His hands gripped my back, holding me so tightly that I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. There was only the pounding, persistent ache of my own denied desire. His mouth dipped lower, closing over my throbbing vein.
His fangs penetrated my skin, and a pulse of white-hot pleasure shot through my entire body. My knees were weakening, my pulse racing faster with every delectable draw of his mouth. Groaning, he drank me in with insatiable hunger. Ribbons of savage, searing desire cut me deep and hard, spiraling me out of control.
He drew back.
“Don’t stop,” I panted.
“I’m taking too much.”
“I am immortal.”
“Immortal or not, losing too much blood will weaken you,” he said sensibly.
To hell with sensibility.
“That’s all part of your plan, right?” I moaned, breathing heavily. “The only way you have a chance of beating me at these challenges.”
“Every time I drink from you, you taste better, Leda,” Nero whispered against my neck. His tongue traced the marks he’d left there. “Sweeter. Riper.”
My pulse popped against his mouth, inviting him to devour me. His mouth closed over mine, kissing me savagely. Then he pulled away roughly, gripping my hand.
“Come with me,” he spoke against my lips.
“Where?”
“To my room. It’s too busy here.”
I vaguely heard the voices of other people in the gardens, but I couldn’t focus on them. Not when Nero looked at me like that.
“Come with me.” His voice had grown thick, heavy.
I bit my lip coyly. “Why?”
“Very well. Have it your way,” he laughed, grabbing my butt. “We can stay here. But your screams might draw attention.”
My face was flushed, my nipples on fire, and the inside of my thighs slick. “You’re awfully sure of yourself, General.”
“Lots of practice, Pandora.”
His words were like a splash of white-hot pleasure against my skin.
“Practice at being sure of yourself or at making women scream?”
“Enough talk.” He bit my lip, drawing a drop of blood. “Enough insubordination.”
“So if I don’t go with you to have sex in your room, that’s insubordination?” I laughed.
“Yes,” he replied, perfectly serious.
“Your room, you say? Won’t Delta mind?” I asked wickedly.
“Delta is off hating me for my father’s deeds. And I will bar the door. If she tries to interrupt us, I will kill her.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or if it was just a figure of speech. And, honestly, right now I was finding it hard to care.
So I allowed Nero to lead me to the stairs, our hands linked, our gazes locked. Thankfully, his room was on the first level up. I wasn’t sure I could have held out any longer than that.
We slipped into his room. Nero did, in fact, bar the door very securely. I’d never seen that many locks and deadbolts on a door, but even that wasn’t enough for Nero. He piled on a few magic wards of his own.
Then, with that done, he turned around to face me, his eyes burning with magic. His wings spread out from his body, a stunning dark tapestry of glossy black, blue, and green feathers. His wings were humming to me, their sweet, seductive serenade slowly parting me from all rational thought. The world and all its problems were just background noise now, distant and muffled. I knew only Nero.
He closed the distance between us in a fraction of a second. Before I could exhale, his hands were on me. My leather jacket hit the floor. My tank top followed. I peeled off his clothes one-by-one, worshipping his body with my eyes and hands.
“Nero,” I said, my gaze sliding down his naked body.
“Leda,” he replied smoothly.
There wasn’t a shred of clothing on either of us.
“From the moment I walked into the Crystal Falls training hall and saw you there, I’ve wanted you,” he said, his voice thick with lust. “I’m not waiting a moment longer.”
A deep horn bellowed through the castle, resounding off the thick walls. Its call was an unwelcome jolt back to hard, cruel reality. The gods were summoning everyone back to their audience chamber.
22
Dark World
I dropped my head to Nero’s chest. “Maybe they’re just announcing dessert.”
The gods’ horn roared again. The noise penetrated the thick walls of the great castle. It sounded like it had been blown inside this room, right in front of me.
Unburying my face from Nero’s chest, I looked up at him. “Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “I don’t believe it either.”
Begrudgingly, I started gathering my clothes. They were scattered all across the room.
“Why do you think the gods are summoning us all to the hall?” I asked Nero as I plucked my bra out of a fruit bowl. “Maybe they’re sending everyone home so they can fight it out without an audience?”
He chuckled. “You are a splash of refreshing optimism in this den of deceit.”
“Yeah, well, someone has to counter all the omnipresent doom and gloom.”
I felt better now, after spending some time alone with Nero. Fear no longer gripped me. United, together as a team, Nero and I could face anything.
If only our time together hadn’t been cut short. In this training, we’d been forced onto different teams, fighting against each other rather than with each other. The gods probably thought it was the funniest thing ever to pit us against those we loved—and to pair us with those we despised. They thought they could dissolve our friendships and love.
Well, the joke was on them. Fighting against Nero had only made me appreciate how great it felt to be on the same team with him.
I located my underwear dangling from the ceiling fan. How the hell had they ended up all the way up there? The fan was too high up to reach, so I had to poke the lacy garment with my telekinetic magic to nudge it off. Surely, the gods would have been absolutely ecstatic to learn that this was how their gifts of magic were being used.
