by S. Young
As they moved through city traffic, Rose fought the urge to close her eyes. She still had questions. “Who is Jada?”
“A friend of Bran’s.”
“She knows what he is?”
“People as wealthy as Jada often find themselves in our world. She and Bran are what you call fuck buddies. Not exclusive. She has a fiancé and Bran has many lovers, male and female. Jada, however, lets him drink from her.”
Rose remembered the vampire tearing into her throat and scowled as she automatically reached for her neck. “Seriously?”
Fionn flicked her a look, saw where her hand was, and turned back to the road. “Rose, it shouldn’t hurt. From what I’ve gathered, a vampire bite provides a human with much sexual pleasure. As they drink, the vampire releases pheromones that causes a chemical reaction. A sexual one. The bastard who bit you was all about the pain, so he didn’t do that.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,” Rose grumbled. “Both are a violation of a different kind.”
“Not when consent is involved.” Fionn shot her a disapproving look. “Jada consents to the bite and to the sex. Don’t judge what you don’t understand.”
“Says the man who hates what he is.”
At his icy silence, Rose heaved a sigh. “Sorry. I’m just … tired.”
“Then sleep.”
“I would but I don’t know where we’re going and … I keep thinking about these powers of mine. Of ours.”
“What about them?”
“You said witches and warlocks have limitations. That they have to pull from the world, exchange something for the magic.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t. Except for exhaustion, werewolf bites and iron, we don’t have limitations. Do we?”
He was quiet a moment as he seemed to consider her question. “Everyone has limitations. I can knock someone unconscious by visualizing my magic pinching their carotid sinus, which is what I did to the Blackwoods back at the hotel—”
“Seriously?” Rose stroked her throat again. “That’s some trick.”
“But I can’t fly. I can fall with style but I can’t fly.”
She grinned. “Did you just quote Toy Story?”
He frowned at her. “What?”
That would be a no then. Rose chuckled to herself and shook her head. “Nothing. So no flying.”
“Technically, no flying. Traveling has its limitations, as you’ve just experienced. And no cheating bodily functions. You have to eat, sleep, drink, piss, and—”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Fionn frowned. “You have very few limitations, Rose. Once you fully let go of thinking of yourself as human, you’ll discover how far your limits go.”
She nodded, considering this. It was both a thrilling and terrifying concept. Something else occurred to her. “Why borrow this car? Why pay for a personal shopper to deliver clothes to our hotel? If you can just snap your fingers and make it all appear?”
His scowl this time was ferocious. “Because I can’t just make it appear, Rose. If I snap my fingers and make this Bugatti appear, it’s because I’ve stolen it out of Jada’s secure lockup. When you’re this powerful, you have to draw a line. It would be easy to use magic to amass wealth, just as Schneider has done. But what kind of man would that make me? I’m going to be here forever, and I will not spend eternity in lazy indolence, stealing from humans. What I have, I’ve earned. Unless necessary, I do not steal.”
Her heart literally skipped a beat. She was in awe of him. “You have your own code. Your own sense of honor.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it that. But if I viewed the world and everything in it as my due, I’d lose myself. And if someone as powerful as me loses himself, I’d be putting the world in danger.”
“Fionn.”
“Yes?”
“I know you know that you’re physically attractive.”
He tensed. “Rose …”
“You’ve never been more attractive to me than you are right now,” she whispered.
In answer, Fionn flicked her an unreadable look. “Go to sleep, Rose. You’ve had a tough morning.”
Disappointment at his avoidance sank deep in her gut. With a sigh, she replied, “I will when you tell me why we’re going to Orléans.”
The car sped up as Fionn drove them onto the highway that would take them out of Barcelona. “I’m going for a fight.” The words sounded dragged out of him.
“A fight?”
“An underground one.”
Their conversation from yesterday played over in her head. “Places for vamps and werewolves to take that natural aggression they don’t want pouring out around humans. They beat the living daylights out of each other with it instead.”
