Chapter 31
VARIDIAN
Ameirah didn’t move when I got to my feet.
The sword I hadn’t been given time to draw before the harpoon struck me scraped along the rooftop as I stumbled towards her.
My chest was mangled, and both blood and darkness had stained my leathers, but my wife knelt on the ground before the dead king, with eyes so distant they were cold, and that was blood leaking down her side, leaving a red trail on the tan stone.
“Ameirah,” I croaked, shutting out the pain that spiderwebbed across my chest. The spike of the harpoon had vanished, but the wound, the blood, the mess it had made of me remained.
I clenched my jaw as I took the last three steps, dropping to my knees beside her. A grunt escaped, but she didn’t react.
Nearby, a wyvern screech split the sky, louder than all the others, livid the same way I was at the sight of Ameirah injured.
I took her face in my hands, looked into those vacant eyes. “Ameirah. Dearling, look at me.”
I didn’t know how much time had passed since the shot and the fall ripped my consciousness from me, but judging by the battle still waged in the skies, it couldn’t have been longer than twenty minutes.
“Raheema is coming. Did you hear her?”
I moved my wife away from the lifeless body of my father as gently as I could, trying not to look at his face too closely.
He was a monster. He deserved to be dead.
But there was no controlling the tight fist around my heart, no sense to the lump in my throat.
Dead and monstrous, but still my father.
It might have meant nothing to him, but blood, family, loyalty—it meant something to me.
“Ameirah,” I said, brushing hair from her cheek, lifting her face to mine.
The emptiness in her eyes scared me far more than the flame and screams in the air.
So too did the plumes of darkness that surrounded us.
The shadows looked like fire, but no flame burned me.
But for her to have expended this much magic… “Dearling, look at me.”
She didn’t blink, didn’t focus her eyes, but her breath did hitch when I kissed her forehead. I seized that like a lifeline, scattering kisses over her brow and into her hair.
“Varidian,” she rasped in the same hoarse voice as our last dream. As if she’d been screaming for so long that her throat was damaged.
“Where did you go, dearling?” I drew back to look at her, relief hitting me like a fist to the stomach when she blinked, those beautiful brown and violet eyes focusing on me.
“I… I killed him.” Her expression cleared, her eyes sharpened with panic. “I killed him. I murdered the king. Oh god, the legions are going to kill me. I’m going to be hunted—”
I stemmed the flow of fearful words with a kiss. “I’ll handle it.”
“But I killed a king.”
I shrugged. “I was going to do it sooner or later. You saved me a job.”
For a moment she gaped at me, looking on the verge of whacking my arm for being so cavalier about his death, and then her face crumpled. Her hands mapped the shape of my shoulders, my chest, and up my neck to my face.
“He told me you were dead,” she cried. “He told me you and the legion died in Daurith, and I—I tried not to believe him, I knew he was just fucking with my head but—”
“I’m okay,” I assured her. “We all are.”
But she saw the shadow that crossed my face, saw the shadow that had permanently cast across my heart. “Who?”
“Buchra. Nabil’s wyvern.”
She searched the smoky sky, looking for her own wyvern. “Is he still—?”
“Alive but hurting.” I couldn’t stand the space between us any longer, small though it was.
“I lost Raheema,” she said in a shaky voice as I pulled her into my lap, wrapping her up tight in my arms. Her whole body shook against mine. “She’s gone.”
“She came to us in the Red Star.” I kissed her temple, scanning the sky above as a dark shadow passed overhead. Shula, guarding us. “She went to get help, dearling, and she’s here.”
Ameirah held me so tightly it pressed on my bruises and the old wounds I’d finally changed the dressing of under Aliah’s command. The pain made this real, made the reality of Ameirah being here, holding me, finally sink in.
“I thought you were dead,” she choked, gasped, the words like a sob themselves. “I thought you were dead.”
I caught her hand in mine, scattered kisses across her knuckles, but frowned at the blood.
“It’s not mine,” she breathed. “I’m not hurt.”
“Ameirah.” I danced my fingers around the gash in her leathers. “There’s blood all over you. We need to get you to Khalid.”
“Khalid.” A furrow cut between her brows.
“He’s a healer.”
“He is?” Her hand trembled as she raised it to my face, moulding her palm to my cheek, scanning my eyes over and over, a tremor in her fingertips.
“Can you stand? Mak’s close, and Raheema must be almost here; we’ll fly you to Khalid and get you healed—”
“No,” she said gutturally, her other hand finding my shoulder and gripping hard enough that I felt it through thick leathers. “I can’t let go of you yet.”
“But you’re bleeding—”
“I don’t care.”
My breath froze in my lungs when she kissed me, blood and the sharp tang of power exploding across my senses, hitting me like a shot of lightning.
For weeks, I’d been sleepwalking and now I was finally awake.
