I gave a little shrug. “I have ways.”
Ouranos strode around the lounge, heedless of the shards of glass crunching beneath his bare feet. “You have ways past my locks—locks that should be able to keep you out.”
“Locks only matter if you’re limited to getting places by walking through doors. You do know what I am, right? I thought the gods had a better idea of what a chimera is capable of.”
“If you’re saying you drifted like a nymph whore, that still doesn’t explain your presence here.”
He grabbed the back of my head and forced me to crane my neck so my face tilted up toward his. His dark eyes studied me intently for several seconds. The depth of the stare was unpleasant, a tangible probing sensation like he’d shoved his fingers deep inside my brain, seeking my secrets. It left me feeling almost as violated as if he’d succeeded in forcing himself on me.
At length he shook his head. “I wondered if your turul somehow got to you and completed your soul, but I see no sign of the power of the winds within you.”
“You’re surprised I made it past your locks, yet you expect him to just walk in to be with me?” I asked.
“He’ll have to work for it, if he feels strongly enough for you.”
“If he loves me, you mean.”
“Yes,” Ouranos said, his mouth twisting in distaste at the very suggestion of love. “If he truly loves you, won’t he do everything in his power to reach you? No doubt your weak little lovers are so hypnotized by your cunt they’ll endure whatever torture my wards present in order to save you. That’s how the lower creatures prove their love.”
I frowned, certain there was a catch, and I wanted to make sure I figured it out before it was too late. “If they come, I want you to allow them to leave unharmed.”
He waved a hand and turned away, strolling down a set of steps to a lower terrace that butted up against the glass.
“I have no use for men,” he said. “Not even members of the higher races. But if more than one attempts to breach my wards, they’ll suffer for it. Your turul seeks the castle as we speak.” He gestured out the window.
I followed and looked down at the landscape. A winding river bisected a forest, twisting through the edge of the trees to curve through hills blanketed in wildflowers. My pulse raced when I spied five figures in one of the fields, walking in circles.
I pressed my hands to the glass, wishing I could warn them off, but knowing full well the only way to beat this god was to walk straight into his trap. I would have to trust Sophia’s promise that my powers would be sufficient to best him.
“They came,” I whispered.
Ouranos snorted. “Yes, it seems they’re weak little men who don’t know how to control their property. Five of them and one of you, yet you still agreed to spread your legs for me.”
Raw anger flared inside me and I spun, fire blazing at my fingertips. I didn’t care if I couldn’t beat him now; I wanted to make him hurt, even if it was just a little.
Ouranos clamped his hands around my wrists before I could blast him, and the next thing I knew, he had me pinned against the glass so hard the air fled my lungs. I struggled to regain my breath, eyes wide, my mind clamoring a silent mantra for me to feel no fear.
His face loomed close enough that I could feel his breath, not warm this time, but ice-cold, frosting the glass behind me. A gaze just as cold held me fast.
“You will be waiting for him when he comes. You will take what he gives you and return to me, ready to receive your godhood and take my seed. If you make any move to betray me, they will all suffer.”
I knew he didn’t just mean my mates, but the entire turul race, and possibly the bloodline too. I swallowed and nodded, secretly more eager than afraid. I couldn’t wait to claim my power once and for all so I could destroy this bastard.
Clearing my throat, I said, “Where should I wait? Does he know how to get in?”
Ouranos relaxed his hold on me and set me back on the ground. “There are no doors or windows visible from outside. You will climb to the roof and meet him there. Your sneaky little talent should let you up there, but it won’t allow you beyond my wards.”
I didn’t need to ask what prevented me from leaving; he had more than enough leverage with his threats to keep me here.
“I’m supposed to make love to him on the roof?” I asked. “I would have thought you’d want to make it easy for him.”
“If he survives the flight, I think it will prove his love, don’t you? It won’t be difficult, if he wants you badly enough. But if he or any of the others attempt to breach my walls, I will destroy them.”
