The sorcerer’s spell broke, and a spectral wind rushed along the ground as the web of his siphon spell released his followers. Thunder shook the sky overhead, and Audrey fell to her knees in the mud as the rain drenched her. Her fireball sputtered out, and her chest constricted with grief as the carnage surrounding her began to sink in.
She looked up at Sephrael, his elegant features twisted in mild amusement, a sardonic quirk to his brow. “I didn’t know being sealed to you would be this much fun.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Be well, Audrey.”
Before she could answer, he swirled away on a dark wind.
A breath later, strong arms wrapped around her, lifting her to her feet. The familiar scratch of Corvin’s beard against her cheek. His lips nuzzling her ear, whispering nonsense. His smell, pine forest and morning dew, awoke a new current of emotions as she clung to him. A flood of familiar, warm energy suffused her senses, and the tight knot in her chest loosened a few degrees.
He swept the hair away from her face and cupped it in both of his hands. “Woman, you are going to be the death of me.”
“I was so worried about you,” she answered, turning to kiss each of his palms. “And then I saw that storm…you’ve been holding out on me.”
His smile as he leaned in to kiss her swept away the sadness in her heart for a moment. As their lips met, the rain stopped. Corvin dove headlong into the kiss, as if he was desperate for her. His hands smoothed heat and light along her skin everywhere he touched, pulsing healing energy into her. She melded into his embrace, and a satisfied rumble echoed in his chest while his lips and tongue danced with hers.
Satisfied that he’d explored her thoroughly enough, he pulled back and gazed into her eyes. “Is Lilly safe?”
She smiled and nodded.
He frowned and laid a hand over her chest, then looked over his shoulder at the bodies of the sorcerer and Esther. “Your heart still aches for…?”
Audrey had to clear her throat before she answered. She couldn’t look. She didn’t want to remember her aunt like that. “Esther. My mother’s sister.”
Corvin hugged her to his chest, tucking her head under his chin. “There’s only one way to kill a sorcerer who’s invoked that spell.”
“His heart?”
He nodded against her.
“She sacrificed herself.”
Corvin’s hands stroked her back, pouring love and comfort into every touch. “She saved all of us.”
She studied his profile as he turned to look over the hundred or so witches still gathering their fallen from the body-strewn battleground. His dark gaze swiveled to hers, and those familiar flames sparked to life. A pleased smile curled his wide, enticing mouth. “And you helped save all of them. I’m so…in awe of you.”
A smile lifted one side of her mouth. “So you forgive me for running away? For convincing you to break the rules and getting us ambushed? For running the other way when I saw you tonight?”
Warmth filled the dark pools of his eyes. “Even for getting me shot.”
“You got shot?” She brushed her hands over the wet flannel molded to the planes of his torso and felt the subtle ridges of bandages.
He smiled and stilled her worries with the calmness of his tone, the tiny flames dancing in his eyes. “I’m fine. And yes, I’d forgive you anything. I thought I might have lost you for good, and I could not bear the idea. I never want to feel that again. Audrey …” His calloused thumb swept across her lips. “I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Very few people had said that word to her, and even fewer had meant it, but she believed him. A warm tingle spread from her chest, through her entire body as she felt the answer rising from deep within, in the secret parts of her she never let anyone touch. She trembled as she held on to Corvin’s strong, warm body and remembered what home felt like. A tear shimmered loose and spilled down her cheek. “I love you too.”
Epilogue
Corvin was beaming as he walked through the halls of the fortress on his way to the kitchen. His students were abuzz with anticipation for their initiation ritual this evening, and as their final class had concluded, he’d waded through currents of mixed anxiety and relief as he’d congratulated each of them and wished them well. The last two months had gone by so quickly. It had been an emotionally charged day, but now his own excitement to see Audrey was the only thing he could think about.
Everyone was looking forward to the merriment ahead. For the first time in a generation, the initiation ritual had fallen on a full moon that also happened to align with one of the high festivals. Mabon decorations hung in every nook and cranny of the fortress. Boughs of grain and silver and gold ribbon stretched across every rafter and above every door. Gatherings of squashes and gourds filled every empty corner. The entire staff was hard at work preparing for the most bountiful feast of the year, when they would open the prior year’s casks of wine and ale and revel early into the next morning.
In all the bustle, he hadn’t seen Audrey since sunrise. They’d taken to meeting in the tower every day, between morning classes and afternoon chores. For the first time since they returned home two months ago, she hadn’t shown up. Which had spoiled his surprise. Now he had to actively seek her out and drag her back to the tower, and she would probably know he was up to something. It had become nearly impossible for him to hide anything from her.
After she’d stood him up, Corvin had checked the library, hoping she was taking his advice to study up on the ritual rather than just “winging it.” Not finding her there, he’d set out for the place he should have checked first.
He found her sitting with Lilly and Peter at the small table in the nook of the kitchen where the cooks took their meals. The three of them were snacking on a tray of bread and cheese, playing cards, and laughing. They kept their voices low so that Tilly didn’t snap and throw them out. She always had a hair trigger on festival days, and this one carried extra pressure to be memorable.
