by Ophelia Bell
“Please,” Vrishti whispered, catching Neph’s attention. He strode back to Aodh’s side and stroked Vrishti’s cheek, brushing her hair away from her pretty face. Brown eyes gazed up at him, beseeching. “I don’t want to be here. Can we go home now?”
“Of course, kitten. Nyx, can you secure her in here?”
“Yes. If you see Gavra, send him to help—he created the perfect prison for me before. I trust he’d be able to create one as impenetrable for her as well.”
“Will do,” he said, and they exited the grotto.
The Haven was a mass of carnage. They skirted the fighting as well as they could, Neph leading the way while Aodh followed, Vrishti securely tucked against him with his wings manifested and cocooned around her.
The Ultiori hunters were every bit as blood-hungry as they’d been before. As he ran, Neph pummeled their soft bodies with his huge fists and impaled them with his horns. Each time a body fell, he heard their death rattles and their final words. Before too long, the repetition began to haunt him with its promise.
“Death will never stop me,” they all said, the words carrying the same intonation and cold certainty every time they were spoken.
Assana and two Thiasoi maidens met him halfway, flanked by a huge brown bear and Gavra in his fully shifted red glory. Fire shot over their heads at the hunters who closed in behind, turning their pursuers to ashes while Silas tore the ones ahead of them to shreds.
The maidens ran alongside with Assana leading the way straight back to the Source. Gavra and Silas held the line behind them, beside the rest of the nymphs and ursa, fighting a bloody battle to protect the Source.
Here and there a Hunter would make it through the line, only to be knocked back by the powerful magic of the barrier Sathmika had erected.
“Mama!” Vrishti yelled, leaping out of Aodh’s arms and running to the barrier. She passed through it without effort and fell into her mother’s arms.
“Baby, you can’t stay here. Take my gift and go. We have no time for formalities tonight. You are the Summer Spirit. Go home and be safe.”
“No! I can fight too. Look!” She turned around and pressed her hand to the ground at the edge of the pool her mother stood beside. Vines surged up from beneath her fingers, but they only tangled around the pebbles before falling back beneath the soil.
“The baby in your womb needs all your power now, Vrishti. Go home and keep the baby safe.”
Neph stood just outside the barrier, avoiding contact with it while he waited for mother and daughter to say their farewells. Sathmika had a look of grim determination in her eyes, and with a sinking feeling he let himself see the path that lay before her.
“Vrishti, let her do what she needs to do and say goodbye. We need to take you home.”
Vrishti shook her head, giving him a bewildered look. “We have to protect the Source!”
“No, kitten. We have to protect you. That baby Meri put inside you means something to her. We can’t risk letting her have it again. If she survives this somehow, she’ll come for you.”
Sathmika bent and rested her hands on Vrishti’s shoulders. She turned her daughter to face her and urged Vrishti to look up into her eyes. A flash of light surged beneath Sathmika’s skin as she pressed her lips to her daughter’s in a chaste kiss. In that instant the light flooded them both, blasting brightly from the sunburst tattooed on Vrishti’s chest, and then Sathmika’s skin returned to its previous deep brown.
The older ursa matriarch held her daughter’s face for a moment longer, her gaze glassy with unshed tears. Then she nodded once and stood, wading back into the Source where she pressed her back to the tree once more.
“I have enough energy to last through the day. Find a way to preserve the barrier and let the others inside before my power is gone.”
“Then you’ll come home, right?” Vrishti asked. “I need you.”
“No, baby. You don’t need me. You have everything you need. Learn to trust the Summer Spirit and you will be fine.”
“Vrishti!” Neph called, and Aodh echoed the call beside him. “We have to go.”
Around him, a chilling chant was being repeated among the Ultiori hunters. “Get the ursa bitch. Keep her. Hold her.”
“Meri’s in their heads still,” Aodh said. “All of them.”
Looking over his shoulder, Neph saw Assana, Silas, and Gavra still holding off the throng of hunters. When Vrishti finally passed back through the barrier protecting the Source, a mad surge pushed against the defenders. Half a dozen frenzied hunters rushed him and he turned, putting his body between Vrishti and the mob. Aodh’s wings whipped out and wrapped around them, shielding them from the rabid attackers.
