Chapter 29
Five years later
Quinn
Igot out of the car on the opposite side of the street from the building and hesitated before turning to face it. I’d come out to see the construction while it was in progress several times, of course, but not since all the outer walls, one of the final steps, had been put in place. Now it was finally going to look whole. Real.
I swiveled on the sidewalk quickly, wanting to take it in all at once. Gazing up at the looming skyscraper, my breath caught in my throat.
It was somehow even more than I’d imagined when I’d first started sketching the building out years ago, not long after I’d returned to my classes. More than any of the concept drawings or blueprints or even my visits during the earlier stages of construction had prepared me for.
I’d never told anyone this, but in my mind, from the very beginning, I’d thought of it as The Monster. To everyone I worked with, that name would have called up negative associations. But in the building before me, I saw everything the concept had come to mean to me.
It was broad as well as tall, huge and imposing and a little twisted with ripples breaking through the upward jut of the otherwise straight edges. But the outer walls with their reflective panes were tilted at just the right angle to reflect the southern sunlight without bouncing it into a passerby’s eyes. The massive structure glowed, like something magical that’d sprung up on this city block.
It was my ode to the types of monstrousness and magic I’d learned to appreciate. And somehow it was standing here in front of me, the first major solo design I’d ever had accepted and constructed. I’d accomplished that dream.
How many more were still ahead of me?
As a smile crossed my lips to match the swell of awe and joy inside me, a figure drew to a stop on the sidewalk a few feet away. I glanced over to see a girl who looked to be in her early teens, a wave of hair so pale it was nearly translucent curving against her cheek as she gazed up at my building from beneath the shade of her sweatshirt’s hood. Her bright brown eyes had widened. Her sinewy frame was weirdly tensed, as if she were grappling between stepping closer to the structure and yanking herself away from it.
“Wow,” she said in a soft voice, her fingers tightening around the strap of her backpack. And then she shivered in a way that instantly set me on the alert.
“Are you all right?” I asked. She’d sounded appreciative when she’d spoken, so I couldn’t tell whether the shiver had been provoked by the building or something else—maybe whatever had made her so tense in general.
Her eyes darted to me with a flicker of anxiety. “Yes,” she blurted out. “Sorry. I just—I’ve got something to do.”
She spun on her heel and hustled off before I could say anything else.
I watched her go, my smile dwindling. But then a gaggle of tourists halted farther down the street to exclaim over the building, and the rush of happiness came back. I glanced the way the girl had gone, but she didn’t reappear.
I hadn’t spent all that much time here in San Francisco. Maybe it was weird for strangers to talk to each other here, and that was why she’d hurried off. In any case, there wasn’t much I could do about it.
A tickle of someone else’s joy seeped into my chest. My smile returned, and I crossed the street to walk around the side of the building.
Even though my sorcerer powers had vanished when I’d lost the heart that’d granted me them in the first place, a thread of my connection to my monstrous men had remained, possibly from the traces of their essence that must have wound into my other vital organs. I could only sense the faintest hints of their strongest emotions, but sometimes that was enough to recognize their presence.
I was just coming up on the maintenance door partway down the side alley, which should have been locked, when it swung open to reveal Rollick’s handsome face and his usual sly smirk. “Are you going to come in and check out your opus from the inside or what? The rest of your entourage is getting impatient.”
I laughed and slipped inside, finding myself in a shadowy hall where the three other men who couldn’t simply stroll down the street without being stared or even screamed at were waiting.
Lance tugged me to him with a pleased hum. “Is it everything you wanted it to be?”
“It’s perfect,” I said, returning his embrace.
“Wait until you see the view.” The dragon shifter shot Crag a pointed look, and the gargoyle held out his hand to me. I stepped toward him and let him scoop me up into his arms.
“I’m doing well enough that I could manage the stairs, even this many,” I had to inform him, though I didn’t exactly mind being cradled by his stony strength. After the usual precarious first year, my doctors had gradually eased off monitoring my new heart. It thumped away in my chest now as if it’d always been a part of me. And hopefully, given that it hadn’t come with any supernatural strings attached, it’d keep pumping for many years more.
Crag let out a gruff sound. “This is much faster. The elevators aren’t running yet. No power.”
“And we’re not letting you play around with the electricity, Ms. Fix-It,” Torrent teased in his dryly even voice from behind us.
“Fine.” I patted Crag’s well-muscled shoulder. “You can be my winged elevator.”
He gave a rumble of a chuckle and stepped to the edge of the elevator shaft. I spotted the car down below on one of the basement levels, leaving the space above us totally empty other than the cables. With a push of his clawed feet and a flap of his wings, the gargoyle leapt up into the air.
My other men disappeared into the darkness, but I knew they were traveling with us. Crag couldn’t move quite as fast as he normally might have when he was working with such a narrow space, but we soared past a few floors with every sweep of his wings. The exhilaration rushed through me, leaving me grinning.
At the top floor, Crag set me down by a ladder to a maintenance hatch that reminded me with a hitch of my pulse of my last urban exploring adventure before my life had become full of monsters. I clambered up the rungs without hesitation, shoved the hatch wide, and pulled myself up onto the rooftop of the first ever building I could take full credit for designing.
