62
The Rebel Witch
Blair
I don’t think I’ve ever run faster—my rainbow hair flying wild behind me as I bolt down the path to the city, my night vision laying the way out easily.
When I arrive, the dwarf looks at me with one flaming-red eyebrow cocked. I present him the box, breathless from my sprint.
“A bomb to ruin me beautiful beard?”
“I’ll start to regret that it’s not a bomb, if you, little fucker, don’t open it now,” I snap.
He leans forward with a sigh before opening it. He looks at me, then back at the scale. “Took you a while, eh? Not the brightest witch out there, are you?”
“But the hungriest—and you look damn tasty,” I snarl. “I bet you’d make a fine roast once I plucked all that hair off you.”
“Crazy folk, are you?” he mutters under his beard, but gets up and disappears into an adjacent room that I know is sealed by magic. I can hear some sort of glamour humming, even from where I’m standing, so I guess that trying to follow him would scorch my lovely hide.
He returns with the necklace.
I snatch it from his grip and hold it against the light.
“Not trusting me, old lad?”
“Trusting that you’re as greedy for gold as I am for dwarfling meat,” I say.
The bastard laughs as if I made a damn joke. “It’s real. I kept it all that damn time.”
“Why?”
He strokes his beard a few times as I shove the necklace into my pocket. “You’re quite the skilled killer. The lads you took out for me were bad people, Miss Alaric. People who messed up a lot of lives.”
I shrug, thinking about the few elves he sent me to kill for him in exchange for gold and glamours. I’d gladly done it, because truth is—part of me always hungers for blood.
“I know. Did my research on them before I hunted them down for you. Made it cruel. But they had quite the potent magic in their blood too. Made a fine glamour.” I smirk at him, remembering how I’d carefully carved them up and drained them of their magic, making a few glamours for myself.
“Why are you so hot for dragon scale?” I ask.
He just looks at me for a very long time, as if he’s weighing whether to tell me or not.
Finally, he says, “Ground, it makes an untraceable poison. I’d have expected a witch would know that.
And I just ran out of it. You see, not hard to get these days, but the demand is higher than ever with all the new court scheming, aye. ”
He turns without another word and disappears again into the next room. He doesn’t return, and I honestly have different shit to do than care about his shady business.
***
I enter the temple, the scent and heavy smoke of burned myrtle immediately engulfing me as I stride through the night halls—empty and still.
Only the water stirs quietly in the large, steaming pools inside, the stars and the moon reflected on their mirrored surfaces as the temple’s roof lies open to the elements.
I walk straight to Meanara’s barren room, only to find it vacant. I touch her bed—it’s cold. So she hasn’t yet been here. What is the woman up to?
Well, I can easily imagine her dancing naked in the woods at night, performing some weird rites when it’s almost full moon. And fine, maybe I pleasure myself from time to time to those fantasies.
I snap out of it and resist the need to snoop when I glance at her desk.
Instead, I really look around, taking in the tiny space.
What a shitty, barren, simple room for the great healer of Avandal.
There’s a narrow bed, a wardrobe, a desk.
Honestly, why? She’s world-famous—surely, she could live better than this.
I quickly lie down on her bed—really, just because I can—and damn me, even the mattress is shit. How can anyone sleep on something like that?
I get back up and stalk out, meaning to search the woods behind the temple, when my nose catches her elusive scent.
I trail it down a corridor to the bathing chamber.
A natural pool lies at its center, the room opening into a circle of columns hewn from the stone itself.
And there, amid the rising steam, is she.
My heart stops when I find her sitting in the pool, moonlight spilling across her and making her skin glow silver.
Her head rests against the edge of the basin, eyes closed, hair drifting around her in the water like pale strands of silk.
My gaze catches on her lips—those perfect, slightly flushed lips, parted just so. And then the rest of her…
The water is translucent. She sits utterly unguarded, the soft ripples betraying the movements of her hand as she touches herself.
She opens her eyes and freezes when she sees me standing there.
We stare at each other for a long moment, silence thick as incense between us.
“Thinking about me?” I smirk, not really believing that.
She just watches me with those strange, blush eyes. But when she lifts her head out of the water and sits up straight, I finally notice the horns—beautiful ones, spiraling up from her head like an antelope’s. Her skin has a grayish, pearly sheen, most unusual for any fae. And—
“Is that a tail?” I ask before I can help it.