I kept my expression serene, though my insides twisted in a little surge of panic. I couldn’t mentally reach my mates from here to send a message, and I wouldn’t put it past them to try to get inside. At least if there were no visible entrances, they might exhaust themselves searching for a way in. I hoped that if I met them on the roof, I could tell them to stay away and let me handle Ouranos.
The sunlight coming through the windows dimmed, the sky beginning to fill with clouds. I frowned as a storm brewed around the castle.
“You really aren’t making it easy for them, are you?” I asked.
Ouranos chuckled. “This isn’t me, chimera. They cannot find this castle as long as the skies are clear. It will only manifest within the densest clouds. It seems your mates are creating the storm themselves so they can get to you. The stronger the storm, the more of an ordeal they will have reaching the top, though. This will be entertaining to watch.”
He turned toward the glass and crossed his arms, staring down with an amused half-smile. “Don’t make your turul fool wait. He might be inclined to try to break inside and force me to kill him.”
The drift went swiftly in my eagerness to reach the roof, and though it only took a moment, I could sense every single floor of the immense tower I passed through. I emerged on a slate-tiled rooftop with a low slope, surrounded by churning gray clouds that flickered with nearly constant veins of lightning.
Below me was a narrow crenelated walkway that wouldn’t serve as an appropriate place for a lovers’ tryst. The roof was only slightly better. There was more space, but the slope was precarious.
I shed my conjured clothes and sat at the very peak to wait. The rising storm paled in comparison to the roiling emotions inside me.
26
Ozzie
Rohan and I emerged from the drift in the middle of a field of wildflowers. Beyond the gently sloping hillside, the landscape stretched off into more hills dotted with the occasional tower like the one we’d just come from.
“Ozzie,” a familiar voice said and I turned, my chest tight and my heart pounding.
Llyr stood a few feet away, the anchor I’d locked onto when I began the drift. I’d seen him as a threat once, but the feeling had been mutual. Now he was my path to Deva, our bond the thing that would give me the power to find her.
“Hey,” I said, feeling strangely self-conscious until I saw the fearful look in his eyes. He took a step toward me, then stopped, Keagan and Bodhi both giving him impatient looks.
Llyr cleared his throat. “Are you . . . you?” he asked.
I felt the tug of our bond, and within it, his apprehension—the worry over whether I remembered him, and if I did whether those memories were good or bad.
“If you two need a private moment, that’s going to be tricky out here,” Keagan said, sweeping his arm at the vast openness we stood in. “But I wouldn’t want to miss out on any reunion tangle. Just putting that out there.”
I clenched my teeth, my jaw twitching from the pressure of restraining the very uncharacteristic urge to yank the big satyr into a tight hug. But was that really me, or a version of me that should never have existed? Did I even want to be that man? That Ozzie had been unburdened by responsibility, by emotion, and by consequence. In some ways I envied that freedom, but I didn’t miss it.
I glanced around at the three men, then Rohan,
who moved to Keagan’s side. Finally I couldn’t hold back any longer. I let out a gruff chuckle and nodded.
“Yeah, I’m me,” I said, closing the distance in two quick strides and clamping my hand at the back of Llyr’s neck. I kissed him hard, needing to prove the truth without words. We didn’t have time for lengthy explanations.
I kept hold of him when our lips parted, and he rested his forehead against mine for a breath. “You ready to go get her?” he asked.
“Hell yeah. Show me the way.”
With a deep breath, he stepped back, his expression severe. He held out his arms. “Somehow, this is where we need to be, but I’m at a loss as to why. There’s nothing here but fucking flowers.”
“How do you know this is the place?” I asked, then spied Blaze’s purple blur. “Never mind. I take it the hound led you here and isn’t going any farther?”
“He just keeps pacing in circles,” Bodhi said. “Ouranos is the god of the sky, right? I thought there might be something up there, but we checked that out too.” He pointed above us, and I looked up into a cloudless sky.
