“That’s not going to help the situation at all,” Dakota said. “A, she won’t even believe you. She doesn’t even believe there’s any such thing as a devoted man. B, there’s three of you and that will freak her the hell out. C, I’ve never told her about the supernatural world.”
“Even if this situation had gone exactly as you hoped, wouldn’t you still have the same problems?” I asked.
“Yes…”
“So you must think of what you want for yourself.”
“But she’s always supported me. She’s always there when I need her. And she’s given me thousands of dollars over the years. Ugh, I just…nevermind, I don’t know. It’s too late now. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“I think you’re saying that you came to us not just because you were worried she would die, but also because you realized you can’t wait for her to die to take what you want.”
Her eyes widened. Then she looked away. “Strong words.”
“Demons take what they want. What do you want?”
Chapter Eleven
Dakota
What did I want?
That was a loaded question, coming from a big, ridiculously sexy man who clearly wanted me, like, yesterday.
I was not used to this kind of treatment. Just the memory of Hiron’s tongue between my legs and I wanted to know what it was like to get close to Xado. I’d never been with a guy this strong before. He looked so perfectly human right now but I could just sense the pent power within him, the ability to become even stronger than he was now, to tear into prey and take flight. With his wild blonde hair, and intense blue eyes like precious stones, and the hard curves of his muscular chest open beneath his shirt, right there begging to be touched…
I think they were all trying to act more like humans for me. Xado, especially, had definitely toned it down once he realized I was offended. He was showing me a little more of who he really was.
But the more he toned it down, the more I wanted to turn it up. Xado was more perceptive than he seemed at first. It was just as he said. When Mom called, I freaked out on multiple levels. Obviously, I loved her. She drove me crazy sometimes, but I also thought she was the best mom ever. This was the first time I really had to face the idea that I would probably spend a lot of my life without her in it, and that was so painful.
But it was true that she’d meant so much to me that I had a hard time doing something that upset her. This had really affected my relationships. As soon as I met someone I started wondering if Mom would approve. So I buried all the kinky bits of myself. It was no wonder I got so jealous of Edie. Before Edie found her men, my fantasies could remain sort of nebulous and shoved aside. But when I saw Dante, Alister and Van doting on her, and heard hints of the kind of action she was getting, well…
I wanted Xado. And Rafe. And Hiron. All of them, touching me, kissing me, filling me, their low voices whispering in my ears. I wanted to spend hours in bed getting fucked until I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to learn magic and wear gowns and have my own castle, damnit, why not?
“Xado…” I reached my fingers toward his chest and trailed down the soft skin and hard strength beneath, down to his abdomen and stomach. I shivered with how good it felt, how strong he was, and he made a small growl of pleasure but didn’t move. I put my hand to the waist of his pants and tried to tug him to me, although it ended up more like I pulled myself closer.
“Dakota,” he said, fingers trailing around my ear, brushing through the locks of my hair.
“I want all of you,” I whispered, finally daring to say it aloud. “I want you to be good to me, and respectful and stuff. But I also want you to pleasure me hard and long…just like you said. I want you all to fuck me.”
“Hrm!” He grunted approvingly, tugged on my hair as he pulled my head back, and leaned down from his height to kiss me. The masculine scent of him was heady, his beard tickling my face, and he raked up my skirt until it was all bunched in his hand and then he massaged my ass, pulling me close to him until I could feel his hardness.
“I want you,” I repeated. “I want your cock.”
All the teasing they had been giving me was almost too much at this point. I wanted some real action.
He kissed me so hard it was almost more like getting fucked than kissing, but I was giving it right back. I stroked one of my hands along his cock past the rough fabric of his pants. Having finally admitted the depth of my sexual attraction, suddenly I just wanted to get dirty. (Although, I hated calling sex ‘dirty’. Nasty? Freaky? I was trying to be sex positive, but the vocabulary wasn’t there.)
He took a step back. “I will not risk it yet,” he panted.
“Risk what?”
“We don’t have the binding spells yet.”
“Is that what Rafe was talking about when he said you need magic to hold back from becoming beasts?”
“Yes,” Xado said. “In my dragon form, I am much larger and so is my cock. There used to be a small risk that a dragon would transform in the heat of sex. The result would tear his mate up from the inside and kill her. Needless to say it was horrifying to everyone involved.” I must have had an awful look on my face—for good reason. “Don’t worry; it hasn’t happened in many hundreds of years, because the Symposium now requires a binding spell. It restricts the size of our cocks to the size of your body, even in dragon form, so no accidents can occur.”
Now I had to suppress a tiny laugh. “So when you’re in dragon form, you’re really small?”
“Is it funny?” he asked. Now he looked both confused and annoyed.
“I guess dragons don’t have tiny penis jokes.”
“No. It would be a point of pride to have a cock that was fit for a human mate. But dragons don’t usually gather in dragon form, in any event. Usually only my enemies and my prey see me as a dragon. And certainly would no one would see it erect, except you. I should hope you wouldn’t find humor in us fulfilling your needs.”
