by Ophelia Bell
The band meant everything to us, and it was still a new arrangement so I didn’t want to risk fucking things up so soon. But Ro and I had been together a lot longer than this iteration of Fate’s Fools. As much as I hated the idea of our boss deciding to kick us to the curb and start fresh, I loved that idiotic dragon in the other room more than life, and couldn’t stomach the idea of losing him.
I slumped down onto the ruined sofa, tufts of downy feathers floating around me. That song they’d sung together this morning had only been the start of it. Watching Ro pick up the guitar had seemed like a joke at first, with Willem and Sandor just encouraging him for fun. They were complete dorks whenever a woman came into the shop and started fondling the gear. We all needed to get out more, or at least entertain some of the propositions of the hotties who’d started coming to our shows since we’d officially been the new Fate’s Fools as of three weeks ago.
Deva was different, though. So fucking different, but I hadn’t seen it until she and Ro started singing that duet and I realized how much fucking trouble I was in. There was something unmistakable between them, and somehow it didn’t matter that it’d been my dick inside her earlier and my orgasm replenishing her magic.
I swiped my hand over my face and groaned, hardening again at the memory of the feel of her. The tight, hot sheath of her pussy had been so new, and so fucking good.
I’d been out of the Sanctuary for five years on my pilgrimage, had had my choice of human women but knew I never wanted to mate one of them. There was just something off about the social structure of modern human cultures. The women were too submissive, too deferential to the men. Not like the females I was used to. The higher races were mostly matriarchal. That’s not to say I wanted a domineering woman—I was as alpha as they came—but I did want a mate who had some power. Finding a powerful male partner to pair with was the first step in finding a woman like that.
That was where Rohan had come in, though our partnership had happened organically. I’d been following one of the rare Fate’s Fools international tours. They’d been my mom’s favorite band from her pilgrimage, so following them around the world was sort of a tradition—a rite of passage that’d gone on for a couple generations in our family.
They had switched members since my mom’s pilgrimage, though. When she’d followed them it’d been three siblings: Iszak, Lukas, and Evie North, but Evie was absent and they instead had a drummer backing them up who I learned was their cousin, Ozzie West.
The guys were amazing, packing every small club they played with both human fans and our own kind. The dragon ascension had just occurred and Fate’s Fools’ music had acted like a beacon to the new generation of dragons that had taken wing. The newest brood was still acclimating to the world after five centuries of hibernation, most of them looking for human mates.
Ro was one of the few dragons who hadn’t hooked up with a woman the night we met. Instead, he and I had closed down the Budapest bar together, only to discover that it was none other than the original bar the band had started in more than a century earlier.
After sharing a bottle of turul vodka that had knocked me on my ass, the band had learned Ro and I both played, and had invited us back to jam the next week. The jams became a regular occurrence whenever Ro and I both happened to be at the same show, which was more often than not. Sadly, their shows were more and more infrequent the last couple years. Rohan had shown up at one I happened to also be at about a year and a half ago in New York, and we both sensed some strange shift happening.
Fate’s Fools’ music was fucking loaded with magic that night, the likes of which I’d never heard, but I could feel down to my bones. It had never been like that before, and it wasn’t until after the war was over that I understood what I’d heard that night was a turul mating call, and that somewhere in the crowd had been the dragon who’d become Lukas and Iszak’s mate.
Not that I’d have noticed her then, because the music that night had also changed things between me and Ro, and we’d been all but mated ever since. At least that’s how it had felt to me. There was no formal recognition of the bond a pair of ursa bachelors shared, but even though he was a dragon I’d considered him my partner ever since, and assumed he was just biding his time for the right woman to complete our triad, like I was.
We may not have found that woman, but we did find a band. After the war ended, Lukas and Iszak quit to be family men, leaving Ozzie to rebuild or move on. And Gaia had smiled on me and Ro when the crazy Maestro decided to move to Los Angeles and invited us to do more than just jam for a change. We were the new Fate’s Fools, and life was fucking great.
