by Coralee June
“Maybe we should call Banner?” Render suggested quietly, though it sounded like he didn’t want to.
“No,” Gritt replied almost immediately.
I wished I were strong enough to tell them all to fuck off. It was confusing, having them give a fuck one moment and toss me to the wolves the next. I was suffering from paragonal whiplash.
“Methinks thou dost protest too much, Wolfy,” Hyde replied with a chuckle. If I hadn’t been so out of it, I would’ve laughed at the necromancer’s words.
“Yeah? Well, me fuckin’ thinks you’re about two seconds from having me tear out your godsdamn throat,” Gritt replied.
The combination of their angry powers had me suddenly salivating. The amulet on my chest started to vibrate, and I knew with the amount of barely-contained hunger running through my system that it was glowing. “She needs to feed. She practiced on me before. I can handle it.”
Panic thumped in my chest. I tried to protest, to sit up, to do something, but it was like all of my limbs were filled with cotton. I was a puppet without strings.
“Are you sure about this?” I heard Quade ask.
I had no idea how I’d gotten here, surrounded by all four paragons, but their power was too much when I was so weak. It was like smelling food cooking when you were starving. Even with the amulet, my Void was practically drooling, pushing against my skin from the inside out. It wanted to unleash and help my body cope with what had been done to me. Gritt was right; I needed to feed.
“I can handle it,” Gritt repeated.
I felt fingers on my neck, strong hands trembling slightly at the clasp of my necklace.
“No…” I tried to protest, to warn him. I was way too weak to hold the Void back. If they took off my necklace, I was going to destroy him. Probably all of them.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Quade muttered right before Gritt finally got the clasp unhooked.
And then, my amulet was yanked away, and my Void expelled out of me.
It was like lying flat on my back on a sandy beach while the tide came. Water overtook me, submerging me entirely, dragging me back out to the depthless ocean.
When a hot hand pressed against my chest and collarbone, that smoky tide of my power washed up my body and into his hand. My eyes snapped open, and all I could see were Gritt’s vibrant green eyes and his mane of blond hair as my black smoke surrounded him. His expression was intense and full of anger, but I didn’t know if that anger was directed at me or something else.
My smoke latched onto him, and his body shuddered as my power drank from him. My Void was starved because my body was abused. The more I drank, the better I felt. His powers entered me in a constant stream, but it wasn’t painful. Just like the first time I’d fed off him, it filled me with a heady, almost erotic pleasure. My chest started to rise and fall in rapid breaths.
“Let...go…” I begged him.
He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Not yet. You need more.”
I couldn’t ask him how he knew that, because my eyes rolled to the back of my head as I felt another powerful wave of his shifter power push into me. It felt so fucking good.
His hand dug into my skin, probably leaving marks, but I barely felt it. When I looked at him again, his expression had softened to something indescribable, and there was a definite heat in his gaze. One that promised to stoke the flames that had ignited in us both.
After another moment, I nodded at him. “It’s okay. That’s enough.”
With great effort, he pulled his hand away, but he didn’t back up. Instead, he leaned forward, bringing my smoke with him. But instead of latching onto his skin or polluting his eyes and ears and mouth, my Void was slowly caressing him, the vapor brushing against him almost with tenderness.
“It worked.”
It took me a moment for his words to sink in because I was so lost in the depths of his eyes. But he was right. It had worked. My Void had drunk from him without draining him. In fact, it had already pulled away, one last sip of his power to quench the last of my needs. But I hadn’t done anything. My Void had done it all on its own. It’s like it knew not to hurt Gritt—like it remembered how I’d taught it constraint the last time. My mind whirled with questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what this meant, but I knew it was important.
Slowly, he brought up my amulet, and his hand gently cupped the back of my head to lift it. He re-clasped the necklace around my neck once more, and I noticed that his canines had elongated, and his expression was slightly animalistic. The last of my smoke evaporated, and I breathed in a shaky breath.
“It seems our shifter likes when she takes a sip from him,” I heard Hyde say.
I sat up, only feeling slightly dizzy at the movement. When I looked down at my body, I saw dozens of fang marks all over me, the telltale pink and red smears of my own blood dyeing my skin. But Render had obviously licked each bite, because they were all slowly closing up. Still, to see the evidence of my attack made me wince. I’d come very, very close to dying, and that fact was like having an ice-cold water dumped over me. I never expected for the level of hatred to come to that. I was wrong.
Gritt pulled a blanket off the back of a chair and wrapped it around me. I took it gratefully and looked around, but I didn’t recognize the bedroom we were in. There was a deep red comforter over a four poster bed, and everything inside—the desk, the side tables, the bedframe, even the widows—were all made of matching dark wood that played off the stone flooring.
“Where am I?” I asked.
My hands smoothed over the leather chaise I was sitting on, and I looked over at the four paragons around me. Render was leaning against the wall with one ankle crossed over the other, his dark hair slightly disheveled. Quade was perched on the desk, a scowl in place. Hyde was...resurrecting a beetle by the looks of it, and Gritt was still sitting next to me, his relieved and heated stare licking up at my soul.
