It gave me some relief that he was no longer focused on Deva, but if I could have gone colder, I would have when he walked to me and pressed a fingertip to the center of my forehead. My body instantly spasmed and my arms shot out, and within a breath, I’d involuntarily shifted into my falcon shape while still remaining frozen in mid-air, my wings stretched wide.
Ouranos snorted. “It seems you missed out, didn’t you? Your brethren were not so lucky. But I don’t want you to feel neglected. You can have your own little curse.”
With a twist of his fingers, my rigid limbs relaxed and I fell to the ground. Dazed, I withdrew my wings and focused, trying to shift back to my human shape.
But I couldn’t. No matter how hard I focused, my body refused to respond. It was like there simply wasn’t enough magic to allow me to transform.
I spread my wings again and attempted flight. I lifted off, only to be tossed head over feet by the wind and land in a feathered heap on the slick, icy surface of the swimming pool. I didn’t dare try again, instead hopping back out onto the stones beside the others.
“What do you want, you bastard?” Llyr snarled.
Ouranos ambled around the group, eyeing everyone as he went. He tilted his head from side to side, repeating the question. “What do I want? That’s a very good question. Perhaps I want what Fate stole from me all those ages ago.”
“You were the one who stole from Fate,” Deva said.
“Is that what she told you? That big, bad Ouranos forced her to do something she didn’t want?” He stopped in front of her and reached out a hand to her naked, ice-coated breast. I let out a piercing screech of protest, but it didn’t stop him from brushing a knuckle along the lower curve.
“She wanted it, little chimera,” he said. “She just liked playing games to get it. But she took my children from me. Wrapped them up in a spell that prevented me from influencing them. I have you to thank for giving them back to me. I will never let them go again.”
His children? He didn’t mean the four Winds, who were the actual offspring he spawned from Fate. They were safe in the Haven where we’d left them, though I wished I had the power to summon them now.
“What have you done to the turul?” Deva snapped.
“You could say they’re in time-out for taking their mother’s side all these years. I took away their toys.”
I wished I knew more about Fate. Whoever this person was, she clearly wielded incredible influence over the gods, if this bastard was so bent out of shape over what she had done.
I squawked at him again and he seemed to grasp my question. He turned his piercing electric gaze on me. “You are right. I have taken their precious voices and wings. I will give them back under one condition.”
“What do you want?” Deva asked.
His gaze heated as he dragged his eyes down her body, and I screeched again, hoping to convey my objections. By all the fucking Winds, I hoped he didn’t say what I feared he was about to.
“I want you, little chimera. I want your immense potential for power, but more specifically, I want what you can offer to the new race of creatures my seed would create within you. The turul are ungrateful, worthless children. I intend to replace them with a race who will honor me.”
A barrage of curses and objections from Deva’s mates joined my primal screaming. But then Ouranos lifted his gaze and swept it over the entire group, and we all went silent, not because we’d shut up—I was still flapping my wings and trying to vocalize, and the others’ mouths were still moving, but no sound came out.
Ouranos fixed his attention on Deva once more. “It isn’t up to them. It is your choice. Come with me willingly, if you wish to free them.”
“And if I say no?” she asked.
“Then you will all suffer for it.”
“Why the elaborate scheme to get me to agree? You don’t give the impression of a man who asks for things he wants. You just take,” she spat bitterly.
He grimaced. “There are parties who would be less than happy if I forced you to be my bride. I need you to come willingly.”
“What makes me so special? Why not go harass someone more of a match for you?”
“Don’t you get it? Are you so oblivious you don’t realize what kind of power you wield? I have seen what you can do. Your potential to contain the power of a god makes you very special. Your ability to manipulate the elements even more so.”
He waved an arm and a cloud appeared before us, dark and sparking with flashes of electricity. With a swirl of his fingertip, the cloud parted, the scene beyond unfamiliar to me. Somewhere in a snowy forest, the crumpled heap of a pickup truck hissed a weak breath of steam. Deva lay inside beyond a broken windshield.
And there was blood. Too much blood.
An intake of breath caused me to look in Bodhi’s direction. He was wide-eyed and ashen, gaze hazy as if he was reliving some terrible moment. I took a few quick hops forward, still not daring to stretch my wings, lest I get swept up in the wind.
Inside the cab of that wrecked truck, I saw him, nearly unconscious and in the process of being mauled by some strange, ethereal beast.
Then something beyond bizarre happened. Before my eyes, the truck began to glow red-hot. Within only a few seconds, the paint peeled away and the metal framework melted, clinging to a glowing orb of fire from within the cab. It expanded like a bubble, flowing into a webwork of molten metal and pushing across the rocky, snow-covered ground.
The entire truck was consumed by this powerful bubble of magic, and some of the minerals within the stones and earth as well. When it stopped growing, the metal cooled, maintaining its dome-like shape with membranes of fire spanning the gaps between the framework.
Deva sat in the center, a bleeding Bodhi cradled in her arms.
Yet here he was with us, whole and undamaged. If anything, the man had power no human should possess. I’d seen his tattoos in action, twisting and moving in reaction to his environment.
