Chapter 44
THRALL
FELíNE STOOD MOTIONLESS AS A pillar of stone. Her leather-clad feet were braced shoulder-width apart. Kal’s head was next to hers, his muscled arms guiding hers on the crossbow she held tucked into one shoulder. His warm breath tickled her ear.
“Easy,” he murmured. “Eyes open. See there? Follow the line of the shaft.”
She swallowed. Shaft. Right. Easy.
“Good girl. Now release.”
The mental image accompanying Kal’s last word, coupled with his silky praise, had Felíne’s finger jerking on the trigger. The arrow flew wild.
Kal stepped back, one eyebrow cocked.
Cocked.
Goddess preserve her.
“Alright,” he said. “Tell me.”
Not a chance. It was the third time in the past two hours that Kal had asked what she was thinking. Twice since they’d arrived in the glen to test and hopefully improve Felíne’s skills with the crossbow. She shook her head.
“It’s nothing,” she insisted. Again. “I just didn’t sleep well.” How could she? With such intrusive, pervasive, inappropriate—
“I don’t believe you,” he replied. “I know precisely how well you slept last night.”
Felíne’s eyes snapped to his. Did he? No. There was no way he could have known the thoroughly disheveled state of her unconscious mind mere hours before. Nor could he have suspected the rather…interesting role her sleeping psyche had assigned him. She swallowed again, remembering. Vividly.
A fresh wave of heat flooded her face.
“I’ll get the arrow,” Felíne mumbled, turning toward the brush at the edge of the glen.
“You’re distracted,” Kal called after her.
“You have no idea,” she muttered under her breath.
Last night, in her mind, Kal had been just as close as he’d been while helping her aim the crossbow. Closer. With distinctly less clothing. And he’d been guiding her through something else entirely.
Mercy. Memories of her lessons with Imogen must have mingled with visions of Kal and Felíne’s subconscious desires, resulting in the scintillating images that occupied her soporous brain.
Felíne snatched the arrow out of a low bramble.
She’d woken with a sheen of sweat coating her feverish skin and her blanket tangled between her legs.
Her breath had come in shaky pulls, her mind snared somewhere between a dream world and reality.
It had felt so real. Her skin tingled with the memory of Kal’s phantom fingers, his conjured kiss.
Felíne had been half wishing she could go back to sleep and half mortified that the object of her dreams might witness her emerging from them.
“Get a grip,” she chastised, trudging back.
She glanced up to find Kal watching her with new fascination.
“What are we gripping?”
Early morning light spilled through a break in the clouds and gilded his light brown skin, playing off the masculine angles of his face and his strong, relaxed posture. Felíne stared, mind going straight back to the proverbial gutter. Curse his acute senses.
“My sanity,” she replied tartly. She cleared her throat. “Did you find anything useful last night?” she asked, changing the subject as much to distract Kal as her relentless, thoroughly inappropriate imagination. He’d insisted upon spending another night perusing texts.
Kal soured. “Much of the same. I fell asleep reading something about reviving a lost soul by sacrificing a blood bond. Or maybe binding souls with a blood offering?” He shook his head, grimacing. “I don’t know. I can’t remember half of what I attempted to translate. None of it seemed useful.”
“Does that have anything to do with the obscene amount of liquor you consumed?” Felíne had found the discarded bottle lying next to him after she’d woken from her fever dream and gently shoved him awake.
Kal had lurched forward in a panic, gaze glassy and disoriented, the spicy smell of whiskey lingering in the air like a stubborn halo of intoxication.
Kal scratched at the stubble on the underside of his chin. “I overindulged a bit,” he admitted.
“A bit?” she scolded. “A horse would have been comatose after drinking as much as you did.”
His lips twitched. “You underestimate my stamina, dear Kitty.”
“Not after last night, I don’t,” she grumbled.
A wicked gleam lit the black of Kal’s irises with a spark of gold. “Oh?”
Alarm shot through her.
“My memory’s a bit fuzzy,” he said, stepping closer to her. “What feats of stamina did I display last night?”
Felíne stumbled. Alcohol. They were talking about alcohol. “Your tendency toward alcoholism,” she snapped, recovering. “And how unhealthy, and decidedly unhelpful, it is.”
“I don’t have a problem with drinking, Kitty,” he said, amused.
“Right.”
