Twenty-four

twenty-four

Zhen

I was the worst husband on the face of the planet. I couldn’t believe I’d let my wife down again .

I’d been in this business long enough to know that plans failed. Redundancy wasn’t just a motto—it was how we stayed alive. I shouldn’t have banked on a single barrier. I should have done, like, two more things at least to make sure Kris wasn’t in any danger.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I was amazed at how well she’d handled the fight. She was a trooper the whole time, but still, I knew how much she disliked being in danger to begin with.

I sat in the car cursing myself out, feeling like dog shit tracked in on a shoe. Being in my own skin was offensive. I did not like me at this moment. I’d have felt so much better if someone would just get mad at me. I deserved someone to be mad at me.

Disappointment in myself made me almost nauseous. Anger raged. At myself, my leg, the bond, all of it. All things I couldn’t beat up, which put my emotions straight into a drama cauldron to stew. The anger and self-loathing churning in my gut was not a pleasant sensation.

Kris didn’t say much to me on the drive back to the cabin, although she kept giving me these looks I couldn’t decipher, which didn’t bode well for me. The foreboding was a living thing.

In fact, we got into the shower together without much more conversation than what we needed to say to coordinate being in the same space. Generally speaking, women who didn’t speak equaled mad. But Kris wasn’t a huge chatterbox (I was the chatterbox in this relationship), so it could’ve been she was just tired.

Wishful thinking?

Felt like it.

It wasn’t until she had me sit on the bed, leg propped up, with pills in hand, that she said anything at all.

“Will you stop beating yourself up?” She paired this question with a frown. “Nothing that happened tonight was your fault.”

Why was she calm while I was losing my shit? “Honey, I’m so, so sorry. I deserve to walk the infinite path of Legos under the Sahara sun for all eternity.”

“You’re not going to let this go until you have some kind of plan to prevent it from ever happening again, are you?”

She knew me well. “That’s…probably the case, yeah. Why aren’t you steaming mad at me? I’m steaming mad at me.”

“First, because you did protect me.” Kris stretched out both arms to the side in a see ? kind of gesture. “Not a scratch on me. When that barrier failed, you put yourself between me and danger. You were my barrier. How can I possibly be mad at you?”

“Please be mad at me.” I wasn’t kidding. “This feels very awkward when I’m mad at myself, alone in my feels.”

“Not happening.” She leaned in to kiss my forehead. “You did your job, zhàng fu . I’m safe, I’m not hurt, the things we hunted are dead. We’ll come up with a much better plan, with two redundancies, the next time we go into battle. Okay?”

Ugh, there was no reasoning with her when she was upbeat like this.

Actually, it was weird how upbeat she was. “Uh, you seem to be fine?”

“I am, surprisingly.” Her smile and tone were completely genuine. “I had a realization at the end of the fight. I realized, first of all, that I’m actually okay in dangerous situations. I didn’t panic, I didn’t lock up, I was able to fight something off and protect myself. I’m still leery because I’d rather not be fighting for my life, but if push comes to shove, I can do it. I feel much more confident now.”

That was what it was. She wasn’t upbeat—she was confident. She was much more comfortable in her own skin than before and basically radiated that.

Oh wow, look at her. I felt so proud of her. She had really come out the other side of a tough week stronger. My pride overturned the other feelings for a moment. It was hard to be so upset at myself when she wasn’t blaming me, and it was really hard to feel that way when she was proud of what she’d accomplished.

All that said, I still had feelings that had nowhere to go and I needed to process. My preference at the moment was to eat my feelings via snacks. Wait, there was Pocky…maybe I could.

“Can I at least have Pocky?”

“If Pocky will make you feel better, go for it.”

I ate my Pocky. Felt better. Then eyed the package suspiciously. Either she’d slipped drugs in there, or the saying that loved to float around social media was right. How did it go? Something about how if you thought you hated everyone, eat something. If you thought everyone hated you, you should sleep. I dunno about the first part, but eating did calm me down. I suspected some solid sleep would do wonders as well.

Bodies. So finicky.

Kris blow-dried my hair and hers because we both hated sleeping on wet hair, then she snuggled next to me in bed before conking right out. Her deep, even breathing quickly lulled me into sleep.

I slept solid before Jake tapped on our door.

“Hey, you guys awake?”

I groaned, flopped, checked my phone, and holy shit, I’d slept ten hours. Wow. Okay, I’d been exhausted. And look, I was no longer angry at myself. How dare sleep solve that.

“I’m awake,” I answered around a yawn. “Oh my god, owww. Sore. Also, ouchy because leg.”

“Me too, man.” Jake popped his head around the door. “I’ll hop into town, buy us some breakfast. Mùchén’s whining for peanut butter. We might need to stage an intervention for the huodou here soon.”

“Heh. Probably. All right, thanks, man. Any word about hunting for the nest?”

“ Huodou said they’re on it. I’m waiting for them to come back with word, honestly. They’re better at tracking this stuff than we’d be.”

“I can’t argue that.”

“All right, be back in twenty.”

I nudged Kris awake, and we went through the whole song and dance of putting on clothes and pretending to be functional adult beings. Bit of a lost cause there for a while until Jake returned with breakfast. More importantly, coffee. He got me two coffees because he was a friend and a buddy, and I was totally going to return the favor at some point.

