by Jamie Magee
He ate too, even though River knew he really didn’t have the need to anymore. They would catch each other’s glance and blush. His legs were tangled with hers and every time they moved she felt a flame ripple through her.
She ate like it was her last meal. There was nothing left by the time it was all said and done.
“There’s dessert, too,” he said ducking his head to look at the second shelf of the cart.
“I had my dessert, first,” she said slyly.
“Kinda flipped this night around didn’t we,” he said with a shy laugh. “I planned to ease into us,” he said with a glance down her body. She was in another cami, but it wasn’t made of silk. He pursed his lips “I know Gavin was only here for business, but I could not handle the sight of him that close to you, not in a private room.”
“So that was all primal?” River asked with an arched brow. She wasn’t too sure how she would feel if that were true.
“Nope. Just gave me nerve,” he said as he reached for her hand and let his lips settle there.
“You’ve never needed nerve. Shy is not in your vocab.”
“When it comes to you it is,” he said with an audacious smirk. “You’ve always made me nervous.”
“Thanks a lot,” she said trying to hold in a laugh but failing.
He laughed out loud. “A good nervous, like I don’t want to mess this up, like I want to remember it forever and I want that memory to be perfect….” His eyes met hers. “I meant what I said.” His fingers reached for her hand and as he laced his through hers, he spoke. “You’re my air. I can’t breathe without you. I haven’t breathed since I left you. I love you, River. I could never love another girl the way I love you...let me in again and I promise to never allow you to doubt how precious you are to me.”
The note. The one they hadn’t talked about. The one River only vaguely referenced before they lost themselves tonight. “I wanted to read that letter before today.”
He bit his bottom lip. “I wanted to give it to you before today.” He shook his head. “At first I didn’t send it because you needed time. Then...then I didn’t send it because I knew you’d moved on.”
River furrowed her brow to question him.
“I had friends outside of Soren and you guys down there. I kept tabs.”
“And you should know that we know how to put on a front,” she said defensively.
“I didn’t think that front would be dating.”
All River could do was stare at him. She only vaguely dated one boy between him and Dagen. And that was all for show. The thing is, if Mason had spoken up, she would have never gone down the road she did with Dagen. That was bittersweet knowledge.
“It was. If I looked strong, no one worried about me.”
“I did.” He squeezed her hand. “I don’t want you to go back to New Orleans.”
“I have to, at some point.”
“Maybe we can just fly back and forth.” Mason was sure that each day that went by he became stronger, and in time manifesting states away would be easy for him. Until then he’d use whatever method he could to hold her every single night of his life.
“On your Falcon jet,” she quipped.
“I’m not letting you go. You’re a thirst I can never quench. Every part of me is reaching for you.”
“I’m sure it’s your transition.”
“My transition justifies my feelings.”
He had a point there. The more they talked about this, the more out of whack she felt, not because of him, but because of not knowing what was coming at them with this Lord business. Her mind was too numb to even bring up her fears or position to him.
Instead, she grinned. “We’re never going to watch that movie are we?”
He smirked then hit a button, River jumped back when a screen started to lift from the base of her bed. Who puts a TV in a bed?
“I’m going to hit play, but I’m not promising that we’re going to watch it,” he said as the lights to the room dimmed again.
Mother of all fates, give me the strength to keep up with this boy…
Chapter Twenty
It was an hour before dawn when Phoenix returned from his meeting with Guardian.
“How’d the meeting go?” Indie asked as she began to dress for a new day.
His thoughts were heavy, and racing. For days, he had strived in every conceivable way to find fault in the prophecy of the Seven that were to rise, to find a single reason or hope that Genevieve was not trapped in the war against darkness that had its grips in him for so long.
Now, he was sure, there was no way out of this. Those that were meant to rise would be tested. Until they were, it was a fate that could not be ignored.
“Good,” Phoenix said as he watched her and thought of all the time he spent grieving for her. It was a pain he vowed to never feel again, no matter what it cost him.
“I doubt that. Is Guardian okay?”
“He’s getting there.”
“You think this deal is going to take you away from him, don’t you,” she said with a glance over her shoulder.
He let out a wry smile. “On the contrary.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can sense them.”
“Who?”
“The Escort kings.”
“You’re not serious?” Indie said with a shaky pitch to her tone. She didn’t want him channeling those evil begins.
His gray stare, highlighted with flames, slowly moved over her and he added, “The new ones.”
Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t form the question.
He answered her inquiring expression. “Guardian is one.”
Her gaze drifted away. She wasn’t surprised. Guardian had Falcon blood within him and the Falcon’s were royalty. She was surprised by Phoenix’s calm, though. “Do you know who they all are now?”
“I know who the new King of Shock, Fear, and Obsession will be, and of course…” his stare rained down on her, “who the King of Grief will be....”
