I braced my hands on his shoulders and arched, seeking a deeper sensation where we were joined. He supported me easily, his voice never once wavering, the rhythm of our fucking perfectly in sync with the beat of our song.
“What is mine, I give to you. My heart, my body, my soul, for you,” he sang.
“What is yours, I treasure always, deep down, deep down,” I answered.
His eyelids fluttered, his brilliant aura flaring with the telltale signs of his impending end. I clung tighter, my body responding in kind to his more urgent thrusts.
The song faded with our need to simply breathe, but even that seemed less urgent than the need to devour each other’s mouths as the currents of our shared orgasm crashed through us. I pulled back for breath, panting wildly through the pleasure.
Between us, Rohan’s soul brightened, the near constant trickle of magic from his wounds still flowing through me toward the hound that had bitten him. Then the magic brightened, and just as my orgasm hit its peak, a tickling sensation rose in my chest where Rohan’s soul bleed intersected with my body.
I was too overwhelmed by pleasure to make sense of this change. Instead I dug my fingers into his shoulders as I rocked harder atop his cock, chasing every last ounce of pleasure from what had already been an even more world-shattering climax than any I’d experienced before.
My body felt alive and flooded with a power I hadn’t expected from Rohan, as depleted as he’d been. Fire danced through my limbs, and as I stared into his face, those flames reached my mouth. Before I knew what I was doing, I dipped my head and darted my tongue out to the dark, wing-shaped tattoo on his left pectoral. A sharp heat burst through me, and Rohan gasped as I traced a new pattern around his tattoo, then pulled back, staring in uncomprehendingly at the way the design still glowed from the designs my tongue had added to it.
“You marked me,” he said, blinking at me in surprise, voice rough and breathy. “Can I mark you?”
I nodded, too stunned to process any other reply than the answer that lay with all my deepest desires—to be marked, claimed by a dragon the way I had just . . . claimed him?
When his tongue lashed my left breast, some of the haze cleared. This shouldn’t have been happening, not if I ever wanted to set him free, but I only had a brief moment before that thought left my mind, the overwhelming bond of our marks blossoming in its wake.
His task complete, Rohan looked into my eyes again and laughed.
“What is it?” I asked, confused, but jubilant at his sudden burst of joy.
“Baby, you have wings.”
I glanced down at the pattern on my breast. The flare of golden fire took a shape that matched his tattoo. They were wings, sure, but then I realized he wasn’t looking at the mark. He was looking at me. Past me.
“Show me your dragon, Deva—my beautiful chimera. Let me hear you roar.”
I braced my hands on his chest and stared at the shimmering hues cascading up my arms in a scaled pattern. Heart pounding, I tracked the transformation of my skin all the way to my shoulder before twisting my head and gasping.
I had dragon wings.
Their weight registered when I straightened up, and I instinctively flexed and stretched, surprised by how second nature it felt to use them.
I scrambled off the bed to the sound of Rohan’s amused chuckle and stopped short when I caught my reflection in the bank of glass doors that made up one wall of his room. Beyond the windows, the sky had cleared to a beautiful red-gold sunset fading into the deep purple of night. Reflected there, I saw myself.
I glowed from head to toe with iridescent light, and stretched out behind me were a pair of the most striking prismatic dragon wings I had ever seen.
“What the hell did you do to me?” I asked.
“Maybe the better question is: What did we do to each other? I feel fantastic. The pain is gone. That sickening pull I’ve felt for the past two days is gone.”
I spun, my wings and scales disappearing with the power of a thought, and I dropped to my knees in front of Rohan, my gaze fixed on his soul.
What I saw made no sense. The bite marks were gone—healed over as if they’d never existed. But something still didn’t look right. His soul wasn’t exactly damaged, but I couldn’t say it was whole, either. A fragment was missing.
The glowing, egg-shaped orb pulsed with golden light just beneath his sternum, as strong as ever. Stronger, really. Yet at the very center existed a perfectly circular void from which light flowed.