“You flew up?” I asked, looking at Llyr.
“A few times,” he confirmed. “Nothing but empty air.”
Ouranos was the god of the sky, but also of storms and weather, and generally anything that related to clouds. “Help me brew up a storm,” I said, giving Llyr a mischievous smile.
“A storm?” he asked. “What for?”
“Because Ouranos lives in a castle in the clouds. Obviously, it isn’t there right now. There are no clouds.”
Llyr’s eyebrows shot up and he looked into the sky. He stepped close again, his aqua eyes already swirling with power. The bond between us vibrated with it, awakening my own magic in reply.
I lifted my hands, palms facing him. He raised his own and pressed them flush with mine. Lightning crackled between us as we sealed contact and twined our fingers.
“This is going to be better than sex, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never merged power with another element before. Usually the immortals are the only ones who do that.”
The magic tickled around our joined hands and a strong breeze picked up around us, rustling through the grasses and wildflowers, scattering leaves and petals. It caught Llyr’s hair, whipping the dark strands across his face. My scalp tingled with the pull of my own hair in the rising wind.
As we focused, Llyr’s skin took on a glossy sheen, then moisture began to bead along his forehead and upper lip. Gradually the sky darkened with clouds first coalescing as wispy cirrus, then condensing into cumulus, and finally the towering, white cumulonimbus. Lightning cracked overhead, followed moments later by thunder. The air around us had grown damp and dense with the scent of ozone.
With a nod, I indicated we’d done enough. The entire field was now shadowed by an enormous blanket of clouds stretching several miles in every direction.
I was loath to release his hands, though. The power of our bond was dizzying, and now that my memories had returned, I had the urge to relive them all. But they were overlaid with the sublime moments this alternate self had experienced since reuniting with Deva.
I’d had no reservations about fucking her, not when I’d been oblivious of any risk associated with consummating our bond, but despite my lack of emotion—or even awareness—being with her had still been a balm to a year-long ache I had endured to keep her safe.
I wanted to relive that moment more than any other. Relive it and do it right. Make love to her with the others sharing in that love, showing Deva how deserving she was of every ounce we could give her of ourselves. I desperately wanted to give her all the love I’d denied her for the past year, wishing like hell that it wouldn’t risk her safety to remind her what we’d shared. We were long overdue to revisit our first night together in a way that mattered.
The wind died down as my power ebbed, and Keagan let out a whoop and a howl.
“That was fucking epic!” he said.
“Shall we go see what we can find?” I asked. “Llyr, can you carry a passenger?”
“I can carry Bodhi and Keagan,” Rohan said, his golden scales already shimmering beneath his skin as he began to shift.
I didn’t wait for the others to sort out travel arrangements. I slipped out of my shirt and shifted, my jeans falling away from my feet the second I soared into the clouds. Llyr followed close behind as an enormous cormorant, his dark feathers blending with the thunderheads and rendering him nearly invisible.
I beat my wings past the lower barrier of clouds, climbing into gray mist that clung to my wings and chilled me to the bone. The higher I went, the more electricity permeated the air.
I began to weave back and forth, traversing several yards of sky at a time to be sure I wasn’t missing something as I climbed. Every so often I caught glimpses of Llyr in the distance, doing the same thing, and on the other side, I’d see flashes of dull gold where Rohan flew in an enormous upward spiral.
It was Rohan’s trumpeting that caught my attention just when my energy began to flag. Adrenaline surged through me and I altered direction, flapping madly to reach the sound and the repeated whistles of the pair of men on his back.
When I reached them, Llyr arced down from above, his wingtips fluttering back at an odd angle as he descended. I flew higher and managed to stop myself just in time to avoid smashing straight into a huge stone wall.
Llyr hovered beside me and Rohan rose to join us.
“I think we found it!” Keagan called.
