by Aja James
Ramses was not fond of this type of travel, to put it mildly.
I can’t fly for long with both of you, however, Rhys admitted what Ramses had already gleaned, and certainly not if he comes after us. He’ll just make me lose my wings again anyway. But I can get you down the mountain safely.
Ramses acknowledged the information with a brief nod and gritted his teeth. Both Rhys and he weren’t in the best shapes. Rhys, from flying for so long at top speed with a heavy load; he, from his multitude of unhealed wounds. If the Eagle King pursued them, none of them would be a match for him.
Though Ramses had wounded the other warrior in the Challenge as well, none of them were as serious as the ones he inflicted when Ramses’ focus had been shattered upon recognizing who he was. Moreover, if he was indeed the Eagle King, he was one of the three most powerful Beasts. His physical strength and stamina exceeded all other Kinds.
But no matter what it took, Ramses wouldn’t let him or anyone else take Eveline again. He was going to keep her safe if it killed him. They had a Contract, after all. She was his to protect for the duration of it.
Brace yourself.
Suddenly, the steep, jagged side of the mountain reared up at them at a staggering velocity, as if they were about to smack right into it.
“What—”
Before Eveline could finish her startled exclamation at their unexpected arrival in the mouth of the small cave, Rhys released Ramses from his talons as he shifted into humanoid form and dropped to all fours on the landing.
Ramses did the same just a couple feet from Eveline, and slowly straightened to his full height. The crash landing had jostled his already aching bones, but he wasn’t about to let the pain show.
Immediately, she came to him, her small hands seemingly everywhere at once.
“You’re covered in blood! Where are you hurt? What can I do? Why haven’t your wounds closed already?”
Ramses grasped her hands to keep them still while Rhys muttered sarcastically from behind him, “Not to worry, folks, I’m fine. Just flew over two thousand miles with a deadweight vampire who seems to be made out of stone, but no biggie. I’m solid.”
Eveline craned her head around Ramses’ shoulder and said to Rhys, “Oh, hi there. Didn’t see you at first. Thanks a bunch for coming after me.”
Rhys said something beneath his breath with a roll of his eyes while Eveline focused back on Ramses.
She seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but as he stood there staring down at her, her hands still gripped tightly in his, all words fled his mind.
Gods! Had he ever seen anything or anyone as beautiful as the female before him? With dirt-smudged cheeks, a disheveled halo of auburn hair, plump red lips and overly large blue-gray eyes.
And freckles. Like shots of sunlight through a canopy of dappled forest leaves.
He was dazed and drunk on her small, fairy-sized loveliness.
“Ramses…?”
Her questioning tone indicated that perhaps he should say something, instead of standing there rooted to the ground like a stone statue.
But he couldn’t. He was frozen. He had no words. He had no thoughts. And even if he did, he couldn’t hear his own mind for the roar of hot blood rushing through his veins like tidal waves. Crashing against the cliffs of his eardrums to the beat of one primal vow:
Mine.
“Shit, I hate to rush this happy reunion, but we have to go. He’s headed this way. I can feel it.”
Spurred into action by Rhys’ words, Ramses grabbed hold of Eveline and started tugging her away.
“Wait!” she cried, digging her heels in. “Can’t we have a civilized conversation with eagle-man? I think he needs our help. Or he needs something in any case…”
“Like our heads on pikes, maybe,” Rhys supplied, his body already tensed for battle.
“We go,” Ramses commanded in a low growl, reduced to his most primitive mode. “Now.”
Accurately assessing that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, Eveline acquiesced.
“All right, but let me get my backpack.”
Hurriedly, she shoved all her things inside, including the mysterious scroll with flaming words, and barely got it strapped on before Ramses grabbed her bodily and literally tossed her toward Rhys like a sack of rice.
She squeaked as one giant eagle talon clawed into the backpack, while the other one reached for Ramses.
With backward flapping wings, Rhys hurled them off the side of the mountain in a deadly freefall. Mid descent, he rolled in the air until he was plummeting down head first, his wings tucked aerodynamically behind him, close to his body, his claws holding his two riders close to his feathered belly. Like a bullet, all three of them shot through the air.
Down, down, down, they went, gathering velocity the closer they got to the ground.
He’s closing in on our location, Rhys communicated to Ramses. I can’t carry you both and out-fly him.
Drop us off where you can, Ramses said. Then pointed to the mouth of a cavern close to the bottom of the mountain.
There. That entrance leads to the other side of the mountain, into the forest, where we’ll have cover.
How do you know?
I can feel it. The crevices and hollows of the mountain, Ramses answered brusquely. The earth is a part of me.
The Golden Eagle looked down at him, clearly impressed, and his beak curled as if smiling.
Groovy.
Then, he was all business again.
After I leave you, I will try to head him off. Probably won’t be able to buy you much time, but I’ll do what I can. Sucks that he can command me with a thought though. Even the Tiger King couldn’t do that to Beasts of Air.
Ramses nodded his gratitude. He knew that Rhys’ choice to stay loyal to him was not an easy one. Unlike other Kinds, those Gifted with animal spirits were biologically compelled to obey their rulers. Even though Rhys was a Lesser Beast, the instinct to obey his alpha was no less resistible.
