by Ophelia Bell
“She’s not ready yet, sister. Let her find her place in her world before we disrupt it with our drama. I promise I won’t wait any longer than I have to.”
And when he came to find her again, he wondered who she would be. Would he find this beautiful, innocent young woman, or a powerful ursa shaman possessed by the immortal spirit of Summer, instead? He only wished it were possible to know her in all her aspects and be able to witness her coming into her own.
Chapter 20
Aurum
Aurum watched the young ursa female’s gaze follow Aodh as he left the room. Vrishti’s aura pulsed erratically, as though in rhythm with a rapid heartbeat. Nicholas had been talking to her and stopped, touching her arm gently.
“Vrishti, are you all right?” he asked. He followed the girl’s gaze, saw Aodh’s back disappear, and then met Aurum’s eyes from across the room.
His look spoke volumes, and she could almost hear his thoughts, his desire for her—a woman he couldn’t have—and resentment at her unwillingness to rebel against Fate in favor of his happiness. He turned back to Vrishti and lowered his voice, but Aurum could still hear him clearly.
“There will be others,” he said to her. “We are better off sticking with our own kind, right?”
Vrishti’s blush made her aura glow even brighter, and Aurum had a sense of the immense power she would wield when she came into her own. When the spirit of Summer merged with her and she chose to take what was her due, Aodh wouldn’t stand a chance. No male could resist one of the ancient ursa spirits, once she set her eyes on him. She smiled in a self-satisfied way at the thought of Aodh ultimately winding up dominated by this lovely, innocent creature sometime in the future. He would have earned it by then.
In spite of Nicholas’s accusatory look, she found some comfort in the fact that Vrishti didn’t seem the least bit attracted to him. It was a ridiculous feeling. Aurum should want a strong mate for him, and Vrishti would be ideal. In fact, if both Nicholas and Vrishti had been raised inside the ursa Sanctuary, there was a high likelihood that they’d have been betrothed from the moment of Vrishti’s birth. Clan leaders tended to choose their daughters’ mates before they had a chance to know their own minds, and many sons of clan leaders wound up waiting decades for a worthy female to be born.
Hopefully, whatever it was that held Aodh back would get worked out before Vrishti’s mother mated her off to some other ursa and he was forced to truly fight for her. They didn’t need a conflict with the ursa when the threat from the Ultiori was in such a state of flux.
Over the next couple hours, Gavra, Numa, and the other residents of the temple filtered in, happily thanked her for the food, and devoured every last crumb. She stayed, enjoying the lively conversation and knowing her cooking had been integral in giving joy to the group.
The larger the group, the better, as far as she was concerned. After she found Calder and her mystery mate, she looked forward to a large family, and several new children. Her original dragon offspring were long dead, their descendants scattered. She could close her eyes and expel a bit of breath to pick up the threads of their magic and find her bloodline, if she chose, but it would do them no good to have an ancient, lonely female latching onto their lives.
Nicholas caught her eye from the far end of the table and smiled, reminding her of how well she could affect the lives of those not linked to her by blood. His aura had lost its desultory tarnish from earlier and now glowed with the same happiness that affected the entire room. The joy of fellowship, of sharing a meal with a group of like-minded people, was as potent a feeling to him as it was to her.
Sitting down finally to eat with the others, she thought that perhaps she should heed her own advice. She could take more mates than the pair from her dream, if she chose. She’d had more pets than her sisters at one point in history, long before Belah’s ill-fated relationship with Nikhil.
After living in the Glade with only her siblings and the occasional visit from the Catalyst for company, the idea of many mates sounded exciting, but after pondering it for several moments, the allure of it wore off. She didn’t want dozens of pets to fulfill her need for energy at a moment’s notice.
She wanted what she’d had with Nicholas for the past couple weeks—just a cherished mate or two to share her most intimate moments with, to wake up beside every day and enjoy a sunrise flight together.
Pursing her lips as she chewed her food, she recalled Nicholas’s acute fear of the sky. Any mate of hers would need to be fearless, where flying was concerned. It was yet another reminder that Nicholas wasn’t the one, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be others. Whoever her mysterious ursa was, surely he would understand her affinity for the wind.
One thing Nicholas did possess was a hearty appetite. Her stomach fluttered when she caught sight of him stuffing his face with more flatbread coated with honey. His eyes met hers as he licked the sweet, sticky substance off his lips, and then his fingertips. Aurum’s entire body heated, the image of what he could do to her with his tongue flitting errantly through her mind. His white beard surrounding his luscious lips only served to accentuate that part of him and increase the allure of the image of his mouth on her body.
Averting her eyes, she blocked out any more thoughts of how well his tongue could work her over on its own. Their necessary entanglement was over, his ursa hormones under control. The next person she made love to would either be Calder or the mysterious ursa male, if Fate happened to put him in their path on the way to the Source.
She continued to ignore him when the acolytes began clearing dishes and cleaning up after the meal. Nicholas soon left the room behind Vrishti, on some pretext of seeing her father’s writings about her ursa roots. Aurum relaxed and left as well, after ensuring the humans needed no further assistance with the cleanup.
