by Ophelia Bell
Ever since I left, I’d been going through the motions of this so-called “soul search,” but I hadn’t really learned a whole lot about myself that I didn’t already know. I was an infinitely adaptable creature and a quick study, yet the powers I was born with were still wimpy as fuck. Three weeks into a self-imposed exile from the life I’d known, all I’d really learned were things related to the human world to which I’d fled.
Humanity was both amazingly resilient and heartbreakingly fragile at the same time. I finally understood why the higher races were so drawn to them. Why the dragons used to collect human mates and hoard them like treasure.
That particular instinct wasn’t exactly dormant in me. Thanks to my somewhat unorthodox origins, I was magically linked to a special segment of humanity infused with divine blood. And thanks to that blood, there was something distinctly magical hurting some of the humans of the bloodline.
My deepest instincts urged me to protect them. Whether it was my dragon nature at work, or a trait of one of the other four races in my blood, I kind of wanted to take half the bloodline home with me just to keep them safe. That would have solved a lot of issues, but it wasn’t exactly feasible to show up in the Dragon Glade or one of the other sacred homes of the higher races with a whole pile of humans in tow.
Even if I could go home. One of the few things I’d learned about myself was that I was stubborn as hell. I was part human, so that resilience and tenacity was there, but I was also immortal, and therefore not so fragile, at least not on the outside. I couldn’t leave the human world until I’d figured out what was hurting the people I was linked to and why, even if it meant keeping watch over the one thing they possessed that I didn’t: their souls.
The irony was not lost on me.
I’d spent the bulk of my introduction to the human world within the sterile hallways of hospitals, achingly aware of the suffering of every soul. But that was where the victims of these magical creatures had wound up, each one falling into mysterious comas for days on end. So far I’d only been able to observe events, powerless to do anything but hang around and wait for something to happen. Without a clue as to the reason for the attacks or what these creatures were, I had no way to stop them, so it was a waiting game.
Another thing I’d learned in those three interminable weeks was that human food was disgusting. I peeled the piece of bread back from the sandwich I was about to eat and narrowed my eyes at the blob of . . . something . . . beneath.
“What is this?” I poked at the brownish substance and scrunched my nose. A low chuckle carried from the next table in the hospital’s desolate cafeteria.
“Catch of the night,” my dining companion said. “Canned tuna salad is my guess.”
I darted a glance at the man, heat rising in my cheeks at the realization that I’d spoken out loud. My heart skittered at his striking gray-green eyes, a contrast to the warm brown of his skin, which was no less vibrant for the weariness in his bearing, his unkempt hair, and his scruffy chin. He lifted his own sandwich in a little salute and took a bite, eyes twinkling.
“See? Edible.” He took a second bite, and then his eyes bugged out and with an exaggerated spasm he slumped down with his face on the tray. His muscular forearms bracketed his head, both covered in mesmerizing, colorful designs that stretched from wrists all the way up past the sleeves of his plain threadbare t-shirt.
I lifted my eyebrows. He opened one eye, narrowed it at me, then sat up and finished chewing.
“No reaction, huh? Tough crowd.”
“You were faking, but nice try?” It was tough to be surprised when his intentions blazed in his aura clear as day—just as clear as the telltale orb of light inside his chest. His soul possessed a particular quality that gave him away as a member of the bloodline I’d taken it upon myself to watch over.
Still, I probably should have laughed. He’d just surprised me, and my interpersonal skills were still . . . well, rough would be an understatement. I knew how to act around family, but my family wasn’t exactly human. This cute, tattooed guy’s humor was new to me.
“I’ve seen you around the last two weeks. Are you a doctor?” he asked, apparently giving up on attempting to make me laugh. I kind of wished he’d try again so I could do it right the second time.
“No,” I said. “I think they eat in a separate cafeteria, anyway.” I waited and hoped he’d follow through on the recognition that always came when a new member of the bloodline finally registered what I was.
This particular man was someone I’d watched for the past two weeks, ever since his arrival with a sick elderly woman. Humans were fragile creatures, but her fragility had very little to do with her humanity or age and everything to do with why I couldn’t go home yet, even if I’d wanted to.
But so far I’d only watched him from a safe distance, protected by the bounds of human social customs—and the hospital's visitation policies. Now that he was talking to me, I was painfully aware of his attention. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed simple conversation, but more than that, I missed contact so much I ached for it.
He’d stopped eating and was now just staring at me. I took a bite of my sandwich and pretended not to notice. I knew better than to push, despite how giddy the sound of his voice made me. It would be easier if I let him start the conversation.
The bloodline were the only members of humanity who knew about my kind, and they’d only just discovered our existence. Despite the efforts the higher races had taken to clue them in, most of them still seemed pretty damn oblivious, or at least selectively blind. Another thing I’d learned about humanity was that they were incredibly adept at denial, even when they had more than enough evidence of the truth.
“Discovered” was probably a strong word, though; the bloodline had already been on the verge of discovering the higher races when we decided to pre-empt them by carrying out a ritual to send them a message. It basically amounted to, “We mean you no harm, but please keep our secret.” Even after three weeks, they were taking their time catching on.