I tracked the path of the light, which seemed to go straight through me, but when I turned to follow it, the snaking trail was nowhere to be seen.
My entire body heated with the understanding. It ended within me.
“Ro . . . Did you give me a piece of your soul?”
He lifted me, wrapping me in his arms as I stared up at him, searching his face for some sign that this was real, that I wasn’t dreaming. My heart hiccupped at the look of adoration in his gaze and tears welled in my eyes.
Rohan gripped one of my hands in his bigger one and brought it to his lips, kissing the center of my palm. “I didn’t know it was possible, but is it so hard to believe? I’ve loved you from the moment we first sang together. How else were we going to be soul mates if I didn’t share my soul with you? Now come back to bed and let me keep my promise. I plan to make love to you until the sun comes up.”
He tugged me backward, a suggestive smile on his lips that had my body warming again for the feel of him inside me, but then he froze, his arms tightening around me and his gaze shooting to the windows.
I looked over my shoulder and a chill ran down my spine. The hounds were back. The pair I remembered—Blaze and Boots—slunk in with ears drooping and tails tucked between their legs. But now they were accompanied by another, larger pair who hung back, their bodies halfway phased as they passed through the glass.
Spinning around, I pushed Ro behind me, keeping my body between him and the hounds, but before I could sing the song to command them to leave, they started to whine so pitifully my heart hurt.
The two smaller ones dipped to the floor, lying down with their heads on their paws, their eyes mournful orbs of violet. Behind them, the others followed suit.
“What are they doing?” Rohan asked, incredulous.
“I think they feel bad about what happened.” I bent down and took a tentative step toward Blaze, reaching out.
“Deva, don’t,” Rohan said, tugging on my other hand. I glanced over my shoulder at him.
“It’s all right. I don’t think they’ll hurt me.”
Looking at the hound again, I squatted and opened my hand in front of its glowing purple snout. It stretched its neck out and darted out a long tongue, licking me the way it had the day before at the Dylans’.
“What do you need, sweetie?” I asked.
It crawled closer, looking up between me and Rohan as it gradually insinuated itself between us. Rohan stepped back cautiously.
“Wait.” I grabbed his arm to keep him from moving. “It’s our bond. You and I have a bond like Susannah and Gus had. They need this magic to survive. Somehow, they must have known we’d bonded and they came back. Come here. Sit.”
Reluctantly, Rohan moved to my side as I backed toward the door, and we squatted down, sitting cross-legged on the plush rug covering the floor.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked. “One of these creatures attacked Keagan.”
“You know he provoked it. Besides, we’d trapped its babies in a cage. Do they look like they want to devour us now?”
“Do you really want to take that chance?” Rohan asked, wrapping his arms around his knees and eyeing the hounds. They remained on their bellies, the other three inching closer to us before stopping and giving me sad looks.
A greenish tendril of magic trailed from a diamond-shaped spot in the center of one of the larger one’s chests, and with a start, I realized it had to be the one who had attacked Keagan. The magic wavered in
the air, trailing around the hound and through the wall toward his room.
But I knew after what I’d witnessed at Susannah’s that the love she and Gus shared had been more than enough to sustain the hounds and afford their victims some respite from their bites. The flow of magic reaching this one from Keagan was fainter than it had been, even though he was in the next room.
The second, larger hound beside it was an almost opaque gray, its purple eyes dim and its movements sluggish, despite a faint trickle of soul magic seeping into it from somewhere beyond the windows. It pushed toward me once more until it could nuzzle my hand. Then it let out a tremulous, guttural warble and went limp, collapsing onto its side. Its companions all whined and looked at me.
“Sweet Mother,” Rohan blurted, releasing his defensive hold on his knees and shifting toward the unconscious hound. “It’s hurt!