Or it had been until today.
The same energy that had infused the North brothers’ music that night was now making my skin prickle with dread. I may not have been an expert in turul magic, but I’d bet my left nut that Deva was singing Rohan a mating song in there, and he was humming right along like he knew all the words.
“No soul, my ass,” I muttered. One of the few things I’d learned about turul magic over the last two years was that magic that powerful needed one heck of a powerful turul soul to back it up. I just couldn’t decide which one of them I was more jealous of . . . Deva because she was probably stealing my best friend and lover from me, or Rohan because she was singing that song to him and not to me.
I couldn’t fucking deal with it. With a curse I stood up and hoisted the half-busted armchair onto my shoulder and headed back out to the workshop beyond the kitchen. I could hide out there and make myself useful by fixing the damn furniture so at least we’d have someplace to sit when Ozzie got home from his trip.
Flipping on the stereo and turning the volume up, I grabbed a hammer and got to work.
10
Ozzie
I climbed the narrow steps to my grandmother’s Brooklyn rowhouse, unsure whether the knot in my gut was more dread or simple irritation. I’d moved to Los Angeles from New York three weeks ago for good reason, and being dragged via red-eye back to the East Coast for some cryptic “emergency” didn’t exactly instill confidence that my absence wasn’t an issue. Of course, leave it to Sophia North to obscure the truth just enough to force me to come.
As if anticipating my knock, the door swung open before I could touch it, revealing the cozy entryway with its polished wood and antique knick-knacks. Despite the annoyance of the summons, my shoulders relaxed. The woman could be infuriating, but this apartment was still home in many ways, and there was comfort in that.
I entered, following the sounds of voices around past the sitting room and kitchen, into the over-decorated living room filled with its worn furniture and dominated by a baby grand piano near the high windows.
I paused in the archway, narrowing my eyes at the big man who leaned against the piano, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Llyr? What the fuck are you doing here?” I didn’t bother with a polite greeting. When my grandmother called, it was not going to be a social visit. This was business, and with one of the Dionarchs’ soldiers in attendance, and a Thiasoi, no less, it was obvious this was serious business.
My grandmother stood from her seat on the sofa, her normally serene gray eyes a disconcerting tumult of storm clouds and lightning. My hackles rose and that previous comfortable homey feeling dissolved.
“This satyr is hunting for a missing woman. Someone I believe you know quite well.”
My stomach lurched when my Nanyo’s whispered message between the words reached my ears: “What have you done, Oszkar West?”
Llyr scowled at me, his whirlpool gaze darting over me as though sizing me up for a fight. Fucking nymphaea and their uncanny sight. As water shifters, nymphs and satyrs could turn a man sea-sick with only a look, but even more intrusive was their ability to see pasts and futures in a glance, thanks to their connection to the River—that mystical power that governed the passage of time. Gritting my teeth against Llyr’s potential onslaught, I remembered the moment of weakness I’d had the last
time we’d met, when I’d drunkenly plied him for information on a particular individual he’d recently had contact with. By the Winds, please don’t let it be Deva who is missing.
“When was the last time you saw Deva Rainsong,” Llyr asked.
Fuck. The room began to spin, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t Llyr’s doing. I held onto my wits, not daring to show any sign of weakness in front of this man.
“Did her father send you?” I deflected.
“All her fathers sent me, though Nikhil and Neph are the most adamant that she be found. She disappeared under somewhat . . . strained circumstances.” He frowned and darted a look away, so brief I could have missed it, but there was no denying the flash of guilt in his eyes and the way it stained his words. He may be able to see my past, but I could hear his lies.
“Why you and not one of the other Thiasoi soldiers?” I challenged, certain there was more to his particular interest than simply following orders.
Llyr’s aqua eyes swirled and he gritted his teeth. “Why me is not important. Have you seen her?”
