Beneath my hand, Rohan’s balls tightened, and he let out a subhuman growl that vibrated through my abdomen. His cock surged between my lips, pushed deep with a sudden thrust that nearly had me gagging, and with a twitch sent hot jets of cum down the back of my throat. His mouth left my pussy and he flung his head back with a roar, the magic he’d absorbed flooding into my body as I swallowed his salty spend.
The second he caught his breath, he clamped his mouth to my core once more, redoubling his efforts and tormenting me until I couldn’t see. He filled my senses, inebriating me with the flood of magic. I’d experienced the flow of such magic before during the ritual, but this was the first time I’d absorbed dragon magic directly from a partner. There was something even more delicious about this experience, about doing it almost purely for the enjoyment instead of a desperate need to protect my world.
I let myself go, succumbing to the urge to rear back and ride his tongue. I threw my head back with a gasp of pure pleasure and clutched at my breasts, squeezing my nipples hard as he sucked my clit.
He slid his hands around my thighs and gripped them tight, urging me to spread wider, which forced my hips down closer to his mouth. The sudden, deep invasion of his tongue back into my empty channel threw me over the edge and I cried out, twisting my hips over his face while he tormented my orgasm from me with a low growl of triumph.
Rohan kept tonguing me while my entire body remained tensed above him, paralyzed by pleasure. When I finally regained use of my limbs, they felt heavy and boneless, and I collapsed half on top of his big body, twisting my hips away from his head. I lay there, humming softly and enjoying the glow for a moment before he squeezed my hand where it rested on his belly and gave it a small tug.
I curled around and rested my cheek on his stomach, then pressed a soft kiss on the indentation of his abdomen just above where his soul resided. “Feel better?” I asked.
“Mmm,” he said, giving me a languid smile. “C’mere.”
He tugged again and I relented, sliding up his body and letting him pull me on top of him and into a slow kiss that I guessed was meant to express his gratitude. He tasted half like sunlight and half like me, a heady combination that reminded me of private mornings in the Dragon Glade, swimming in the central pool at dawn when the bright sun was just peeking over the horizon. It had just been me and the sun those mornings, and I’d taken the time to explore those constant fantasies that tormented me, imagining my hands weren’t my own but those of a lover—Ozzie’s hands—but perhaps I could rewrite that fantasy now.
I was gratified by Rohan’s response, and particularly by the way his aura had strengthened after all our fun. I’d always known that the fertile and carnal magic the higher races could produce was powerful, particularly when used by dragons, but until the ritual, I’d never seen it in practice. And until today, I’d never experienced it one-on-one with a dragon, the one race who depended on it most heavily. If sex was really this powerful, no wonder it was such a big deal to us all.
This was a feeling I could easily get used to.
While the infusion of energy was as sustaining as a good meal, it didn’t remove the need to empty my bladder. Reluctantly, I kissed Rohan and darted a quick glance around, hunting for the bathroom.
“Be right back,” I said, slipping away to relieve myself.
When I returned, he was curled around a pillow, his hair tousled and his eyes half-lidded from exhaustion. He reached for me, and I was sure I felt the lightest invisible tug. It had to be my imagination. We’d just had amazing sex, which had blended our energies, and I did care about him. I was responsible for what had happened and therefore obligated to help him in whatever way I could. This draw to him couldn’t be more than that.
But what I felt was something sweeter than simple responsibility, something giddy and wonderful that was completely out of place, considering our predicament.
I narrowed my eyes at him as I crawled back up onto the bed. Like it or not, I had fallen for him in the span of a day.
“Please tell me you didn’t waste any of that power I gave you on your dragon breath.” I tugged the pillow out of his arms and slipped in beside him, tucking the pillow behind my back.
Rohan snuggled closer, wrapping his arm around my thighs and resting his head in my lap. He blinked up at me, a lazy smile curving his lips, then made a small O with his mouth and let out a little puff of shimmering golden smoke. It floated up to my face and I couldn’t help but inhale, a wave of euphoria passing over me as his magic took effect.
When I opened my eyes he gave me a weak, though genuine smile. “I wanted to see you smile. It worked, didn’t it?”
Laughing, I stroked his head. “You should save your energy. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to figure out how to fix you.”
“Mmm,” he agreed, nodding as his eyes fluttered closed. “I suppose it isn’t feasible to suggest you just stay in my bed for the rest of my life.”
“Probably not, but we can stay for a little while.”
He turned over with a low rumble akin to a purr, resting his other cheek on my thigh and curling his arms around my hips.
I resumed stroking his head and back and relaxed against the pillows, humming softly. The lyrics we’d made up earlier kept going through my head, and so I started singing again, comforted and fortified by the song as much as he was.
9
Keagan
Deva’s voice carried down the hall from Rohan’s room, the song so quiet it almost blended with the crashing surf below the bluffs outside the house. But I could hear it well enough for it to get under my skin. The melody itself should have pleased me—it possessed an honest simplicity and beauty that evoked a love of the sky—but I knew it wasn’t for my ears.
She’s just helping Ro.