Behind her, half-visible above the water, a strong tail moves—very much like Aris’s. Looking closer, I spot silvery markings scattered across her skin—not true scales, but faint, glimmering patterns, like the ghosts of tattoos.
She doesn’t speak.
But I drink her in—every strange, breathtaking inch of her.
“What kind of creature are you?” I ask at last.
“I’m…hellborn,” she admits, her blush-pink gaze dropping to the water.
I take in the sharp line of her collarbones. They don’t sit gently beneath her skin like most people’s do. They rise sharp and pronounced, elegant crescents that cast delicate shadows, like the beginnings of folded wings.
Her waist narrows sharply, her hips delicate and angular, the bones there just slightly pronounced beneath her pearl skin, her ribs faintly traced in silvered shadow.
And then there are the marks.
Those strange, symmetrical knobs.
Small, raised points that run in deliberate lines beneath her skin, starting just under her throat and trailing downward along the center of her sternum.
They catch the light differently than the rest of her body—tiny, pale ridges, like beads or the subtle studs of bone or cartilage embedded beneath the surface.
I just stare, utterly transfixed by her otherworldly beauty. She still has her gods-damned legs parted, and I can see a phallic-shaped stone buried inside her. Abyss….
Her tail flicks once when I step closer.
And damn, what that does to me. I cannot think. I cannot do anything other than step into the water. My leathers get drenched, but I don’t care.
I cross the pool and realize that she’s shivering.
“Don’t move,” I order her when she goes to close her legs. My heart starts pounding, blood rushing in my ears the same way it did when I first rode my wyvern—and never since, not once, even though I’m over a hundred years old now.
My eyes go to her lips, wet with water, glistening like sugar and syrup. I guess that the taste will be like that too.
“Let me take care of you tonight,” I murmur when I’ve reached her. A kind of desperation in my voice. In my bones.
I lift my hands between us and retract my claws for her to see. They shift back, melting into my skin, leaving me strangely bare, vulnerable. Witches never retract their claws unless…well….
I’ve never retraced my claws when I was with someone else. Not even for Caryan.
But right now, here, with her, it’s the only logical thing to do. The most natural thing to do. But strangely enough, even fully clad in my leathers, I feel more naked than ever.
Her eyes trace my hands with my claws gone, and I bring my thumb to her perfect, luminous mouth.
Her gaze flicks to mine. I wet my lips, tracing her bottom lip, feeling her heat, the moisture there.
I draw in a sharp breath between my teeth when she starts sucking at my thumb.
Gods help me, the sensation almost drags a moan from my throat.
Her wide, pink eyes are on me when I trace my other hand over those strange ribs of hers. Trailing the intricate pattern of her ribs, ending in those pearls under her skin.
“So fucking beautiful,” I breathe in awe, as I brush my hands down her sharp collarbones to her absolutely stunning breasts.
Abyss, I swear she’s got the most damn beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen.
They’re round and full, glistening with that unusual, pearlescent, silver-gray complexion of hers.
Only her nipples are pink, the same color as her lips.
Her breath hitches when I trace my thumb over one of them. I let my hand slide down, over her flat belly and down to where that damn stone is lodged inside her.
She gasps, and the tiniest sound escapes her lips when I touch it. It’s warm from her body and slippery soft. Slick with her and water.
I gently pull it out halfway, feeling its size. It’s three fingers wide, as long as my hand and made from polished rose quartz.
“This is how you spend your nights, healer?” I ask huskily, moving the stone in and out of her torturously slowly.
“Don’t call me that. Tonight, I’m not a healer. Tonight, I wish to be anything else but a healer.”
“So—what are you then?”
“Whatever you want me to be,” she breathes, and fuck, that turns me on.
“Then turn around,” I order.
For a brief second, fear flickers in her eyes. The good kind of fear. Still, she obeys, offering me her perfect butt with that amazing, thick tail coming straight out of her lower back. It’s strong, becoming thinner at the end, and graced with an arrow-shaped tip that reminds me of a dragon-tail.
Again, I just stare.
Her spine forms a visible ridge down the center of her back, each vertebra faintly outlined, catching the moonlight one by one like a string of tiny pearls beneath her skin. The same subtle knobs trace that path too, running along her spine in a perfect, deliberate line.
They make her silhouette look sharper. Wilder.