The very thought now had me agitated to get to our stop, and I caught Deva giving me a curious look.
“Are you all right?” she asked after I gunned the engine on a somewhat clear straightaway, the hounds ahead of me easily keeping pace no matter what speed we went.
“I may be a total ass for saying this, and I know I’m rationalizing, but I want you tonight.”
Her mouth dropped open, and I swore I saw fear in her eyes. “We shouldn’t.”
“Why not? We did last night and nobody lost their minds. If it’s fucking we can’t do, then I want to do everything but that. I’m not going to fucking waste this chance to have you to myself.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. “But the others . . .”
I reached out and took her hand. “The others will understand. Unless there’s some reason you can’t be with me without one of them around . . .” I frowned when she winced. “Is that it? Can we not be together alone for some reason? Girl, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Don’t leave me in the dark.”
“No, I’m just afraid . . .” She sighed and gave me a resigned look. “I’m afraid of how much I want you, Bodhi. With the others, I have more options. If it’s just the two of us, what if I can’t hold back? I’d never forgive myself.”
My chest tightened at the same moment understanding bloomed. I didn’t think I could love her any more than I did in that moment. Bringing her knuckles to my lips, I kissed them gently.
“Deva, I fucking love you. If I’m going to have to wait to have you all the way, I need a night with you alone, and I can’t see us getting another chance as long as the others are within a mile of you. Give me a little credit. I promise we won’t mate or do anything that might hurt me, but there’s a hell of a lot of other things we can do that are just as amazing.”
She turned toward me, fighting the tightness of the seatbelt for a second before finally unlatching it and leaning over the console to kiss me on the cheek. God, I wanted to kiss her properly again, but the navigator announced our turn was coming up and I didn’t want to miss it.
“Yes, I want that. Of course I do. But there’s one more thing you should know.”
A flutter of apprehension took hold of my belly but I squashed it. No news could be anywhere near as crazy as what she’d told me earlier.
“I’m fucking positive, angel. Lay it on me.”
She wrapped both her hands around mine and pressed my palm to her midsection, just beneath her breasts. My pulse picked up at the feel of the soft swell of her breasts against my knuckles, but she held me tight, giving me an intense look.
“It wasn’t Llyr who made it possible for me to be with Ro and Keagan last night. It was you.”
My pulse spiked, and I stared at her. The question, “why didn’t you tell me?” was on the tip of my tongue when an enormous blur of deep violet shot out of my periphery in front of the truck between us and the hounds we followed. I slammed on the brakes, twisting the wheel hard to the right, my brain screaming at me that I’d made a mistake, but it was far too late.
As the truck careened off the road and went airborne, I clung to Deva’s hand. The world turned over and over as the truck flipped, landing hard on Deva’s side, slamming her body into mine. I grabbed on and held her, my terrified gaze fixed to hers. Gravity stopped existing, and all I could think was why? Why did I have to die this way, when I was so fucking close to true happiness?
The din of crunching steel was deafening as the truck bed hit something hard. Tree branches scraped past like some enormous beast was raking its claws along the sides of my truck. We flipped upside-down as we fell, the blood rushing to my head. Still I clung to her, repeating the same word over and over: Why, why, why?
With a violent jolt and smashing glass, the tumbling stopped short. Everything still spun and my body was wracked with pain from multiple angles, but I’d held on. I’d held onto her. Her soft shape was draped across my chest, our hands still twisted together somewhere between us and the enormous air bag, sandwiching her hard against my torso.
“Deva,” I croaked. “Angel, are you okay? Say something. Sweet fucking Jesus, say something!”
I wrenched my hands out from between us, yelling as pain spiked through my shoulder. Before I could turn Deva to face me, a purple flood filled my vision through the busted windshield amid the driving sleet raining frigid ice down over us. The hound leapt, passing straight through my upraised arm and sinking searing fangs into my throat.
I could only cry out in helpless pain, desperately clinging to the woman I loved as darkness snapped tight around me.