I screeched an affirmative, then exhaled a whispered message to Llyr. “Find a window or a door—anything we can use to enter.”
To my surprise, Bodhi relayed the message to their party. I darted a look his way and gave him an inquisitive chirp. He laughed and held up his arms.
“Magic ink, dude! I can speak all your languages, it turns out.”
I squawked my congratulations and another message that amounted to “you guys head that way,” then ascended to cover an upper tier while Llyr went lower.
I flew for what seemed like hours, growing more and more frustrated at finding nothing but more stone. Deva had to be within this fortress. There had to be an entrance somewhere. I refused to let this bastard keep her.
Higher and higher I flew, the wall seeming to extend for miles into the clouds. As I soared, jagged bolts of lightning shot out from the walls at greater frequency. Llyr and Rohan rose with me, having likely exhausted their search for entrance at the lower levels.
Llyr let out a piercing cry of pain when a charge hit him, sending a plume of feathers into the air as he tumbled into the darkness of a cloud. Rohan veered away with a roar, hopefully catching the stunned satyr before he could plummet to the ground.
The path higher would be more dangerous, but I would have to cover the rest on my own. When Rohan reappeared, hovering several yards back, Llyr’s limp body was draped across his shoulders.
A whispered message reached my ears, Bodhi’s voice coming in clear: “We caught him just in time, but he’s out cold. Can you keep going, or do you want to regroup on the ground?”
“Go take care of him. I’m not stopping until I find a way in.”
Bodhi only nodded, understanding full well that I would keep going until I found Deva, even if it killed me. I would tear down this place stone by stone, if I had to.
As I continued, I began to sense a pattern in the electrical surges. They were triggered by my approach, and didn’t seem to care whether I was inches away or feet. But at seemingly random intervals, the air would grow dense and the surface of the stone would glow as if absorbing power from the air to shoot out. If I paid attention, I could dodge the lightning bolts.
I flew on, swerving up or down into the dense mist of the cloud to avoid the surges, more certain than ever that these wards were meant to prevent me from reaching Deva. But even as the lightning became more frequent and harder to avoid, the clouds began to clear. I was too charged with exciteme
nt for my weariness to register, even though I must have been flying for hours.
Finally I emerged into a clear night sky populated with a kaleidoscope of heavenly bodies more spectacular than mere stars. I was dazzled for a moment when I caught sight of something even more beautiful.
Below me on the peak of a slate roof sat a figure I almost hadn’t seen at first. Her hair fluttered behind her in the cold wind, and when our eyes met, she smiled, and my heart nearly exploded out of my chest.
Deva!
I closed the distance as quickly as I could and shifted, bare feet touching down on the slate the very second my wings transformed back into arms.
And then she was in my arms so quickly it was as if the wind had pushed her. She hooked her hands around my neck and pulled me down into a kiss so deep and desperate my knees went weak, and I collapsed on the sloping roof with her cradled against me. I stroked her hair, her shoulder, and her back as I tasted her mouth, so hungry despite a recent memory of having her.
Those memories weren’t really mine, though. They belonged to another version of me, one that hadn’t ached with need to touch her for more than a year, one that hadn’t been forced to witness her coupling with four other worthy males who I both hated and loved in equal measure—for having her, yet being strong enough to protect her heart in a way I couldn’t.
“You’re here,” she finally whispered when we parted. She looked up into my eyes, a question apparent in her gaze for only a moment before whatever she saw gave her the answer. “You remember.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. We’re together now.”
“Let me take you out of here,” I said, slipping my arm around her and preparing to drift. I summoned the power and attempted to take us back to the ground, but when we rematerialized, we hadn’t moved from the top of the tower.
Deva gave me a sad smile. “It won’t work. There’s no way down unless you fly through the lightning. You made it through once. You can make it back.”
“We can make it back,” I corrected her. “You’re coming with me.”
Fate's Fools Box Set Page 119