“Not in over a year. Will you tell me what the fuck is going on?”
He sighed and raked a hand through his sleek black waves. Every breath he exhaled was infused with guilt but when he looked at me again, I was smacked with the sense that somehow he blamed me for Deva’s disappearance.
“You know that three weeks ago Dion’s powers returned.”
I nodded and moved to the sofa to sit, gesturing to indicate he sit as well. “I know, but it was a gradual thing. The bloodline linked to the god was starting to become aware of us a few weeks before the Equinox. I was with Belah and Nikhil and my cousins and we all had to do a bit of damage control in the city to maintain order here until the Quorum could perform a ritual to control the entire bloodline.”
Llyr eyed the chair I’d pointed to but paced away, staring at a bookcase instead. He was dressed to fight, wearing a simple black t-shirt and supple leather trousers. A satyr as big as him couldn’t easily blend in with humanity no matter where he was, but he’d have fit in perfectly at one of the clubs where Fate’s Fools performed.
He wandered past the bookcase and grazed his fingers over the polished brass curve of a trumpet that rested on another shelf, only one of many musical instruments in my grandmother’s collection. His tension made me uneasy. What was he hiding?
“We did perform the ritual. And as you know, it was a success. Every last member of the bloodline received the message and the charm to compel them to secrecy.” He turned back, his lips pressed tight together. He was definitely hiding something.
I leaned forward in my chair and glanced at my grandmother. She narrowed her eyes at me.
What the actual fuck? I wasn’t the one hiding shit. She let out a little puff of breath and a second later I heard a whispered, “Fate will learn your secret. I hope you’re prepared.”
Clenching my hands into fists on top of my knees, I shook my head at her and redirected my attention to Llyr. I didn’t have the time or focus to deflect my grandmother’s cryptic threats. For once I’d like the woman to actually say what she fucking meant.
“So, what the fuck does Deva have to do with anything?”
“She disappeared from the Haven shortly after the ritual was complete. We haven’t been able to locate her and I believed she would seek you out eventually. She is rather . . . attached to you for some reason.”
His whirlpool gaze stilled as he stared at me and a jolt like ice water shot down my spine. My turul talents revealed a subtext of accusation that was painfully apparent in his words and I got a sick feeling in my gut.
“I moved to Los Angeles three weeks ago, but I haven’t seen her. Nanyo, I take it she hasn’t come here looking for me since I left?”
My grandmother shook her head and eyed us both. “I promise you, if Fate finds that soulless girl first, there will be hell to pay. The ones born without souls are wildcards where Fate’s concerned. He doesn’t like uncertainties. She was safe from his eye while in the higher realms, but if she interferes with his plan on Earth, she will attract notice. If she hasn’t already. Lacking a soul will only let her evade his attention for so long.”
Llyr came around the chair and sank down into it with a heavy sigh. He sat forward and scrubbed his face with his hands. “If she didn’t come to you, I have a feeling she’ll be even more difficult to find. Something happened at the end of the ritual that she was trying to bring to our attention, but everyone was too distracted. We didn’t heed her warnings. I should have heard her, but I was too fucking . . . preoccupied to believe her.”
“This happened three weeks ago? She’s been gone all that time? Why the fuck am I just hearing about this now?” It was all I could do not to haul him up by his collar and shake him, even if he was a head taller than me.
“No offense, but you were a fucking last resort. We weren’t worried at first . . . thought she needed some space. And when Neph finally enlisted me to find her, I thought I could track her down myself,” Llyr said. “We have a bond. We’re half blood-melded thanks to her origins.”
The words “bond” and “blood-meld” crashed together and before I knew it I was on him with my hands around his throat. “What the fuck did you do to her you son-of-a-bitch?! Did you mate her? By the Winds if you mated her, I will end you.”
