Chapter 8 #2
He didn’t raise his tone, but Anayla’s eyes widened. Maura froze, then smoothed her expression back into its usual stoic mask. There was a brief flicker of unease in her gaze before she turned it on me, hard and angry, as if it were my fault I’d glimpsed the crack between them.
“My apologies,” she said lightly, though everyone could tell how rarely those words passed her lips.
Fieran studied her, silent and steady.
Then Maura turned to me. “I’m sorry, Cara.”
The sound of my name on her tongue startled me. Fear might have forced an apology from her, but it must seem as ridiculous to her as apologizing to a broomstick.
“It’s no trouble,” I murmured, but she was already striding away, leaving me to speak to her back. She and Fieran exchanged a look before she trudged off into the shadows.
“Don’t mind her,” Fieran said quietly. “She isn’t as mean as she seems. New faces are difficult for her. She barely trusts us.”
I only nodded. Maybe I wasn’t much different. Reserved, cautious, careful with my limited energy. I wasn’t sure I wanted to open my heart to anyone beyond the few already settled inside it.
And yet…around Fieran, I felt an ache. A longing to be absorbed into the warmth of his band, even knowing it could only be for tonight. Tomorrow they would move on without me.
“Well, she won’t have to see my face for long,” I said, attempting levity. Fieran frowned, as if he meant to argue, so I hurried on. “Show me how we finish setting the trap. Is it something I can help with as a mortal?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted.
“You’ve never worked with a mortal before?” I didn’t want to sound like a dog trailing at his heels, or worse, a servant.
He caught my sleeve and tugged me along gently. “We rarely make friends with the villagers. It’s harder to convince them to trust their saviors once they realize we have the same faults and failures, no matter how much magic we carry.”
The thought struck me strangely deep. He had let me in when no one else had. “Tell me some of those faults.”
His mouth quirked, an amused exhale escaping him. “And then will you tell me yours?”
“I’ll tell you mine now,” I said quickly, almost patly, though it was true enough—I’d spent too many nights turning them over in bed. “I’m self-centered. Stubborn. I say the wrong thing more often than not.”
“What makes you so sure they’re the wrong things?”
I let out a small laugh. “The way people react. Now, your turn.”
“I’m not sure I believe yours,” he said. “Except for the stubborn part. That, I saw for myself.”
A roar rumbled through the distance, shaking the ground beneath my feet. “Are you worried about your friends?”
“Not in the slightest. We’ve been together a long time.”
The words formed a wall between us, one more barrier I would never be able to cross.
He stopped abruptly. “I’ll show you how we shape the rune.”
The rip pulsed behind us, alive, a steady hum in the air. The shifters said dragon senses made it unbearable, but was I supposed to feel it so keenly too? My skin prickled, a shiver tracing down my spine. I wouldn’t rest until it was sealed.
Fieran drew his knife and pressed it to the stone, muttering a few words in an unfamiliar tongue. Golden sparks flared where the blade cut, runes shaping themselves under his steady hands. His hands looked far older than his face, broad and calloused and scarred.
I wondered what Fieran really felt. If he felt as tired inside, as worn down, as his hands suggested he might.
It still felt there was a wall between us.
I stared in fascination as the chipped-away stone left behind a shining golden mark.
“To answer your question. My faults are many and varied. It depends on where we are. They’re different out here, with my friends, than on the training grounds with shifters.
There I’ve cultivated a reputation where the other clans stumble over themselves to get out of my way because they see me as so merciless. ”
Merciless? That was quite the word. “Merciless toward whom?”
He let out a faint huff of a laugh instead of answering. “My faults are different in the Fae Court, where I lie and manipulate for the sake of a cause, and where, if I fail, I’ll be remembered as a monster.”
His voice was calm, matter-of-fact. But I wondered if he had stayed awake as heavy-hearted as I had over my own faults.
“It sounds as if you have three different faces,” I told him, and then winced. “I told you one of my faults was that I never say the right thing.”
But he grinned. “At least all three of my faces are handsome.”
“You think rather highly of yourself, don’t you?” My voice was teasing, but I worried I’d struck the wrong note.
He scoffed. “I’m neither blind nor given to false humility. Are you?”
Lidi had helpfully pointed out that morning I had an expansive new outbreak of acne, as if the wyrm spit had been bad for my skin.
“False humility? I think you forget that I’m mortal.” I didn’t want him to pretend that he found me attractive. I could believe that he found me novel, brave—little mortal—and I would make do. “Give me the knife and tell me where to chisel. Then I can help you set the rest of the traps.”
He turned the blade to himself as he handed it over, but he was still gripping the hilt, so my fingers overlapped his. The sparks felt as if they were on my skin now, instead of in the still-smoking, still magical golden glow of the rune.
I should have pulled back. Instead, I lingered. Then I came back to life, embarrassed—not because I wanted to touch him, because who would not? But for the first time in my life, I felt an impulse for more than touch, for more than one night. I really did want to linger.
He leaned in to guide my hand across the stone.