13
Deva
I couldn’t breathe. A heavy weight pressed at my back, constricting my lungs. My breasts were crushed against something warm, something spasming and groaning. A large hand was tangled with mine, sandwiched between us. Bodhi’s scent filled my nostrils along with the unmistakable aroma of hot blood, slamming me back into the present.
My eyes snapped open and a wave of dizziness hit, my head throbbing and forcing me to close my lids again. But in that brief second, I’d seen the alarming purple glow of a hound, and not one I recognized.
With a groan I pushed back against the pressure behind me, struggling to gain enough freedom to breathe. I opened my eyes, forcing myself to ignore the pounding behind them.
“Get away from him,” I said, my words slurring. The hound was at Bodhi’s throat, teeth tearing at his flesh. It jerked its head around to glare at me, lips curled back in a resonant growl. Its maw was coated in an iridescent residue that must have come from Bodhi, but couldn’t be his blood.
A gurgling groan erupted from beneath me and my gaze shot to Bodhi’s face. His eyelids fluttered and his mouth opened and closed once before he whispered, “Run.”
“The hell I’m running,” I said. I smacked at the hound, but my hand passed right through it, and with the contact, my power tangibly faded. With a frustrated cry, I pushed back harder against the pressure behind me, wild panic surging. I had to get the hound off him, had to get us out of here before it killed him. How he was still alive, I didn’t know, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I intended to keep him that way.
I attempted a breath of fire, but all that came out was smoke. The hound bent again, its incorporeal teeth sounding just as deadly as real ones as it clamped down on Bodhi’s throat and growled. The sound was almost irritated, as though it were impatient for him to die, but my beautiful human held on.
“Don’t let go. Please hold on for me, Bodhi.”
Frantic, I glanced around us for some solution. The hound was phased halfway through the roof of the truck, which had caved in partway over us, its big paws resting on either of Bodhi’s shoulders. It was dim wherever we’d landed, and a cold, wet wind tore in gusts through a gap behind me, chilling my back. I craned my neck to look over my shoulder and saw the half-inflated bulk of the airbag, but what was beyond it chilled me.
We were surrounded by dozens upon dozens of other hounds, all watching and waiting. Somewhere past them were sounds of a struggle and a tumult of brilliant lavender light that must have been my four hounds desperately fighting to reach us, to protect us.
A row of hounds took a step toward us. If this one failed to carry out its duty to kill Bodhi, the others would step in. Perhaps all of them at once would tear him to pieces, and I couldn’t let that happen.
“Leave him alone!” I yelled. “Take me, but let him live. Please.”
The fiery purple tendrils flaring from their eyes glowed brighter, but they didn’t take the bait.
I clamped my hands around Bodhi’s throat, blocking the hound’s access. The pulsing warmth of his blood hit my palm and my link to him flared bright in my mind’s eye. His soul struggled to keep hold of his body and it was all he could do to hang on; that tether was fading terrifyingly fast.
He gripped my wrists, his body tensing as the hound bypassed my hands and went for his upper arm instead, clenching its ether
eal maw around the bicep and tearing into flesh once more. Bodhi’s soul dimmed and his eyelids shut.
“No!” I yelled, more desperate now.
I reached inside myself, uncertain what to do, yet having no choice but to try. My dragon power flared bright when I reached for it, and I embraced it, letting that beloved nature fill me as my body began its shift into the still unfamiliar shape. But the truck’s frame wouldn’t budge and Bodhi’s strangling sounds halted me from completing the shift. I couldn’t transform completely within the confines of our trap without crushing him, and I didn’t dare leave him to do so.
My ursa soul was still mostly untested, but I feared the same issue would arise if I tried. And I didn’t think a bear would be anywhere as effective against the hound as a dragon. Shifting was out of the question.
Frantically I pushed my magic into Bodhi to try to heal him, but the hound kept biting, now tearing at his other arm. Bodhi was too weak to protest, but his glassy-eyed gaze remained fixed on me, part despair, part absolute trust that I hated knowing I was failing with every second.
