It had my wings rustling with outrage.
I was very aware that a claim hadn’t been staked, and the male’s presence made my temples throb with the knowledge.
“We’ll be training out there today, sir,” Matthew was saying, and his tone was calm—well, to everyone else it sounded so.
Matthew epitomized that saying, ‘Still waters run deep.’ He was the kind of person who made everything look effortless, who appeared calm and chilled on the outside, while inside? He was a wreck. Because I knew the anger inside me would be roiling around in his veins too. And Gaia only knew how Daniel would be responding. Because he’d been exposed to Riel’s powers earlier than we had, he was even more of a fucking beast than Matt and me.
“You need to clock up a certain amount of hours out in the field,” the other man was saying. “You’ve been spending too much time—”
“We’ve been training Riel how she needs to be trained, Instructor Leopold,” Daniel ground out. “Thrusting her into the field when she isn’t trained for anything is a foolish waste of our time. She’s currently our weakest link, so we’ve spent the hours open to us training her where she needs to learn.”
Leopold.
Outrage filled me.
The bastard who’d felt up my defenseless mate, to the point where she’d stabbed him in the fucking foot with her sword. He’d been leaving us alone ever since, and I’d wondered when the instructor would come hovering around.
Figured I had my answer today of all days when, even though a part of me felt more settled than ever, everything else seemed as though it was up in the air.
“Indeed, as Matthew has already said, but I believe I need to see this for myself,” Leopold responded, his tone snide. “If she cannot keep up with you then she’s a detriment to your troupe. Why you picked her when you could have had Dyrian or Dewar, I’ll never know.”
“Our reasons are our own. She’s quite knowledgeable about human and Fae history, which will be useful when it comes time to approach zones of conflict,” Matthew replied easily, without a hint of anger.
This knowledge was the first I’d heard of it, but Leopold seemed to believe Matthew because he grumbled, “Well, we’ll see. As it stands, I expect you out on the field within the hour. I’ll be waiting.”
With that warning, he stomped out and I released my hold on the back of Riel’s neck. When I stared down at her, I saw she was asleep.
Asleep.
Gaia.
Pinching her nape could send her to sleep?
Sol wept.
Hefting her into the other room, I saw Matt and Dan snap to attention as I carried her inside.
“What happened?” Daniel half roared as he rushed over to her.
“New development. You know how puppies have a weakness at the back of their neck when they’re born?”
“Their scruff. It helps the mother carry her pups around between her teeth,” Matt answered, but he sounded confused as he rubbed his hands over Riel’s arms.
“Well, she has the same weakness,” I blurted out. “When I heard Leopold—”
Daniel growled, “You felt like killing him too for approaching our quarters?”
I shot him a look. “Exactly. I pinned her to me, and to stop her from struggling, I used the scruff.”
“It worked,” Matthew noted dryly, his gaze on our sleeping woman.
“Too well,” I mumbled, my tone sheepish as I ran a hand over my face.
“What are we going to do? Leopold will return if we don’t head out and do as he asks. He’s well within his rights to ask to see us train. He’s our liaison, after all,” Daniel groused, sounding as pissed off as I felt about the matter.
“She’ll wake up by then, won’t she?” I queried nervously.
Matthew blew out a breath. “We can only hope she will.”
❖
Gabriella
Though they explained, I wasn’t particularly happy about this new development.
Of all the shit I was learning, this one pissed me off the most.
I had a scruff.
What the Sol?
Even worse, it incapacitated me to the point where I fell asleep?
The notion set every feminine instinct inside me wild. But I also knew there was a reason for it. Just as there was a reason for every other whacked thing that was going on with us.
Like why Daniel was growling now. And I wasn’t just talking about a grumble under his breath. He growled like a fucking dog.
Like how, last night, when Matthew had rubbed my clit as he fucked me—a surefire way to get me to climax in the past—had done nothing for me. Only when he’d covered me with his body, only when I’d been surrounded by his weight and scent, had I been able to orgasm.