“Alcoholism is a dependency. I could easily go the rest of my life without consuming another drop.”
“Then prove it,” Felíne challenged.
Kal grinned. “I don’t think you want me to.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Kal’s hand shot out, snaking around Felíne’s waist and tugging her body against his. The air left her lungs on a startled exhale. Kal dipped his head close to hers, his mouth hovering mere inches from her lips.
“Because,” he whispered, breath mingling with hers. “You like the way I smell after drinking whiskey. You like the way I taste.”
“Dragon,” she reminded him. “Hot and foul.”
He chuckled, brushing the tip of his nose over hers.
“I don’t like you,” Felíne said with positively zero conviction.
He smiled wider. “Haven’t we established you’re a poor liar?”
She huffed. Kal laughed, planting a playful kiss on her lips. The sound was rich and wonderful, coaxing Felíne’s face to light without her permission.
“Who’s distracted now?” she teased. “You’re supposed to be teaching me how to shoot a crossbow.”
Kal released her but stayed close, as though his body was loath to relinquish her proximity.
Felíne wanted this. She wished she could spend the rest of her days in this glen with Kal, training skills she need never use.
Wished she could occupy her nights enticing her recent dreams into the waking world.
A wicked sliver of sadness struck her, burrowing deep.
They hadn’t found anything in the texts Kal had collected.
Felíne hadn’t thought they would, but she couldn’t deny the pang of disappointment that reverberated with the acknowledgment.
Her time here was coming to a close. She felt it in her spirit.
Kal watched her with knowing eyes, tracking the melancholy that stole over her. “Let’s take a break,” he said gently, attempting to pull her out of her internal spiral. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
Kal led Felíne deep into Stillwater Wood.
So deep, she wasn’t even sure they were still in Stillwater Wood.
The towering, verdant trees and varied plant life that sheltered Meress had given this section of forest over to their ancestors.
The flora here was ancient. The bilobas, redwoods, and puzzle trees were so gnarled with age that they no longer resembled their original forms. Roots tangled to build foundations for entirely new species.
Trunks hosted complete ecosystems. Limbs spread wildly, ensnaring unsuspecting neighbors.
This forest appeared wholly untouched by shurii.
The animals that made their homes here were strange and skittish, offering only glimpses of oddly patterned hides and wide, mysterious eyes.
“Kal,” Felíne whispered, following him closely. “Where are we going?”
“Into the past.”
It certainly felt that way. They weren’t following any discernible path.
There wasn’t one. If Felíne had been concerned about losing her way between Kal’s cabin and the glen where Kal trained, she was terrified now.
Here, she could wander for eons and never find her way out of this labyrinth of colossuses.
Felíne looked up into a ceiling of amber and green.
The plants were so tightly woven in some places that their boughs seemed to insulate the forest floor from sunlight entirely.
It was impossible to know what time it was without a visible sky.
When she asked, Kal seemed confident it was afternoon.
How he knew, she had no idea. Felíne did not possess whatever internal mechanism advised him.
So, she followed, trusting Kal’s instincts over her lack thereof.
Without warning, the mass of trees and spongy underbrush stopped.
The shadows cast by the dense treetops surrendered to a cheerful sun.
Kal led Felíne into a breathtaking clearing.
She looked around and was surprised to find the trees didn’t just stop.
Their imposing canopies almost appeared sheared off, as though they grew against an invisible barrier that forced their trajectories along its boundary.
Not a single wayward limb extended past the unseen line of demarcation.
The one she and Kal had heedlessly stepped over.
Ahead of them, waist-high grass swept forward, waving serenely like a pale green sea in the gentle breeze.
Beyond the grass, a large hill sloped upward, its flank dotted with blood red blossoms, disappearing into a high plateau.
Crumbling stones jutted from the hill’s base and flank, winding up and around in a jagged line.
The sound of water trickling punctuated the sighing of the wind, though Felíne couldn’t identify its source.
Strands of hair had been pulled loose from the low bun holding her mass of waves, and they blew into her face.
A sudden, unexpected chill swept through her.
Gooseflesh rose on her bare forearms. An ominous sensation settled upon her despite the picturesque landscape, an odd feeling of déjà vu.
Something had happened here. Something painful. Something wrong.
Felíne glanced again at the oddly growing trees that hemmed the glade. Whatever memories this clearing harbored, even the forest declined to intrude.