The December sun had finally pierced through the veil of rainclouds, filtering in through the roof lantern of the temple high above the circular corridor. A small patch of blue sky was visible through the glass above her.
She itched to fly but knew better than to risk it, even in this remote area of the world. In this era, rumors traveled fast. The Dragon Court and their mates had warned her and her siblings of how technology had overtaken the world. Even humans in a primitive corner such as this still had access to devices that could capture their images and replicate a photo of a dragon flying, then distribute it globally with the touch of a button.
With the lull in the rainfall, some fresh air and solitude under the open sky at least would help improve her mood. They only had a few hours before they needed to be on their way again. At dusk, Nicholas would lead them to the path they needed to trace over the course of Midwinter night, and he would carry out the ritual to open the Rainsong Portal to the Sanctuary.
At the rearmost curve in the circular hallway was an exit that opened out onto a small stone staircase leading up the hill behind the temple. The lush vegetation in the terraced beds beyond might be considered a garden, but was more of a small jungle of greenery that happened to be densely planted in a precise pattern of beds with stone paths dividing them.
Tranquility filled the place, easing her agitation as she climbed to the highest tier, a wide, circular plateau overlooking the mist-filled valley and the bright red of the temple that stood out in the center of all the green. She wandered along the flower-lined paths, sensing that there was power in the pattern that had been laid out.
She closed her eyes as she walked, letting her other senses lead her so she could visualize the shapes of knotwork that some ancient gardener had carefully set into stone for her to someday walk upon.
“It’s a mandala for fertility.”
Aurum stopped abruptly and opened her eyes, her heart pounding at the sudden interruption to her peaceful stroll. Nicholas stood beneath the eave of a small, vine-covered outbuilding with peeling green paint around the door frame and small chimes hanging from the corners of its roof. His posture was relaxed, but watchful, someh
ow cautious of her presence.
“Nicholas … how do you know?”
“Vrishti’s father wrote about it in his journal. This temple may cater to all the higher races, but the ursa are its keepers. The Summer Shaman designed this pattern ages ago. Any female who walks it with the desire for offspring will conceive soon after. Or so the legend goes … I think even after meeting us, the humans here still hold some skepticism for our actual existence. Do you think it’s true?”
“That they don’t really believe in the higher races? I wouldn’t blame them. We don’t advertise what we are, and we don’t show our true forms to them unless they’re our mates.”
“No,” he said, stepping forward. “Do you believe walking this path will help you conceive? I know how much you want it … to have a child again. A family.”
Aurum swallowed, looking back the way she’d come, remembering that particular intimate conversation between the two of them. It had only happened last week, while they lay entangled in bed in the Glade one morning after making love. That moment seemed eons ago.
Her gaze followed the path through the foliage until it was lost in the haze of light that filtered through the pregnant clouds above. The rain wouldn’t hold off for long.
Nicholas took another step closer, his aura surging outward to tickle at the edges of her own. His desire for her was tangible, even though he was still a couple feet from her. His common desire for precisely what he knew she wanted infused his energy.
A family.
“Nicholas, we can’t anymore. You don’t need my magic. And we’ll be in the Sanctuary in a few hours. I’ll be with Calder not long after … I need to let you go. Vrishti … she’s a lovely ursa female …”
He took another step closer and frowned at her. “She isn’t you. And she isn’t for me, anyway—I saw the way your brother looked at her, I remember his ridiculously cagey description of his dream mate. He’s hers, whether she knows it or not. I think I’m yours.”
Taking a shaky breath, she said, “I don’t mean her, specifically … but an ursa like her. There’s someone in the Sanctuary for you, a female who will stay with you on the ground because I know how much the sky terrifies you …”
She babbled on, her eyes flitting around his face—at the perfect, clean cut of his beard, the curling silver strands of his hair grown long enough to brush his shoulders now. Fresh misty raindrops clung to those curls like tiny diamonds reflecting the last bit of sunlight shining down before the rainclouds took over.
She stared anywhere but directly into his eyes. She knew those strange, silver circles shot through with green would be filled with a longing she couldn’t face. She recognized the ursa-centric language he used—“he’s hers; I’m yours”—that only a male ursa would use. As a male, he had to wait for a female to choose him. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, no matter how much he wanted it.
“Did you hear me, Aurum?” he asked, gripping her shoulders and sliding his hands up to cup her jaw. “I believe I am yours. What I feel makes no sense otherwise.”
“No, Nicholas. You aren’t mine. Calder is mine … Fate says so.”
“I never said he wasn’t, but after hearing all the stories your brothers and your sister shared, I saw a common thread. There’s more than one for all of them. Did Fate really only send you a dream of one satyr, if all your brothers and sisters dreamed of two mates? Even Ked and Belah have two, don’t they?”
The clean line of his teeth and the bow-shaped curve of his lips set in the boundaries of his silver beard entranced her. She still couldn’t meet his eyes, especially not now. Up close, she abstractly noticed darker flecks of hair in his beard amid all the white. Had those been there before?
His fingertips squeezed at her nape, tilting her head back and forcing her to look him in the eye. She blinked back wetness that might have been blamed on the droplets falling with increasing frequency from the sky.