Like how slick I’d grown from Seph’s touch this morning. Every woman knew that, under the water, any ‘lube’ disappeared. I’d never been able to get off in a bath for that reason alone. But with Seph? I’d been gushing like the frickin’ Trevi fountain.
And what was with that anyway?
There was so much wetness down there I wondered if I needed to visit the OB-GYN or something. Sol, it wasn’t natural how wet I could get, and certainly not from him feeling me up so he could put blood inside my pussy.
Gaia, talk about a way to turn any woman off.
Yet, there I’d been, close to orgasming from the creepy touch.
There was a reason why I liked it when they overpowered me, why I wanted their skin on mine constantly, and why I could, all of a sudden, fucking purr. We just hadn’t figured it out yet.
And yeah, we were a ‘we’ now. Even if the change of pronoun was enough to spin me into a panic attack.
Before my jumbled thoughts could get the better of me, Leopold grated out, “Come on then, it’s time to see how your private lessons have prevailed, Gabriella.”
His sneer was evident, and the desire to flip him the bird—witch style—was powerful. Sol, what I’d give to flick my finger at him and trigger a nosebleed.
Gaaaaaaia, I wanted that so badly that I knew, before this semester was up, whether we succeeded or failed as a troupe or not, I was going to do that.
In fact, screw that. I was going to make his nose gush just as badly as I did when Daniel growled at me.
Ugh, gross, but true nonetheless.
I still felt shaky from whatever this scruff shit meant. After I’d woken up on the sofa and they’d handed me some toast with the proviso that I needed to haul ass, they’d clued me in on the un-clue-in-able.
All I truly knew was that I was tired, and not because I’d fucked two guys and sucked one off last night—normally, that shit would reenergize me. Witches loved nothing more than a good orgy to clear out the magical ‘pipes’ as it were. But me? I felt like I’d been down the mines for three solid shifts.
Blowing out a breath as I got to my feet, I grabbed the foil. My Virgo—yikes, was I truly calling them that now?—had downgraded me from a saber the first day we’d trained privately together because it was too heavy, and I was relieved because this was easier to maneuver. Not by much, but some.
Leopold pointed up. “Thirty feet high, please.”
I winced because it took a surprising amount of effort to take off and to fly to that height. I knew it was nothing to the Fae who flew among the frickin’ airplanes in the sky, but to me? It was still hard work. Especially after this morning.
Even though I wanted nothing more than to take a run and ascend, I knew that Leopold would just make me restart—the true Fae way was to take off from a standing position.
Yeah, it was as hard as it sounded.
Except, this time, I had magic on my side. I just needed to make sure that the prick instructor didn’t see it.
Blowing out a breath, I let my wings begin to move. Slowly at first, softly, allowing the wind to whisper through the feathers. I sped up when I saw that Daniel was already in the sky, and calling on the wind again, I let it help me surge upward.
Leopold cal
led out, “Well, that’s certainly an improvement.”
That the bastard had praised me was testament enough to how bad I’d been just a week before. Gaia, I was never doing shit without magic again.
Fighting with the wind to aid me still wasn’t second nature, but with practice, it would be. And if I could show Leopold a marked improvement in my dueling skills, then hopefully, he’d leave us alone again. I was well aware that I’d pricked his pride—as well as his foot, ha—but as he’d avoided us ever since, I had to hope he’d do that again until someone called his absence into question.
As I made it to Daniel’s height, I saw the pride in his eyes. Sol, it was surreal how that made me feel. My posture straightened, my neck lengthened, and a smile curved my lips… almost like I was preening for him.
“I want to fuck you in the sky,” he growled—there was that growl again, and there was me, wet once more.
I released a shaky breath. “I won’t say no.”
“Damn right you won’t.” His nostrils flared. “You’re wet for me now, aren’t you?”
There was no need for artifice. I knew he could scent my arousal. “I am.”
