Taken by my mate

Spencer

“Who is Caius?” The Alpha asked when she had sat down, apparently calm enough to gage her emotions again.

“My brother,” she responded around a mouth full of food, swallowed and looked at him. “I tried to leave,” she reminded.

“What does he want?” Alpha ran his hand over his head and scratched at his scalp.

“I’m not sure anymore,” she shovelled potatoes into her mouth and moved to the carrots.

“What did you think he wanted?” I asked, bring a strange aura of attention to me.

She smiled at me. “To kill Covyn, but he was outside and he met Varro face to face.” She looked him up and down as if reminding herself he was alive after that.

“What, why? Because I took their baby sister?” Covyn scoffed.

“I’m older!” Evadiene barked. “By many hundred years, I helped raise those little bastards, and they love me more than common sense.” She finished sadly and before the moment faded I had to ask.

“Why are you so sad?”

“I haven’t seen them in a very long time,” she whimpered and looked up at Covyn. “Did he look well?”

He shrugged, “yea. Just a regular grown guy looking around 23 I guess, healthy.”

She smiled in return and nodded like she hadn’t expected less.

“Why haven’t you seen them?” Daley’s voice mirrored Evadiene’s sadness.

“I…” she paused, composing herself. “I made a choice, a very important choice, that required me to give up a piece of myself, and I’m not longer allowed home.”

She polished off her plate and set it on top of the first. Like she could read her mind Sequoia brushed passed Alpha to the bed, and pulled off one of the smaller blankets so Evadiene could pull her feet up onto the chair and curl herself up. She looked exhausted, and I wondered how much energy returning from ash took from her.

“What was the choice?” Alpha asked suddenly and she shrugged.

“I don’t know; a condition of the deal I made. All of our magic is based on deals and bargains.” She sighed and looked to the covered windows. “It must have been really important to me to take so much.“

“What part of you did you lose?” I asked softly, leaning towards her and wishing I could comfort her.

She picked up the very old book Alpha had gotten from her house. Carefully she opened the cover and flipping through the book until she found a large feather of bright red and orange like the first leaves of fall or the fire she came from. She held it so carefully from the base and twisted it in the light of the fire I had made while she showered.

“I lost my phoenix. Like your wolves, I could shift into a glorious bird as big as a plane or as small as a robin.” She smiled warmly to herself as she stared into the fire instead. “My wings were beautiful, and could carry me to the highest mountains without tiring.”

Sequoia hugged her and, as her eyes closed and opened for a slow blink, a tear rolled over her cheek.

“I bet you could,” Sequoia whispered. “I wish I could have seen you.”

“You weren’t with her then? How long ago was this?” Daley asked softly, inching closer on her chair.

“Nearly five hundred years ago,” Evadiene replied, returning the feather to the book.

“She didn’t need a familiar before,” Sequoia added. “Losing her phoenix didn’t decrease her magic, just her… resilience.”

“When you said you were stronger before,” I realized, “but you suffered permanent injury that prevented that now. This is what you meant?”

Evadiene nodded. “That lie hurt a little, but it was close enough to the truth.”

“The ‘lie’ hurt?” I confirmed.

She nodded again and looked to Covyn. “I told you I can’t lie, that it’s like a super power, but it’s really part of of my curse.”

“Why so many curses?” Ellion groaned rubbing his face with his hands like it was exhausting for him.

Evadiene rolled her eyes. “Would you feel better if I called it a condition? Our power comes from making deals.”

Daley looked more excited than before and leagues more than anyone else. “How does that work? How do deals give you power.”

Evadiene set her book in the table and moved to the floor as she opened it. The first few pages were sketches of magical creatures and then she stopped at one covered in script I couldn’t read. She smirked at the page like it was a memory she didn’t need the page to remember.

“We make our first deals with our parents at thirteen solar rotations when we leave home. Each year with the gifts we bartered for, that we didn’t break the conditions, our power grows.”

“Like your ability to find things!” Ellion gasped sitting up straighter now and she nodded.

“And in the library, with the books?” I asked, and again she nodded.

“How does that work?” Daley insisted. “You said you can find things sought?”

Evadiene’s mouth worked but she couldn’t get the words out. Sequoia moved beside her and rubbed her shoulder before laying her head against it. The purring sound returned and Evadiene’s shoulders relaxed.

“Things… needed or…. Important,” she said carefully.

Alpha growled. “What did that cost?”

She looked at him, surprised by the question. “To find these important items-,” she sighed deeply, “-anything important to me will always be at risk.”

“Anything? Things? People?” I confirmed and she nodded.

“Sequoia and this book are the only exceptions to the rule.”

“Why are they exceptions?” Daley was chewing on her nails now as she listened.

“The book reminds her of the promises she made the the prices she has paid, and I was assigned to her when she gave up her phoenix, to protect her and rein in the power she isn’t always strong enough to control anymore.”

“Why would you make that deal?” Alpha demanded, a growl forming in his chest.

“It didn’t start that way,” she started to defend herself, but her mouth stopped again like she couldn’t say what she wanted.

I watched her reach back to her chair and grab a throw pillow to scream into. It sounded like she was emptying her lungs of auditory stones she had been carrying with the weight the action. Covyn sat forward and looked at her, eyes wide in some crazy realization.

“That day in the kitchen, you didn’t hurt yourself in the freezer, that was how you felt then.”

She startled at him. “I actually had to hurt myself so I wouldn’t be lying, but yes, I did scream first.”

Alpha looked like he was about to ask why when Ellion got the same look. “I was asking you about finding things in the kitchen when Covyn entered and I dropped it.”

Daley’s hands moved to her face. “That must have been so frustrating.”

“It generally is,” she whispered, turning the pages in the book idly.

There were a lot of figures and symbols to a language I don’t think any of us had ever even seen. In and amongst the words were sketches or slips of paper adhered somehow to the old paper. We all paused in our thinking and speaking to watch her, and I’m not even sure she realized it.

Another turn of the page and there was a loose paper stuck into the book with a drawn family portrait. In the middle was a younger Evadiene with a tall dark haired man beside her and three younger boys, looking around ten standing between them. She smiled fondly at the photo, only touching it from the sides. Her and the older man each had a hand on the outer boys shoulders, and that was when I noticed that the mess I thought was just dark hair contained horns.

“Who are they?” Daley asked carefully, I’m sure fearing this was a past relationship she was admiring in front of Covyn.

“My family, that’s my father and the triplets.”

“Horns?” I asked and she nodded. “You don’t have them, and neither do the boys, how come?”

“They were still too young. Only maybe 100 when this was drawn for us, they wouldn’t get them until at least 180,” she smirked.

“Why don’t you?” Covyn insisted before I could.

She looked up and realized we were all uniformly confused. “Because I’m a girl. Phoenix don’t have horns.”

Covyn got more tense with that. “Then what are the boys of your species?”

She turned the page to reveal the picture of the same as her answer. “Dragons.”