“I did dream of another,” she finally said, picturing the vivid image of the virile, dark-haired male from her dreams making love to her in the shallow waters near the bank of a river. He had the earthy scent of a rich forest floor. “But he isn’t you.”
His brow creased as disbelief filled his gaze. “You can’t be sure … I don’t believe you.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you. I’ve seen him in my dreams for years. He’s dark like Calder, and he finds me washed up on the shore of a river when we meet. You are … you. Why won’t you believe me?”
He bared his teeth at her, his eyes flashing with anger mixed with lust. Before she could blink, he turned them both, pushing her back against the vine-covered stone of the building, his pelvis pressed against her hips.
“Because of this,” he growled. His mouth covered hers, lips hot and urgent, tongue pushing deep.
Aurum groaned and pushed back against his shoulders, but as strong as she was, the will to resist him evaded her. She turned her head, but he only traced his tongue down the line of her throat.
“No, Nicholas,” she panted.
“Yes,” he murmured, his beard brushing against the base of her throat as he hiked up the conjured gown she’d donned to replace her wet hiking clothes when they arrived.
His large hand gripped the back of her thigh, lifting her leg as he pressed his arousal into her core. He inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring as his gaze fixed on the point where their hips met through their clothes. “You always smell like sunshine when I touch you. I can’t fucking think straight.”
Sweet Mother, the slow, rough grinding of his hips into her made her entire body flood with heat. He bent his head, mouthing her breast through her clothes, and her head fell back against the stones. She sighed, gripping his scalp and tangling her fingers into his damp curls.
The raindrops splatted harder onto the stone around them, splashing off the broad, green leaves of large palms and the other plants. Chilled as the water was, it had no effect on his need for her. He raised his head, his gaze feverish, his lips almost red against the pale beard. Her mouth watered, craving another taste of him.
She should find the strength to stop him, somehow. But she didn’t want to. With a slow exhale, she succumbed to her desire. The joy of being in his arms still warred with the despair of her impending loss.
“Yes,” she said as his lips brushed hers again, his tongue teasing seductively at the corner of her mouth.
Again, their mouths merged, each as hot and hungry as the other. His hands tore at the bodice of her gown, the fabric easily ripping.
“Get rid of it. All of it,” he said, making a clean rip down the middle that stopped where his hips held her pressed against the wall.
Aurum exhaled a lungful of magic, and their clothing dissolved entirely. The rain seemed to wash away his conjured trousers and shirt, leaving him gloriously naked. His hard cock, no longer constricted by the pants, rubbed hotly against her now naked belly.
She gave in wholesale, wrapping her legs around his hips, her arms around his shoulders and lifting up for him to enter her. When his cock pierced her and slid deep, she cried out, tilting her head back. The cold rain washed over her face, an icy counterpoint to Nicholas’s tongue laving the tip of her breast.
Her back pressed harder into the round, river-smoothed stone of the wall behind her and she dug her nails into his shoulders. Nicholas braced himself with both hands on either side of her head, letting his weight and her own limbs hold her up while he fucked her.
“This is why I’m yours,” he said, gazing into her eyes. His voice was rough and uneven from his thrusting, but he didn’t cease his pounding rhythm. Every push went deeper, every pull dragging more pleasure from her.
Their bodies grew slick from the frigid rain coursing down around them. His pale hair plastered to his skull looked dark silver in the storm-dimmed light, and he smelled like the forest rain. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend he was the ursa from her dreams, that the silver beard and curls were as black as Calder’s and the rough sounds of his climax
and his seed pumping into her belonged to one of her two Fated mates.
Her body’s pleasure exploded when he drove one last, hard thrust into her, letting out a roar. Heat and sensation flooded her core, the power of his Nirvana crashing into her, pushing her to her peak and past it until their voices carried high into the sky.
Panting in the aftermath, he held her tight against his rain-soaked chest, one hand gently stroking her head where she rested her cheek on his sturdy shoulder.
“Only Calder ever made me feel this when we fucked. You and Calder make me feel alive, Sunshine. Free.”
She looked up at him. His green-shot eyes were studying her, his throat working as though he had more to say.
Aurum couldn’t speak, her chest too tight with emotion and all the things she wished she could tell him, but that she knew would only make their separation harder when it came. Instead, she raised a hand to his cheek, gently raking her fingernails over his short beard, reveling in the feel of it under her palm and wondering how she could have ever suggested he get rid of it.
Shaking his head as though to banish whatever feeling had gripped him, he pulled away. She reluctantly lowered her feet to the ground and leaned breathless against the cold stone. She shivered, more from the absence of Nicholas himself than from the rain that hit her breasts, now that his body no longer served as a shield.
Nicholas stared at the wet ground, his gaze deliberately averted, his fists clenched at his sides.
“I’m not going to give up on you Sunshine. You might be Calder’s mate, but if he won’t come to you, he doesn’t deserve you.”
He turned away and Aurum stared after him, hot emotion gripping her chest as she watched his wet, naked backside disappear into the thick fog that had filled the garden. Soon all that was left was the strong, greenish glow of his aura—all fertile ursa male tinged with fiery spikes of determination, but not the aura of the ursa from her dreams.