“Like this,” he murmured, the words grazing the edge of my mouth.
I turned—just slightly—and the space between us vanished.
His lips caught mine, firm and heated, as if he’d been waiting too long to resist.
The world narrowed to the press of his mouth and the way his hand slid from the knife to the nape of my neck, holding me close. Fire flared low in my belly, fierce and unexpected. The rip hummed, the rune glowed, but all I could feel was his urgent mouth against mine.
His mouth coaxed mine open, and I yielded to him, pressing into him with hunger that surprised me. His tongue stroked into my mouth, and my fingers tangled in his collar, my hips pressing his.
Somehow, despite how much greater his height was than mine, he formed himself to me, edging his leg between my thighs, lowering his head as he kissed me mad, until it felt as if there was no part on my body that wasn’t dominated by him.
I tore myself away from him with a sudden, wild surge of effort. It was as difficult as forcing myself below water while my lungs burned. All I wanted for myself in that moment was Fieran’s mouth against mine, his hands on my skin.
Fieran’s eyes burned, fixed on me as though he’d just uncovered a secret he meant to keep. I had just as many secrets to keep, and no reason to trust—let alone kiss—this dragon shifter.
“Now what?” I asked, my voice embarrassingly breathless. “With the runes?”
“Once we’ve placed the last rune to make the shape of the trap, we have to say the words to ignite it.” He repeated a few words to me, and my tongue tripped, trying to repeat them. His lips tugged in a faint smile.
“I don’t know that language,” I said, as if that weren’t obvious.
“It’s the dragons’ language. They might be gone, unless they can access this plane by sharing the body of a shifter, but there are still traces of their magic.”
“I’ve never learned anything about that,” I said.
“Why should you?” His hand slipped from mine, and I felt as if I’d stumbled. I was coming too close to revealing secrets to him that no one could ever know.
But he was merely turning away to another rock.
He lifted it easily, holding it between us, as if to keep himself from kissing me again.
To him, it seemed to weigh nothing, but I knew if I’d wrestled that stone out of our fields, I’d have needed a long soak in the tub and at least two nights without Lidi kicking me in the back to recover.
“Draw the rune for me,” he said.
I glanced at the other rock to review the shape, then took a step forward. It felt intimately close to him as he held the stone against his equally rock-solid torso. He might as well have been one of the statues of the gods in the temple.
“For you?” I teased as I dug the blade into the rock. “I’m doing this for my village.”
“Of course,” he said, as if he knew one of my faults was lying, and as if another of my faults was being terrible at lying.
When the rune was done, his eyes lit in genuine delight, his lips curving at the edges. “Well done. Feel free to tell Maura you’re a quicker study than she is if she refers to you as any kind of cleaning tool.”
I was grinning at him when he leaned forward and kissed me again, the rock still held between us. I felt it press against my stomach, but barely registered it as his hand slid up my shoulder, my neck, igniting sparks.
His lips were soft against mine, his mouth greedy and sure. When his tongue teased into my mouth, my body seemed to turn to liquid heat against his, my knees weakening. He kissed me like I’d never been kissed before.
This time, he was the one who pulled away first, but barely. He rested his forehead against mine, and for the first time, this powerful, unstoppable man looked as if he were trying to catch his breath.
“Let’s place this last stone, set the trap, and go back to the inn,” he murmured.
“After we check on your friends?” I teased him.
“Sure,” he said, his thumb teasing over the edge of my jaw.
I resisted the impulse to turn my face into his hand, to seek more contact with him. That rock between us might be the only thing to keep my last rags of respectability intact.
Not that I wanted them, at the moment.
The two of us walked through the forest—he must have some internal compass, because I was hopelessly turned around now that I couldn’t feel the slant of the ground or see it through the dense trees—and he stopped to place the stone.
“Now—” he began, but he broke off.
There was a crack overhead, loud as thunder, and he yanked me in his arms, drawing me tight to his body as he turned. He ducked out of the way as a branch crashed down in the place where we’d just been.
Up in the treetops, an enormous bird was swooping down toward us again.
“Griffin. We must be near the nest,” he managed to sound as relaxed as ever. “Stay out of the way.”
Branches shattered overhead as the griffin dove in a blur of claws and dark feathers and murderous intent. I breathed in as if I were about to scream, but it didn’t leave my throat.
He raced away from me, sheathing his sword onto his back—it glowed gold for a split second, then disappeared—and leapt into the air.
The griffin’s gleaming eyes were on me—and then Fieran was between us, and the monster’s attention was owned solely by Fieran.
For one breathless heartbeat, he hung suspended between earth and sky. The world seemed to pause around him.
Shadows glittered around him, dark and metallic, like magic being forged and shattered all at once. For a second, his form was obscured by the shadows.
Then the shadows shattered into wings, into a head that thrust itself upward, into a tail that whipped out like a lash.
His dragon form was huge, a shadow hanging over me, rising steadily to meet the griffin.
I had never felt so small and awed in my life as I did when he struck the griffin, their battle ranging across the sky, blocking out the moon.