The sprawl of the city spread out before us, glinting with lights of different colors as evening started to creep over the streets. We were high enough up that I couldn’t hear the thrum of the traffic passing by below. When I turned, I could make out the glinting ocean waters beyond the buildings along the coast.
“Who needs walls when you can be up here,” I said with a laugh, and inhaled deeply with a gust of wind that tossed my hair back over my shoulders.
Rollick, who’d emerged from the shadows alongside the others to join me, arched his eyebrows. “Rethinking our current living arrangements, sweet mortal?”
I thought of the apartment back in Jacksonville we all shared now—as much as my shadowkind men needed a physical living space. Rollick had insisted on contributing enough funds that I could afford a corner penthouse, which had almost as amazing a view as this, the ocean in one direction and the city streets along the beach in the other.
Since none of the men needed to sleep, we could manage with a two-bedroom, the second bedroom set up in case they wanted to relax with a little privacy. Or entertain themselves while keeping out of my hair when I was working from home. Mostly, though, we’d fallen into a rhythm of living alongside each other that had quickly felt completely natural.
I could have had the place to myself whenever I wanted—I knew all I had to do was ask—but there was something comforting about knowing that just about anytime I called out, at least one of them would be in hearing distance.
“I’m always happy coming home to Jacksonville,” I told the demon with a playful swat. “Which means you’re also not convincing me to move to Miami anytime soon.”
He grabbed my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles. “Then it’s a good thing there are handy rifts I can jump through between the two, isn’t it?”
My other three men had been content to putter around Jacksonville and the area nearby with occasional daytrips abroad, enjoying their favorite aspects of the mortal realm without straying for long from my side. Torrent had started anonymously donating small sculptures he made out of found natural objects to a local gallery that’d been excited by them, but that was the grandest of their ambitions.
Rollick, on the other hand, hadn’t waited much time before getting started on rebuilding his legacy as he’d always said he would. His new hotel stood on the most popular stretch of Miami Beach, flocked to by human and shadowkind guests alike.
From what he’d said, the shadowkind needed a refuge like that even more now. The Highest hadn’t stirred from the depths of the shadow realm again, and no other monsters had rampaged across the mortal realm since the leviathan’s death, but the near-catastrophe had left a lot of the mortal-side beings shaken. Humankind seemed to have brushed off the craziness of those few weeks with our usual dogged resistance to anything beyond our understanding, but the shadowkind wanted to know they had like-minded companions they could turn to if anyone tried to steal their freedom or the land they considered a home again.
Lance let out a soft growl at the sight of Rollick’s affectionate gesture and grabbed my other hand. He leaned his head close to mine and nipped my earlobe before murmuring, “I heard there’s something humans like to do to make a place really their own. ‘Christening’ it, I think they call it?”
My cheeks flushed. “And you figured we’d do that up here, huh?”
An unusually mischievous glint had lit up in Torrent’s sea-green eyes. He extended one of his tentacles to tease around my calf. “What better spot to celebrate our daredevil lover’s great achievement?”
A thrill shivered through me, affection and excitement twined together. The men I loved knew me so well, both what was important to me and what got me off. And I couldn’t say the proposal didn’t have a significant appeal.
I nudged Lance with my elbow. “What are we waiting for, then?”
He let out an eager little snarl and pounced, snatching me up and flipping us over with his usual acrobatic grace. The next thing I knew, I was sprawled on top of his lean frame while he stretched out on a flat section of roof, and he was pulling my mouth down to his.
The sudden movement had left my pulse racing, and the flick of Lance’s tongue between my lips only keyed me up more. I kissed him back hard, reveling in the wonder of the moment—that I’d accomplished this much, that I had these men with me. That I was here, alive and well, at all.
Seconds later, the rest of my men had gathered close around me and Lance. Crag lowered his head to kiss the side of my neck. Rollick slid his hand up under my shirt, tracing the line of my spine with a giddying caress. Torrent stroked my thigh with his hand while his tentacles glided over my legs where my skirt left them bare.
When one tentacle rose to the apex of my legs, squeezing my clit with a deft sucker, I whimpered against Lance’s mouth. He took the opportunity to adjust the angle of our heads and kiss me even more deeply, as if he were trying to devour me whole. Then he released my mouth to nibble along the line of my jaw, pushing me up over him high enough that he could grab the bottom of my shirt.
He yanked the thin cotton garment over my head, and then Rollick claimed my mouth for himself. The demon’s kiss was as searing as ever, with no hesitation about participating in this joint effort now that we had years of collaboration behind us. He trailed his hand back down my spine and snapped open my bra in the same movement.
As the straps slid down my arms, Lance dipped his head to catch the peak of one breast between his lips. Crag closed his rocky hand over the other, the warm but rough texture of his palm brushing over the nipple to perfect effect. I rocked helplessly against Torrent’s pulsing tentacle, already feeling way too close to the edge. But then, these men could always take me there so quickly.