“What is this?”
Kal looked down at her, and she startled. He stood in first form, skin warm, expression calm. But his eyes were not the black of a midnight cove, offering Felíne the occasional twinkle of buried treasure. They were solid gold.
“I feel it, too,” he said in answer to her question. “My second form is restless here. It wants out.”
“It?”
He shrugged, grinning. The familiar gesture helped settle Felíne’s fraying nerves. “It’s not a separate entity,” Kal clarified. “I just mean I have this urge to shift. To run and roar and disappear into the wild. To give my humanity over to my instincts.”
Felíne gripped his hand tightly. “Please don’t do that.”
He squeezed back. “I won’t. Come on.”
“Kal,” she warned. “Are you sure…”
“Yes,” he replied, somehow intuiting what she did not say.
They made their way through the tall grass, Felíne trusting that Kal would sense any hidden threat long before it dragged her under the undulating stalks.
As they neared the hill, she realized the stones she’d spied protruding from its side were the weathered remains of a once enchanting stairway.
The steps looked older than the forest, their carved designs faded by time and neglect.
They crumbled now, but Felíne could tell they’d been intentionally, lovingly laid by whoever originally used them.
How long had they waited for another traveler’s curious soles?
A hundred years? Five hundred? She stepped onto the first wide lichen-covered stone.
A flash of what could have been a memory from another life ignited in her mind’s eye. Felíne saw an inhuman beauty. Flowing hair that glowed like the sun’s rays. A radiant smile. Moonbeam eyes. Delicate, pale fingers reaching back to grasp a huge, black, clawed hand.
She felt love. Knew love. So overwhelming, so complete, it stole her breath.
Before Felíne’s conscious mind could claw back to the present, her feet were climbing. She was being pulled. Compelled. Kal trailed her, his golden eyes transfixed, his large body shadowing each step.
They traveled the stone path, ascending and winding around one side.
A stream, the source of the trickling water Felíne had heard, cut through the hillside to join their trail in parallel.
Tiny, silvery fish darted through the water.
Reedy horsetails jutted from the bank alongside strange vermillion blooms. Lillies floated on the surface of the bubbling runnel.
A brilliantly speckled frog leapt into the shallows as they passed.
Kal stopped Felíne with a hand on her forearm. She glanced back, charmed.
The severity of his gilded gaze tempered some of her thrall.
“Felíne,” he breathed. Her lips parted at the sound of her name spoken in his rich timbre, but he wasn’t looking at her. “The brook.”
Felíne forced her eyes back to the stream. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“It’s going the wrong way.”
She frowned. Then gaped. He was right. The water should have been flowing downhill. It wasn’t. It was flowing up.
Impossible.
Felíne searched the path ahead of them. The stone stairway and the aberrant creek disappeared around a final bend. “Kalevar,” she asked, “what is up there?”
He turned wide, lambent eyes on her. “I don’t know. I’ve never been beyond the grass.”
She stared at him. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, brows wrinkling.
“I found this place years ago, after I built my cabin. But when I stepped into the clearing that first time, I felt an untamed sense of tranquility.” He gazed at her.
“It makes no sense, but that’s the best way I can explain it.
I felt wild, raw, and yet…utterly at peace. I had no desire to go any further.”
Felíne shuddered. “And today?”
An odd sense of wonder settled over Kal’s handsome features. “I wanted to be here with you. I don’t know why, but I need to see what’s up there.” Kal turned his attention forward. Upward. He retook her hand, and Felíne felt the gentle prick of claws. “I need you to be there with me.”
“Kal,” she whispered. “I’m afraid.”
Something inside Felíne felt conflicted.
She too wanted to reach the top of the hill.
To follow the unnatural stream and mournful stone steps to the crest of the plateau.
But something else, a quiet insistence, warned her that what she would find would hurt her.
Not physically, but a foreign, timid voice in the back of her mind cautioned her with words she was certain she’d never heard before.
The body may ache, but bodies will heal. Ruinous pain afflicts only the soul.
Felíne’s admission of fear broke the fragile trance that held Kal momentarily captive. His gleaming eyes grew fierce, focused. “You are mine to protect,” he said to her, the statement oddly formal. “Nothing will harm you while I am here. Not now. Not ever.”
She believed him.
They walked together up the final stretch of steps.