“Oh, no, no. I’m sorry.” Come to think of it, maybe this was better. When you saw a dragon in a movie, did that dragon ever have a huge dick? No. I couldn’t recall that I had ever seen a dragon penis in a movie. “I don’t think any girl would actually complain about custom fit cocks.”
He smirked. “It won’t kill you, but it will still be a lot to handle.”
“Well, the fact that you said that tells me that you do understand tiny penis jokes, but okay.”
He laughed loud. “You’re right.”
I was rather pleased with myself for making him laugh, but I turned back to the Grimoire. “I should learn a spell, shouldn’t I?”
“Yes, we should be as quick as possible.”
I opened the book and the first spell listed was a protection spell. It was exactly like I would hope a spell should be, like a recipe where you had to mix a bunch of cool stuff together and say some words.
“You know, maybe you’re right about me and magic,” I said. “I just remembered that when I was a kid I made my own spell book and it had recipes for spells just like this. Like, I remember to make a whirlpool, I had to find seven rocks and two sticks, and throw them in the pool, and say, ‘Rocks and sticks will make a mix…’” I trailed off because I realized the spell words were way too dumb to ever repeat again. (Since I rule I’ll make a pool? What was that stupid crap?)
“You were able to make a whirlpool in the Fixed Plane?”
“No. It was just a game we played. And Mom yelled at me for always throwing stuff in the pool.”
“But you did have some idea of what a spell should be,” he said.
“Apparently so.” I smiled. “Do you have all these ingredients? Crushed pearls and turtle shell…” I paused. “I hope you didn’t kill a turtle.”
He looked guilty and pointed to one of the cabinets. “It was a monstrous Sinistral turtle.”
“Aww, no! I love turtles.”
“It would as soon have snapped my hand off.”
“Okay. A mean ugly turtle.
I’m going to have to trust you on that.” I sighed, but I opened the doors, looking over all the bottles of weird ingredients, and I felt a little thread of excitement stitch its way down my spine.
Chapter Twelve
Nicole
The transition into Sinistral made my head spin, but once it started to clear, it didn’t feel very different from the real world. However, we were looking right at an imposing stone castle at the top of a hill, a forbidding dark forest with the treetops just poking out of the fog, and a village tucked into the valley below the castle.
“The dragons live there,” Elias said, pointing at the castle. “It’s quite a place, isn’t it?”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Oh, no. Rafe met me at home. I mean, in the Fixed Plane.”
“So how did you know how to get here?”
“That’s a good question. I have a strand of Rafe’s hair from our meeting.”
I gave him some serious side-eye. “Are you his stalker?”
“He gave it to me. At the time, I thought I might write a history of Sinistral music in the Fixed Plane, and I wanted to include him in a chapter. Flattery,” he shook a finger. “It gets you everywhere.”
“And collecting hairs is your equivalent of entering something into Google maps?”
“It’s one way,” he said. “Because nothing is fixed here unless we make it. So the hair—”
“I get it. Never mind. This is too weird. Let’s just get Dakota and go.” I took one step and he threw out an arm to stop me. “Wait,” he said. “These woods have a lot of hungry crows. Shit. They seem restless…”
“What does that mean?”
He met my eyes with a fierce expression. “It means, don’t go ahead. Follow my lead and stay very close. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He paused. “I can tell you don’t like being told what to do, but in this case you’d better put up with it.”
“Well, that really makes me feel—” I screamed as a swarm of crows (no, a murder of crows, I corrected myself) came out of the forest toward us. They seemed to be headed right for me. I could only assume they attacked humans. I dove for cover under some bushes and covered my head even as Elias—
Elias turned into a wolf. Which was what he did, I guess. I shouldn’t be surprised.
I was however, determined not to look impressed. I was not into any of this. Edie might have gotten sucked in to the paranormal world, and Dakota might have signed herself up like the dreamer with bad planning skills that she was.
But I liked the real world. I liked technology and science and things that made sense, and I was not one to fall for a guy just because of his hotness factor or coolness level. Elias turning into a wolf right in front of my eyes and snapping a crow out of the sky with his jaws before growling at the rest of them so that they scattered?
I just want to go home. This is ridiculous.
He started shifting back, his wolf form contorting back onto two legs. I shut my eyes.
“I’m still clothed,” he said.
“I would just rather not watch,” I said.
“I didn’t take you for the squeamish type.”
“I’m not the squeamish type. At all.”
He shrugged. “Anyway, you see why I want you sticking close, right? And those dragons won’t give your friend up—“
“You can’t talk to this Rafe guy even though he liked you enough to give you his hair?”
“No demon is going to give up a human bride,” Elias said. “Especially one so easily gotten. But they’ll have to leave the castle to take her to the Symposium. They probably won’t fly…” He looked at the sky.
“What if they do?”
“Then we’re screwed.”
“Oh man.” I was trying not to freak out. This kept getting worse.
