Flight: The Roc Warriors (Immortal Elements Book 1)

by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  The crowd cheered. The woman at his side stood quietly with her hands folded in front of her. She looked elegant and beautiful, yet strangely not bird-like. Although appearing taller than me, she didn’t seem as tall as most of the women here. And her hair wasn’t brown; it shone a deep auburn. She was human?

  Wow.

  Using his hands to calm the cheering, the regal man talked about what this ceremony meant to their people and gave his sincere hope for continued peace with the wolves. Then he invited the men to the floor.

  All the men began a dance, which looked more like fake fighting, as they circled the grand fire. It reminded me of the dance I’d seen at one of the Indian casinos, the kind they used to entertain the patrons.

  The orchestral music in the background started low, growing as the “fighting” grew more intense until both the fight and the music reached an emotional crescendo, then dropping low again as Shadow, Rogue, and Crest acted out the surrender and subsequent signing of the peace treaty.

  I didn’t know for sure, but it felt like one of those ‘I am so honored’ moments, getting chosen to reenact that scene, making me proud of those guys. Like cheering for my favorite sports team, seeing them, I whooped it up, cupping my hands around my mouth to shout Shadow’s, Rogue’s and Crest’s names as loud as I could shout them.

  At the conclusion, the women began to join the men on the dancefloor surrounding the bonfire. The orchestra closed down as a DJ started up. They played the same type of heavy bass music I heard coming from the clubs on the avenue.

  Rogue and Crest had moves. When they began dancing—wow! With how each man’s body moved to the beat and the way they looked, the women flocked to them—all up on them—for about a song and a half before Crest broke off to talk with a couple of men, I guessed, were his friends.

  As I turned away from my admiration of Rogue, Shadow’s eyes found mine. It was exactly like one of those cliché moments in a romance novel. Our gazes locked on one another across the dancefloor. I swallowed hard. Then I found myself standing and gliding past everyone, including Rogue and Crest—straight into Shadow’s arms. I couldn’t help myself. Nothing save my death—and the way the sparks fired up again, maybe not even then—could have kept me from him. The intensity of my feelings this time around kind of scared me. But straight up, as much as needing air in my lungs, I needed to be in his arms. Period.

  “So, you have made your choice?” he asked. Uh… well… I had no idea there was a choice to make, but the way he spoke to me in that low, gritty, sexy voice—so damn sexy, it turned me on in a way I’d never experienced before—if it was a choice, then yes, I made it. He had to be wearing a pheromone cologne. I felt so hot I had to get this dress off. He needed to put his mouth on me.

  Yeah, pheromone cologne, it was the only explanation for my reaction to him. The way he made me feel. Sparks fizzled from my fingertips. Pins and needles shot up my arms.

  “I have to get this dress off,” I whispered, and I swore he growled.

  “We are going,” he ordered. Finally, finally, his lips touched mine, he picked me up by lifting with one hand under my bottom while wrapping my legs around his middle with the other.

  There were hoots of laughter and back pats for Shadow. As we passed by, one of the men with Crest muttered, “Better luck next time.”

  Our lips remained fused for most of the way, his tongue pushed to gain entrance into my mouth and I willingly opened to let it, touching and tangling them as he walked faster than a man should be able to holding another person. Shadow growled once again, low, guttural, sensual, painful. This time I was sure of it. A woman could never mistake a sound like that from a man wanting her.

  We’d left the crowds and frivolity of the city square far behind when he breathed the word, “Finally” against my cheek then glided his lips down to kiss the pulse point on my neck, where he sucked hard, biting and pulling at the skin there. Lapping his tongue against the rawness he’d created when I cried out.

  I ground my center against his crotch and begged him. “Please.” I couldn’t help myself. I needed him. In every way I could have him.