He gritted his teeth. “Let’s get this farce of a show over with and we can get back to our quarters.”
When Seph’s space had become our quarters, I couldn’t say. Apparently, because it was the place we’d fucked first, it had the honor of boarding us forever. Not that I was complaining, more like wondering how my whole world had shifted so severely in a matter of days.
“En garde!” Leopold declared, making me jump.
My wings fluttered me backward until I was about seven or so feet away from him.
“Prêt!” came his next command, and we raised our swords.
“Allez!”
I called on the wind, using it to anticipate Daniel’s next move. That he was going slower than usual was a given. He was used to tempering his speed now, and I let the wind advise me as it shadowed his moves and I picked up on inferences from it.
My focus on the fight was absolute. Maybe if it hadn’t been, I’d have noticed the storm brewing around me. It seemed to appear out of nowhere, and as I managed to use the wind to predict Daniel’s next move, using the space I opened to cut him on the arm so I won that bout, I cheered as I happy danced in the sky.
Only then did I look around me and see how the bright blue sky had morphed into a deep and stormy gray.
“Should we go in?” I called out to Leopold, who harrumphed.
“A bit of rain hurt no one. Continuez!”
He went through the en garde, prêt, and allez routine, but this time, it was harder to focus on Daniel. The wind was helping me still, but it was more difficult to hear thanks to the sudden currents that floated into being all around us.
I took a chance to look over my Virgo’s shoulder, and when I saw the funnels appearing out of nowhere, I blinked at them. When Daniel’s sword stopped a scant inch from my stomach, he grumbled, “You could have stopped me, Riel.”
I shook my head. “Look at the sky.” I pointed over his shoulder and when he twisted around to stare at the twenty funnels that had made an appearance, he ground out at Leopold, “Surely we should go in. Those are twisters in the making!”
Leopold just folded his arms across his chest. “We’ll stop when I say we stop.”
The prick!
I grunted as we went through the motions to start another bout, but the wind whistled so hard I couldn’t hear anything. Straining to hear the magic in my own spell, I felt the change in the atmosphere. It plummeted, making my wings feel heavier as I strove to stay in the sky.
With a sudden surge, the air around us began to billow, and the small funnels began to merge into larger ones.
I was from Miami. I’d been born and bred there. I’d been three when the Great Tornado hit us, but I remembered the devastating images, and every year, on May 12th, the news always reported it. The harrowing photos of a stormy sky with a great funnel as it tore through downtown Miami would haunt most Floridians forever. Storms weren’t called ‘Great’ for no reason.
This sky was a nightmare waiting to happen, and our instructor was insisting we remain skyborne for it?
I shook my head. “We need to get out of here.”
Daniel didn’t even wait for me to finish the sentence, he grabbed a hold of me and carefully, we began to descend. But just as we started to, and Leopold began cursing at us, a funnel snapped out of nowhere. One massive spout that I felt tugging at me like a huge magnet. My wings flared wide, flapping in overdrive as I tried to descend, but the wind, usually my ally, was my foe. It caught me within its currents, tearing me from Daniel’s arms and ripping me twenty feet higher.
Just as I was caught in its powerful thrust, a bolt of lightning threaded through the sky. A crashing boom jolted, seconds before it struck again.
This time, it hit me.
And the second it did, I recognized a power that was not Gaia’s.
My body didn’t fry under the massive electrical power. Instead, it felt turbocharged, renewed and revitalized after the weakness I’d suffered from this morning’s impromptu discovery of my scruff. I could hear my men screaming at me, felt them trying to fly toward me, but the wind was stopping them just as it was tossing me about like a boat caught in a tidal wave.
There was no way they’d get to me, no way at all because whoever was behind this didn’t want them to catch me. I felt certain the bolt of lightning hadn’t been for my good, but for whatever reason, my body didn’t suffer under its power.