“It’s okay. When they walk out of the castle, we just have to ambush your friend. Then, and only then, should you go ahead of me. Grab her hand, tell her to come back with us. I’ll bring us back through the portal and she’ll be safe with me and the other guys until we find someplace permanent for her.”
I looked at the ground. I was going to lose Dakota, one way or another, by the sound of it. First Edie, now Dakota… “I always used to like crows…”
“They’re Sinistral crows,” Elias said. “You can still like Fixed Plane crows.” He paused. “It seems like this place really bothers you.”
“I just don’t want to lose any more friends,” I said.
“Have you lost Edie?”
“Sort of.”
“You know, whenever your friends have babies and you don’t, it sucks. I’ve been going through that myself. We definitely need to have some kits eventually…”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My band.”
“So you’re also like bonded? Do you have a wife?”
“That is a hitch in the plan so far,” he said. “Finding the wife.”
“Why aren’t you gunning for Dakota, then?”
“I don’t have a settled life to offer. We don’t have a castle or a manor house or any of that, just a camper van and some tents. Dante said Dakota is fairly high maintenance.”
“She’s not,” I said, but that was probably me just being defensive.
“Our friends in Canada have a great place on the water. She’ll like that better.”
“And that’s that, huh? Dakota gets packed off to Canada and your friends get to marry a stranger. How romantic.”
“We can only work with what we’ve got,” he said. “Not too many women know about us in the first place, and it’s not something you put in a personal ad. There are really strict rules about sharing information with ordinary humans.”
Awkward conversation. It was hard not to worry that this whole demon-marriage thing was contagious, and even if Elias was an ordinary human, he still checked all of my “no” boxes. The band thing, the band wardrobe, the lack of stability. But these days, the biggest “no” of all was hooking up with a demon or three.
Chapter Thirteen
Dakota
I carefully poured the spell out in a circle around me. Once the circle was complete, the entire ring lit up and then glowing energy rushed up around me, stirring my clothes and hair. Then it was gone, and I was just looking at the dark stain of the liquid on the floor.
“That’s it,” Xado said. “On your first try. You’re a natural.”
“Really?” I was practically giddy. A natural witch?
Growing up, Mom always seemed to be looking for my natural talent. She was convinced that everyone had one. Whenever I was interested in anything, she jumped on it. I was always taking classes and teachers always loved me. I was the sort of kid that got called “sunshine” and the “light of the class”. I was an enthusiastic kid. But I was also…kind of a bad student. I got a lot of “just needs to apply herself” and there was a stint in a Waldorf school where I wandered into a patch of swamp behind the school during some activity and somehow got lost and the whole school was out screaming my name. The teacher was about to call the cops. They found me, but it was very embarrassing. All my little friends were like, “Ha ha, you got lost!” because kids can be such assholes. I made up this whole story about how I had followed a baby deer into the woods and it let me pet it.
This was perhaps the most classic Dakota story of all time.
Anyway, I never had really found a talent. Since Mom had forced me into college, I just had fun there. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. When I got out I went on a European backpacking trip (technically, not actually a backpacking trip, I took a full-on suitcase to tote around my cute clothes) for four months and then worked at World Market for two years where in hindsight I probably talked about my European backpacking trip way too much. Oh, I see you’re looking at our marzipan collection. I had the best marzipan in a little market in Austria on my backpacking trip to Europe!
Now I had the cafe job and I was really good at making art on lattes.
I
guess that was something.
But this? This was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. And it made so much sense. I was always drawn to anything mystical.
And then I realized I couldn’t tell Mom about it. She might be into alternative stuff, but this was like ten leaps beyond alternative stuff. Whether she lived for another two years or twenty years, I was going to have to figure out a bunch of lies to tell her about what I was doing. Edie already had to lie to her parents, but she didn’t talk to her parents every day either.
Being here was going to mean giving up everything I knew. Even if I could come back to visit, it definitely wouldn’t be the same.
I deflated, just a little.
Xado put a hand on my head. “Dear little bride! You were meant to be here. We should tell the others before we make the healing spell. We could never have hoped for such a good result.” As he looked into my eyes, he said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just overwhelmed with the idea that I can actually do magic.” I had to shove aside my other worries. It was way past time I really started growing up. I couldn’t live based on my mom’s hopes or expectations anymore. There was nothing to be said about that.
When we walked out into the main living space, Hiron and Rafe both looked at me like they were freshly bedazzled. Just seeing them all together again, the graceful way that Hiron rose from his chair, and Rafe leaned back on the bench with his guitar, made me feel better about everything. I liked seeing them together, how at ease they were in this shared space. Come to think of it, the only time in my life where I lived with more than one other person was when Edie and Nicole were with me.
“I see the spell was a success,” Hiron said. “And it’s strong.”
“Can you tell just by looking at me?”
“The protective spell has a faint shimmer in certain lights.”
“Do you think you’re ready to recreate the spell for the Symposium?” Rafe asked.
“Sure! It was pretty easy. Just mixing a few ingredients.”
Captured by Dragons: A Reverse Harem Paranormal (Brides of the Sinistral Realms Book 2) Page 7