Chapter Sixteen
Austin
Austin stopped at the top stair to open the door to the lab and found Snuffles sat on the other side. He peered up at Austin with his beady red eyes and thumped his back feet against the floor. Hard.
“Oh, sorry little guy,” Austin chortled, stepping aside. He motioned with a swiping motion for the bunny to take the stairs. The bundle of inky fur rushed down the steps then flung himself into Hyacinth’s awaiting arms. She giggled sweetly, hugging him close to her chest.
“There you are, Snuffles,” she murmured to him, nuzzling her face into his fur.
Austin waited at the top of the stairs as she hoisted the rabbit over her.
Bringing him to her mouth to give him an overly affectionate kiss to the top of his head.
She’s just so… The moment down in the lab flashed in his mind and Austin twisted around so fast he feared he snapped his ankles in half.
Naked. Soooooooo naked. Dragons, she’s pretty.
She’s more than pretty. When he closed his eyes he relived that moment when his eyes roamed down and put everything about her to memory.
He was honest when he said during the emergency stitching, she wasn’t naked in his head.
She was in dire need, and his mind was on the hole in her lungs.
Even when they’d put her back together, she wasn’t sexy to him.
Then all of a sudden, she sat up and smiled at him, her little rosebud nipples catching his attention.
His cock hardened again. Quit that! In hundreds of years, he’d chosen a handful of times to have that post orgasm fuzzy feeling.
It didn’t happen often, not as a lack of desire but a lack of inspiration.
Words on the page just didn’t do it for him, and he’d not experienced enough flesh to flesh to have a treasure trunk in his head to replay.
But he could replay that moment. Second for second, the way her legs swung so sweetly.
Confident and brazen and unashamed of her body.
And why should she be? She’s gorgeous. With supple curves and thick thighs and a nest of auburn tresses that glistened in the laboratory lights.
Suddenly, all those words on the page he’d devoured in the library, had a visual to go with…
and boy was he replaying some of his favorite scenes with Hyacinth as the heroine.
I am a pervert. I am a monster. Some lewd creature that puts how pretty her breasts are to memory and imagines my lips around them—ah!
Only, Austin actually yelled, “Ah!”
A hand ran up his back, and he lurched out of the doorway. Hyacinth peaked around him, Snuffles in one hand, the other still between his shoulder blades. “Sorry. But I did say your name a few times.”
“Did you?” He wheezed, laughing at himself as he side-stepped her and offered her the space needed to step out into the foyer. Yet that tempting hand never left him, in fact, it stayed on him, merely brushing across his arm till her fingers curled around his sleeve.
“What’s Lord Rosemont doing?” she whispered, tugging on the cotton in her hand while she nodded her chin at the front door. Austin leaned over to find their maker looming. His mask on his face, a top hat over his long green hair. Sebastian’s hands were tucked behind him in the small of his back.
“Don’t know,” Austin muttered, leading the charge toward the front. As they passed Smith’s office, the slender slipped out into the hall. Soon, the whole house was loitering inches behind their lich Lord.
“My love?” Dahlia asked as she slid up beside him, her hand brushing up the back of his coat. Silence. It lingered, suffocatingly.
“Sir? What are you staring at?” Austin broke the bubble of silence.
“There is a man on the other side of the fence.” Sebastian turned from the door.
“In this weather? Does he have a death wish?” Melody barked with laughter, leaning against the wall.
The entryway glowed brighter with Carl’s flames and the sound of his panting for air bounced off the walls.
Austin spared a hand down to the giant fluffball and ruffled his fingers through his heavy fur. Carl licked him in appreciation.
“No, just a divine purpose.” Sebastian growled as he grabbed his trench coat off the rack and pulled it around his body.
Austin’s muscles tensed. The priest is back.
Clerics tended to be a stubborn infestation.
With their divine justice and sense of self-worth, he should have known the man from beyond the fence would come back.
Doing so in the middle of a hurricane was a surefire way to get the attention he craved.