“Hold on,” Neph said and Vrishti clung to both him and Aodh when they drew their collective power and drifted back to the Sanctuary.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Aodh
“She’s going to die, isn’t she?” Vrishti asked, still staring out the window of her dawn-lit quarters in the Rainsong Clan Lodge. She didn’t cast a glance to Aodh or Neph, but Aodh moved closer to her anyway, needing contact as much for his own comfort as for hers.
“What do you see, kitten?” Neph asked softly.
“Don’t ask her that,” Aodh snapped. “She doesn’t need the burden of your goddamn curse right now.”
Vrishti gave him a sad look and tugged at his hand. He lowered himself to a crouch in front of her and looked up into her eyes.
“I suppose it isn’t really a question I don’t know the answer to. I can see it as well as you can. I hate feeling like we’re just waiting for the inevitable.”
Aodh squeezed her hand. “We aren’t just waiting. My sister’s working on a solution with Sophia North and her nephew. We can go help. Neph and I just want to make sure you are all right first. You and the baby.”
Those words sounded so foreign coming from his mouth, and felt even stranger when the odd thrill surged through him at the idea of being a father again for the first time in several thousand years.
Vrishti gave him an odd look and a half-smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I felt that. You didn’t even get me pregnant, but you’re still happy about this baby? I’m not even sure if I’m happy about it. I just wish I’d had a choice.”
“We’re happy as long as you are, kitten,” Neph said, lowering himself to the floor beside Aodh. The big satyr sat back against the wall to one side of the window with his knees bent and his arms rested atop them. “If we need to find a way to … take care of it … we will.”
Her hands pressed tighter against her belly and she shook her head. “No! Don’t you dare suggest hurting it!”
Neph expelled a relieved sigh. “We’ll love and protect the baby as if she were our own. All our races care fiercely for our offspring. Loving your child is instinctual for us, regardless.”
“Even if it’s really her baby?”
“But it isn’t hers, either,” Aodh said. “No more than Nicholas was hers. No more than my brother Ked’s child was hers—or might have been, if we hadn’t rescued Evie from the Ultiori before they had a chance to steal it. This baby was an innocent victim, stolen from another Ultiori captive. We rescued her.”
Vrishti dipped her head and rubbed her palms in a circular motion over her slightly swollen belly. “I wish we had more time to … to process all this. But we have to find a way to save the Haven.”
Time. The bane of Aodh’s existence would never cease to haunt him. Either he had too much of it, or not nearly enough.
“We can have a little bit,” Neph said. “More than we think we have, at least.”
Aodh’s gaze shot to Neph. “What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t chance more than a few hours, maybe a day. But the Sanctuary is fed from the Source, so I have access to enough power now to literally give us time. Time I think we need. To prope
rly mate, to decide what to do next. To help Numa and the others figure out how we’re going to get Nikhil’s soldiers inside to end this war.”
“Will you be able to save my mother?” Vrishti asked.
Aodh felt the pang of Neph’s uncertainty before the satyr could hide it. Vrishti’s frown betrayed that she’d sensed it as well.
“I don’t know. If we can find the answer soon enough, perhaps.”
“Then we should start now,” Vrishti said.
Neph stood and reached out his hands to them both. When they drifted, it was only a short distance to the lush courtyard in the center of the lodge. The Rainsong Lodge was largely deserted, aside from the three of them and a handful of guests, including Numa, her two ursa companions, Sophia North, and Ozzie West.
The courtyard they stood in was a huge garden spanning the large central wall of the throne room. The knotted pathways surrounded a clear pool with a big, round stone in the center that reminded Aodh of the pool in the center of the Dragon Glade, only this one was covered in verdant moss and dotted with tiny yellow flowers.
Neph shed his clothes and dove into the water, coming up on the island and motioning to the pair of them as he settled back. He appeared tense and ready for action, his brow furrowed. Vrishti dropped her robe to the ground and dove in after him and Aodh followed, admiring the pretty ursa’s complete lack of self-consciousness that was so at odds with how he remembered her the first time they’d met.