  He couldn’t have gotten us back to the boarding house any faster if he’d flown in bird form and he didn’t set me down until we were in my room with the door locked. And let me just say, it took great dexterity to get the doors opened. If he was that skilled as a lover, then I was about to experience greatness.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said while unstrapping my shoes. “The fates were in our favor but I refused to get ahead of myself. Thank Saēna you chose me.” With every word he spoke, I felt my need grow tenfold. I was consumed with it—pulling at me from the very core of my being.

  His strong hands latched on to the hem of my dress, pushing it up, up, up until he was able to rip it off overhead. Yes. With the wretched garment gone and my skin still on fire, I whimpered, still needing more.

  Oh, and he gave me more, using his mouth all over my body, nipping, licking, sucking, and kissing while I struggled to rip open his shirt. Buttons flew through the air and scattered on the floor right before I pushed the fabric from his shoulders, but then I fumbled the unbuckling of his belt. The sparks sizzled beneath my skin.

  I must have looked like a virgin on prom night with my overzealous, klutzy behavior yet, dear god, it felt good—no. It felt great.

  Nothing in my life had ever felt this good. No man had ever come close to making me want him with such wild, unadulterated passion. Something began to unfurl in the pit of my belly, spiraling, spiraling like a blackhole. I needed to move. I needed to scream.

  Stroking his hand along my breast as he moved, Shadow pulled back, only to strip his pants and shoes off, leaving him as naked as me. He kneeled on the bed before me—a work of art—the sculpture of David, or a non-blond Adonis. The portrait of a man and all that encompassed. So strong and full of masculine promise. His skin glistened with a light sheen of sweat.

  And he was mine.

  Blessed be the woman and her self-lubricating function because I needed him inside me. Not wanted. The throb between my legs had grown painful. The spiral in my belly made me sick with want. I needed him inside me.

  “Please, Shadow,” I begged him.

  “Please what, eaglet?” he taunted.

  I opened my mouth to answer yet only managed a squeak. My head fell back as I gasped to find a breath. Closing my eyes, I swallowed roughly then finally forced out, “Please… take me.”

  With those words, he flipped me over onto my hands and knees, pushing on my upper back until my forearms rested on the bed and my forehead touched the pillow.

  I felt him take up position behind me and turned to watch. He squatted, up on the balls of his feet, the insides of his knees pressing against my hips. His hands dug into the small of my back as he angled his body to rest slightly above my bottom. Then he aligned himself and with no more warning, drove inside me, powerfully plundering the spoils of lust. My back arched and my head reared back at the force of his intrusion, urging my hips back up in time to his thrusts.

  No one had ever gone at me from this position before. He thrust so deep, so hard, he bottomed out and I couldn’t decide between pleasure or pain. It felt like he might split me in half, but in the best possible way. Stroke after stroke, he built me up. I thought my heart might stop, it pounded so fiercely in my chest. I felt the overwhelming urge to cry.

  Then seated to the hilt, he ceased the thrusting to grind against my cervix. Gold spots popped behind my closed eyes, I squeezed them so tight. How could this level of good even exist? It felt like… like… the sun, moon, and stars converged overhead punching a hole in the heavens allowing the meaning of life to flow out and spark within me, opening up a floodgate of history and future and everything in between. “What is this?” I whispered, consciously fighting back the onslaught of tears waiting to flow free.

  I began to shake from the intensity of our lovemaking. I wanted to come, needed that climax. Yet every time I got clos
e, he denied me. Why deny me? Unable to hold it in any longer, I screamed out, begging him to let me finish. He continued to grind me from behind. Those damnable tears began to fall because I had no control over them.

  His animalistic grunts, my feral groans. The carnal sex sounds drove me higher and higher toward an edge I desperately wanted to leap over. My tears continued to fall.

  “I am your choice?” he bizarrely asked, as clearly, he was my choice. Wasn’t it his manhood impaling me?

  When I didn’t respond right away, he demanded it. “Meena, answer me. Am… I… your… choice?” His voice came at me breathy. He was close, holding back it seemed until I gave him what he wanted.