I’d just finished up my second cup when Guo popped back into the living room, tail wagging, with an expression of victory.

“We found the eggs,” he announced. “They were strangely not up in a tree? But in a nest made of fallen trees and brush.”

“Oooh, great job, buddy!” I immediately dug through the bag. “Have some peanut butter.”

“There’s peanut butter?”

Guo came over and nosed at the bag hopefully, which only impeded me. I had to push his nose out of the way to get to the jar, and then I barely got the jar open before he took it from me. He settled down on the floor with it, jar between both paws, as he stuck his tongue inside like a baby with a bottle.

“Where is the nest?” Kris prodded him.

Guo barely lifted his head and mumbled something I couldn’t make out—probably because his mouth was glued together with peanut butter.

“Swallow,” Kris advised dryly, “then try again.”

Guo made an effort, swallowed, and slurped at his lips with nothing but satisfaction. “Ahh, so good. Nest is actually not far from where we were attacked the second time.”

We’d had so many run-ins with the Ravens, it took me a minute to remember. “Oh, you mean where we fought the Smoke Wolf?”

“Correct.”

“Holy shit, it’s that close to town?” Made sense why they were attacking humans so much. “Well, then it won’t be much of a ride up there to deal with it.”

“That it will not. Easier to ride me. I’ll take you there.”

“All right. Jake, got some kerosene or something?”

“Gallon of gas in the Jeep,” Jake said, but his eyes were narrowed on me like he was trying to figure something out. “You’re not going to rest easy until you see the nest burn with your own eyes, are you?”

“Nope.” Which was the truth of the matter.

“Yeah, figured. All right, I’ll go with you and Kris to deal with it. Then let’s come back here, write up an invoice for our clients, and buy some plane tickets. I don’t know about you guys, but I want to be home soon.”

“Now, that,” Kris declared, “I can agree on.”

Guo mumbled something while still having his tongue stuck in the peanut butter.

I looked down at his massive head and drawled, “In English this time?”

He had to lick his mouth clean before saying, “There’s no other dangers within fifty miles of here. You’ll be done once the nest is cleared.”

“No Wolves either?” I was surprised by that.

“We can’t find a den. It might have been a stray.”

“Huh. Well, that’s good news.”

Kris picked her phone up off the table and typed something in. “I’ll text that to Sheriff Parker and Ama so they’re not worried about it.”

“Tell them about the nest, too.”

She didn’t look up from her phone. “Yup.”

Jake fetched the stuff we needed from the Jeep, and I tried to help with that, but the second I got two feet away from Kris, the bond started acting up, which said a lot about my emotional state right now. My guilt needed some time to settle into something more productive, but I didn’t see it being a today thing. Hopefully Kris wouldn’t kill me for being clingy.

Kris paused at the door and looked toward the area where the nest was, even though she couldn’t see it from here, of course. “Do you really need me to go if it’s that close?”

I took both of her hands in mine and gave my best beseeching look of all time.

She looked into my eyes and sighed. “Your bond is freaking out right now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I shrugged because there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“Zhen. Please calm down.”

“I’m trying.”

“That bad, huh?” She blew out a breath but went for her shoes to pull them on. “Fine, I’ll go with you.”

“Aww, lǎo pó , you do love me.”

“Obviously.”

She was being a little sarcastic, but I did feel loved. She knew I was struggling, so she’d go along. It was that simple for Kris. Honestly, she was one of the best people I knew, and it was why being married to her wasn’t hard. Challenging sometimes—mostly because of the damn bond—but it wasn’t difficult. I was really grateful that she’d compensate for me when I had these down moments.

We all loaded up on the huodou . Guo proved right, it was really close—far too close for comfort. It barely took thirty minutes to get there, and that was at a walk. The nest was exactly as he described, in a triangular shape between three fallen logs, with lots of bush and leaves in the middle forming a cushion. On top were the eggs.

Look, I’d seen an ostrich egg in real life, and just one of those could feed a family of six without any trouble. These Raven Mocker eggs? Made them look like supermarket chicken eggs in size. They had to be fifteen pounds, easy.

To make it worse, there were four of them.

“Hell to the nope.” I immediately got off Jun Hie, favoring my leg but needing gasoline to enter the scene. “Holy garbage fire, I do not like this. All of this crap is dry, so it should burn splendidly. Match!”

Jake lit a match and tossed it lightly onto the eggs.

WHOOSH.

Excellent fire, if I did say so myself.

For some reason, though, Jun Hie was sitting next to me and salivating. Huh?

Oh. Wait.

Duh, I was an idiot. The huodou were creatures of fire. According to legends, they ate fire and ash—those were their main dinner entrées. To him, this looked like a gourmet delicacy, I was sure.

I patted him on the shoulder. “Feel free to dive in.”

“Needs to cook a little more,” he explained, eyes not leaving the fire. “Not quite done yet.”

“You like yours well done, I bet.”

“Absolutely.”

Color me surprised. Not.

Took about ten minutes for the eggs to burn down enough for the huodou to munch down. Which they did with gusto. They cleared out the whole charred area in a minute flat between the three of them.

It was only with those damn eggs safely burned and in their bellies that I felt the last of my tension ease. Finally, finally, we had won the day.

Which meant it was very much time to go home.