“I won’t let you die.”
I reached deep inside me once more, closing my eyes and focusing on the bright wells of power I’d acquired over the past couple days. They remained divided. I could access them each separately, but not at the same time. But what if I tried to merge them anyway?
I focused, mentally grasping at them both and urging them together, speaking the words of an elemental spell I recalled from a tome I’d read in the Rainsong library earlier in the year. It summoned fire and earth together, melding them into a force capable of shattering mountains. The spell was meant to be shared by an ursa shaman and an immortal dragon—two immortal entities combining their power to control volcanic activity. At least that was how I’d interpreted it. But it was the only thing I could remember that would make use of the two divergent powers I held inside me.
The two orbs of power that comprised separate pieces of my soul rebelled against the effort, slipping apart like magnets whose matching poles were aimed at each other. I focused harder, forcing them to merge with all my might.
The words of the spell were on the tip of my tongue, ready the very second my two souls snapped together. Agony ripped through me as they rebelled, rejecting the merging, but I ignored it, concentrating on forcing out the words as I drew on the magnified well of magic.
Fire and earth melded and flowed outward from my center, sending bright pain through every extremity. I kept my eyes clenched shut in concentration, fearing I’d lose that tenuous control over my rebelling natures if I looked at Bodhi’s fading soul again. But it was too difficult.
“Deva.” Bodhi’s ragged voice reached my ears, almost too faint to hear, but I opened my eyes anyway. If he died, I wanted him to leave the world knowing I loved him.
When I met his anguished gaze, the rebelling elements inside me suddenly seemed to snap together, aligning perfectly with a brilliant wash of the power I’d gathered for the spell. All at once, deafening squeals of wrenching metal surrounded us, and along with them, the satisfying howl of a fate hound in pain.
I let out a sharp cry of surprise and latched onto the spell once more, keeping my gaze fixed on Bodhi’s face. He was the binding agent. I doubted this reprieve was permanent, but I would take it. I pushed more magic into the disparate elements that had merged together, my entire body tense with the effort to maintain control. Bodhi groaned and his eyelids fluttered.
“No. Stay with me, please. We’re almost there.”
His eyes fell shut and the pain returned with a vengeance, instantly growing too great for me to focus. I halted with an agonized cry, sobbing in fear that I’d failed. I couldn’t hold it long enough. But as my cries faded, I registered the warm, comfortable silence and hesitantly glanced around.
I was tangled on Bodhi’s lap, skewed sideways with my torso half covering his. I scrambled off and stood, looking around. The hound was gone and so was most of the truck. We were in a strange, glowing dome extending a few feet beyond what had been the cab, but was now nothing more than upholstery and vinyl draping across the forest floor as though any framework within it had disappeared. What had once been the driver’s seat was nothing more than foam and fabric propped against a dead tree trunk with Bodhi limp on top of it.
Outside the fiery orange of the dome were several molten piles of crumpled metal oozing across the landscape, and beyond those the shapes of a dozen hounds lunging at the barrier and falling back when their snouts burned away on contact.
The throng parted and a hound I recognized trotted forward. It was the deep purple one that had attacked Keagan and Bodhi the morning before, but it was whole again. Apparently, it didn’t take much for them to recover from dragon fire.
It stared intently through the barrier but didn’t venture farther. Something in its gaze suggested it was assessing me, but I didn’t have time to wonder why.
I turned back to Bodhi and shifted my vision to see his aura. His pulse was weak, his soul barely hanging on.
“You are not going to die, Bodhi,” I gritted, moving close to his head and lifting it to rest it on my lap. I exhaled as strong a dragon’s breath as I could muster, which wasn’t much after the enormous power I’d pushed into the barrier I’d managed to create.
My smoke settled over him, snaking into all his wounds and healing them as much as I could, but the power wasn’t quite enough to revive him or cleanly heal all the wounds. Scars remained and his pulse continued to flutter erratically. My healing wasn’t enough. There was only one thing capable of keeping him alive, but that could destroy his mind forever.