“My room,” Render replied before propelling himself off the wall and sauntering over to me. “Tell me why you did it, Void.”
I twisted up to look at him. “Excuse me? Please tell me you aren’t blaming me for what happened back there. It’s not like I asked for all those vamps to bite me,” I replied in a stormy tone. Now that I had my energy back, I was feeling bold. Angry. I had half a mind to set fire to this elitist school and never look back.
“No. I want to know why you just took it. You could have taken off your necklace, and it would have been done. It would have never gotten so far if you’d used your power.” He was angry, his face shadowed by fury I didn’t understand.
“What, and prove them—and you—right? Be the destructive Void everyone accuses me of being? I don’t want to take people’s powers, Render. I’d hoped you’d recognize that by now.” Years of prejudiced anger was boiling me up from the inside out. Why was I still being judged for my powers? I’d shown them who I was as a person. They should damn well know better by now. “I caved when I realized that they wanted to kill me instead of just fuck me up, but Blaire stopped me,” I said, shooting a look to Render, but the stoic vampire didn’t show any reaction at all. “But...I didn’t want to take off my amulet because I don’t want to be hated or feared. I don’t want to be the monster everyone thinks I am.”
“Fuck what people think. You could have died,” Quade interrupted. He strutted forward, and my heart skipped in tempo. I had nowhere to back up since I was still sitting, but he towered over me, looking so angry that my adrenaline spiked.
He leaned down, putting one hand on the backrest, his arm brushing against the sleeve of my shirt. With his face only inches from mine, I found I couldn’t breathe.
“You’re different than they said you were,” he murmured, his dark eyes searching my face.
I frowned. “Who?”
“My parents.”
I blinked at him, my mind whirling with everything that he wasn’t saying. We’d been ten years old when my Void had come out, and I’d been
told I couldn’t play with him anymore—told I was too dangerous. But I’d never considered what he’d been told.
“What did they say?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. Instead, his gaze had dropped to my mouth, and I sucked my bottom lip in, biting it gently.
“Why does my power keep tugging me toward you?”
His words threw me for a loop, and confusion washed over my expression.
“I feel it too,” Gritt admitted, and I turned to look at him.
He and Quade were both so close, I could feel the heat of their breaths on my cheeks. I shifted where I sat, pressing my thighs together. They weren’t the only ones who felt a tug. My Void was calm inside of me, content for the first time, but there was this inexplicable reaction that I always had when around these four—like their power called to me, buzzing under my skin and warming at their presence. Maybe it was because they were paragons. Maybe being the most powerful of their kind was the reason for it. Maybe my own magic responded to that. I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t deny the pull.
“This is just a lot to process right now,” I replied warily before tearing my gaze away from them and rubbing a hand down my face. I was avoiding the conversation. I didn’t want to think about the implications of it. If I lured powerful supernaturals to me, then it would be another reason for them to distrust me.
“In case anyone is wondering, I feel the pull, too. Just throwing that out there,” Hyde added with flourish before tossing the beetle up in the air, letting its metallic black wings flutter in the air. He tilted his head back and laughed as the excited bug took flight before turning his attention to me. “I felt it really strongly a couple days ago, too. Pulling, pulling, pulling. Pulling my hair, pulling my power, pulling my di—”
“Shut the fuck up before I kill you,” Gritt interrupted, rubbing his temples.
Hyde didn’t get the memo though, because he ended with, “I’d like to call dibs on touching her next.”
I scrunched my eyebrows in confusion. “No,” I replied as I stood up. My feet were unsteady, and I felt myself waver before a strong hand grabbed my upper arm to steady me. I looked up at Quade before jerking from his grasp. “No more touching me. No more testing the Void out on your powers. No more whatever the fuck this pull is, okay? I’ll continue to work with Banner—”
“Oh, it’s always fucking Banner, huh? You sure are getting comfortable,” Gritt bit back, and I dropped my mouth open in shock. He was rippling with anger and jealousy.
“Who I get comfortable with is none of your godsdamn business. I’m the Void, remember? You don’t want me as a mate, that’s what you said. Unless you’ve changed your mind?” I challenged, glowering at him. He didn’t move an inch, just stared at me like I was some kind of dog treat he wanted to nibble on. When his eyes dropped to my chest, at the blanket I was still clutching around me, I realized that I’d let it gape too much. I quickly pulled it tighter around me, but the damage had already been done, because now my body was responding to the heat in his eyes.
“My, my. The sexual tension in this room could raise the dead!” Hyde quipped while clapping his hands together, the resounding smack echoing across the room.
Ignoring him, I turned back to look at Gritt. “You never should have taken my amulet off without Banner here.”
Gritt stood up too, so that I had to crane my neck to look up at him. “You and him got something going on?” he growled.
I couldn’t believe this. How dare he think that he had any right to even ask. I jabbed a finger against his chest. “Since I’m not your mate or your girlfriend, that’s none of your business,” I snapped. “And it has nothing to do with that, anyway. You could’ve gotten hurt. Unleashing my Void powers without a neutralizer present was dangerous. I could have wiped out your powers just like that,” I said with a snap of my fingers. “Or worse.”
