“Me too,” she murmured, gripping his shoulders.
With a burst of physical strength he hadn’t imagined her capable of, she rolled them to their sides—and jammed her knee between his legs.
For a second he felt nothing, only saw the sparks of white flash behind his closed lids, and then agony snapped through his body.
“Get out!” Elena dragged herself to her feet, unruffled as he lay in a crumpled heap, sucking in one breath at a time, waiting for the pain to subside.
Immortal and impervious to most forms of death, he still had no defense against a furious woman with a knee forged in titanium.
Fuck.
Turning her back on him, she walked out of the room.
He lifted his head, growling the foreign command he’d memorized, the ancient magic in the word crackling across his tongue while the ring he wore burned his finger.
Elena stopped mid-stride. “Vaughn?” A visible tremor ran through her body. “What have you done?”
Gritting through the lingering pain, he climbed to his feet, circling around to face her.
Panic widened her eyes, and it took him a moment to realize that she couldn’t move. The old Fae word he’d barely been able to pronounce had actually worked, the magic he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to wield channeled by the ring he’d been given.
Curls of ivy burst across her skin like fireworks going off. She couldn’t break the hold, but her sorceress heritage ran deeper than the Fae blood in her, and she’d slip the leash soon.
Burying the gut-wrenching sensation eating him up inside, he brushed her hair away from her face.
“Whatever you’re thinking about doing, Vaughn, you can stop. Stop this now.”
The wolf growled at the trace of fear in her voice. Vaughn leaned forward, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“Vaughn!” The fear was gone, the steel-tone he admired back in full force.
He put his hand on her chest, reciting the other words he’d committed to memory before he could talk himself out of it. Her skin warmed beneath his palm, and he drew back as a series of Fae glyphs appeared like a brand on her skin.
The mystical tattoo resembled an archaic necklace and pulsed as if it were alive, drawing streaks of blue across her skin until they pooled in the sapphire-like center.
Elena’s eyes widened. “What is happen—”
She screamed, the agony-filled sound tearing a snarl from the wolf inside him.
He caught her as she collapsed. “I’m sorry, Ivy. There was no other way.”
CHAPTER TWO
Two Months Earlier
If someone asked him to spell Trouble, Vaughn’s answer would have been the same as anyone else’s—until he spotted her standing on the opposite side of the room.
Trouble. E-L-E-N-A.
She walked between the rows of blinking slot machines that hummed in an irritating chorus of bells and dings, turning toward the Blackjack tables where people gambled or observed the play, pausing briefly to take in her surroundings.
In true Elena fashion she was dressed to garner attention, and every guy—and more than a few women—in the immediate vicinity followed the swing of her hips in the too-short black skirt.
As if she knew she had every eye on her, she flipped her hair back, exposing a shoulder left bare by the pink shirt that wrapped around her upper body in thin, gauzy layers.
And it was all part of her strategy.
Catch their eye, let people form their superficial opinions, usually the wrong ones, and then blindside every one of them like a train jumping the tracks at the last second and barrelling straight at you.
Vaughn was pretty sure he was still scraping himself off the pavement from the last time their paths crossed, and surprisingly they’d both made it out of the Gauntlet alive.
Every few millennia, the gods awakened to wage war against one another, shifting the balance of power and keeping the immortal population in check. The Gauntlet routinely preceded each war—Campaign—by a century or two, giving the awakening gods prime candidates to recruit for their side.
All of the competitors coerced into participating in the most recent Gauntlet—Vaughn included—had believed they were competing in the real event. In truth the whole thing had been nothing more than an elaborate ploy to seek vengeance against Rhiannon.
The goddess had her share of enemies, but most immortals in Avalon remained loyal to her, if only because she’d given birth to Arthur. Countless immortals clung to the so-called prophecy that their fallen king would someday be resurrected.