I barely tasted the questionable food as I chewed and swallowed, hyperaware of the man as he stood up and moved to sit across from me. The quality of his aura had changed from a dim blue signifying weariness to a crackling violet warning of confrontation, yet softened by pink curiosity. My belly clenched and I found it hard to swallow.
“You’re like me, aren’t you?” he said in a low voice. “Or . . . are you one of them?”
My pulse raced as I set down my sandwich and lifted my gaze to meet his. Dark brows curved over his gray-green eyes and his skin was a tawny brown about a shade lighter than my own. His thick black hair fell almost to his shoulders, mussed like he worried his hands through it often. He raked fingers through it, confirming my observation. The Adam’s apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed, and a piece of stone carved in the shape of a musical clef jiggled on its thong.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Am I like you, or like them?”
It wasn’t really a test. I genuinely wanted to know. I was technically human—both my biological parents were human, at any rate—but I’d been ripped from my mother’s womb shortly after conception, then grown in a tank and sustained with ancient nymphaea blood for the first five months of my existence.
Being so acutely conscious of every moment of my life, even from those first glimmers of awareness after conception, should have made it easier for me to understand my own nature . . . to know where I fit in. But it had only made it infinitely harder.
I wasn’t just human—the blood of the higher races that ran in my veins defined me as much as my humanity did—and part of the reason I’d run to begin with was to try to understand what I was. I couldn’t be everything; that was too damn confusing. But at the moment, I didn’t really feel like I belonged anywhere at all. Maybe his observation would help me understand.
He studied me for a moment longer, then shook his head and frowned. “I think you’re something else. But if
you aren’t human, you have to be one of them, right? You just look so normal. I mean . . . you’re fucking gorgeous. They’re all beautiful, but, um, you look mostly human.”
I gave him a gentle smile and nodded, barely containing my elation at having this conversation at long last, and with a man as lovely to look at as he was. “I am mostly human. But out of curiosity, what do you see that suggests otherwise?”
His half-eaten sandwich lay forgotten on his tray, though he stared at it blindly for a second before looking at me again. The divine glow that tinged his aura flared, reminding me that though the bloodline was also mostly human, they carried faint genetic mutations that linked them to the higher races. More importantly, they were all carrying blood that linked them to a god. That divine link had been dormant until three weeks ago, the god at the other end of it on the mend after a particularly brutal attack. But he was at full power now, and so the bloodline was now at full awareness of the higher races.
My new friend seemed to struggle for words, and my heart went out to him. None of this could have been easy—first to discover out of the blue that humanity wasn’t the only race with advanced intellect on the planet, and then that whatever traits marked him and the rest of the bloodline as special also made them targets for some invisible threat. But I had to know what it was he saw that identified the higher races.
Over the past three weeks since I’d left home, I’d learned to be cautious when I interacted with the bloodline. We may have been a little heavy-handed with the cautionary aspect of the spell we cast on them to protect our secrets. They avoided talking to anyone about us as a result, even each other, and were downright terrified of any of the higher races they came into contact with. Somehow I managed to fly under the radar. The higher races barely paid any attention to me when I came across them, and the bloodline just gave me odd looks, as if they wanted to say hello but were afraid of looking dumb.
This man was clearly willing to risk looking like an idiot to get it out, and I’d be damned if I was going to discourage him from talking.
“It’s all right,” I finally said, reaching across the table and squeezing his hand. His head jerked up as though I’d just shocked him and he stared at me. His hand tightened into a fist beneath my fingers and the intricate design on his forearm flexed. What looked like scales inked into his arm faded from deep red to bright turquoise.
“Fuck, you are one of them,” he breathed. He relaxed his hand and spread his fingers out, then turned it over beneath mine until our palms touched. I got a view of the rest of his tattoo of a huge fish swimming amid stylized blue-green waves. Warmth radiated from his skin along with a spark of something more that made my breath catch.
The increased intimacy made me want to pull away, but he seemed on the verge of a revelation, so I left my hand in his grasp. Taking a deep breath, he said, “It’s like you all resonate at a different frequency than the rest of us. Like the sunlight bounces off your skin differently, and sound waves travel around your bodies differently. But until a few weeks ago, I just didn’t have the senses that could see and hear you properly.”
Glancing up at the abrasive fluorescent lights, he chuckled. “Guess nobody’s immune to crap lighting though, huh? It took me a few minutes to be able to tell after you sat down, but now . . .”
He slid his palm along mine. An electric charge passed through my hand into his skin. I pulled my hand back and rested it under the table on my lap, uncomfortable with the rising need that simple touch had elicited. I didn’t need my dragon or my nymphaea nature waking up with this enticing stranger. Or at all, for that matter. There was too much at stake.
“What’s your name?” he blurted, his eyes now bright with curiosity, the floodgates having opened up after our touch. “What kind are you? The message said there were four . . . ah . . . races? Are you a dra—”
He clamped his mouth shut and glanced around. The parking lot beyond the windows was nearly empty and the cafeteria was dead, aside from one lonely cashier reading a book near the self-serve stations across the room. At this time of night, the place was a graveyard.