Lance tapped the tips of his claws against my side and, when I gasped, scraped them delicately over the skin. At my shiver, he sucked harder on my breast. Torrent picked the exact same moment to tuck the tip of his tentacle right inside my panties, the suckers plucking directly at my flesh, and I came with a rush of bliss that propelled a cry from my throat.
Rollick drank the sound down, and then Crag was tugging my head toward him, his strength tempered by the gentleness he always offered me. “We’ll take you even higher than that, Softness,” he said gruffly, and melded his mouth with mine.
Torrent was busy sliding the panties right off me. He nudged my hips a little higher and turned toward Lance, with a grin I could hear in his voice. “I can think of other places our woman would appreciate those claws.”
I quivered with anticipation as Lance lowered his hand. He grazed the vicious talons ever so carefully over my folds and clit. Needing to hold so perfectly still only amplified the thrill of the sensation. I gasped, aching for more.
Torrent didn’t leave me hanging. The second Lance withdrew his claws, the other man plunged his tentacle into me with just enough force to send my thoughts spinning with the surge of delight. I moaned and clutched at Lance beneath me, then pressed my lips harder against Crag’s.
Rollick flicked his own shorter claws over my untended breast, adding to the symphony of pleasure that was swelling through me all over again. My mouth tore from Crag’s with a guttural groan, and Lance beamed up at me.
“What do you want now, baby girl?”
“You,” I mumbled. “Inside me. Give me the dragon cock.”
He chuckled. “I’ll never deny you that.”
He was so good at his vanishing act now that my body barely shifted from where it’d been braced above him before he’d returned to physical form, now sans clothes. His monstrous cock with its thicker head rubbed against my clit, and Torrent withdrew his tentacle to make room. The wind licked over my back, chilling me for just an instant before Torrent leaned close enough for his warmth to envelop me. “Will you take me too, Quinn?”
Lance thrust up into me at the same moment, so my first answer was nothing more than a gasp. “Please,” I said, breathless and shaking.
My gargoyle and my demon were still kneeling on either side of me, now fully naked in their monstrous forms. I gazed down at Rollick’s two cocks and lowered my head to take the upper one into my mouth. It slid past my lips as Torrent prepared my back entrance with strokes of his tentacle, and the heady sensation of being triply filled careened through my nerves.
When I tested my teeth against Rollick’s shaft, he hissed a breath and clutched my hair. I sucked him down as far as I could, swirled my tongue around him as I eased back, and released him only to draw his second cock into my mouth. He swore at the pursing of my lips around his rigid length.
I might have teased him more if Torrent’s cock hadn’t filled me then, gliding into my ass to match Lance’s rhythm from beneath. Instead, my groan reverberated over Rollick’s cock.
I brought my mouth back to his upper shaft and gripped the lower one with my hand, knowing from experience how to best ensure he unraveled. Crag kissed my shoulder and resumed his fondling of my breasts, not one to be left out. I pumped the demon’s pair of dicks with the same blissful force my other two men were applying to me, bringing tongue, lips, teeth, and fingers to bear.
“I’m never going to get tired of seeing that hot mortal mouth around my cocks,” Rollick rasped. His head tipped back, and he stiffened for just a second with a twitch of both shafts before he came, his smoky, salty release spilling down my chin and over my hand.
Before I could wipe my mouth, he leaned in and lapped his own cum off of me. I shuddered at the unexpectedly hot gesture, adding to the fire of passion searing through me with every rock of my lovers’ bodies beneath and behind me. Then I turned to my gargoyle, wanting to bring him with us too.
Crag showed no qualms about kissing me while the taste of his fellow shadowkind must have lingered in my mouth. When I reached for his stunning gargoyle cock, he groaned. His hips pumped into my grasp instinctively.
I couldn’t fit my mouth around more than the head of his shaft, but that was enough to make him shudder with delight. Then everything blurred into one string of motion, my body swaying between all of my men, the bliss blazing through me higher and hotter. And here we were up on top of a towering building, one that I’d helped bring to life, a dizzying distance from the regular world below.
The thought of that height and a fresh gust of wind over me somehow spurred my pleasure on even more. I whimpered around Crag’s cock and pumped him faster, and just as he jerked with the first spurt of his release, Lance and Torrent hit the most sensitive spots inside me in perfect unison.
I came again, shivering and clenching around them, my mind blanking with the flare of total ecstasy. Torrent’s breath broke and Lance let out a choked snarl beneath me as they followed me over the edge.
For a few minutes after that, I wasn’t aware of much other than the bliss still racing through my nerves and the heat of my lovers’ bodies around me. As I came back to myself, I found I was lying on my back, propped up between the four men to keep my skin off the surface of the roof, gazing up at the seemingly endless indigo of the evening sky. I grinned up at it, flooded with hope.
“This is just the beginning,” I declared—to the sky, to my men, to the world stretching out all around me. “There’s so much more I want to do, and there’s no power in existence that can hold me back.”
Lance hummed happily. “Especially not while you have us by your side. And we’re not going anywhere.”
Torrent tucked a tentacle around my waist, adding to the joint embrace. “I can’t wait to see what you’ll pull off next.”
I closed my eyes, drifting on pure joy. “Neither can I.”