“Austin, Havershum, with me. The rest of you stay in the house. Smith—”
“Nothing will enter this home, sir.” Smith bowed his head to Sebastian as he ushered Melody, Kevin, and even Dahlia. The lawyer walked them back from the door. Dahlia huffed in protest but when Austin and Havershum looked over their shoulders at their Lady, shaking their heads, she stopped.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Hyacinth asked, attention darting between the lich and the dead man who spared her an apologetic grimace. “Why are you going outside? I thought we weren’t to go outside in the storm?”
“Clerics aren’t good,” Austin nodded at the scars on her chest, and she put a hand over the stitching. “Not for us.”
Austin took the jacket offered to him by Sebastian and pulled it over his body.
He followed his maker into the torrential downpour.
Havershum floated behind him, keeping himself in the shadows till he was needed.
Austin wasn’t sure what he was hoping for, but it wasn’t that the man with the smokey aura and shifting robes would be standing inches outside the fence.
Drenched from the rain, and yet unbothered by the funnel cloud that raged past him.
It descended upon the forcefield that protected King’s Fall from such magic storms.
There were really only two types of people who could make storms such as the one raging over the haunted woods.
Tempest dragons, and they’d have to be pretty old.
One of those hadn’t existed in the region for ages, not with Sebastian around.
And poltergeists, but they would have needed to be an arch-fiend or an arch-nightmare to gather that kind of potent magic.
A regular human or wizard or whoever died out in those woods wouldn’t make a specter powerful enough to conjure that.
Which hopefully meant the storm was made from clashing magic. And not intentionally created.
Austin watched the hurricane bite into the trees.
It spat out the branches and foliage like bones from a carnivore enjoying ribs.
Austin held up a hand and deflected one chunk of tree the same size as him from hitting Lord Rosemont.
His maker continued, unbothered by the howling winds or the cutting rain.
In no time, they stood an arm’s length from the fence.
Lightning tore through the sky, showing off the dark, mysterious aura wrapped around the man.
It still gave Austin a strange uneasy feeling in his stomach.
“Hello stranger,” Sebastian bellowed over the storm. “Can I help you? It seems to be a terrible time to try and sell me snake oil.”
The man, with all his hair stuck to his head and lashes heavy with droplets, sneered. “Foul abomination, I’ve come to collect the monster you’ve been harboring.”
Austin shifted forward but Sebastian put an arm out, halting him in his tracks. The cleric flipped his cloak over his shoulder to expose his chest. A golden, gleaming set of light armor. He pulled a short sword from his hip and leveled it at the fence.
“You’re not here to simply try and burn my home to the ground, then?
” Sebastian asked above the booming thunder that shook more of the forest loose.
The storm roared louder, ripping up something far more embedded in the ground than a random tree.
Austin heard its steady cracking until the old tower, a hidden gem within the forest, was torn from its cemented roots.
The cracked stone building was now the hurricane’s toy.
Austin twisted slightly, bracing for having to punch away a stone wall.
“You and your ilk will burn, don’t you worry.” The cleric’s sword glowed brighter, his blade igniting with pearlescent flames. Rain hissed upon touching it. Steam lifted around the cleric, giving him an eerie glow. “But I’m only here for her.”
“For who?” Sebastian asked.
Austin was prepared for him to say Dahlia.
She was The Hungry One, a goddess of madness and untold knowledge.
Or there was Melody, the guard dog of the Nightmare Realm, an immortal creature tethered to Persephone, another goddess.
Or even Agatha, a banshee who’d stayed in the land of the living even when most would pass on into the afterlife.
“The dead fae girl. Or, at least, she ought to have been dead if you and your disgusting bodyguard hadn’t interfered, I would have seen to it that her corpse was ash and her essence purified by His holy magic.
” The cleric swung at the fence and was immediately rebuffed.
His boots dug trenches into the soggy earth as the rain doubled.
Fat buckets of water were poured over their heads.
The wind shifted, and suddenly the storm was headed back toward them.
Yet the cleric was unbothered about the deadliest storm Austin had seen in a millennium creeping up behind him.
Austin did, however, see red. It painted the slate gray sky, turning it into a bloody mess. It dripped down, poisoning the rain till they were all painted in it. He pushed past Sebastian’s hand to the fence. “You killed her!”