I Just Kidnapped My Twin Alpha Mates

Chapter One (Part One): The Crystal Ball Incident

How did this whole mess begin? The simple, easy answer where I'm not at all implicated for any of the following problems would be this: my buisness partner smashed my crystal ball with his elbow and refused to recompensate me. The longer, probably more accurate answer where I don't come out looking quite as good would be that I pushed him, he caught himself with his elbow and the crystal ball rolled under my foot where I then crushed it. Afterwords, I tried to make him pay for it, and when he wouldn't, I stalked down the nearest archeological site where I could get one that was slightly bigger than my other one, ie, not the size of a marble.

One of the advantages of getting an online degree instead of going to actual school was that I could just take a test to get my GED, not have to sit through four years of highschool, and study whatever the hell I wanted in an environment that suited my own intents. That meant taking archeology classes at midnight while trying not to drip popsicle juice on my bedspread. Frozen lemon DOES NOT come out of purple velvet, no matter how hard one tries. (Personal experience is a bitch.) That made finding a site incredibly easy, and one thing led to another, and the world explode. Ha, kidding. There was only a little bit of fire, and I techignically didn't blow up anything really important. I just pushed it over the side of a cliff that I SHOULD NOT have gone near. But hey, no one told me that, so again, not my fault.

But I digress. I'll let you get back to reading about my screw ups. Envision, oh gentle reader, through a magical bubble of prismatic transportation light, September 21st, 2018, two days before my eighteenth birthday, and a lovley, slightly chilly, friday evening.

I, like always, was sitting at the front desk of Marcel's Antiques and Collectables, a rickety little table piled with way to many papers and textbooks that both Elliot and I had left there. We'd agreed with Marcel, who quintupled as both our landlord, employer, random father figure, disciplinarian and sometimes short order cook to clean them up later, but hadn't set a specific time, so we hadn't done it yet.

My feet were on the table, and there was a book on Ancient Greek artistic endeavors propped open on my legs. Despite my best friend's protest, none of the lightbulbs screwed into any of the ancient looking wall hanging were LED, so warm, orangish light was cast over the room, battling the thunderstorm raging outside.  Elliot leaned against the counters, pretending to write in vocabulary words on an SAT practice sheet, but really hurled insults at a poor, utterly defenseless me who was just tying to do her homework. Ok, that's a lie. I was participating in the name calling war, but to be fair, I was  trying to turn in a paper.

I banged my head against the table, more to annoy Elliot than to hurt myself. "Can you quit it for five seconds, Cat Boy? My teacher's going to hunt me down and flay me alive if I don't get this in on time!" Papers rustled, and a calculus textbook thunked to the floor along with my phone. Face down of course. Why would a phone want to minimize the suspense?

"Good god, Cass, what is this, the fifth phone you've shattered this month?" He groaned and bent down to grab my unfortunate mobile device, holding it face down so that we could revel in my stupidity together.

I shot him a look, complete with a squished almost unibrow. "I remember mine, yours, mine again, and that random lady at the supermarket, but what's the fifth?"

Elliot rolled his eyes. "Marcell's backup." He surveyed the desk with critical eyes. "Do we have any more chocolate left?"

"Ohhhhhh. Right. That one." I shook my head and sifted some of the junk off my lap so that standing was a remote possibility. Digging through the piles, I found a stray piece of chocolate from Elliot's stash. "I think we d-"

Flapping sent gusts trailing through the room, stirring pages and shooting leaflets left and right. A savage beak yanked the soon-to-be-devoured candy out of my fingers. Talons alighted on my shoulder, and a wing scrapped playfully against my ear which I normally would have appreciated, but right now sent spirals of pain shooting through the lobe. "Back Bel!"

She returned to her perch atop a bookshelf and looked down on my with judgy eyes like if she was human, she'd be sticking her tongue out at me in an 'I win you lose' sort of way. I crinkled my nose at her.

"And this is way you don't chose ravens to be familiars." Elliot burried his head in his hands and pushed his glasses all the way up to the top of his hair line.  His beanie shifted, and for a moment the right hand most of his second set of ears poked out the side. "Chocolate, Rest In Peace."

"No, this is why I should have gone to a tattoo parlor instead of having your dumb ass do my cartilage."  Really, that's something I still regret. Healing spells can only go so far if the idiot who's piercing you doesn't know how to work a needle. I mean, how hard can it be? Draw a dot, line up the needle, then push and put the earring in, and yet Elliot still managed to mess it up. How come I could trust him with powdered potassium and not with my ear? Good question. I have no idea.

"Oh please." He fixed his hat. "You just have a raven fetish. We all know it."

I reared back. "Gross! No!"

Elliot raised his eyebrow and managed to still look superior despite the ink soaking into his sleeve from his upended fountain pen. Actually, I don't think he noticed the ink, so that may have been a moot point.  "You spend half your time as a raven, so...."

"That has no bearing on the fact that I'm into human beings, thank you very much! That would be like saying becuase you have cat ears and a tail that you'd want to take Millie out on a romantic evening around town!"

"Fair point."

I leveled the tip of my pencil at him. "Then concede."

He set my phone back onto the wooden countertop and raised his pen. "Never."

It was at that moment—as I was going for a well timed, if I do say so myself, thrust to the ribs—where things started to get a little bit more interesting. The lights popped and fizzled, then shot out, leaving us in a state of darkness, and worse, mild irritation. Bel furled and unfurled her wings, cawing nerviously. Static crept up my back. For some reason, I felt compelled to keep my voice down at a whisper. "Elliot, do we still have the enchanted blades in the magic school bus tin?"

He shifted, and his tail unwound from his waist, lashing back and forth through the now slightly to thick air. "No, Marcel took them out for cleaning ages ago...."

Thunder crashed, and lightning illuminated a hunched figure by the glass front of our shop. Elliot and I exchanged glances as it knocked once, twice, and then a third time with wrinkled talons.

Elliot began to back up. "You handle this one?"

I looked the figure over again, from the black leather boots crusted with what I hoped was dirt and not intestines, to the tattered fabric covering the figure's face, then the arrow sticking out of it's head. "Yeahhhh, that might be a good idea."

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Author's Note: Journey would like to say that they had fun writing this. Journey would also like to say that they also like talking about themselves in the first person to an audience. They hope you had fun reading this as well.