No matter how many times I reminded myself of that fact, I knew there was something deeper at work. My friend was in danger, and it was a kind of danger I was helpless to defend against. But that song . . . there was so much more to it than simply helping to strengthen his aura against the damage to his soul.
I didn’t want to think about what it could mean—what it very likely did mean: that her turul power to command the Winds and music was somehow a lot stronger than she believed, and she’d charmed him into loving her. Into taking him away from me. She sure as fuck wasn’t singing to me, anyway. I’d have preferred they went back to fucking, or whatever they’d been doing. Sex sounds were somehow easier to stomach.
With a curse, I tossed another scrap of broken furniture out through the smashed window. I’d already set aside anything salvageable and was gradually removing the trashed bits and throwing them out onto the patio to have Rohan burn later . . . assuming he’d have enough power to generate the clean fire needed to turn the detritus to dust.
I’d rather the Maestro not come home to his house in such disarray, but the more I worked, the more sluggish I became, a helpless feeling coming over me. What was the fucking point? He’d need to know, one way or the other. We were his bandmates, and if one of us was out of commission, it’d affect our whole schedule for gigs. Not to mention he wouldn’t be thrilled we’d brought home a woman, and there was no way in hell I was telling her to leave when she might be the only thing keeping Ro alive.
The band meant everything to us, and it was still a new arrangement, so I didn’t want to risk fucking things up so soon. But Ro and I had been together a lot longer than this iteration of Fate’s Fools. As much as I hated the idea of our boss kicking us to the curb and having to start fresh, I loved that idiotic dragon in the other room more than life, and couldn’t stomach the idea of losing him.
I slumped down onto the ruined sofa, tufts of downy feathers floating around me. That song they’d sung this morning had only been the start of it. Watching Ro pick up the guitar had seemed like a joke at first, with Willem and Sandor just encouraging him for fun. They were complete dorks whenever a woman came into the shop and started fondling the gear. We all
needed to get out more, or at least entertain some of the propositions of the hotties who’d started coming to our shows since we’d officially been named the new Fate’s Fools as of three weeks ago.
Deva was different, though. She was so fucking different, but I hadn’t seen it until she and Ro started singing that duet and I realized how much fucking trouble I was in. There was something unmistakable between them, and somehow it didn’t matter that it’d been my dick inside her earlier and my orgasm replenishing her magic.
I swiped my hand over my face and groaned, hardening again at the memory of the feel of her. The tight, hot sheath of her pussy had been so new, and so fucking good.
I’d been out of the Sanctuary for five years on my pilgrimage and had had my pick of human women, but knew I never wanted to mate one of them. There was just something off about the social structure of modern human cultures. The women were too submissive, too deferential to the men, so unlike the females I was used to. The higher races were mostly matriarchal. That’s not to say I wanted a domineering woman—I was as alpha as they came—but I did want a mate who had some power. Finding a powerful male partner to pair with was the first step in finding a woman like that.
That was where Rohan had come in, though our partnership had happened organically. I’d been following one of the rare Fate’s Fools international tours. They’d been my mom’s favorite band from her pilgrimage, so following them around the world was sort of a tradition—a rite of passage that’d gone on for a couple generations in our family.
They had switched members since my mom’s pilgrimage, though. When she’d followed them, it’d been three siblings: Iszak, Lukas, and Evie North. But Evie was absent, and they instead had a drummer backing them up, who I learned was their cousin, Ozzie West.
The guys were amazing, packing every small club they played with both human fans and our own kind. The dragon ascension had just occurred and Fate’s Fools had acted like a beacon to the new generation of dragons that had taken wing. The newest brood was still acclimating to the world after five centuries of hibernation, most of them looking for human mates.
Ro was one of the few dragons who hadn’t hooked up with a woman the night we met. Instead, he and I had closed down the Budapest bar together, only to discover that it was none other than the original bar the band had started in more than a century earlier.
After sharing a bottle of turul vodka that knocked me on my ass, the band had learned Ro and I both played and invited us back to jam the next week. The jams became a regular occurrence whenever Ro and I both happened to be at the same show, which was more often than not.
Sadly, their shows had grown more and more infrequent the last couple years. Rohan had shown up at one I happened to also be at about a year and a half ago in New York, and we both sensed some strange shift happening.
Fate’s Fools was fucking loaded with magic that night, the likes of which I’d never heard, but could feel down to my bones. It wasn’t until after the war was over that I understood what I’d heard that night was a turul mating call, and that somewhere in the crowd had been the dragon who’d become Lukas and Iszak’s mate.
Not that I’d have noticed her then, because the music that night had also changed things between me and Ro, and we’d been all but mated ever since. That was how it had felt to me, at least. There was no formal recognition of the bond a pair of ursa bachelors shared, but even though he was a dragon, I’d considered him my partner ever since and assumed he was just biding his time for the right woman to complete our triad like I was.
We may not have found that woman, but we did find a band. After the war ended, Lukas and Iszak quit to become family men, leaving Ozzie to rebuild or move on. And Gaia had smiled on me and Ro when the crazy Maestro decided to move to Los Angeles and invited us to do more than just jam for a change. We were the new Fate’s Fools, and life was fucking great.
Or it had been until today.