Distantly I knew we needed to move, to get to Mak and fly fast for the city limits, but my wife was here, safe, and kissing me, and no force in any world could get me to stop her.
I grasped her hip, careful of the wound that shed blood down her side, and dragged her closer, fitting my lips to hers over and over, imprinting the feel and warmth and taste of her onto my very soul. Never again. I would never send her away again. Never let her leave my damned side.
My eyes pricked with the beginning of tears when her thumb caressed my cheek, our kisses reverent and soft even if they were rapid and desperate.
Needy, breathless kisses to reassure ourselves, to settle the panic that had set up a permanent camp in my chest, to soothe the fear that made her tremble and clasp me so closely that not a scrap of air existed between our bodies.
It ceased to exist—the time and distance we’d spent away.
Nothing existed except the soft sound that left her lips when chaste kisses deepened to something hot and urgent and charged with so much emotion, I could feel her relief, her desperation, her shaking need.
The taste of blood and magic was replaced with the syrupy tang of honey I’d become obsessed with, craved for weeks, thought about without end.
I could glut myself on the taste of her and never get enough.
“Mine.” The word tore itself from my bleeding chest, demanding it be spoken. “You are mine, Ameirah,” I said against her lips, her panting breaths tickling my lips. “My wife, my heart, my soul. I will never make you leave again. I vow it.”
Her eyes were hazy and dark, but they cleared when she blinked at me, and the dark flames licking at our knees seemed to bank. “Actually, about that…”
I waited for her to give me the dressing down of the century, but I should have known better than to assume anything of my dearling wife. Hot pain cracked through my cheek when her palm collided with my face, and I blinked in shock, then a staccato burst of laughter left my lips.
“I deserved that,” I admitted with a smile, falling into the dangerous gleam in her beautiful eyes. For hours, I’d feared I would never see that look again, never feel the warmth of her in my arms, the solid weight of her against me, and now I had all three. Lucky—so fucking lucky.
“That’s for sending me away,” she informed me, stroking the cheek she’d slapped, soothing the sting.
I was ready for another slap, but her hand slid into the knot of hair that had come loose on my head, and she blessed me with a kiss so rough and possessive, all I could do was surrender everything I had to her control.
By the time her lips abandoned mine, I was both bereft and dizzy.
“That’s for coming to get me.” She paused, seemed to remember the wyvern battle in the skies and stared at the smoke beginning to fade from the city, the thirty or so wyverns that remained. “Unless there’s another reason you’re here, with apparently more than one legion in tow.”
I shrugged a shoulder. Shut out the fire of pain from my wound as I gave her a slow smirk as I recovered my wits. “Needed to get my hair done. Look at how limp it’s become; there’s barely enough hair for a bun.”
“That certainly warrants multiple legions,” she agreed, stroking my cheek, the black flames vanishing from around us. “We can’t risk losing all that pretty hair.”
It had been hell without her, and the council would no doubt seek revenge for my father’s death, and even now the Zalaam queen’s dark forces lay poised to attack more cities, but even as an executioner’s blade hung over our necks, I couldn’t help but grin. Ameirah thought my hair was pretty.
Raheema shrieked a cry I knew was a very detailed death threat to all who got in her way, and then she was at the edge of the rooftop, her wings carving through the hazy air as she frantically scanned her rider from head to toe.
“I’m fine,” Ameirah rasped.
“She’s injured,” I countered, getting to my feet and helping Ameirah up too. She caught up something from the rooftop before she stood, but I didn’t get a good look at it. Whatever it was could wait. “Where’s Khalid?”
Raheema swung her long neck to indicate the remaining clash of wyverns fighting above the medina’s square. I didn’t spy the healer, but I did see Dahab, with Zaarib atop him using his magic to knock wyverns out of the sky.
“Raheema,” Ameirah choked out, rushing towards her heedless of the injury on her leg. I stayed close behind as she pressed her forehead to the blue wyvern’s snout, my eyes on the trickle of blood winding down her leathers.
“I’ll lift you up,” I offered, the sight of that blood like a burning itch.
I needed her to get care right the fuck now.
A quick glance showed Mak hovering nearby, one eye on us even as he blasted fire at a brown wyvern sneaking closer.
I ignored his grumble about the gaping hole in my chest. “Raheema, make sure she doesn’t fall off. ”
Raheema lifted her head, her chest puffed out with responsibility. I carefully helped Ameirah mount, ignoring another flash of pain, and gave one last glance to the king whose body grew cold on the rooftop before I climbed atop Mak and rose into the sky.
“Wait,” Ameirah shouted across the thump of wingbeats. “There’s something we need to do. He mentioned prisoners, people from Cirestia.”
“From where?”
“I’ll explain later. Follow me!”
Before I could caution her against it, my wild, brave-hearted wife guided Raheema away.