She glanced away not feeding into his comment, opting to change the course of conversation. She already knew who the new King of Grief was, long before tonight. Him. He was her king. “What emotion will Guardian rule?”
“Guardian will rule fear, Draven shock.”
“Obsession?” she asked meeting his gaze.
“A bloke named Blakeshire.”
Indie dropped her gaze.
“What?” he asked.
“I went over a few things with Gavin last night.” She clenched her jaw. “I think Wilder is more powerful than we thought...and because he is we need to think hard about what Lord to take down.” Her gaze cascaded over him. “He’s the current King of Grief, and the Lord Umbra, the one who entraps lost souls, feeds him souls.”
Phoenix rose from his seat to face her.
“Did little bit read that in the text?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Kinda, Gavin gathered information from her notes. I think I always knew, though” she angled her gaze away. “I was always defensive around Wilder. When I first woke from death I thought it was because he was enthralled by Candace or something, but I don’t know, every time I think back to things he said or did I cringe, and that scent…at the wake yesterday I caught it again.”
“He was at the wake?” he raged.
“No,” she said as gently as she could. “Lilies. They were the flowers there. I linked it with him, how he smelled.”
Even though he doubted his words he said, “He could still just be a lead mark of yours.”
“Yet your doubt agrees with me.” Silence filled the room for countless moments, the weight of what was to come. Her choice seemed to grow heavier with each second that passed. “What do you mean you can sense the new kings? Is it like how you are with the boys?”
“No…it’s more regal. I can pick up on their emotions from a vast distance, share knowledge.”
Indie drew in a sharp breath, knowing Gavin had said as much the night befor
e when he spoke of the powers between current kings, and those that would rise. “Did you invite them to our shindig?” she joked.
He shook his head. “Charlie and Draven might be there, but the others have their own deal going down, these dark Kings are spreading us thin, most assuredly.”
“So you figured out the timeline matches up? They’re trying to hurt us all at once, aren’t they?”
He flinched a grin. “We have a few tricks up our sleeves to counter the time problem. I found a dimension to push the souls to that we set loose.”
“You found living people that are good with ghosts moving in?”
He nearly laughed. “No, there’s no population where they’re going.”
“Then what is the issue?”
“It’s right between where Guardian and Blakeshire take up residence, in theory, this might solve a few other problems, but the solution was too obvious for my comfort.”
“As obvious as which Lord to take down is.”
He held her stare. “You’re against taking down Camlin...”
“Doesn’t feel right,” she admitted. “And that was before I realized the Lord Umbra rules Grief and is more than likely feeding Wilder power.”
A brief nod.
“We all have to agree, though.”
“Love, you know I would refuse very few request of yours, if any.”
“I don’t think this is a conscious choice. I just wanted facts. Gavin was looking into the texts last night. I’m sure he came up with something after I left him.”
“Where’s little bit?”
Indie tried to hide a smile. “They were occupied last night.”
He raised a brow. “I didn’t expect for that to sink in as easily as it did.”
“What to sink in? You telling her what you told me not to tell her?” she asked as she crossed her arms.
He cursed. “She was uncovering the text at a speed that would make anyone question why. She was linking things together and flat out told me we were missing books. She was close to a truth but blind at the same time. I laid it out for her. Gave her a brief run down. I told her whatever her and Mason were up in arms about didn’t matter because they started before this life. That the secrets that room held were placed there by her.”
“That truth has holes all in it,” Indie said as her eyes darted over his expression, sensing his truth, or lack thereof.
“I might have mentioned something about her Escort fling, asked if her father knew about him.”
“Sebastian Falcon.”
He raised his hands. “We have enough on our plate without picking a fight with an Escort from the line of Exaltation. She’s the only one that could call it quits with the other guy.
“Threatening her is not the way to go about it, she already has trust issues with me!”
“It worked didn’t it? They took the afternoon and night off to reconnect.”
“I don’t think that had to do with you. Mason came to see me last night. He didn’t mention anything about her being an Allurest, and I know Mason. If he had that assurance of their beginning, he wouldn’t have been as nervous.”
“Nervous?”
“Like wedding night nervous, and he was still on edge about his mother. I doubt he would care what the woman thought if he knew how divine him and River were.”
“Well, then see I didn’t do any good or bad.”
“Debatable,” she said with a playful scowl.
He put his arm around her and leaned in for a ‘forgive me’ kiss, somewhere in the middle of the kiss he moved her to her office. Which Indie realized the second she heard Gavin cough.
“Should I bail?” he asked.
Phoenix laughed as he moved away from Indie.
For the first time in hours, Indie could sense Mason, which must mean he was on his way to this meeting, too.
“What did you figure out?” Indie asked Gavin, recognizing the look in his eye, the one that said he had a breakthrough.
“Like I said before, unless I read it wrong, Umbra is the Lord of Grief, which puts him under our radar first formost. The dude has a rep for taking ‘time’ from souls, trapping them in a time warp.”