The same energy that had infused the North brothers’ music that night was now making my skin prickle with dread. I may not have been an expert in turul magic, but I’d have bet my left nut that Deva was singing Rohan a mating song in there, and he was humming right along like he knew all the words.
“No soul, my ass,” I muttered. One of the few things I’d learned about turul magic over the last two years was that magic that powerful needed one heck of a powerful turul soul to back it up. I just couldn’t decide which one of them I was more jealous of: Deva because she was probably stealing my best friend and lover from me, or Rohan because she was singing that song to him and not to me.
I couldn’t fucking deal with it. Snarling, I stood up and hoisted the half-busted armchair onto my shoulder and headed back out to the workshop beyond the kitchen. I could hide out there and make myself useful by fixing the damn furniture so we’d have someplace to sit when Ozzie got home from his trip.
Flipping on the stereo and turning the volume up, I grabbed a hammer and got to work.
10
Ozzie
I climbed the narrow steps to my grandmother’s Brooklyn rowhouse, unsure whether the knot in my gut was more dread or simple irritation. I’d moved to Los Angeles from New York three weeks ago for good reason, and being dragged via red-eye back to the East Coast for some cryptic “emergency” didn’t exactly instill confidence that my absence wasn’t an issue. Leave it to Sophia North to obscure the truth just enough to force me to come.
As if anticipating my knock, the door swung open before I could touch it, revealing the cozy entryway with its polished wood and antique knick-knacks. Despite my annoyance at the summons, my shoulders relaxed. The woman could be infuriating, but this apartment was still home in many ways, and there was comfort in that.
I entered, following the sounds of voices around past the sitting room and kitchen, into the over-decorated living room filled with worn furniture and a baby grand piano near the high windows.
I paused in the archway, narrowing my eyes at the big man who leaned against the piano, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Llyr? What the fuck are you doing here?”
My grandmother stood from her seat on the sofa, her normally serene gray eyes a disconcerting tumult of storm clouds and lightning. My hackles rose, and that previous comfortable, homey feeling within me dissolved.
“This satyr is hunting for a missing woman. Someone I believe you know quite well.”
My stomach lurched when my Nanyo’s whispered message between the words reached my ears: “What have you done, Oszkar West?”
Llyr scowled, his whirlpool gaze darting over me as though sizing me up for a fight. Fucking nymphaea and their uncanny sight. As water shifters, nymphs and satyrs could turn a man seasick with only a look, but even more intrusive was their ability to see pasts and futures in a glance, thanks to their connection to the River—that mystical power that governed the passage of time.
Gritting my teeth against Llyr’s potential onslaught, I remembered the moment of weakness I’d suffered the last time we’d met, when I’d drunkenly plied him for information on a particular individual he’d recently had contact with. By the Winds, please don’t let it be Deva who is missing.
“When was the last time you saw Deva Rainsong?” Llyr asked.
Fuck. The room began to spin, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t Llyr’s doing. I held onto my wits, not daring to show any sign of weakness in front of this man.
“Did her father send you?” I deflected.
“All her fathers sent me, though Nikhil and Neph are the most adamant she be found. She disappeared under somewhat . . . strained circumstances.”
He frowned and darted a look away, so brief I could have missed it, but there was no denying the flash of guilt in his eyes and the way it stained his words. He may have been able to see my past, but I could hear his lies.
“Why you and not one of the other Thiasoi soldiers?” I challenged, certain there was more to his particular interest than simply following orders.
Llyr’s aqua eyes swirled and he gritted his teeth. “Why me is not important. Have you seen her?”
“Not in months. Will you tell me what the fuck is going on?”
He sighed and raked a hand through his sleek black waves. Every breath he exhaled was infused with guilt, but when he looked at me again, I was smacked with the sense that somehow he blamed me for Deva’s disappearance.
“You know that three weeks ago Dion’s powers returned.”
I nodded and moved to the sofa to sit, gesturing to indicate he sit as well. “I know, but it was a gradual thing. The bloodline linked to the god was starting to become aware of us a few weeks before the Equinox. I was with Belah and Nikhil and my cousins, and we all had to do a bit of damage control in the city to maintain order here until the Quorum could perform a ritual to control the bloodline.”
Llyr eyed the chair I’d pointed to but paced away, staring at a bookcase instead. He was dressed to fight, wearing a simple black t-shirt and supple leather trousers. A satyr as big as him couldn’t easily blend in with humanity no matter where he was, but he’d have fit in perfectly at one of the clubs where Fate’s Fools performed.
He wandered past the bookcase and grazed his fingers over the polished brass curve of a trumpet on another shelf, only one of many musical instruments in my grandmother’s collection. His tension made me uneasy. What was he hiding?
“We did perform the ritual. And as you know, it was a success. Every last member of the bloodline received the message and the charm to compel them to secrecy.” He turned back, his lips pressed tight together. He was definitely hiding something.
I leaned forward in my chair and glanced at my grandmother. She narrowed her eyes at me.
What the actual fuck? I wasn’t the one hiding shit. She let out a little puff of breath, and a second later, I heard a whispered, “Fate will learn your secret. I hope you’re prepared.”
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