Marek and I sat at the tables studying the books.

“Daire, this book mostly speaks about magical beings as being myths passed down by people for centuries,” Marek mumbles as he continues to read.

“Same here,” I say. “This one speaks of the tradition of telling old tales to children to teach them some moral lesson, like fables. Most of the mentions of fae seem to be lighthearted. Dragons and werewolves seem to be a mix of terrifying and wondrous. Vampires and magi seem to only be evil. Some old tales speak of werewolves attacking and eating humans. They seem to think vampires only want to control them, drink them dry, and leave them for dead. How could they have things so amiss?”

“How can they know of us at all?” Marek asks.

“My best guess is that some humans living in this realm, when the realms were split, told tales of the magical beings to their children, then the stories continued being told to subsequent generations. Maybe the humans who remembered us only remembered those who forced a claim on them.”

This thought distresses me. If the only memories of us in this realm are of those who had abused the human population, then my mate was raised to think of me as not just having a beast form, but as a monster incarnate. I slam the book closed and rest my forehead in my hands.

“So how did humans go from us being human-eaters to being the stars of those s*x books? Ms. Olive Fordix did not write a book about getting eaten. Well, not all of her anyway,” Marek says with a straight face, which made me snicker.

“We do do that well,” I say before laughing fully.

Marek laughs in reply. Taking a scrap of paper from the notepad the librarian gave us for taking notes, Marek balls it up and throws it at me in reply.

“How weird is it for you to have read a s*x book featuring a werewolf written by your mate?” Marek asks.

My laughter stops abruptly. My goddess, I had been wanting to cheer on the man who had taught the author those moves just this morning, and now I want to rip his d**k off! I mean, I’m no virgin, so I would never just assume my mate would be, but the thought of anyone having her in such ways makes me livid. Funny thing is, I’m livid at myself! How could I not search her out before someone else had those moments with her? And in turn, I’m livid that my own experiences were not with her as well.

“So, I can see you are not too happy about that,” Marek starts carefully. “At least you got one bonus out of this — you got a full hard-on by your mate before you even met her! No one else can claim that!”

I don’t know what to think right now! My mind and heart are a maelstrom of emotions. In only a couple of days, I was cast from one realm into the void, but passed through the void into the human realm. Of all the places in all the realms, I found my mate this morning at a bookstore signing romance books she wrote about werewolves. And she’s human, so there’s that. Then, like an i***t, I tried to reject her, but it didn’t work. Let’s not fu(king forget that I have the impending end of the world by Sid the Sorcery Kid that I need to handle!

Man, I need to eat something!

I look over at Marek, who is looking at me as if I’ve gone feral. “I need to eat something.”

“Your call,” he says and nods at me.

I pick up the books from the table and replace them in their proper locations on the shelf. As we approach the desk near the door, I lean on it to ask the librarian a few questions.

“Hey, so yesterday you handed me some books by Star Knightly. What can you tell me about her?”

She giggles, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes.

“Well, she’s a local author who is really making a big name for herself. Her books are flying off the shelves! She actually released her new book, Always Choose Dare, today.”

Her book is called Always Choose Dare? Shocked, I gape at the librarian. She probably thinks something is grossly wrong with me, but I’ve lost my ability to speak or move. Is this a sign? Is the Moon Goddess telling me she will still choose to be with me?

“Thank you for your assistance today,” Marek says while nudging me.

“Yes, thank you,” I mumble.

“It’s no trouble at all! All in a day’s work for your local librarian,” she says enthusiastically.

As we step outside, Marek mutters next to my ear, “Pretty sure she thinks you’re crazy.”

“Noted,” I say. “Let’s find some food before the sun goes down, then I’ll track Star. I want to see what I can learn about her so I can convince her to speak with me about how she has my mother’s ring.”

“Are you completely sure it’s your mother’s?”

“Without a doubt! I played with it as a child, constantly amazed by the sizing enchantment my mother had put on it so that it fit any finger when put on by the enchantress - my mother,” I say emphatically.

Marek and I continue our walk down the road. Finding a roadside food cart, we order some food and eat it on a nearby bench. We discuss our plan for the evening. Once I find her home, I’ll do what I can to glean information that I might be able to use to get her to have a conversation with me while Marek keeps overwatch. The last thing we need is for someone to find us and think we’re predators!

Once we finished our food and our discussion, we made our way back to the bookstore and found the back exit. I focused and pulled forth only part of my inner lycan, just enough for me to have enhanced senses, including smell and vision. It took us a couple of hours to track all the places she had been today, but eventually we found her home. And when I found it, all plans were tossed aside as I did not expect to see what I saw through that window!