From the smells filling the kitchen and wafting in from the roasting spits outside, she’d outdone herself. She didn’t even pay Corvin notice as he shuffled in behind one of the Kinde assigned to be Tilly’s personal forklift for the day.
Audrey glanced up, as if feeling his eyes on her. The smile she flashed at him made him almost trip over his own feet. It felt like a dream. All that time tangled in sheets, walking through the forest, talking over the embers of a fire until dawn. All the nights he’d carried her to bed, and the nights he hadn’t dared to move as she slept so peacefully in his arms.
There was also the crying. The fighting. Then, always, the making up…
He wouldn’t trade any of it. Weeks and months would never be enough. He wanted a lifetime to love her.
But you have yet to get up the balls to ask if she’s ready for that.
Her expression turned quizzical as he took an empty seat beside her. He leaned forward and kissed her to distract her from trying to puzzle him out. The teenagers uttered disgusted protests under their breath.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m sure you have,” Audrey said, her tone dripping with innuendo. Her eyes sparked with mischief, and Corvin’s neck heated as he recalled the state she’d left him in this morning.
He cleared his throat, drumming his fingers on the table idly to hide his nerves. “Can I steal you away, Audrey? It’s sort of important.”
She stared at him for a long, heated moment mid-shuffle, then looked at the other two as if to remind him they were sitting there. “That all right with you guys?”
“Yeah. You two need to get a room,” Peter said, turning beet red. No doubt his empathic powers were picking up on the charge between the two of them.
Lilly giggled into her hand, then whispered something in Peter’s ear. He nodded, then asked, “Can we hang out in the rec room until it’s time to prepare for the ritual?”
Audrey feigned deliberation while she snuck an adoring glance at Lilly. The young girl was thriving here. She�
��d taken an instant liking to Peter and was slowly coming out of her shell and making friends with some of the other children. Though she wasn’t old enough to study for her initiation yet, she had a voracious mind and spent hours observing classes or nested in the library.
Corvin’s heart swelled with satisfaction to see Audrey so pleased with Lilly’s progress. She’d even agreed to let his mother tutor the girl privately when, upon meeting his mother, Lilly had announced that Esther had told her Patricia would be her next teacher.
Audrey bumped shoulders with Lilly. “Okay, but don’t spoil your dinner with too much cider. Tilly will have your heads if you don’t eat at least a helping of everything.”
The teens had a much easier time slipping out of the bustling kitchen than Corvin had had coming in. Audrey tucked the deck of cards back into the drawer of the buffet by the window, then slid into his lap.
He held her tight, burying his face in her long, silky hair and breathing in the light floral scent of her skin. He massaged her hips and thighs as he tilted her back and kissed her, a small growl of desire rumbling in his chest. Her breathing and heartbeat changed, and without tapping into her emotions at all, he felt her unspoken surrender and knew he could have her against the cold bricks of the fortress just outside if he wanted to. It was a tempting idea. With all the fertile Mabon energies swirling around the fortress and forest, he wanted nothing more than to take this bountiful woman back to his hearth and feast upon her. But instead, he led her from the kitchens, out the side exit, and to the tower, where his first surprise of the day was waiting.
When Honey spotted Audrey, she dropped the small rodent she’d been chewing on and called out in glee, launching into the air. Audrey wasn’t wearing her gauntlet, so he lifted his arm and caught Honey as she landed.
Audrey laughed and greeted the eagle with a neck scratch and a slow stroke of her outstretched wing, now fully healed. “She’s off the leash.”
Corvin nodded and walked Honey over to the crate waiting in the back of the Rover. She didn’t want to go in at first, but he corralled her with only a few nips of protest. “She’s been hunting all morning. She’s ready.”
He turned from the business of securing the giant bird to find Audrey staring at him as if he’d just struck her. “So soon?”
The energy around her shifted as the fact that today was very different from all those that had come before finally sank in. They hadn’t spoken of this day. Not in simple terms, anyway. As if they’d both been afraid to face the possibility of parting ways, they’d been vague and for the most part focused on the frivolities of day-to-day living.
He had no desire to tie Audrey down, and she hadn’t made her own intentions clear.
At first, he’d wanted to give her space to recover from her ordeal with the sorcerers. She had been their captive for less than a day, but in those hours, she’d learned more about her past than she had known her whole life. She’d found the last of her living kin, then lost her. She’d rescued Lilly and helped free hundreds more from the sorcerers. But the victory had been bittersweet, stirring up the undercurrents of a lifetime of loss. Those first few weeks, he’d often found her staring off into space, a thick cloud of anger and grief swirling in her aura. He hadn’t pushed, but he’d offered a hand out of it. Sometimes with a joke or tease, sometimes just by holding her or finding other means of distraction.
Slowly and surely, she’d come out of the fog.
Then, she’d become a one-woman rehabilitation task force. She’d made every effort to connect with every refugee they’d brought back from the sorcerers’ lair. She’d learned all of their names, every one of their stories. Her own practice classes had proved unnecessary, so she’d volunteered to serve as a personal liaison, putting each of them in touch with the right person to help them track down their family or otherwise work on integration into the next cycle of initiates. She was popular and well liked among the survivors.