There had to be another way. I stared at the remains of the truck scattered around us. It seemed anything metal had been destroyed, reformed into the base of the dome with a glowing web of molten metal with only a handful of gaps I could see beyond, and within those gaps were membranes of glowing orange fire. We couldn’t stay here, but I didn’t dare go out there. The hounds would kill him. I was sure of it.
I thought about the cabin we’d been heading toward. Ozzie had said it belonged to a dragon friend. After our hotel stay, I’d learned that dragon-owned buildings tended to be sanctuaries from Fate, thanks to some level of immunity the dragons possessed against that eternal entity. I’d never talked with my white dragon stepfather, Aodh, about their relationship with Fate, but knew he and Belah and their four siblings were considered Fate’s favorites. Did I dare hope that the home of this dragon would be off-limits to the hounds?
I knew we weren’t far from the cabin, but I wasn’t sure I could get to it from here without carrying Bodhi through the throng of hounds. I could shift and fly now that I had room, slip into my dragon form and easily break through this barrier with Bodhi in my grasp, avoiding the hounds entirely. Except I’d used nearly all my magic to create the barrier to begin with and had used much of the rest to heal Bodhi. If I shifted, it was possible I’d be stuck in that form with no magic reserves, which meant I’d risk losing my sanity to a dragon’s feral nature.
I understood now why Willem hadn’t shifted when he and Sandor had been faced with the hounds. He didn’t dare risk the damage he could do as a feral dragon to the man he loved.
I may have even been able to drift, if I had any reserves left to do so, but I had learned early on that drifting required both magic and skill. I was too unpracticed and depleted enough that attempting it would be dangerous.
I stroked my bloody fingers through Bodhi’s hair and stared down the hound outside our protective dome as the creature focused on me, tilting its head from side to side.
“I won’t let you kill him or any of them. They’re mine; do you hear me?”
The hound glanced down at Bodhi, the purple fire in its eyes flickering as if in challenge. Beneath my hand, Bodhi’s heartbeat fluttered and his aura faded. His damaged soul grew terrifyingly dark.
Sweet Mother, no. Please don’t let this be the only option for us.
I clutched at his b
lood-soaked shirt, then brushed a shaky hand over his cheek. “Bodhi, please stay with me.”
His face was ashen, his body too still. I didn’t have a choice anymore. I would either lose him entirely or he would lose himself, but at least with the second option, he would be alive.
“I’m so, so sorry, but this is the only way,” I said, then bent my head and summoned my dragon tongue.
I said a silent prayer to Dionysus in the hope that the god’s blood could indeed protect Bodhi from my magic. Then with a quick series of lashes with my tongue, I seared my mark into his flesh at the side of his neck where the hound’s scar still blazed dark pink against his caramel skin. It was the same mark I’d given Rohan and Keagan—the Fate’s Fools emblem, which still seemed appropriate, particularly now that we were all targets of whatever punishment Fate seemed to want to inflict on us. Now Bodhi was just one more victim, and my heart was already breaking.
“See?” I said, glaring at the hound once more through a haze of tears. “Mine.”
14
Deva
The hound opened its big maw as if to snap at me, but the sharp teeth gaped wider and wider, the creature contorting and changing as it rose up on its hind legs. I held Bodhi tighter against me, resisting the urge to scramble backward. We were completely surrounded by hounds, and I had no idea where my own were, or if they had even survived the fight.
The hound’s torso straightened, as did its hind legs, its shoulders widening and its head becoming rounder as its snout shortened. Within only a moment, I found myself staring at a luminous figure clad in a strange web of pale, luminescent threads. The web stretched out around the figure in thousands of directions like a nimbus of filaments so bright they appeared made of brilliant light at the ends. The icy sleet passed right through the figure as it took a step closer, staring at me with an expression of complete neutrality.
Fate's Fools Box Set Page 63