Chapter 15 Caesar
Fighting the cold was taking every bit of my concentration. And still, I had only managed to raise the temperature inside the tent ten degrees. Turned out not even gryphon weather manipulation could contend with the Washington winter, especially as the sun was setting over the mountain tops to the west.
“I’m f-freezing my t-tits off,” Shea stuttered as she hugged her knees against herself, looking like an adorable ball beside me. “L-literally, they’re g-going to f-fall off.”
I pulled her into my arms and draped myself around her as best I could. “That would be a shame.”
She snickered even as she nuzzled into me.
“Did you make connection yet, Kai?” I called to him behind his wall of tech gear on the other side of the extra-large tent.
“Almost,” Kai mumbled, eyes glued to his screen and fingers tapping like mad. Janette was hovering over his shoulder, watching whatever he was doing with rapt fascination.
“P-please h-h-hurry,” Shea whimpered.
I tried my best to keep a brave face for Shea, but I was getting worried with each passing second as the light beyond our tent continued to dim. We had to make sure we could connect to Heritage Prep before we could fully establish our campsite, and if we didn’t do that soon, we’d be vulnerable to the monsters that lurked only a half-mile away from us.
“Aaaand, got it! I’m in!” Kai exclaimed, fist-pumping through his own vaporized breath cloud.
“Oh, t-thank f-fuck!” Shea praised, crawling out of my embrace. “J-janette, l-let’s g-get this ov-ver with.”
Janette nodded and ushered Shea through the zippered opening of the tent. I followed behind them, knowing Kai would be completely fine on his own in here. I didn’t trust the girls going outside on their own with dusk so imminent. Even with light clinging to the sky, the shadow of the mountains was certainly enough to allow vampires to roam, and I had no way of knowing how far their surveillance reached. If they already knew we were here, we were sitting ducks.
I watched as Shea and Janette slowly walked a circle around our camp, reciting the ancient words to cast a protection spell that would keep us cloaked from passersby—immortal or otherwise. Anxiety itched and slithered beneath my skin as I waited, my senses keen to every sound in the surrounding forest. All I could do was keep pushing back the cold with my gryphon powers and be ready to shift at the first sign of danger.
I had hoped that once we set ourselves up, I would’ve made peace with this decision. I had hoped that once we’d gotten this far, I would’ve accepted it. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Now more than ever, I hated that Shea was going to trek over to the vampire headquarters in the morning. Every instinct I had urged me to hold her tight and never let go, to lock my talons around her and fly her far away from this place.
Rationally, I knew we had to do this, for Julian and Arya, and the fate of the entire world for that matter. But knowing that didn’t make going through with it any easier. I couldn’t lose her.
No, can’t think like that. Shea can do this. And everything will be fine.
I took little comfort in the fact that, if she came into any kind of danger or harm, I would sense it. But what would I do about it? Give in to my imprint and go barging in and get us all killed? I’d never felt so…powerless in my entire life than I did now, counting down the seconds until Shea left me, possibly forever.
After the longest fifteen minutes of my life, the girls completed the circle, and an ethereal dome rippled over the radius of our camp, only visible in the disturbance it made in our surroundings for a split second. The compression of my tight muscles gripping my chest finally eased, and I let my shoulders relax. At least now if vampires came snooping, they wouldn’t be able to see, smell or hear us. We were safe.
“Alright, Janette, let’s h-heat this p-place up,” Shea announced with an eager clap of her gloved hands as she and Janette returned from the edge of our camp radius.
“Are you sure that spell is safe?” I asked. “It’s not going to create a greenhouse effect in here, is it?”
She shot me a cutting frown. “Ac-cording to the b-book, it’s just g-going to m-make the temp-perature inside the p-p-protection c-circle comfortable. And I’m f-f-fucking freezing, so we’re d-doing it!”
I raised my hands in submission, flattening my lips in complacence. It was almost cute how irritable Shea got when she was cold, and in any other circumstances, I would’ve been amused.
The girls held hands and chanted more pretty words that I didn’t understand. Their hands began to glow a soft sherbet orange, and with a pulsing wave, the cold was suddenly banished and replaced with a cozy warmth all around us. It was like walking into a hearth-heated cabin from outside.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“I kn-know, isn’t it g-great?” Shea cheered, hugging herself and spinning around with a huge grin on her face.
I couldn’t help but smile. She was so beautiful, so full of light—and sass. I was so incredibly lucky to be mated to her. Pulled in by her magnetism, I hugged her from behind and pulled her against my chest, and we swayed slightly as we savored each other.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you more,” I whispered back, kissing the top of her soft brown hair.
“Alright, enough of that, lovebirds,” Janette chided playfully. “Let’s go back inside and see what Kai’s been able to find.”
With a synchronized sigh, we followed her into the tent.
“Whatever you girls did, thank you from the bottom of my heart,” Kai declared, pressing his hand over his chest. “It’s almost like a sauna in here now.” He shrugged his coat off his shoulders and set it to the side in a bundle.
Janette knelt behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Just a little magic. But I can do a lot more to warm you up.”