Rose considered Fionn. “Why do you need to fight?”
That telltale muscle ticked in his jaw. “I need a fight, that’s all.”
“You’re frustrated?” Sexually or otherwise? Rose was hoping it was otherwise because Fionn deciding to take/or give a beating rather than throw her onto a bed somewhere and let their wild sides reign was a little insulting.
“Today the Blackwoods could’ve gotten you. That was my fault. I took too big a risk with you.”
He felt guilty.
Rose relaxed a little. “Fionn, I’m a big girl and I decided to go after the dagger.”
“Because I asked you to.” He shot her a dark look. “Go to sleep, Rose, and give us both some peace.”
She eyed him, in no way put off by his grumpiness. Instead, longing coursed through her as she watched his big hands change gears, pushing the Bugatti to 120 mph. It didn’t even feel like it was doing sixty. Rose sighed, closed her eyes, and settled in to sleep. But before she let slumber come for her, she murmured throatily, “There are better ways to vent your frustration.”
Even though Rose didn’t open her eyes to see his reaction, she felt the air inside the car turn electric as a flood of desire gripped her belly low and deep.
It was foreign.
It was his desire.
Although pleased by the thought, his desire only inspired a natural response from Rose. She shifted in her seat, crossing one leg over the other, and willed her blood to cool. Thankfully, Rose was so goddamn weary from the encounter with the Blackwoods, exhaustion pulled her under.
The arousal never faded, though, pulling her deep into the dark where the only thing that existed was Fionn. Naked. Entwined with her.
There were few streetlights in this district of Orléans. Industrial buildings, sites, and warehouses occupied the street in Saint-Jean-de-la-Ruelle. Broken chain-link fences, old, tired concrete buildings, rusted corrugated iron, and faded red brick surrounded them.
Fionn had, with much regret, left the Bugatti with a contact at a luxury hotel near the Loire River. He had no idea who the man was, but Bran had trusted him to return the hypercar to Jada. Rose had chuckled sleepily as Fionn handed over the fob with obvious reluctance.
It was probably wrong that not buying a Bugatti before his final trek into Faerie now ranked on his list of top twenty regrets.
The woman at the top of that list, holding the number one spot with a painful, talon-like grip on his soul, watched the shadowed figures disappear into a large warehouse across the street, behind a secure chain link fence.
Fionn had assumed a sleeping Rose would be a reprieve from his unexpected and entirely unwanted attraction. Instead, it had proven the opposite. He didn’t pretend to have the nose of a wolf, but fae had heightened senses. Rose’s scent changed as she slept, becoming musky, feminine, and familiar.
Whatever she was dreaming about, she was enjoying it.
Too much.
Now and then, she’d emit little moans or groans that were driving him wild. At one point Fionn drove so fast down the highway hoping to run from his desires that he’d inadvertently taken the tank too low. Rose had slept through his pit stop at the gas station. He’d had to take a minute before getting out of the car or everyone in the fucking vicinity w
ould know Rose had him primed like a prepubescent boy instead of the goddamn immortal warrior he was.
Fuck.
How is she doing this to me? he wondered as he studied her watching the warehouse.
By the time he’d handed over the Bugatti, Fionn was ready to unleash every molecule of pent-up frustration on someone. He just hoped there was a being up to the challenge in that warehouse. The plan had been to leave Rose at the apartment Bran booked for them in the center of Orléans. It was a beautiful space on the top floor of a seventeenth-century building in the heart of the city. Balconies led off nearly every room, looking down on the cobbled street with its shops and trams.
Rose had seemed energized by her sleep in the car and the new location, still seemingly unfazed by all the shit that had happened to her in less than a week.
She amazed him.
And that was the problem.
His plans for her had become a constant knife through his throat.
There was no relief from that knife. Not only did Rose insist on eating with him at a restaurant across the street, she’d then tried to insist, like a nagging wife, that he rest before the fight.
Fionn couldn’t.
Too agitated.