After a brutal decades-long war with his half-sister Morgana, Arthur had succumbed to a fatal injury inflicted by his own nephew on the battlefields of Camlann. No one had grieved more than Arthur’s mother, and Rhiannon’s punishment had been swift and merciless.
Not even those closest to Arthur had been spared her fury for failing to protect her son.
Vaughn used to believe there wasn’t anything worse than having his ability to turn to stone to heal turned into a prison sentence. However he’d gladly take being trapped in his stone animal form from sunrise to sunset any day over the agony suffered by Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.
Those poor bastards didn’t even have the freedom to search for Excalibur, assuming Arthur’s lost sword really was the key to undoing Rhiannon’s curse.
But right now Vaughn couldn’t afford to waste time contemplating whether or not finding Excalibur would truly somehow resurrect Arthur centuries after his death. Vaughn needed to keep his head in the game and his eye on the prize.
“Vaughn?”
Almost reluctantly, he dragged his attention from Elena, keeping her in his peripheral vision as he faced his friend. “Hmmm?”
Dare grinned and took a swig of the beer in front of him. “Who is she?”
“Who?”
Dare arched a brow. “The brunette. A.K.A the only female you’ve looked at in months. Maybe years.”
The reminder that Vaughn’s attention had slipped from the task at hand, the most important job of his life, twisted his gut.
Dare winced. “Look, in forty-eight hours we’re going to have your sister back. One last piece of the puzzle and we can put the whole fucking disaster behind us.”
Normally Dare’s optimism was contagious, but this close to arranging Piper’s release after her abduction right before the Gauntlet weeks ago, Vaughn couldn’t quite rally. If he’d kept a better eye on her like he’d promised, she wouldn’t have been taken in the first place.
“You sure you’re not going to miss it?” Dare bumped his shoulder. “It won’t be the same without you.”
What he missed was his sister. He’d learn to live without the adrenaline rush that accompanied working for the rebellion to undermine Morgana at every opportunity and reclaim Camelot.
Although Arthur had begun the rebellion before he died over a thousand years ago, the faction still wasn’t powerful enough to take down Morgana. There were too many immortals that refused to support the rebellion, too caught up in their own greed for more territory and power. And every one of them played with fire.
He’d witnessed firsthand how Morgana slaughtered those who defied her, never mind those still loyal to her dead half-brother. She wasn’t giving up her claim on Camelot without far more bloodshed than anyone needed to witness, and it had taken losing Piper to remind him of that.
He was working with Dare purely as a means to an end on this. What the rebellion did after tonight didn’t matter one way or another to Vaughn, and he had no intention of returning to the fold when he got his sister back.
If anything, he planned on putting as much distance between them and his family as he could. He hadn’t kept that a secret, and Dare had been doing a pretty good job of pretending this wasn’t their last rodeo.
“It won’t be the same without you. Who’s going to back me up the next time I run into a bunch of trolls? Or grab a drink with me to celebrate the next time we crush another one of Morgana�
��s plots?”
“Maybe you’ll manage to hook up with your ant idol.”
“Angel,” Dare corrected with a don’t-screw-with-me look on his face. “The Shadow’s Angel, which you well know. And that guy is too badass to hang out with me.”
Badass? Maybe. Reckless, dangerous and driven by a wicked death wish, definitely.
But Vaughn didn’t bother expressing the latter, knowing Dare’s hero-worship of the elusive immortal known only to the rebellion’s leader, Rutger, was at an all-time high.
“She is pretty,” Dare mused a moment later, nodding in Elena’s direction.
“Careful.” Vaughn took a drink of his beer, resisting the urge to look at her. He didn’t need to. His awareness of the sorceress ran bone-deep. “She eats pups for breakfast.”
Dare growled good-naturedly at the dig. “So you know her.”
He nodded. “And she doesn’t play well with others.” The fledgling sorceress could have walked into the crowded Vegas casino in plain-jane clothes, eyes dodging everyone in the room like a classic wallflower and there still would have been something about her, an undeniable electric pull that would have captured most people’s attention, human or immortal.