“Did you think Fate was the only one who saw?” Ouranos asked. “Power that strong does not go unnoticed.”
“Fate was the reason for that accident,” Deva said shakily. “Bodhi nearly died.”
“Why not guarantee your protection by joining with me? Fate will never touch you, if you’re mine. I will see to it.”
“It isn’t me I care about. The turul and the bloodline need protection more,” she said, but her tone was starting to sound more like a negotiation than a protest.
I flapped my wings and managed to fly closer until I was beside her bare feet. I rapped at the stone with my beak, hoping to convey my displeasure at the direction their conversation had taken.
But she was still frozen and couldn’t look down, couldn’t look me in the eye to see how strongly I objected to her even entertaining going with this fucker. Ouranos was not someone you made a deal with, because you would always get shafted. Particularly if you were a woman.
I tried again anyway, this time pecking at the ice that coated one of her feet. The shell was as hard as glass, but within it, she frantically wiggled her big toe just before Ouranos kicked me across the patio.
I reflexively spread my wings, only to be swept up in the winds and hurled head-first into one of the glass doors. Pain lanced through one of my wings as the glass shattered and I kept going. Flapping the other wing only made me spin and flail.
The room passed in a blur until I collided with a wall. I slid down to the floor in a daze just in time to see Ouranos wrap his arms around Deva and disappear in a cloud of electricity.
18
Ozzie
My body ached, but at least I had it back. I sat on the sofa, cradling my broken arm against my chest. It would heal within a few hours, but I’d have to suffer the pain until then.
What I couldn’t suffer was the fact that Deva had willingly left with that fucker.
“Will he hurt her?” Rohan asked.
I exchanged a dark look with Sandor, who had arrived with Bodhi’s mom and their
dragon mate a few moments ago. He knew the score where Ouranos was concerned.
“He won’t be gentle, I’ll put it that way,” I said, watching Sandor for any sign of contradiction.
His nostrils flared and he clenched his fists. I’d wondered whether the gods in my memory were different than in this reality, but apparently, they were the same. Ouranos had a reputation as a brutal, abusive, overbearing male who enjoyed dominating women, and not in a fun way.
“Her sacrifice worked, at least,” Sandor said. “We have our voices and our wings back, which means we can rally the turul to help, though most are still feeling betrayed that we broke the curse.”
It didn’t take a dragon’s ability to read auras to know the other four were losing their fucking minds. Keagan was pacing angrily enough to leave a groove in the floor, Rohan’s skin had erupted into golden scales, and Llyr had physically expanded until his shirt looked like it might rip to pieces. Thankfully he hadn’t fully shifted, but he looked like he was about to.
Bodhi was the only one who seemed the least bit reasonable, but all he did was stare through the hole I’d made in the glass door when Ouranos punted me.
“Help what?” Llyr rumbled. “We don’t exactly have a plan.”
“We have to get into the realm of the gods,” I said.
“He has to know that’s the first place we’d look,” Llyr argued.
I shook my head. “If he’s the same god I remember, he’s too arrogant to care whether we chase him or not. He’ll go to his castle, which rumor has it is practically impenetrable. Based on what Deva shared with me, the realm of the gods was where I first made love to her, so if I have any chance of reclaiming my memories, that’s where it will happen.”
In a blur, Llyr reached me, wrapping his enormous hand around my throat. He yanked me off the sofa and pinned me to the ground, hovering above me, eyes wild and horns sprouting from his skull.
“If you’d made love to her before, this wouldn’t be happening. She’d have had the strength to fight him off!”
“You said that you understood my reasons!” I rasped through my ever-narrowing windpipe. My vision started to darken at the edges and I twisted in his grip, but he was too strong.
Finally Keagan and Rohan caught on to my struggle and yanked Llyr off me. I sat up, coughing and rubbing at my throat.
Llyr’s horns receded and he got himself under control, then turned and stomped toward the window to stare out at the evening sky. “We need a god to take us there. I’ll have to go back to the Haven and plead our case to Dionysus. He’s the only one accessible to us now.”
I lifted my eyebrows at him as if to say, “What are you waiting for?” and he muttered a foul curse before disappearing.
I pushed to my feet and looked at the others. “Are there any other moments worth telling me about here? We may as well keep going while we wait.”
Keagan gave a sullen shrug, but Rohan seemed to have settled now that the angry satyr wasn’t in the room. His scales and horns faded back into his body and he frowned.
“You’ve never been easy to read, emotionally, but there were a couple pretty charged moments after Deva arrived. Super-charged for you.” He laughed and studied me for a moment. “You really did have some seriously strong feelings about her mating me. Conflicted, but strong. Come on.”
He headed toward the dining area and walked around the table, propping his hands atop the backs of two chairs. “The morning after I made love to her, we had breakfast here. We celebrated the event . . . Deva and I marking each other . . . but you weren’t exactly in the mood to celebrate. Llyr wasn’t in a great frame of mind, either. All I could think was what fucking idiots you two were for holding back. She loved you both more than me, at the time.”
I stared at the table, trying to imagine people sitting at it.