  “Yes.” I cried out as he gave me one more powerful thrust. I came and I came; it felt like a continuous sonic wave rippling throughout my body from his added climax as his hit strong and hard. More than our bodies joined tonight.

  Something felt different than the other times I’d had sex. That was when I realized he hadn’t worn a condom. Maybe this was part of the Roc mating ritual, but that was something we should’ve discussed. I didn’t want to end up pregnant. We collapsed to the bed, his weight pressing my body into the mattress even as he lay offset from me.

  He stroked slowly in and out of me a few more times before he pulled out completely. I hissed from feeling our separation.

  “Roll over, eaglet,” he said.

  I did as directed. He sat up on his knees. In his hand, he held a thin rose gold chain with the head of an eagle attached. The eye of the eagle was a dark amber stone. It was elegant. It was beautiful.

  “What’s that for?” I asked sleepily.

  “When we are born, males are given a chain to gift our mates.” He clasped the chain around my ankle. “I have carried mine around since the age of thirteen, human years, when my father, who had been its caretaker, presented it to me. He told me I must never leave the house without it, because one never knows when a pair-mating may occur.”

  What he’d said hit me. “You’ve had that since you were born?”

  “Yes. Waiting all these years to give it to you.”

  “But rose gold is my favorite.”

  “I know.” He smirked.

  “H-How?” I stuttered as the shock of this revelation set in. He hadn’t gone jewelry shopping with me.

  “I know because it is rose gold. If it had been yellow gold, silver or platinum, I would have known one of those were your favorite.”

  Okay, so that was pretty freaking cool. How could whomever gifted him the chain know what my favorite metal would be before I ever knew? Not to mention, how did he carry it for all those years? I mean, the man shifted into an eagle.

  “What about when you fought in bird form?” I asked, hoping for an answer to at least one of my questions. “Or when you were naked, protecting me from the wolves?”

  “I still carried it. Every man not mated carries one somewhere on his person, even while fighting. Yours stayed concealed under feathers when bird and hidden by hair as man.”

  This beautiful, delicate chain he’d kept with him the whole time I’d taken care of him in his majestic bird form and I’d never known it.

  Unfortunately, we reached the cleanup stage of the evening’s festivities. I didn’t want to move from the spot. As I started to push up, Shadow did the sweetest thing. He leaned way over to pull open the second drawer down on the bedside table to retrieve a package of wet wipes. I didn’t even know the drawer held wet wipes. I figured the drawers were empty, ready to be filled by the woman occupying the room.

  Imagine my surprise as he pulled up the tab, tugged one out, and proceeded to clean me tenderly of the mess from our lovemaking. Never had a man cleaned me after sex before. It was nice. Highly intimate. After, he tugged a second wipe to clean himself, tossing the cloth into the wastebasket when finished.

  The act was as tender as it was erotic.

  I’d never felt so wanted in my life. God, I could fall in love with this man. I thought I might have already started.

  When he lay back at my side, he placed the tip of his nose to the tip of mine and ran it up the bridge, then back down. Then he rested his forehead against mine. “Sleep now,” he ordered, and he reached over to the edge of the bed to flip the quilt overtop the both of us.

  As his eyes drooped, I snuck off to use the bathroom. He remained half-asleep until I returned to his side, sliding into the bed next to him, the arm he used to pull me in tight draped around my waist. I snuggled against his strong body to get comfortable.

  He held me like that as I drifted off to sleep, content in a way I’d never experienced before. In every way a person could be content.

  When I awoke halfway through the next morning, it was to Shadow tracing his finger lightly over the seam of my sex. I should’ve been too sore to go another round, what with his size and the pounding I’d received last night. But my body simply accepted it all, welcomed it, in fact. Leaving only pleasurable memories. “Are you going to take me again?” I asked.

  “Are you ready for that?”

  “I’m ready,” I whispered.