“No, I’m not a dragon,” I said. “Not exactly. My name’s Deva Rainsong. I’m sort of an ambassador from all four races.”
That sounded plausible; he didn’t need to know that what I was, while it had a name, wasn’t exactly definable. I was a chimera, a hybrid of not only the four higher races, but human too. And I was the only one of my kind.
He also didn’t need to know that I had effectively run away from home and was absolutely lost when it came to understanding my own nature.
“Day-va,” he said, smiling as he drew out my name. “I’m Bodhi.”
“I’m happy to meet you, Bodhi,” I said, smiling slightly, but too apprehensive to make it stick. Thanks to his rippling aura and a particular quality to his words, I could sense he was about to ask me something and I wasn’t going to have a good answer for him, which killed me.
“You guys have . . . abilities, right? Mystical powers?” He lowered his voice again as he shoved his tray aside and leaned closer to me. The desperation that had lain dormant during our interaction thus far flared to life, crackling though his aura.
I had to suppress a sigh because I knew what was coming.
“We do, to varying degrees,” I said. I was using at least two of them already to interpret his true desires. Not only did my dragon nature give me the ability to read his aura for secrets about his state of mind, but I had the innate ability to hear the truth in people’s spoken words—a trait I’d inherited from my turul side.
“My grandma’s sick. The doctors don’t have a clue what it is, but it started the same day the message came. It has to be linked. There must be something you can do.”
“I can try,” I said with a nod.
Swallowing a knot of helplessness, I stood. While I did have some abilities, those I was born with were woefully inadequate to do fuck-all for his grandmother. I hadn’t spent the last three weeks in hospitals for my health, after all, or for the health of the victims I’d observed. Bodhi’s grandma was not the first to fall prey to some mysterious creature that only seemed interested in members of the bloodline, and chances were that Bodhi himself would eventually become a target. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
But I could sure as hell try, and him inviting me to actually see his grandmother was the first break I’d had since this all began.
He grabbed both our trays and dumped the remnants of our midnight lunches in the trash, stacked the trays on top, then held the door open for me to follow.
“It’s this way,” he said, leading the way across a courtyard through another set of doors with an elevator on the other side. I could’ve found the way in my sleep.
When his grandmother had arrived, I was already here, having just watched a man fall into a coma as his soul fell to the beasts that had come for the bloodline. Before him, all the victims had died before I could see what had happened to them, but over the last few weeks they seemed to last longer, though I was beginning to lose hope that I’d be able to figure out how to actually heal them.
The two most recent victims were afflicted by a weakening of spirit that drained their will until they were nothing but feeble husks. The doctors had conducted every test imaginable, but they couldn’t see what I could.
I braced myself when we exited the elevator by the fifth-floor nurses’ station. The beasts were there, lurking in the shadows.
I glared at the creatures I’d taken to calling “soul hounds” as we passed through the door into Bodhi’s grandmother’s room. They were pair of shimmering, violet mirages that vanished when I looked directly at them, and inexplicably perked up whenever I arrived. One had a silver blaze down its face and the other had glowing, booted paws.
Both shadowy heads followed my passage. It was as if they were just biding their time until the woman died, but I’d be damned if I was going to let that happen.
The hounds spent their
evenings pacing between the two victims, their foxlike ruffs shimmering with pale cascades of power from the energy they drained. Everything I’d tried to get them to leave only seemed to encourage them.
At least it wasn’t a constant thing. They’d arrive in the dead of night when the hospital was quietest, their dim glows gradually brightening as they absorbed power from the souls of the afflicted, and they’d leave at daybreak. I had no idea where they went. They seemed completely disinterested in the normal humans who staffed the hospital; the only people they cared about were the pair whose life forces reached out with a shimmering magical tether to each of the hounds.
What would happen if and when one of the victims died, I had no idea—I’d only felt the prior deaths, not witnessed them—but I suspected they would move onto someone else in the bloodline, judging from how they sniffed around the family members who came and went, including Bodhi and a woman who I believed was his mother.
Bodhi’s grandmother would be the first I’d actually see in person. I’d tried and failed on several occasions to talk my way in before.
The night nurse eyeballed me as I strolled by, and I gave her an exaggeratedly sweet smile when Bodhi opened his grandmother’s door and motioned for me to enter. Hopefully I could learn something new from actually examining one of the victims.
Fate’s Fools Series
Fate’s Fools
Fool’s Folly
Fool’s Paradise
Fool’s Errand
Nobody’s Fool
About Ophelia Bell
Ophelia Bell loves a good bad-boy and especially strong women in her stories. Women who aren’t apologetic about enjoying sex and bad boys who don’t mind being with a woman who’s in charge, at least on the surface, because pretty much anything goes in the bedroom.
Ophelia grew up on a rural farm in North Carolina and now lives in Los Angeles with her own tattooed bad-boy husband and six attention-whoring cats.
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