The funnel that had tossed me from Daniel’s embrace made another appearance, catching me within its swirling torrent. Any strength I’d gained from tangling with the lightning dissipated as I was whipped around, around, and around, until my wing stubs ached as the wind tore at them. My body throbbed with the punch of each current into my flesh, and my head was dazed from how fast I was spinning.
And just when I felt sure I was about to pass out cold for the second time that day?
The twister stopped.
From the great mass of clouds that had appeared out of nowhere, suddenly, the blue sky returned. And with it, the funnel began to disappear. The speed with which I was churning around in an endless sweeping cycle didn’t, but as the pressure dropped, so did the wind, and the power that kept me soaring through space, hundreds of feet away from my Virgo, disappeared just as the clouds had.
Like a drill bit in full motion, I plummeted to the ground. Swirling in a tight formation that propelled me into terminal velocity. I couldn’t use my wings, could do nothing to try to break my fall.
I could hear my Virgo screaming at me, knew they were racing toward me, but there was nothing they could do.
Whoever had wanted to end me had achieved it.
My body felt like an anchor that was going to settle beneath the ocean’s surface, but unlike the water, the ground wouldn’t cushion me in its willowy embrace.
I prepared myself as much as I could for what was about to happen. I even tried calling on my magic, but it was just as lost to the swirling torrent I found myself in—overpowering me and my senses, both physical and magical, until I was nothing more than a sack of bones being hurtled toward earth.
I couldn’t even open my eyes, that was how powerful the pressure was against me.
When my feet connected with the ground, I screamed. Finally, the pressure abated enough for me to do that, but just as I felt like my last sound on Earth was my terrorized yell, the ground parted just as water would.
I slipped through it, between it, soaring further and further, down and down.
Was this the end?
Had Gaia spared me at the final moment? Ripping from me the memory of my tragic end so it wouldn’t follow me into the next realm and haunt me?
But just as I began to be certain that she had tried to spare me, a chuckle sounded next to me, “No, granddaughter, today is not your day to die.”
Granddaughter?
; Sol, had my grandfather kidnapped me?
To be continued in FAELING HARD, which is now live on preorder and due for release October 2019.
Faeling Hard
Gabriella
1912
My heart was pounding as I watched my abuela twitch and jerk on the thin mattress. Beside her, Havana, her familiar, growled, but when she whimpered, the perrito licked at her face, her hand, scampering up and down the bed in an attempt to calm her. To soothe.
But there was no calming, no soothing. My grandmother was not awake, neither was she asleep. This was no dream, not even a nightmare.
I wished, with all my heart, that my madre hadn’t gone into the fields so early. With double the work now my grandmother’s fingers were knotted and gnarled like the roots of the plants we grew, she tended to the crop twice as long, with the dark and light blurring for her as she worked so hard. Next year, she said, I could help her, and I hated that I was useless. Hated that I couldn’t help her now, when she needed me.
Except, at this moment, I needed her too.
Abuela’s visions were coming more and more often. The same thing over and over. She muttered words about Sol and Gaia, of angels and pearls. It made no sense to me, but I was only little. I’d seen six winters, but we grew up fast on the farm. Faster still because of Gaia’s Way.
A sharp cry escaped my grandma, different in tone and tenor, and, quickly, I dashed across the small room to where the rickety cane stand held a deep enamel dish. The bright white pitcher gleamed against the dark thatched walls as I poured water from it into the wash basin, then, into its crystal-clear depths, dunked the thin cotton wash cloth that was neatly folded at its side. I squeezed it as tight as my little fingers would allow, then with it dripping as I rushed back to her side, draped it over her forehead.
At the sight, Havana growled at me, but I understood. I felt like growling too. Fear hit me because I was sure the vision was taking longer than usual. By the time I heard her whimper, she was usually being drawn out of whatever it was she Saw. Today was different, though. Today, she Saw more than she ever had before because, by now, she was normally awake and teasing me out of my fright.
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