Suddenly, the eagle’s wings shot out from his sides, seemingly pulling them up when all he did was slow their downward momentum. Twenty feet from the ground, at the mouth of the cave, he flapped his giant wings, hovering like a helicopter while Ramses pulled Eveline into his arms just as Rhys’ talons released them.
Hurry, Rhys urged. He’s less than thirty miles away.
With that, the giant eagle flapped his wings to scale the skies again, letting out a shrill, ringing shriek.
On the ground, Ramses pulled Eveline to her feet and ran—
Into the dark, restless bowels of the volcano.
*** *** *** ***
After about a mile and a half of full-speed sprinting, Eveline’s stitch in the side forced her to come to an abrupt stop.
“I can’t…” she wheezed, “have to…”
She put her hands on her knees to keep them locked, and hunched over to catch her breath.
She wasn’t a female made for strenuous exertions! She had no muscles on her anywhere. She was all soft and giggly and not in the good sort of way. Of all physical activities, running was perhaps her least favorite.
Ramses didn’t say anything as he stalked over to her, heaved her over his shoulder, and started running again. But from her position dangling halfway down his back, Eveline could see blood oozing from his wounds through his clothes; she could hear his labored breathing from both pain and exhaustion.
“Stop! Put me down! You’re hurt, you can’t keep this up. Please—”
And that was when Ramses involuntarily went down on one knee mid stride, allowing Eveline to scramble down from him.
He’d finally run out of strength.
“Where are you hurt? How can I help?”
She immediately put her hands on him, gently searching.
They were almost eye-level with her standing and him kneeling on one leg, he was that much bigger than her.
Her wounded warrior.
A wash of hot tears burned at the back of
Eveline’s throat. She felt awful that he’s hurt. Irrationally, it made her want to bawl like a baby.
He pushed her hands away and gritted out, “Go.”
“Like hell!” she practically shouted in his face. The stubborn male was daft if he thought she was leaving him like this.
“Go,” he growled through clenched teeth.
“Don’t make me madder,” she warned him, getting madder anyway, “you’re not going to like the consequences.”
Weakly, he pushed at her again, only managing to make her stumble a small step back, showing just how far gone he was.
She came to stand before him again, her hands on his neck, where the wounds from eagle talons still oozed blood.
It had been many hours since the Challenge. His wounds should have started healing, or at least closed off the bleeding. Why was he so weak?
Heal him, Angel of fire. Heal him when he comes for you.
Take him!
And it came to her like a flash of light: Dark Ones needed blood. She was his Blood Contract. Ergo, he needed her blood to heal.
Forget the Angel of fire nonsense, Eveline thought. She didn’t know what that meant. But she did have what he needed coursing through her veins. Whereupon she thrust her wrist against his mouth hard enough to scrape the fine, tender skin against the edges of his teeth.
“Here,” she offered. “Time to feed. And don’t argue with me if you know what’s good for you. You know it’s the logical thing to do. My blood will make you stronger. Then, you can carry both of us out of here if you want. I’ll be happy to go along for the ride.”
For a brief moment, he stared into her eyes, poised on the precipice of some internal struggle.
And then, without warning, he struck, as fast as a viper. His fangs searing into her flesh, his hot mouth pulling roughly on her vein.
Eveline staggered and gasped from the force of his feeding, but he held her tightly to him with steel-like arms. A predator subduing his prey. His uncontrolled bloodlust giving him desperate strength.
This wasn’t like the gentle feedings she’d experienced with him before, most of the time only felt in her dreams. This was a ravenous, frantic, wide-awake gorging of blood. The initial penetration of his dagger-like fangs hadn’t been the most pleasant sensation, but the moment his saliva entered her veins, Eveline felt nothing but pure, undiluted ecstasy.
He’d fallen back on both knees, clutching her body to him.
Dazedly, she felt him pull out of her wrist and lick the wounds closed. He sat back and pulled her with him to straddle his lap. Like a man starved, he half kissed, half nipped his way up her bare arm, past her shoulder to her neck, where he nuzzled deeply, inhaling her scent in great, shuddering gulps.
“Ramses…” she murmured, his venom shooting through her veins like lightning bolts of raw desire.
“Alend,” he rasped in a voice so deep and husky, her sex clenched reflexively with anticipation and need.
“My name is Alend. Say it.”
“Ah-lahnd,” she whispered shyly, pronouncing it the way he did, and felt him shudder against her.
He licked along the length of her throat and sucked the skin over her jugular vein urgently, hard enough to leave a bruise for hours after the fact.
And then, slowly this time, he entered her flesh with his elongated fangs, letting her revel in the burning pain-pleasure of his penetration.
“Alend…” she gasped again, her pulse jumping wildly, her heart pumping furiously to push more blood through her veins, as if her body was as desperate to provide nourishment to him as he was desperate to take from her.
He drank from her in long, steady, heady gulps, his arms tight around her, his body a hot, muscular prison from which she never wanted to escape.
“Please…” she begged deliriously, even though she didn’t know what she was asking for.
She just wanted.
She needed.