My heart lurched and I too approached, reaching out. At first its body felt like nothing more than a cloud of denser air beneath my hands. Then, instead of trying to touch it, I drew in a breath and exhaled, hoping that along with my wings, I’d also acquired more powerful dragon traits that I could put to use.
I was thrilled when vivid, multi-colored smoke billowed from my lungs, and it only took a slight effort to will it into action. I enveloped the hound in the smoke, commanding the magic to solidify enough to lift the creature up so I could check it for wounds.
The hound levitated in the air over my head as I rotated it slowly, its muted shape disturbingly lifeless. My heart pounded with dread that it might have come to me too late, that it had died already, and that it might be my fault for not figuring out its secrets sooner.
But when I caught a glimpse of the underside of its belly, I saw them—claw marks that ran in three long, ragged lines. Something at least its own size, if not bigger, had attacked it.
I pushed my magic into its wounds, closing my eyes and mentally connecting with my smoky breath to try to understand this creature on a deeper level. I didn’t glean much, but I was at least relieved to be able to sense its life still struggling within it. I didn’t know if I could heal it, but I wanted to try.
Gradually its wounds closed, and I gently lowered it back to the floor. When I reached out to brush my palm over the strangely tingly ruff of its neck, it twitched and sat up, blinking at me. Its indigo gaze had brightened and its dull coat gleamed once more.
“Can you show me what hurt you?” I asked it.
The hound cocked its head and blinked once at me, then lifted its snout and howled, but the sound wasn’t something I heard so much as absorbed, as though its frequency was designed to sink straight to my soul.
For the first time since encountering these creatures, I had a clearer idea of how they should work. Their strange, ethereal songs were how they communicated, but they spoke to our souls, and it was only now that I had a soul that I could actually hear its message.
But what I heard terrified me.
33
Ozzie
Llyr and I flew for several more hours after Sandor doubled back like his tail was on fire. We pressed on against the ever more violent winds, chasing the winding knot of greenish magic that was swiftly growing too faint to see.
I hoped we’d find a den of some sort, but the hounds didn’t fucking stop moving, and we kept losing sight of them among twilight shadows of the city.
I slowed the beat of my wings when I spotted a glowing, four-legged creature far below. I followed it, but it just ambled along like it didn’t have a care in the world. It was walking down a busy sidewalk, so I didn’t want to descend too close; birds my size could create a panic when swooping down over the heads of the humans.
Llyr seemed to sense my dilemma and arced past me, his huge heron shape shrinking and magic flooding off him as he descended and shifted at the same time. When he was done, he was nothing more than a gray dove perched on a light pole several feet above where the hound had paused. I found purchase in the shadows on top of a nearby building and waited.
Llyr took flight again several moments later and angled toward the center of the roof I’d landed on beneath a canopy of solar collectors. Once in the darkness, he shifted and crouched. I slipped into my human form.
“It isn’t one of ours. It’s too big, bigger than the mama hound that attacked Keagan. It also seems to be stuck like glue to a human woman I’ve never seen before. I couldn’t tell whether she’s bloodline, but she doesn’t appear harmed. There’s no evidence of soul bleed. I communed with the River, observed the flow of Time around her to see her future, but . . .” He frowned.
“What?” I prompted.
Llyr shrugged. “Completely benign. She’ll meet a man tomorrow and they’ll be happy together. It must be one of the hounds Fate still controls. How many do you think are in the city?”
“No idea, but it’s going to make our task harder.”
“They don’t bite unless the person is bloodline; your grandmother said as much. We just need to pick up the trail of soul magic that links our hounds to their victims.”
“Which is hard to do when we also need to stanch that bleeding if we want Keagan and Rohan to survive. We lost the trail because Deva’s singing to them, no doubt. I have a feeling trying to track them isn’t the most efficient way to find them.”
Llyr nodded. “We need her to lure them to us again. But we need to be prepared for an attack when we do.”
The idea made me uneasy. What if Sophia was right? Hell, that was a given—I knew my grandmother, and she was never wrong.