“The clocks,” Indie breathed.
Gavin shrugged. “Makes sense. If you’re right, and that Lord does have a claim on Cashton, the boy should be given a medal for surviving him. Umbra takes souls that died before their time, traps them in a head-spinning dream. He tempts them with every sin, then locks them away to relive that sin, feel guilt for it. I have a good feeling taking him down will free up some square footage downstairs.”
Indie knew it. It was Cashton she was supposed to set free.
***
River was kissed awake that morning. Breakfast was brought to her bed. And the best part was, she made it two nights without nightmares. It was like the nightmares could not touch her when Mason was next to her.
He told her he wanted to get whatever meeting he had with Indie and the others over with first thing so he could spend the day helping her with the text. He walked her to work, or rather shifted her there, giving her one last deep fiery kiss before he vanished from the library.
When River glanced at her workspace, she figured out it had been invaded, and she was wrong about Gavin being smart. He was a freaking genius, obviously. Her only issue—her whiteboard looked like it belonged to the Umbra, Lord of Grief, fan club. Camlin was clearly not his focus.
“Can we say queue the conflict,” River whispered to herself.
She spent the first part of her day fact-checking him, and she used the word fact as loosely as possible because there wasn’t enough information to call any of this fact. Even if she had every book she thought she was missing, it would take a lifetime to establish a baseline of perception because honestly the author of this text was, in fact, writing down an opinion. Even biographies are opinions, the perceptions from one point of view.
River didn’t find anything to disprove Gavin, but she found enough holes in what he had uncovered to prove to herself that she wasn’t trying to improve her agenda. Both Lords had way too many variables behind them, releasing either one would set off a tidal wave of coincidences and bring new players to the field of war.
River heard and felt a whisk of wind, one that carried no flame of a Phoenix, but it still heated her cheeks. A mix of guilt, embarrassment, regret, heartbreak and hope swarmed through her.
The hope was because even though she felt like Mason was on her side in this vast manor, she still felt alone. The other emotions were because she wasn’t one hundred percent sure Dagen’s words and actions would line up now that his predictions had played out.
She slowly glanced up from the text she was reading to see his ice blue eyes shining down on her, his familiar smirk plastered across his face that usually meant ‘you rang?’ Today it meant ‘I told you so.’
“I see you accepted the claim you denied,” he said as his gaze moved all around her.
“Tell me what you see. How vastly different is my all too human perception?” She owned up to her emotions and how she had judged people, but if these supernatural beings she kept attracting into her life were seeing some kind of collar around her neck, that needed to be dealt with, or at the very least, there better be one around Mason’s too.
“The absence of pain and the birth of another.”
River arched a brow at his statement.
“You don’t fear that he will never return. Now you fear that you will lose him again.”
Well, if that didn’t hit the nail on the head.
“I meant what I said before, nothing is going to change our friendship,” she swore.
“Oh, I’m sure a few elements are going to change,” he said with the ironic grin he was famous for. The one that stated how much life he had behind him, how many times he’d seen the cycle of life play out. Dagen is no doubt hot, but his bank of wisdom, that reference point that River could always fall back on when decoding text was where her true attraction
to him always was, and that attraction had not dulled with the rebirth of Mason. She needed him now more than ever.
Dagen wasn’t an objective point of view she knew that. She knew no matter what she said or uncovered he had his own agenda. No one could fault him for it, freeing his boy was in a sense saving his life, along with all those that followed them. They were fighting to break away from the current King of their line. Exist without having to follow the conformity set before them.
“For a brief time yesterday, it felt like we had never said goodbye.”
“I saw, or rather my faction did,” Dagen said as he glanced at the whiteboard and furrowed his brow.
“What you do mean you saw?” River was mortified. The last thing she wanted to do was throw Mason in his face, that was would be the lowest of all lows.
His stare met hers. “Your snow fight was reported, and it was only reported because during the fight a shield was put around the manor so no supernatural souls could observe. My boys thought maybe you were under attack. We were on high alert until we tracked down Camlin and understood he was not a threat to you. That someone just put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign.”
“You know where Camlin is, and he’s still standing?”
“I’ve known where he was since the moment your friends here popped his cell door. We’re waiting on an alignment to fall into place. It should happen in just over twenty-four hours now.”
That made sense. All spells drew power from the energy in the heavens.
River was starting to think she was just a bystander in this. Indie was clearly planning to take down Umbra no matter what she said, and Dagen had a plan for Camlin.
“You have everything you need?” River asked when it dawned on her that her mother had sent components for a spell to her the day before.
“Apparently I do now, though, I have to say in some way I wish I didn’t, but then again...,” he said at length. “I always knew we would have an end, at least to the physical side.”
“What are you talking about?”
He leaned a little further over the table, breathed in, as his eyes rain down over her. “The blood of the forsaken and reclaimed.”