She burned.
Deftly, he shifted beneath her, doing something magical with his hands.
And then, he was there. Right there at her naked core.
Eveline moaned with abandon as his fangs sank even deeper into her throat, as he undulated against her lower body with his, sliding the hot, steely, satiny thick length of him against her weeping wet sex.
The engorged head rubbed against her pearl with each slow thrust, making her shudder and quake all over like a tuning fork repeatedly hit with a rubber hammer, each strike more resounding than the last, making endless ripples of pleasure cascade throughout her body to the tip of every extremity.
And he wasn’t even inside her yet!
“Want you…please…” she begged incoherently. “Want you so bad…never…I’ve never…”
Suddenly, he pulled back from her, his fangs disengaging from her throat, and he efficiently licked her wounds closed.
Eveline made a gurgled sound of desperation and loss.
Come back! She shouted in her mind. She needed him inside! Any way she could get him.
“Eveline.”
Mindlessly, she tried to wriggle closer, her open core dripping her juices against his naked cock, primitively marking him as hers as she ground down upon him. She wanted to mark him everywhere.
Mine!
“Eveline.”
She rubbed the swollen lips of her sex against his thick steel, the silky friction mind-numbing with how good it felt. Her inner muscles clenched with anticipation and hunger, needing him inside. Need him to obliterate her emptiness.
Only him.
Only Ramses.
Strong fingers gripped her chin gently, forcing her to meet his eyes, even though she continued to grind against him, shivering all over, already on the verge of the most cataclysmic orgasm of her life.
“Look at me when you take me,” his chocolate-sin voice rumbled.
“Feel me when I take you.”
Fervently, she nodded.
Whatever he wanted. She’d consent to anything and everything. Just please, Goddess!
Come the fuck inside!
As if he heard her command, his obsidian eyes glinted savagely as he snapped his hips with unerring force. And filled her thoroughly from root to tip in—
One. Long. Searing. Thrust.
Mercy! But he was quite ridiculously overwhelming!
Eveline had the fleeting thought that she should have perhaps captured measurements before begging to be impaled upon his King Kong cock; she was sure she felt him all the way in her throat!
But her most prominent thought was that this feeling of extreme fullness, the heat and hardness of him inside her, his drugging scent permeating the air all around her—this was what she’d been missing all her existence.
She knew in the depths of her soul that she’d never feel it with anyone else but Ramses.
“With his surrender, the sacrifice is made. Death is near and Darkness surrounds, as the race’s Adversary raises its blade…”
—From the Zodiac Prophesies
Chapter Fifteen
Mine.
It was the only thought in Ramses’ mind.
In his heart. His soul.
When he entered her veins for the very first time with his fangs the night they’d met, he heard it then. One whispered word that warmed his blood in ways he’d never felt before. He heard it again every time he’d taken her vein since then. The sound of it growing louder, more insistent, more difficult to ignore.
But he still ignored it.
Now, when he penetrated her with his maleness, locking them together so tightly they were truly one and the same, yet still so starkly female and male, two distinct but inseparable halves of a whole, the word roared through him in an explosive conflagration:
MINE!
Something irrevocable and absolute locked into place within him. Something he’d never felt and never realized he’d been searching for. Endlessly searching. But he’d never had it with Ashlu. And he’d quashed all desire for it since his ill-fated Dark-Mate.
/>
After all these millennia, Eveline found him. Though she, too, hadn’t been searching. They’d found each other.
They’d come home.
He didn’t know all the ins and outs of what this meant. He didn’t know if this was “love” in all its undefinable forms. He thought he felt it once upon a time, but he knew now that it had been a destructive obsession. Loneliness. Dependence. Desperation for a place of belonging.
But one thing Ramses did know, in this moment, with everything he was, that he’d never, ever, let Eveline go.
He held her tightly against him with one arm behind her back, and cupped her head to hold her where he wanted her with his other hand. He stared intensely into her dilated blue-gray eyes, darkened to slate with undiluted passion, as he slowly undulated beneath her, pulling out almost to the tip before surging powerfully back inside until he was balls deep again, ramming home with a bone-jarring, muscle-melting jolt.
“Mine,” he growled, barely moving his lips, his eyes unblinkingly spearing into hers.
She gasped and shuddered in time with each of his slow, deep, impossibly deep thrusts, her eyes glazing over with mindless pleasure.
But she still had the wherewithal to grab his hips with her small, firm hands and pull him with surprising force back into her as he retreated again.
“Mine,” she said, not as an echo of his Claim on her, but clearly making a demand of her own.
Involuntarily, he shuddered at her possession, feeling it change him totally from the inside out, as if he were being reborn.
But she wasn’t done, apparently, because she continued her stuttered, impassioned speech:
“Don’t even…think…I’ll put a curse on anyone…”
He focused on picking up the pace of his thrusts while she struggled with words, the euphoric pleasure he gave her making her nearly incoherent. Not that it stopped her from making her thoughts known.
“…Curse them! If anyone touches you…mmph…” she paused to groan deeply when he angled his hips just right and turned all of her insides into one continuous orgasmic tunnel, until every nerve ending buzzed with ecstasy.