She’d also butted her way into weekly meetings with his mother and made it her personal mission to ensure every victim of the sorcerers was taken care of. As if she’d made their healing a part of her own. When all of that had finished, she’d stayed up late reading every text the archives had on sorcery and taking an entire journal’s worth of notes.
She was incredible. A force all her own.
The depth of her heart and the strength of her focus humbled him. And it was no small matter that his mother had come to respect Audrey’s hard work and to value her opinion. A glaring spotlight had been focused on the inner workings of the guardians, unearthing corruption within the Council itself that had allowed this particular faction of sorcerers to grow so large and established.
His mother was still on the hunt, rooting out key players within the Synod, and Audrey was at the top of a list of new recruits that would be in high demand as the guardians were reformed. Audrey had hinted at other reformations she was slowly pushing on Patricia, too, and she seemed confident she was going to get her way. The two of them had formed an unlikely friendship, and though he was still sorting through his feelings about his mother's—their—secret, it had mended something inside of him to see her and Audrey conspiring and bantering.
He was so damn proud of her, and yet all of her activities had left him feeling obsolete and stagnant in his usual routines. A stick in the mud, as she’d called him on so many occasions.
Another reason he was so excited for today’s revelations.
He had no intention of anchoring Audrey or tying her down. He wanted her to follow her heart, as he planned to follow his.
Once the Jeep was loaded and they were on their way off the grounds, Smoke napping in Audrey’s lap and the peaceful quiet of the open road insulating them, he reached out to test her feelings. She’d gotten very good at shielding the last few weeks, but most of the time, she left herself open around him. The trust her actions showed and the comfort of not having to tether his instincts around her had helped him fall deeper and deeper in love with her. Now she was calm and pensive, but beneath that was a thread of anxiety.
Corvin took her hand and twined their fingers together before bringing it to his lips. “Penny for your thoughts.”
She smiled and sighed, gazing out the window. “How do you do it?”
“What?”
“Say good-bye.”
A cold spot blossomed in his stomach, slowly growing, setting off his nerves, but he asked, “What do you mean?”
“I know it’s best for her. I know the wild is where she belongs. I knew this day would come, and I’m…happy, but…”
His heart squeezed in sympathy, and he watched her out of the corner of his eye. If only she could hear the irony of asking him those questions when he was struggling with the very same feelings about her. “It’s difficult. But when you feel the rightness of it, you realize that attachment is not a part of nature. We are all bound together in the web of life, and so we are never parted. Attachment is a very human idea.”
She smiled at him and unlaced their fingers to ruffle hers through his hair. “I love when you talk about humans as if you’re not one.”
He laughed. “I’m at least part bird.”
“And part demon,” she chimed in with a teasing grin.
“That too.” His cheeks heated. He was still coming to accept the truth of his parentage. His demon blood strengthened his body and his magic, as he’d discovered when Roderic had given him a Khaos potion that had put his Zyne power on steroids. The storm he’d summoned in the battle against the sorcerers would have landed him in a Council trial under other circumstances. He’d only begun to explore the differences between his perceived and actual limitations. He saw the extra magic as a gift, though a dangerous one that must be kept secret.
“Any word from Roderic?”
He shook his head. “The last we spoke, he was on his way to Europe to handle some personal business.”
“Oh.”
His mother had left key information out of her report of t
he events leading up to the raid on the sorcerers’ lair, shining a light instead on the failings of the guardians. She’d never mentioned him going off on his own or the reasons behind Roderic’s resignation. No one had asked. Corvin was free to return to life as he’d known it, teaching classes and tending his birds, only to find he’d outgrown it.
Now he wanted so much more. Starting with the woman at his side. But Audrey had also opened his eyes to the many needs of the Zyne that were not being addressed or serving the higher good of the Legacy. She’d shaken up his world and turned it on its head, and he’d been forced to see that hiding in his tower was not the answer. There was plenty he could do. For years, he’d used his gifts as an excuse to hold himself apart from people when he should have been using them to help others, to make a difference. He envisioned them continuing the work she’d started here all over the country, or perhaps the world…together.
If she’ll have you.
“Are you sad he won’t be here for the ceremony?” he asked when Audrey’s mood sank into melancholic territory again.
“Hmm? No. I get it. It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s kind of a big deal.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m taking it seriously.”
“I know you are.” Her defenses started to go up, and he couldn’t help bristling in response. As they had all day, his hopes for the future warred with his doubts that she might shoot a gaping hole right through his vision of their life together.
“Right.” An awkward silence filled the car. Audrey shooed Smoke out of her lap and fiddled with the radio, seeming agitated. Smoke hopped to Corvin’s shoulder and pecked him on the ear in silent admonishment for rousing him from his nap.
Corvin sighed. “Have you decided where you want to finish your training?” He kept the question completely neutral, unwilling to influence her choice in any way.
To Tame A Wild Heart: A Zyne Witch Urban Fantasy Romance (Zyne Legacy Romance Book 1) Page 24