“You know, I am tempted to leave them up there for Delta to find,” I said, pulling on my underpants.
“I have no objections.”
“To my lack of underwear?” I chuckled. “Noted.”
“To your leaving your underwear here. Or your other clothes as well.”
“That would be a funny sight, wouldn’t it? If I were to walk naked into the gods’ hall, everything out there for everyone to see?”
“Let them see.” His chest was pressed hard against my back, each word buzzing against my skin. “Let them all know that you’re mine. And only mine.” His hands closed over my hips.
“Feeling rather frisky, are you, General?”
“We’ve already established that when it comes to you, Pandora, I cannot control myself.”
“If only we had more time,” I sighed wistfully.
When I turned around and saw he already had all his clothes on, I couldn’t help but frown in disappointment. “You and I have very different ideas of what no self-control means, Nero.”
He’d had enough control to put his clothes on in record time. His efficiency transcended battlefields and training halls. And I was standing here in nothing but my underwear…because a part of me was still hoping that Nero would throw me down on the bed, gods’ summons be damned.
But that wouldn’t be prudent. Gods, I really hated being prudent. It was even less fun than being punctual.
“Don’t confuse multitasking with disinterest, Pandora,” Nero told me. “I can dress myself and undress you with my mind at the same time.”
True to his angel nature, he did mean his words quite literally. Even as I put on my bra and tank top, I felt his telekinetic magic tugging at my clothes. He was indeed undressing me with his mind. Nero’s magic brushed against my skin, sliding my tank top’s strap off my shoulder. The hot, caressing breath of his magic kiss trickled down my body.
I shivered. “It isn’t nice to te
ase, Nero,” I chided him, my words cracking. I rose to my tiptoes, leaning into him.
“Who’s teasing?” he asked silkily. The white-hot brand of his magic’s touch burned my body.
“You are most certainly teasing,” I gasped. “You have no intention of following through. You know we don’t have time.”
“Multitasking, Pandora.”
He slid my leather jacket over me. Then he zipped my pants closed. His hands were professional, efficient. His magic, on the other hand, was a whole other story. It was feeling me up and down, penetrating me deep to my wanton, wicked core, stoking my desire until every part of me from head to toe trembled.
I was fully dressed. He was fully dressed. The gods were waiting for us. And I just didn’t care.
“Nero,” I gasped.
He opened the door for me. I stepped into the hallway, barely seeing where I was going. Nero’s magic continued to touch me, to tease and torture me. A sweat broke out on my brow. A single irrefutable thought rang loud and clear in my mind: if I didn’t have him right now, I was going to die. A whimper blossomed on my lips.
“Control, Pandora,” he whispered.
I struggled to gather up the tattered remains of my higher brain functions. There were other people in the hallway. Like Faris’s soldiers. I couldn’t slam Nero against the nearest wall and have my way with him, no matter what his misbehaving magic was doing to me.
I gritted my teeth and glared at him. “You are an evil, depraved angel,” I snapped at him when we were alone in the hallway once more.
Nero leaned in and growled against my lips, “So evil and depraved that you want to drag me back to my room.”
My hands clutched the back of his head, drawing him closer. “Yes, please.”
His hand slowly stroked down my face, tracing my neck, my shoulder, all the way down my side, grazing my breast. I squirmed.
“As long as we’re enemies, I don’t think that would be appropriate,” he declared, a devious spark in his eyes.
“I will get you back for this, General.” My voice ground like crushed gravel.
He bowed, his gaze never leaving mine. “I’m thoroughly looking forward to it.”
Shooting me an easy smile, he walked through the door and entered the gods’ audience chamber. I took a moment to catch my breath, to calm myself, to reel in my raging libido. Then I followed him into the chamber. A quick visual scan of the room told me I was the last to arrive. All the gods, angels, and Legion soldiers were already here. Not that I was surprised. After all, I’d had to find my underwear first.
“The next challenge is about to begin,” Faris declared.
“They are changing the plan,” I whispered to Nero. “It wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow.”
“I’d imagine the gods are eager to learn all the other gods’ secrets, and then put this whole thing behind them.”
“If Faris has anything to say about it, they won’t be putting it behind them any time soon.” I met Colonel Fireswift’s glare, his silent command to join him. Oh, goody. “Duty calls, honey.” I kissed Nero’s cheek. “The gods are watching. Please don’t kill Colonel Fireswift, even though he’s an asshole.”
Nero grunted. I took that as an agreement. Nero wasn’t foolish enough to attack another angel in front of the gods.
“We’ve all been waiting for over five minutes,” Colonel Fireswift snapped as soon as I was standing beside him. “What took you so long to answer the gods’ summons?”
“I was just getting some air.”
“It’s hard to get air with your mouth glued to Windstriker’s.”
“Were you spying on me?”
“I don’t need to. Your face is flushed. And there’s blood on your neck. I can see where he bit you.”
I flashed him a grin. “Jealous?”
Colonel Fireswift glared at me like he was contemplating whether setting me on fire or poisoning me was the better punishment. I shrugged it off and just kept smiling.