Teetering on the edge of temptation.
Temptation he was destined not to outrun, apparently, because the bloody woman insisted on accompanying him.
“I want to see,” Rose had said, her expression taut with stubbornness when he refused her request. “And I’ve got your back.”
Just words. They irritated him almost as much as his desire for her. No one, except Bran, had ever had his back. “I hate to burst your bubble, Rose, but I don’t need you to have my back.”
Rose would not be shaken.
Damn her.
“So, this is an underground fight?” She gestured to the warehouse.
She’d showered and changed into the jeans and shirt the last hotel had dry-cleaned for her, but her singular summery scent overwhelmed the complimentary coconut shampoo she’d discovered in her en suite.
Fionn grunted in response and walked toward the fence. A man, almost as tall as Fionn, stood guard by the gate. He knew his face. The vampire was at least fifty years old, for this was the third fight in France Fionn had attended where this vamp acted as a doorman.
“I know you,” the vampire said, opening the gate. “Here to do some damage?”
He gave another grunt as he made to walk by the doorman.
“I don’t know her.” The vamp grabbed Rose’s arm.
Later Fionn would blame his response on his wasted nerves. As soon as the vampire touched Rose, Fionn whirled on him, gripped him by the throat, and lifted him off his feet. He bared the spell-cast fangs he wore to pretend to be a vamp at the fights and growled into the doorman’s face, “We mustn’t touch what isn’t ours.”
The vampire tried and failed to release himself from Fionn’s grip, shock slackening his features when he realized he was the weaker of the two. Finally he nodded, and Fionn lowered the vamp to the ground.
He could sense Rose’s tension at his back as he guarded her from the doorman’s study.
The vampire rubbed his throat, gaping at Fionn. “No offense meant,” he wheezed out. “I sensed magic, that’s all.”
“She’s a witch,” Fionn replied, “and she knows the rules.”
Still holding his throat in bewilderment, the doorman waved them on.
Furious at himself for responding like a territorial animal, it took Fionn a moment to look down at Rose and ask after her welfare.
She nodded solemnly at him. “I’m okay. And just for the record, I can handle myself. But thanks.”
Knowing Rose was right, that she could handle herself, only made him feel worse. He was born in the late European Iron Age, not long before the Romans would try to conquer his part of the world. Fionn believed differently from how modern humans might expect. Perhaps they assumed women were treated as they were for most of history, as the weaker sex, to be protected and owned by men.
As a human king, he had believed he owned Aoibhinn, but it was a mutual ownership. She owned him in return. As the man who loved her, he wanted to protect her, but as a king who was often away at war, he wanted Aoibhinn to be able to protect herself.
Just as he taught Rose to use her abilities, to defend herself, he’d taught Aoibhinn how to wield a sword as well as any man in his army.
This kind of belief in the fairer sex had been unconventional and only lent itself to expounding upon the uniqueness of his kingship.
That belief in Aoibhinn had been his undoing.
Three centuries above the dirt had allowed time to disintegrate some of those memories, to mute the pain.
But never his thirst for vengeance.
As Fionn strode into the warehouse, relief moved through him as he took in the two large circles that had formed. Two fights. Supernaturals circling each, fists above their heads, baying for blood. The coppery scent of it already filled the air, mingling with sweat, dirt, and some kind of chemical, most likely due to whatever had been stored in the warehouse before it had been converted into an underground fight club.
He searched the space, determined to find the supernatural that would prove the most challenging.
“Is this like a bare-knuckle boxing match?” Rose asked, raising her voice to be heard over the commotion. He heard the awe in her tone but refused to look at her. The bloody woman muddled everything up.
He opened his mouth to respond in the affirmative just as a huge figure strode between fights, observing the opponents, halting Fionn’s answer.
The Fates were feeling sympathetic. A hard smile pushed at Fionn’s mouth.
Kiyonari. Or Kiyo as the werewolf preferred.