  Unlike the intensity of last night, he rolled me onto my side, my back pressed to his front as he gently pushed inside me and kissed my neck. Slow strokes. Easy strokes. He played with my nipples and nipped at my ear. Our joining lasted a long while like it had last night, only because of the meandering pace, it took me a while to reach climax. Though different from last night, it felt equally as beautiful.

  “Thank you,” I said after pressing my lips against his hand.

  “For what? You chose me.”

  “I don’t know… for wanting to be chosen?”

  This response brought on a soft chuckle. Yes, I could most assuredly fall in love with him.

  Still holding me close, he began to speak. “You need to know some things, my dear eaglet.”

  “Things?” I asked. Puzzled. Tired. Sated.

  “As you know, I am of the Roc.”

  I nodded, but then stupidly added, “When you first told me, I thought it was your last name.”

  “My people carry no last names. Though when I need it, I have used Roc as surname. Roc. Named after the first of our kind. Our legend states that he was a fierce warrior bird but was injured in battle. When he fell, he was nursed back to health by a beautiful human woman.”

  That sounded like us.

  “He fell in love with that woman. She in turn fell in love with him. They wanted a way to be together. Luckily, she was no mere human, but a witch. She cast a spell on the Roc to give him the power of transformation. Where he could walk among the humans in a human form.”

  “That’s a beautiful story.”

  “Tis not a story, my dear one. It is our truth. Ours. The Roc. Ours, yours, and mine. You must know.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “Don’t delve any further into that part of the story.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re going to tell me something that will freak me out, I can feel it. And I don’t want to freak out. We’ve just made love for the first and second times and I’d like to bask in the afterglow for a little while longer.” Anytime someone started a story with ‘you must know’, well, that was a big, freaking red flag signaling that they were about to share information that would anger, disquiet or downright terrify the person being told.

  “You realize you have pair-mated with a man who turns to bird,” said Shadow, chuckling but not speaking mockingly. “Do you really think anything I say would freak you out at this point?”

  We were lying naked in a soft, comfy bed. Couldn’t that be enough for now?

  “Please?” I begged.

  As answer, he kissed my temple, nodded once and continued on with the story, presumably skipping the freak-me-out parts. “They had a child together, and as the child grew, they wished for him to have a mate. But the gravity of their secret, of keeping their secret, weighed so heavily, not just any mate would do. She cast a spell out into the world for one
mate to exist for each of our kind and once we mated, we mated for life. It is our life’s mission to find our mate. Though we have to come together on our own.

  “As direct descendants of Roc and his mate, we carry all the characteristics of the bird. Speed, agility, battle prowess. And have maintained some of the magic of the witch. The ability to communicate with and understand other species, even in bird form and some other characteristics I will not go into so as not to freak you out until the afterglow has faded.” He chuckled again and bent in to peck the tip of my nose.

  “That’s incredible.” The uncanny coincidences between Roc’s story and our story made me feel a little woozy.

  “As is the way of most shifters—what you call buzzards, wolves and many other creatures—in human terms, we are immortal. For us, we are born and follow the same rate of maturation as humans. Only after we reach sexual maturity does our aging slow. We die, but only after thousands upon thousands of years. My father is a millennia old. My mother several hundred years less.”

  Immortal? Wow.

  “That’s beautiful.” For some inexplicable reason, the tears began to fall from my eyes again. He pulled my face to his and ran his nose up and down, from the tip of mine to the bridge and back. “But what does that mean for us? I’m not… I’m just a human, Shadow.” That was when I understood my tears.

  “You need to meet my parents today.”

  “I’m not so good with families. I’ve never been.”

  “Sorry, eaglet. It is the only way. You must meet your new family. We will get breakfast and then I will take you to them. You will understand all once you meet them. I promise.”

  He allowed us to lie together a bit longer. I could have stayed wrapped in his arms the rest of the day. Unfortunately, he eventually forced us up. We showered together. I dressed in a respectable meet-the-parents outfit of a light lavender cable-knit cardigan sweater worn over a deeper lavender camisole and a pair of camel-colored corduroys along with my tall brown boots.