And Vaughn wasn’t any more immune than the rest of them.
The man in him found her intriguing, suspecting there were intricate layers beyond the devil-may-care attitude she wore like armor. The wolf in him loved to play with her. The fact that she was powerful, dangerous and unpredictable only made his animal half more eager to engage her.
But today he didn’t have time to indulge the instincts that surfaced the moment he caught her scent—a teasing blend of vanilla in a rain-drenched field of blueberries.
He slid off his stool. “Wolf chow,” he reminded Dare, who continued to watch Elena.
Dare snorted and adjusted the ball cap he wore to cover his white-gold hair. It tended to draw too much attention, and they already risked being remembered today.
At least Vaughn did.
Dare was the Calvary in case Vaughn ran into trouble.
“She looks fairly harmless.”
“And that’s exactly what she wants you to think.” He’d seen Elena go toe-to-toe with Kellagh the Black, the only immortal others feared as much as Morgana.
Once fiercely loyal to their king, the dragon gargoyle had betrayed Arthur at the battle of Camlann and became the terrifying bedtime tale all of Avalon told their children to make sure they behaved.
Kel made even Vaughn’s goosebumps get goosebumps, and Elena hadn’t even flinched when she’d faced him after they’d all been abducted to compete in the Gauntlet.
Vaughn waited until Elena walked in the other direction before choosing a Blackjack table tucked in an alcove.
The others at the table consisted of a Richie Rich type in an expensive suit with a scantily dressed blonde hanging off his arm, an older woman who made the wolf cringe at the strong perfume she bathed in to cover the smell of her two-packs-a-day smoking habit, and a beefy, bald guy who either made a living fighting professionally or he chugged steroids for breakfast just for kicks.
Vaughn slipped on the glasses Dare had given him and joined the game.
In no time he’d amassed a sizable stack of chips in front of him. The suit pretended not to notice when the blonde flirted with Vaughn after every successful play, while the beefy guy glared openly each time the cards didn’t go in his favor.
Vaughn’s highly developed senses thanked the older woman when she gave up and left the table a few minutes later, only to be overwhelmed almost immediately by vanilla and blueberry fields.
He turned his head as Elena sank into the chair on his right.
She joined the game and waited to be dealt in before finally glancing at him. “Hello, Barkley.”
***
Goodbye boredom.
Elena glanced at the card the dealer laid on the table and checked the initial impulse to use her magic to blow Vaughn out of the seat next to her.
There was a little problem of witnesses, and the Wolf’s Den was the last place she wanted to draw too much attention to herself. A few of Rhiannon’s huntresses had turned the Vegas casino into their new favorite playground, and she wasn’t in the mood to provoke any of them today.
They took their job of ensuring the secrecy of Avalon’s existence a little too seriously, and could be downright bitchy if they suspected one of Avalon’s immortals might blow the whistle.
As fun as it was to ruffle the sticks shoved up their Amazonian asses once in awhile, Elena preferred to stay off their radar most of the time, especially lately.
It helped that she didn’t break the cardinal rule of exposing immortals to the human race, though part of her secretly wished some moron would do it already.
It would make for one hell of a show to sit back and watch with an epic-sized bowl of popcorn.
Kind of like sitting down next to the one immortal she would have gladly fed to the enormous tiger-shifter they’d faced during the last round of the Gauntlet.
There wasn’t a damn thing to like about the treacherous wolf next to her, except maybe his eyes. Gods, they were stunning, the blue more hypnotizing than any enchanted jewel. But they didn’t make up for the fact that he’d turned his back on his oldest childhood friend, leaving her and everyone else to face a nightmare.
Briana may have forgiven him for the betrayal, but Elena wasn’t feeling quite so generous. While she knew he’d been heavily motivated to win the competition at all costs to save his missing sister, his actions had stung more than Elena had expected.