“I may be crazy for saying this,” I began, “but I think we need to give Deva the reins when they come. Let her test her voice more. I want to see if she can actually control them.”
“Her voice . . .” Llyr narrowed his eyes at me. “Why is it her voice that seems to have all the power? She’s formed equally from all races, yet her turul power is dominant. This fucking wind started at the house and hasn’t abated all night. I guarantee if we looked at a weather report, high winds wouldn’t be in the forecast.”
“How do you know it isn’t me, or Sophia, for that matter?” I asked, lifting a challenging brow.
Llyr stood and snorted, pacing away to lean on one of the heavy steel posts propping up the solar panel above us.
“You two are more disciplined. This wind . . .” He swirled his finger in a spiral. “. . . it’s too chaotic. I can feel the magic in it. Is there something else you aren’t telling me about your bond with her? Why the hell are you keeping your distance from her if she’s your One?”
“What does your fucking River tell you?” I sneered.
“I told you—not a goddamn thing. Everything about Deva is a mystery. I only know some of her future based on the link she has to the other guys. Your future is just fucking empty, which I could interpret as a depressing lack of living—some people have futures where they merely exist without love or purpose to drive them.
“But I know you better than that. You fucking want her, probably as much as I do, if you were willing to accept me as a shitty substitute.”
“She shouldn’t be my One,” I said, my voice low and tinged with despair. Reluctantly, I added, “You still have a chance, if you want her.”
Llyr shook his head. “I don’t get it. I see how she looks at you. As much as I hate exploiting my link with her, it’s become a reflex. But that means I can also feel some of what she feels. She fucking loves you, which makes more sense, now that I know you two are meant for each other.
“And despite all this encouragement you keep giving me, you hate the idea of her with anyone else. You could have her, yet you push her away and throw all the rest of us at her instead.”
“I don’t fucking throw anyone at her,” I countered.
“You’re definitely being an asshole about it every step of the way, but you aren’t discouraging it.”
My blood heated. “What should I fucking do? She wants love that I can’t give her. Encouraging her to direct it at you losers is the bes
t alternative to keep her safe.”
His expression darkened. “Safe from what, Ozzie?”
I shook my head and stalked away, careful not to venture too close to the edge of the rooftop. The wind had abated and the sky had somewhat cleared, making way for a spectacular sunset, but there was no telling who could see if they looked up at the right moment.
Behind me, Llyr spoke again, closer now. “Gaia’s fucking tears, safe from what? Is she in some kind of danger I should know about? My job is to protect her!”
I scrubbed my hands over my face, body tense with suppressed frustration over this entire fucked-up situation.
Llyr grabbed my shoulder and spun me, standing about a foot taller than he’d been before and his eyes a maelstrom of both rage and fear. I didn’t bother to defend myself or struggle when he slammed me against a support post, shaking the panel above us.
“Safe from what?” he bellowed.
“From Fate! From goddamn Fate! And from me. You want to protect her? The best way is to distract her from me, because if she gets close enough, I don’t know that I can hold back.”
He seemed to grasp my sincerity—he shrank to his former size and cursed, but notably, he didn’t release me.
“I’m the worst person to enlist for help,” he said, sounding just as resigned to some inescapable fate as I was. “In case you missed it, I am persona non grata to her.”
The metal post was ice-cold against my back, a stark contrast to the heat of the satyr in front of me. My traitorous cock twitched at the memory of his mouth on me the night before, and the sadness in his eyes diminished my urge to punch him—again.
“Why the hell would she hate you?” I snorted. “She fucking sang you a mating song.”
Llyr narrowed his eyes. “Because I accused her of not being a virgin before we fucked. She insisted she was, but there’s no faking that with a satyr. Do you have any idea why she’d cling so adamantly to a lie?”
My blood chilled and I closed my eyes, a sick feeling settling in my stomach. Of all the people to make love to her, it had to be a creature so attuned with fertility magic he’d sense the missing power a true virgin would possess.
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