“But you didn’t,” he pointed out smugly.
“But I could have,” I argued back. “And you also had no right to do that while I was half unconscious. I wasn’t even in control, Gritt.”
“I was right, so why does it matter?”
“It matters because you can’t take stupid risks. Not with the Void.”
Gritt took a step forward, crowding my space completely, and shocked the hell out of me when his hand came up to grip the back of my neck. “My animals could feel your pain,” he said quietly, his eyes searching mine. My mind flicked back to the damn book in his dorm room, and each impending step in the mate bond.
“Well, I apologize for the inconvenience.”
Pain and worry flashed through his gaze. The way he was looking at me was so different from how our first introduction had gone. He’d been wild with feral fury before, touching me for the sole reason of attacking me. But now, he was holding me like he needed to reassure himself that I was okay. I didn’t know how to process it. My emotions were going haywire.
“I need space,” I whispered. I didn’t want to believe that Gritt could actually care about me. Hope was a useless emotion, and allowing myself to have hope in someone like Gritt would just get me burned. His reaction to me this morning, and the way he was being now—hell, the way all four paragons were acting...this was all too new, too strange; I needed space. I needed time to process and figure out what I was thinking and feeling.
“You need to rest,” Quade interrupted, cutting off my face-off with Gritt. “You’re still weak. Why don’t you sleep here for a little bit? Or you can come to my room.”
“She’s not staying in your fucking room, elemental,” Gritt snapped.
“Yeah, she could just stay here in mine,” Render spoke over him.
Gritt’s hold on my neck tightened.
“No need. I’ve been having some zombies fix up the feral shack since the bobcat shifter left this morning. Devi can just go back to the cabin,” Hyde said with glee before spinning around to catch the flying beetle in the room and crush it in his palm. Such a weirdo.
I shook my head, trying to sort through all the conflicting emotions, deciding to address Hyde’s remark first because it was the easiest to handle. “I thought I told you no resurrecting forest animals to clean my cabin?” I wasn’t actually angry about it, but it was better than confronting the jealous shifter, confusing elemental, and oddly protective vampire.
“I couldn’t help myself. They were just begging to recreate that Snow White scene. I even choreographed a musical number to really make it something special.”
“Of course you did,” I mumbled. “Okay. I’m going to my cabin. Alone.”
I took a step away, making Gritt’s hand drop, but Quade intercepted me. “I’m going with you. At least to make sure you get there safely.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. The Void had replenished me some, and Render had helped to close all the puncture wounds, but I’d still lost a lot of blood. I wanted a shower to wash off the assault of the vampires in class, but surprisingly, the fact that Render’s saliva was coated over my skin didn’t bother me at all.
“Here,” Gritt said, whipping his coat and shirt off. Before I could protest, he’d shoved his dark button up dress shirt into my hands.
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
He grunted out some sort of unintelligible response and then held up the blanket so that I could slip his shirt on over my naked body without flashing everybody. I hadn’t even had time to process the fact that they’d all seen me naked while I was unconscious, but my cheeks burned at the thought. “What happened to my clothes?” I asked as I buttoned up the shirt.
“They were shredded and bloody,” Render answered. “They fell off you when I carried you up here.”
“Oh.”
The next time I saw Blaire, I wanted to punch her right in the tit and then suck power from her until she was drooling on the floor.
When I was done getting dressed in Gritt’s shirt, he dropped the blanket, and his eyes swept over me with male satisfaction. I avoided his gaze as I thanked him once m
ore.
Render walked over and opened the bedroom door for me. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”
“Okay.”
I dreaded going to another class tomorrow, but I had no choice in the matter. Unless I ran away, which was feeling more and more appealing by the day.
When we exited Render’s room, Quade led the way down the stairs. Good thing too, since I had no idea which way to go. Thibault Academy was huge, and I had barely scraped the surface of the different rooms and wings it housed. We were obviously in the wing for the vampire dorms, the fanged emblem hanging on the deep red walls.
“Who got me out of the gym?” I asked curiously.
“Gritt was tearing back like his ass was on fire. Guess he felt your pain or something,” Quade said. “He ran into Render on the way, so the vamp flashed to you, and they both got you out. Hyde had some dead sparrow or some shit spying in through the window, so he got alerted that something was going down, and he called me. We all met at Render’s since his room was the closest.”
I nodded, trying to visualize what I’d remembered versus the gaps he was filling in for me. “Why would you show up?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly that,” I said. “Why would you care if the vampires attacked me?”
Anger settled over his features. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Devi.”
“You wouldn’t have cared before,” I pressed.
“That was before—” he cut himself off when we rounded a hallway and saw that it was full of students. As soon as they spotted me in a male’s shirt and nothing else, covered in smears of blood and matted hair, the whispers started.
Quade was quiet as we walked, ignoring everyone we passed despite how they pointed and snickered and muttered. My life at the human boarding school had been better than this. I missed Reed in that moment so much that tears filled my eyes. When the girls at Coxcomb’s had been particularly awful, he’d always stood up for me and then planned for us to sneak out later. He knew what made me feel better.