His face turned beat red and a wobbly smile formed on his lips.
“Okay, seriously, Aunt Janette, get a room,” Shea groused.
“Maybe when this is over,” Kai mumbled with a shrug.
Shea and I both gawked at him, mouths literally hanging open. Did he actually just say that?
His complexion reddened further under our scrutiny, and he shrugged again. Janette beamed and pecked his cheek before settling beside him and looking at his multiple-screen layout.
“Please don’t leave me here with them,” I whispered to Shea, and we both stifled a chuckle.
In all seriousness, I was happy for Kai finding romance even in these bleak circumstances, but I desperately hoped they wouldn’t be rocking the tent this whole time. That was very much not a situation I wanted to be the third wheel in.
Shea and I gathered around Kai and examined the various screens for ourselves.
“Damn, that is a lot of cameras,” Shea commented.
And she wasn’t wrong. There had to be at least fifty feeds filling three of the four screens in front of us. And they kept changing scenes. I suspected the cameras were motion sensitive, and there were moving bodies in every single feed—Heritage Prep obviously came alive at night.
“It’s going to take me some time to map out where each of these cameras are on the blueprint, but once I do, I’ll be able to track you everywhere you go,” Kai said, looking over his shoulder at Shea.
She nodded without looking away from the screens, squinting as if she was looking for something.
“Can you find Julian, or Arya?” I asked, scanning the various faces and rooms myself.
Kai leaned closer to the row of screens. “Well, I’m not sure what Julian looks like—all vampires look the same to me.”
I frowned, unsure if that was meant to be a joke or not. Then he looked up at me briefly and winked. Yep. Trust Kai to keep his albeit quirky sense of humor in the darkest of times.
“Oh, I think I found Arya!” Kai suddenly said, tapping on one of the keyboards and enlarging one of the feeds.
We all leaned in, studying the raven-haired girl sitting at the end of a long table next to a young boy—wait, boy? Why the hell was there such a young child at a vampire school? I disregarded that for the moment and tried to distinguish the face hiding beneath the familiar curtain of waves.
As we watched, she threw her head back in a laugh, fully exposing every detail of her face to the camera.
“Omigod, that’s her!” Shea gasped. “Why does she look…happy?”
My stomach knotted as I pondered the same thing. “I’m just glad she’s being treated well. Apparently being Hadrian’s daughter counts for something, after all.”
She nodded, though her brow didn’t unwrinkle. “Okay, what about Julian?”
Kai minimized the feed once more and leaned back to give Shea and I room to search. As frequently as the scenes changed, it was hard to find anything recognizable. It was a miracle we’d found Arya, at all.
“Wait, what’s that?” I pointed to a feed that looked particularly dim and ominous.
Kai enlarged it, revealing it to be a dungeon of sorts, just as I suspected. But the cells were empty. I let out a long breath of relief. Wherever Julian was being kept, it wasn’t the dungeons. That gave me some small measure of hope—which was repeatedly quashed by the terrible fear that they might have already discarded him.
We studied the screens for hours until our eyes stung; all the while, Kai was making notes and changing screens as he coordinated the exact location of each camera. It was disheartening that we never spotted Julian, and I could feel Shea’s dread as potently as my own.
After a bland dinner of canned chili—we only brought foods that would be easy to prepare and eat—we all eventually settled in for the night. Kai curled up in front of his screens, seemingly pleased as a clam to have Janette spooning him from behind.
Shea and I snuggled under a pair of connected sleeping bags on the other side of the tent. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t turn off. My pulse wouldn’t slow, my insides wouldn’t untangle, and the doomsday scenarios wouldn’t stop playing on repeat in my mind.
What if there was a reason we couldn’t spot Julian? Shea had talked to him only yesterday, but anything could happen in the span of twenty-four hours, especially for creatures who don’t need to sleep. What if our mission had been rendered pointless?
No. Arya was still there. She still needed us, even if Julian…
I felt Shea’s weight shift in my arms, and I opened my eyes to see her climbing gingerly out of the sleeping bag and quietly unzipping the tent to let herself out. I hesitated a moment, wondering if she just needed to use the bathroom. Ultimately, I couldn’t not follow her. Even with the protection spell in place, I needed to know—always—that she was safe.
I quietly slipped out of the bag and slunk out of the tent, looking around in the darkness. When my eyes finally adjusted to the lack of computer light, I spotted Shea sitting on a log just beside the tent, her head turned in my direction.
“Hey,” she whispered.
I stepped softly toward her, noticing that the heat of her climate control spell had successfully melted the thin layer of frost that had covered the ground before. I sat beside her, putting my arm around her shoulders.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I just needed some air.”
I nodded, knowing full well that wasn’t the issue. Her lack of sleep was caused by the same thing as mine—our fear for Julian.
She looked up. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Confused, I turned my gaze to the sky as well. To my surprise, white flakes were slowly descending above us, disappearing completely a few feet above our heads where they came in contact with the heat contained by our magical protective barrier. It was truly a sight to witness.
A sort of peace settled over me. This moment was so magical and yet so simple, I couldn’t help but feel humbled by it.