His throat rippled beneath my hands and my fingers passed through as though his flesh had become liquid. Then powerful arms threw me back and he stood, looming over me. Fucking satyrs were big. Not as stocky as ursa, but taller than dragons, with lithe, lean bodies, at least in their human forms. When they were fully primal shifted, they were half-human monsters double the size of a normal man and at least half again as big as a turul like me. Their female counterparts, the nymphs, weren’t any less intimidating either.
Llyr’s leathers creaked under the strain of his half-shifted body as he glowered at me. “She wanted to mate me but I told her no. If I had fucking said yes, we wouldn’t be in this goddamn predicament now, but I was too afraid of her father to follow through. Tell me, Oz, is that what happened to you too? Or did you follow through?”
I stood glaring at him, bristling at the soft expletive from my grandmother. I wouldn’t put it past my grandmother to know my secret—she had her ways—but what the fuck did this guy know?
“What makes you say that?”
He regarded me with a serious expression then sat back down, his body visibly shrinking back to his prior human size; he was still huge but not the monster about to rip out of his clothes that he’d been a moment ago. I could’ve held my own against him, but turul males in general tended toward small compared to the other higher races, and our females were downright petite, with only a few rare exceptions. My grandmother was as small and birdlike as they came, but somehow managed to be intimidating as hell by her sheer powerful presence.
She stood up and shot a dark glare at each of us. “I believe you had better start at the beginning, Llyr. Perhaps my grandson will share his story when you’re finished.”
“I don’t have a fucking story,” I said. “But please do tell us yours.” I sat back and waited for Llyr to begin.
He gave me a wary look, then nodded. “The ritual itself is no secret. Those who chose to participate joined us in the Haven on the Equinox. We needed to generate enough power to reach the entire bloodline with the message, so the six members of the Dragon Council and their mates were at the core of it, since they are capable of drawing the most magic and channeling it to a common well . . . They call this central hub a Catalyst, which they used to use during each Ascension’s Animus ritual to distribute magic from the Dragon Court and their mates to the Dragon Queen and then out to the entire brood, awakening them all together.”
“I know how the fucking dragons work,” I snapped. “Tell me about this ritual you were part of.” I had a sinking feeling I knew where he was going and my knuckles cracked under the strain of my clenching fists. I hoped like hell he was
about to tell me that the dragons’ own Catalyst, a Prismatic dragon named Kris, had volunteered for the role in this ritual.
“We needed more than a Prismatic dragon to reach the bloodline. The bloodline aren’t dragons. They are human, with traces of our blood mixed in. Though I understand that any dragon who has a bloodline-linked human in their ancestry would also be part of the bloodline. Anyone that dead bitch Meri corrupted with her blood and any of their descendants qualify, so there are millions of them out there.”
I nodded, realizing too late that I should have at least offered some sympathy. The woman he referred to had been the higher races’ mortal enemy for eons, and had kept him and his fellow satyrs—the last five males of his kind—imprisoned for the last two thousand years or so. She had a particular proclivity toward harvesting blood from the higher races and using it for her deranged experiments. Deva had been the result of one of those experiments.
It had been just a little more than a year since we’d finally vanquished Meri, who had at one time in her life been a nymph and someone I imagined Llyr had once known personally. But over the centuries she’d claimed more sinister monikers, the most popular of which was the Lamia, for her penchant toward stealing babies from the higher races and draining their blood.
I hadn’t been involved in the final battle that culminated in Meri’s demise, but I was well aware that Dionysus had subsumed her bloodline in the end. Anyone previously linked to her was now tied irrevocably to the god. But it wasn’t only Meri’s blood these people carried; her experiments had introduced blood from all the higher races into generation upon generation of humans. It would have remained dormant in perpetuity except that the divine blood introduced last year would have triggered it, possibly granting the humans power, but, more alarmingly, allowing them to recognize any of the higher races on sight. Dion had lost his power during the war, so we’d had time to prepare, but on the Spring Equinox three weeks ago, his power had returned.