Mate of Honor

Mate of Honor Ch. 24

Last chapter and Epilogue going in one. Enjoy, its over, tell me what you thought! For those interested in the sequel, please read the next chapter as well which purely discusses it.

             “Anyone else feeling perpetually lonely,” Rosie questioned sprawled over a couch, eyes gazing bored at the ceiling. “It feels like they’ve been gone for hours.”

            Roxie spared her a glace, “That’s because they have been gone for hours, and they’ll be gone a few hours more.” She was getting annoyed with her twin, but could understand the feeling. Rosie wanted Ethan back, and Roxie wanted Hunter back right where she knew he was safe and sound. She felt uneasy, like something bad could happen at any moment and she didn’t like it.

            The shifters had left early last night after a few other important non-shifters had been dropped off. Those humans disappeared from sight hours ago, finding something else to do to distract them from the ever growing tension filling the house. The twins and the Dryad women with them had settled in together. Roxie moved her knight knocking out the pawn of the Alpha Female across from her. Luna Bluebell Quill bit back a smile twitching a finger sending the vine plant on the table to move her rook and knock out Roxie’s knight.

            -Check- She wrote on her notepad the vine clapping two of its swirling limbs together in pride. –Again.-

            Rosie scowled at the potted plant and then at its owner, a dryad mated to the Alpha of the Blazing Fire Pack who was herself Alpha of the pack that was once Orchid Moon’s only competition for top pack, Moon Song. The two had joined their packs years ago after Blood Claw had supposedly been defeated once and for all and the rest of Moon Song had been able to come out of years of hiding from their enemy. The mute Alpha Female was no shifter though, fully chained to her half dryad lineage, a bloodline that effected each first child, always female, with the powers of a dryad and the loss of one sense. To the twins meeting the Luna and her daughter, Sasha, had been just another supernatural culture shock. Playing chess with plants had been the second. Unless you counted the discovery that ghosts do indeed exist, then everything moved down a rank. That story had been an interesting one indeed.

            “You might as well give up,” Sasha muttered petting her Seeing Eye dog, Chloe, in a bored manner, her free hand fluttering over the bumpy pages of a book. “Mother never loses, only my little brother Kyle can beat her, and that’s only because he’s a super genius.” Bluebell communicated something neither twin could hear to her daughter and Sasha laughed before adding, “Mom reminded me she HAS indeed beaten Kyle before… once.”

            The teenager smirked and her mother rolled her eyes before turning back to the chess board which Roxie was trying to ignore for as long as possible until she could figure out a suitable move to send the woman into the dusts of defeat. The dryad women were communicating silently through a mind link, much like that of the shifters in wolf form, except they could communicate just as they were skipping over the boundaries that limited Bluebell from talking to anyone else. When one can’t speak and the other can’t see what other option could there be but a mind link, or at least that was how Miranda had put it before rushing off to comfort some of the other pack females earlier that morning. The current Alpha Female was still making her rounds, going from house to house to talk, comfort, and give news to worrying mates.

            Roxie had almost laughed at the fact so many females stayed at home. At first she had thought it sexist; women could fight just as well as men. It was true that plenty of female wolves went with the men, but there were too many problems with the rest fighting. There were children to look after, pregnancies, ones of too small size in wolf form to fight well, and ones whose presence in battle would only distract their mates from fighting well.