“You’re not even trying to be discreet about it.” His words cut like a whip. His eyes zeroed in on the bite marks on my neck.
I was worried he’d demand once more that I heal myself with the fairy magic I did not possess, but he didn’t say another word. He just shook his head with detached disapproval.
“The next god you will need to steal from is Faris,” Athan declared, glancing at the god standing beside him.
Faris looked relaxed, too relaxed considering all the godly secrets that the challenges had thus far revealed. Of course, he had orchestrated this whole thing. Likely, his item would merely allow him to expose the other gods’ secrets. Just like the glasses of his ally Aleris had done.
The seven ruling gods summoned their teams of two forward.
“You two will go through first, before the other teams,” Faris declared when we were standing in front of his magic mirror. “Come with me.”
Colonel Fireswift and I followed him through the mirror. A dark world waited for us on the other side—and a massive black castle of spires and spikes. We stood on the castle’s highest balcony. In one direction, a sea of tall red grass spread out from the castle, stretching to the horizon; in another, dense forests blanketed the ground around the castle.
Pink lightning flashed through the dark storm clouds swirling overhead, rumbling like a giant’s empty belly screaming for food. I was hit with the unsettling notion that the clouds were, in fact, hungry—and that they planned to eat us to satiate that hunger.
“What is this place?” I asked, looking around. Yes, Faris’s world was frightening, but it was also wondrous, albeit in a formidable, military-might sort of way.
“This is one of my castles,” the god replied.
“One of your castles?”
“I have many,” Faris declared smugly. “This is my stronghold on Gravite, one of my worlds.”
Wow. Many castles on many worlds. With all the hair-pulling and bickering, I’d admittedly begun to think of the gods like they were people too. But Faris’s words reminded me that I couldn’t be more wrong. His statement had put this all in the cosmic scale. He controlled many castles and many worlds. His power and influence spanned planets and galaxies. The gods weren’t people. Not at all. The universe was their playground, and I and everyone else were just props to be manipulated and moved around to suit their aspirations.
“Here on Gravite, we are at the outskirts of the gods’ influence,” Faris said. “It is a distant place, far from the eyes of the other gods.”
I wondered what exactly Faris was plotting here, ‘far from the eyes of the other gods’.
But asking that would be pretty cheeky, even for me. So instead I said, “What is it that we need to protect in this challenge?”
Faris turned, his long cloak swishing around him as he moved. The cloak was black on the outside, so dark that no light got through, and blood red on the inside. As the god moved, the sanguine material flowed silkily behind him, as though it had been woven from the hot, freshly-spilled blood of his enemies.
We followed him into the building. The chamber inside resembled a war room more than a bedroom. Rows of weapons hung from every wall. Between the knives and swords and spears, a thick black brush had painted strange symbols on the red walls. Those symbols felt familiar somehow, but no matter how long I squinted at them, I couldn’t read them.
They’re magical, I realized.
The symbols hummed to me like musical notes, an ancient language lost to this world. Each word practically bursted off the wall with powerful magic. If only I knew what they were saying to me.
Beside me, Colonel Fireswift didn’t stare overly long at the symbols. Unlike me, he clearly couldn’t hear them singing. So I kept moving, resisting the urge to stop and analyze the symbols, to decrypt their secrets.
Faris had stopped in front of a tall cabinet as high as the ceiling. It looked like a wardrobe. More of those ancient symbols were painted over the cabinet’s dark wooden doors. I struggled not to stare at
them, even as their singing grew louder inside my head.
Faris’s dispassionate gaze slid from me to Colonel Fireswift. “This is what the other teams will try to steal from me. This is what you must protect.” He waved his hand, and the doors to the wardrobe parted, revealing an impressive display of weapons.
We didn’t merely have one item to protect. We had many. It was a whole set of weapons. I took a closer look at them. I recognized those immortal artifacts. They were the weapons of heaven and hell, which Nero and I had recovered from the Lost City last year.
23
Doomed to Fail
My eyes panned over the weapons of heaven and hell. The set of silver armor. The shield and sword. And the gun that had given me the scar in my abdomen. They were supposed to be locked up inside Nero’s vault. How had they gotten all the way out here, on some distant world so far from Earth?
“You recognize these artifacts.” Faris gauged my reaction.
“Yes.”
“You have seen them.”
I hadn’t just seen them. I’d used them. Of course I didn’t volunteer that information. I didn’t say anything at all.
“Those are the weapons of heaven and hell,” Colonel Fireswift said. “Ancient, rumored immortal artifacts of great power. No one has seen them in centuries.”
“Your teammate recovered them from the Lost City last year,” Faris said as he locked the cabinet with a spell.
Colonel Fireswift looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “I knew you were up to something in that city.”
I ignored him, turning to Faris instead. “How did you get them?”
“You shall soon find out.”
“Along with the other gods, angels, and anyone else nearby,” I commented.
However this had come to be, however he’d gotten his hands on the weapons of heaven and hell, I was pretty certain the tale didn’t implicate him. Instead, it would expose one of the other gods.
Fairy’s Touch: Legion of Angels: Book 7 Page 21