Reminding herself that she’d flay the skin off Morgana herself if the sorceress ever touched her twin only took the edge off that sting.
Elena tapped the table for another card, considered the other players at the table before choosing to hold at nineteen.
She’d walked into the casino looking to kill a few hours, maybe take a few poor fools’ money, and had found Vaughn instead. Apparently fate decided she deserved to have an interesting evening after all. Picking a fight with a huntress might be off the table, but goading a gargoyle…
Good times.
Dressed in dark pants and a light blue button-up shirt rolled to his elbows, one that made his eyes even more vivid, Vaughn gave her a quick once-over. “Sweaters must be all the rage in hell these days if you’re sitting down next to me. Either that or you must have really missed me.”
“The way one misses the smell of a dumpster-diving wet dog.”
Did he really have to clean up so well? It was more enjoyable insulting his canine heritage when he was naked and covered in dirt and blood, like the first time they’d met.
She followed the play around the table, particularly Vaughn’s. He hadn’t lost many hands since he’d sat down, and she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. If the dealer hadn’t already signaled the pit boss to keep a closer eye on Vaughn, he would shortly.
“I see Lucan hasn’t caught up with you yet.” Briana’s mate hadn’t been particularly forgiving about Vaughn’s one-man survival routine during the Gauntlet.
“Heard he has bigger problems these days.”
Elena had heard that too. Morgana had made new allies during the Gauntlet and used the relationship to take Rhiannon down, at least for a while. With Rhiannon out of commission for the time being, there was no one left holding the leash where the wraiths were concerned.
Once Knights of the Round Table, Arthur’s most loyal warriors had been enslaved by Rhiannon soon after the god-king’s death. Forced to drink blood to survive and hired out as mercenaries, wraiths had no choice but to complete their assignments or face a crushing madness that would inevitably force them to fulfill their contracts anyway.
Rhiannon’s iron-clad hold over the wraiths had lasted more than a thousand years, and now that their cage door had been thrown wide open, the wraiths, some permanently mad, were wreaking havoc throughout Avalon.
Huntresses were working overtime to keep them on Avalo
n’s side of the veil, and Lucan was apparently trying to help rein-in his once brothers-in-arms before the huntresses started putting them down.
Actually, that would make for one hell of a fight, too. Rhiannon’s immortal police versus her monster squad.
“What’s the punchline?” Vaughn cocked his head. “Something is clearly amusing you.”
“Just imagining that it was your body parts raining down that day in the courtyard.” Only one immortal had been stupid enough to believe anyone actually had a choice when it came to competing in the Gauntlet, and walked away.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t been the irritating wolf next to her that the gods had made an example of.
“Ouch.” Vaughn faked a blow to the chest, earning a disapproving look from the dealer. It probably didn’t help that the gargoyle beat the house in the next two rounds.
She watched the two men standing a dozen feet beyond the dealer. The taller of the two reminded her of a professional athlete turned sports commentator with his broad shoulders and engaging expression.
Mac’s right-hand man.
Like most casino owners, Mac had a low tolerance for cheaters or anyone trying to game the system. Although she could easily use her magic to her advantage, it took all the fun out of gambling. That personal preference also kept her on Mac’s good side, unless she was trying to provoke him.
Seeing that Mac was her new brother-in-law’s best friend, she took particular pleasure in trying to fire him up. And nothing fired Mac up faster than aiming Nessa his way and setting her loose.
The only thing that would have made competing in the Gauntlet more fun would have been if Nessa and Mac had participated. The huntress and wolf gargoyle would have made for even more drama than watching Briana face-off with Lucan’s monster half.
Elena nearly shivered at the memory of talking to Lucan when the warrior hadn’t been in control. Only a cold, calculated killer created by Rhiannon’s curse had stared back at her. Lucan’s dark half may have had a soft spot for Briana but everyone else had been fair game, and for once Elena had gone out of her way to avoid another immortal.
Primal Bounty_Pendragon Gargoyles Page 2