“Willem and I were here,” Sandor said, moving to stand at the head of the table closest to the kitchen. “We’d made breakfast, and were breaking out the mimosas to toast the happy couple. You showed up and crashed our little celebration with the news that Fate was up to something.”
There it was, the pang in my gut. Deva’s face flashed before my eyes and I had the strongest sense of fear—fear for her safety mixed with the fear of losing her to Rohan, and the resignation of seeing it already starting to happen.
“I was jealous of you, but mostly afraid for her,” I said. “Fucking hell, I wish I could actually see the events in my mind. All I get are snippets of emotions, which I realize is a vast improvement over who I was when you found me the other night. I’ve never been an emotional guy.”
“That’s good,” Rohan said, straightening again. “Not that you’re not emotional—I already knew that. You’ve been a stoic motherfucker as long as I’ve known you, but Deva brought all the fun feelings out of you. It was eye-opening, to say the least.”
He wandered around the table and headed across the house again, and I followed as he passed the door to the first bedroom—my bedroom—and into the next one. The bed was neatly made and the room didn’t look like it was used, but Rohan kept going until he reached the closet in the far corner.
He opened the door and flipped on the light, then gestured for me to enter. I paused and lifted my eyebrows at him.
“Something happened in the closet? Seriously?”
“Trust me, Maestro. I can still feel the intensity of that moment like it was yesterday. I didn’t see it, but from what I gather, you weren’t too keen on Deva wandering around in nothing but my old T-shirt, so you made her put on something else. When I showed up, you were both so worked up that just being around you made me hard.”
I smirked, enjoying the mental image of Deva dressed the way he’d described. “That kind of moment, huh?”
I stepped into the closet and looked at the racks of dresses. On one side were several drab-colored ones with nondescript shapes, while on the other were more flowery frocks. I touched one that was white with blue flowers, but something about it wasn’t quite right.
“The one she wore isn’t here,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how I knew.
“Ah, no. We sort of destroyed it later that night. Bodhi and I . . . You know what, forget about that. I want to know what you’re getting in there. Something’s definitely brewing inside you.”
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the emotion smoldering in my gut. My cock roused and my mouth watered.
“I fucking wanted her so much I could taste it. But I didn’t take her. What a goddamn fool I was.”
“Yeah, well, we’re here to fix that.”
“If I could face the man I was, believe me, I’d probably punch him for being such a royal jackass.”
Rohan chuckled. “You were pretty damn transparent to everyone except her, but I can’t say we didn’t benefit from the fallout. She dreamed about you even before she reclaimed her own memories, and she always woke up from those dreams particularly needy.”
I shook my head and sighed. “As clear as it is that this version of reality is better than the one I remember, you guys sure have some epic assholes to deal with. She never should have been forced to forget. If I’d had any balls, I shouldn’t have let her.”
Rohan let out a huff from the doorway and I turned to stare at him. “Do you disagree?”
“No, but it’s easy for you to say that without understanding where you were coming from. You were there the day she was born. Your love for her had to mature really fucking fast—as fast as she did—for you to save her life. Trust me, you had good reasons, and nobody blames you for what you did. Despite all these conflicting feelings you had over it, regret was never in the mix.”
His words offered some comfort, but I still itched to understand. I stared around at the dresses again until my neck prickled with awareness of Rohan’s intense stare. “What now?”
“You didn’t even flinch when I said you were there the day she was born. Did she already fill you in on your history?”
I frowned, thinking
back to what details had been shared. “Not much more than the fact that we made love and then made a pact to forget the event. Why?”
“Because Deva is special. The day you were taken to the realm of the gods to protect her was the same day she was born. I wasn’t there myself, but she gave us all the details when she arrived. She was born and grew to adulthood in a matter of hours.”
I absorbed this new information, mulled it over, and then shrugged. “All right. I assume you’re waiting for me to be shocked about her age. I admit it’s strange, but is it any stranger than what we’re dealing with right now?”
He smiled and laughed. “No, it isn’t. I admit I was a little confused by the revelation at first, but I’d already fallen hard for her and there was no turning back. Not for any of us, once we learned the truth.”
“She’s no little girl, and I’d never confuse her with one. Not after the past twenty-four hours.”
“Good,” he said with a nod. “Let’s see if you have any other revelations in the rest of the house.”
He tilted his head for me to follow and I did. We wandered through the other rooms I hadn’t visited yet, including the detached studio. The place was a pretty sweet setup for band practice, as if it had been planned and constructed specifically with a musician in mind.
My palms itched as I walked toward the drum kit, and I had that sense of déjà vu again. I touched the drums, hoping something would come to me, but just like what had happened in the other locations, all I got were more emotional impressions.
These impressions were decidedly less salacious and more desperate—longing mixed with anger and desperation. I wandered to the corner kitchenette and stared at the cabinets, hoping for some insight.
Impulsively, I bent down and opened the small fridge. Peering into the freezer compartment, I pulled out a frosty bottle of vodka.
“You knew that was there?” Rohan asked.
Fate's Fools Box Set Page 113