Years ago, Kiyo had learned of Fionn’s immortality. That did not worry Fionn, for Kiyo was an anomaly, the result of ancient Asian magic that even Fionn was ignorant to.
Kiyo was the world’s only immortal werewolf.
Sensing him, Kiyo halted his progress around one of the circles and turned his head. The shadows beyond the overhead lights masked his face, but Kiyo had spotted him. Fionn knew.
They walked toward one another.
Rose followed at Fionn’s side. “Who is that?” The awe in her voice penetrated this time. He shot her a quick glance and caught her ogling the shirtless Kiyo.
He bit back a growl of annoyance.
Kiyo drew to a stop before them, his expression the same as always—scowling and impatient.
Fionn had been accused of being a broody bastard but no one brooded like Kiyonari. The product of an illicit affair between an American doctor and a Japanese merchant’s daughter sometime in the nineteenth century, Kiyo’s life was difficult before he was bitten and spelled with immortality.
Although Fionn hadn’t thought of it one way or another before Rose’s reaction, Kiyo’s mixed heritage (a curse during much of his human and immortal life) had favored him physically. Rose’s expression said the werewolf wasn’t hard to look at.
“I was just about to leave,” Kiyo said, his accent distinctly American.
Kiyo had lived in New York until the 1960s. He’d been a nomad ever since, but he’d never lost his adopted accent.
“I assume you’ll answer my challenge.”
Kiyo nodded, his attention moving to Rose. His expression never changed. “She’s like you.”
There was no question in the comment, just an observation by the most perceptive son of a bitch in the werewolf world.
One of the things Fionn liked most about the werewolf, however—he wasn’t a nosy arsehole.
“Hey.” Rose held out her hand to Kiyo.
He stared at it and promptly ignored the gesture.
“Okay, then.” She threw a “Who’s this guy?” look at Fionn that would have amused him under other circumstances.
“Weapons?” the wolf asked.
Fionn rolled his shoulders, shrugging out of his coat. At the same time, he called on the
weapons he stored in his Paris apartment. He had homes everywhere and weapons in every single one. Magic tinged the air around them as the swords appeared in his hands. The coat slipped to the ground.
The others were too caught up in the current fights to even notice.
Rose drew in a breath at the sight of the medieval claymores, steel glimmering in the dim light.
Kiyo quirked an eyebrow. “No katanas this time?”
“Last time you had the advantage.” Fionn tossed one of the broadswords to the wolf; he caught it by the hilt with ease. “This time it’s my turn.”
“Like you need it.” Kiyo brandished the sword with ease, feeling out the weight and balance of the steel.
“A sword fight?” Rose stepped between them to ask Fionn, her back to Kiyo.
“You’re surprised? It’s what I’m used to in a fight. And this way it’s fair. No magic, just strength and skill.”
She took a step closer to him. Too close, if you asked him. “Who is this guy?” she said under her breath.
Kiyo scowled at her back, having heard her easily with his wolf ears.
“This is Kiyo … a friend. A werewolf.”
Kiyo transferred the scowl to Fionn and this time, he failed in his attempt to suppress his smile.
“Your werewolf friend is hot,” Rose said, causing his smile to wither in an instant. He glared down at her, and she grinned. “But not as hot as you when you smile.” She smacked him playfully on the arm and stepped out of his way. “You should do it more often.”
She really was the devil.
The werewolf offered him a commiserating look in return for Fionn’s beleaguered one. A roar of animalistic growls rent the air, signaling a fight was over. Kiyo turned from watching a crowd disperse, calls for the next opponents circling the warehouse. “Now?”
Fionn nodded before handing his overcoat to Rose. “You watch. That is all. No interfering.”
Her expression serious, she nodded, folding the coat in her arms. “What about…” she bared her teeth and gestured to Kiyo.
Amusement flickered through him. He guessed that was her way of asking if he was concerned Kiyo might bite him. “We’re sword fighting, Rose. No teeth.”
She didn’t seem assured, but replied, “Got it. Go kick some ass.”