“I’m worried about Julian,” she whispered.
I tightened my hold on her, squeezing her arm. “I know.”
She pulled away and stood, beginning to pace in front of me. She ran her hands over her face, and I could hear soft weeping muffled beneath them. “What if we’re too late?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no words to comfort her. I had to believe that Julian was still alive, but I was afraid to promise things over which I had no knowledge or control.
She walked over to a nearby tree within our circle and put her hand against it to support herself as she gave in to more stifled sobs. I rose and went after her, putting my hand on her back and resting my forehead on hers.
“It’s going to be okay,” I soothed. “One way or another, everything is going to be okay.”
She buried her face into my chest and nodded, and I draped my arms around her, offering as much comfort as I was seeking to take from her. I couldn’t tell her how terrified I was to let her go. I couldn’t share any of my fears or conflicted feelings because she needed me to be strong for her.
But I had never felt weaker.
I scooped my finger under her chin and gently tipped it up to face me, and no sooner did her watery eyes meet mine than she threw her arms around my shoulder and crushed her lips against mine. With desperate demand, she forced my lips apart, her tongue imploring my mouth to give her what my words couldn’t.
And I did. I kissed her with every vulnerable need, every angry defiance and every unspoken declaration that blazed inside me. I inhaled her love and her sorrow as I gave her the passion she commanded of me. I cradled her waist with such care even as she clawed at my neck, my shoulders, my waist, eager to be the one on whom she took out her grief and fury.
When she pried at the zipper of my pants, I happily obeyed, pushing her up against the bark of the tree and tugging down her layers just enough. I wanted her so badly, needed her more than I could ever express in words. But remembering our bedfellows in the tent only feet away gave me pause.
“Wait, what about them?” I whispered, breaking from her hungry swollen lips to nod my head in that direction.
“Consider it paying it forward for the trysts they’re no doubt going to have before this is over,” she said, nibbling my lower lip.
The thought should’ve stolen my desire, but the way she was stroking my cock could keep me hard through any series of misfortunes. Fuck, I couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Good point,” I hissed before descending on her delicious mount once more.
I blindly guided my cock to her opening, lavishing in the wet heat that bathed my tip as I slid it between the sweet petals of her silky flesh. She gripped my shoulders as I slowly entered her, savoring every inch that sheathed my aching shaft. And when I was finally buried as deep inside her as I could go, I ground into her, grabbing her ass to increase the pressure.
I never wanted to leave this moment. I wanted to stay connected to her like this until the end of time. And reminding myself of all the reasons I couldn’t only made me more desperate for her.
“Fuck me, Caesar,” she whimpered into my ear. “Please.”
How could I deny her such a simple request? Pinning her hips against the tree with my firm grip, I began to move my pelvis back and forth, sliding slowly in and out of her. Fuck, she was so wet. So warm. The scent of her need filled my senses, intoxicating me in the best possible way. I wanted to suffocate in her sweet perfume. It drove my rhythm, compelling me to go as fast as she wanted, as hard as she needed.
She began to pant with each thrust as my force intensified, and I put my hand over her mouth to stifle the sounds, only vaguely concerned at this point with disturbing our travel mates. Nothing could make me stop now. Nothing could tear me away from her heaven. My mate.
Her moans were hot on my hands as I drove into her, pleasure building in my core as her flesh coaxed it out of me. And then I felt her tongue graze my finger. She sucked the side of it into her mouth, nibbling as I fucked her and shooting a spike of need through me. God, she was incredible. And she was mine.
Not mine. Ours.
Julian. I couldn’t deny that, as amazing as it felt to have her to myself, I did miss his company. Not only for her sake, but for my own. He was a part of us. And he wasn’t here.
I pushed that thought aside and picked up my pace, worshiping her enough to make up for the loss. I existed only to please her, to satisfy her, to fill her every need and desire.
And as her muscles tightened around me, squeezing my cock with a friction that nearly drove me to destruction, I knew I was doing exactly that. I struggled to hold back, to continue my pace to deliver her into her ecstasy, but the feeling of her pleasure was so overpowering.
Hold on. Hold on!
Heat bloomed against my palm as she sighed into my hand, her body convulsing beneath me, her core quaking against my cock, and oblivion took me.
I came hard inside her, pleasure pulsating through me from the tip of my dick to the top of my scalp, making me see stars as it stole the blood from my head for a moment. I fell against her, both of us relying on the tree to hold up our weight, and she didn’t stop kissing my neck, my cheeks, my chin, as she tried to catch her breath.
“I love you, Caesar,” she said over and over. “I’m coming back to you. I promise.”
I stole one last desperate kiss from her lips. “You’d better,” I said, half-teasing, half-completely-fucking-serious.
We stood like that for a long moment, caressing and kissing and embracing, until finally we pulled our bottoms back up and retreated back into the tent. With a thousand unspoken words hanging between us, we held each other tightly through the night.
I still couldn’t sleep, though Shea had seen to it that I was thoroughly exhausted and drained. I was certain that I would never sleep again. Not until she was back in my arms, far away from the monsters who sought to destroy us all.