“It’ll only take a moment if you both help,” Neph said when they settled beside him on the island. With Vrishti between them, they linked hands and their minds easily followed.
Within moments, the intention was as clear as if it had sprung from Aodh’s own thoughts. They would create a temporal bubble, just large enough to encompass the lodge itself, that would speed up time inside and thus slow down the passage of it outside the bubble. They would feel no different, but for every hour that passed within their little bubble, only a minute would have passed outside it.
He sent his sister a brief warning that was met with an enthusiastic “hell yes” before they proceeded. With their three powers merged, it took a split-second for them to erect.
When Aodh opened his eyes, he met the gazes of the two people who had monopolized his thoughts for centuries, and it hit him like a tidal wave that this moment was finally the moment he’d been waiting for all that time.
For once, he believed time was on his side.
Chapter Fifty
Vrishti
“Are you sure we have time for this?” Vrishti asked. Her body thrummed with desire for the two men beside her. After all they’d been through, after learning how much she could endure, she really hoped that this time she could just let go and enjoy the pleasure they gave her.
Her control of her own body had become a sense of pride for her since the first night she’d followed Neph’s commands to discover her own pleasure. That control had been completely stripped from her within the past day after Meri’s horrific invasion—of the Haven and of her own womb. She would do everything in her power to protect the child she now carried, but it would take more time for her to feel fully in control of her body again. Right now, she just wanted to trust in the pleasure her mates could give her and let her body enjoy what it needed to feel complete. And if this worked, she would hopefully be granted enough time to recover.
Neph nuzzled her neck on one side, inhaling deeply as though she were his only source of air. On her other side, Aodh stroked her hair and cupped her cheek, tilting her head so he could gaze into her eyes.
“Our meld should tell you all you need to know,” Aodh said. “What do you think?”
The meld. Of course. She’d felt the rush of awareness flood her in those moments after she’d tasted Neph’s blood, followed by Aodh’s, in her protective maternal rage. The link was still there, as strong as ever, and she closed her eyes and dove beneath that shimmering surface of their shared power. What she saw was akin to looking through the glass at an aquarium, but everything on the other side appeared frozen.
The entire Sanctuary outside the Rainsong Clan Lodge was in a kind of stasis, and when she let her consciousness fly over the landscape and down Gaia’s Falls into the Haven itself, she found the same had happened there.
The chaos of the fighting had stilled completely. Arrows hung suspended in mid-flight and drops of blood hovered inches above the ground. Hunters remained at the edge of death while even more of their counterparts stood ready to take their place when they fell. From her vantage, she could see the vast scope of the battle that raged in the Haven and how terrifyingly outnumbered they were.
Vrishti let her mind explore this new landscape of frozen time while Neph and Aodh explored her body with lips and tongues and soft caresses. They pressed her down to the soft, mossy rock, and her body rejoiced in the pleasure while her mind still flew, separate from the experience yet fully aware and engaged just the same. It was as though she could exist everywhere at once, the way the summer sun can shine its light upon an entire continent, blessing the living creatures with its warmth.
Her consciousness reached her mother where she remained waist-deep in the crystalline pool of the Source, her back up against the sacred tree she’d tricked Silas into growing to save the Sanctuary. Her mother’s power held strong in the moment, but without the Summer Spirit that now resided in Vrishti’s soul, Sathmika would not last. It saddened her, but she knew her mother’s decision had been the best one. To wait longer to transfer her inheritance would have been disastrous.
The other clan leaders appeared outside Sathmika’s barrier, lending their own power to fortify it, but Sathmika called them off. It was not their time yet. Summer was due to sleep, to rest and rejuvenate to be reborn again when Spring had finished her reign. Vrishti recalled the lessons she’d learned about the ursa hierarchy. When she was at her full power after her first child, she would be ready to take over ruling her race for a season, but in ursa lore, a season could mean several centuries. She had time.
They could have more time, if she wanted. With her power merged with her mates, they had command of time—could manipulate it to their needs, but did they dare abuse that power? Could it help them win?
She touched Neph’s head, reluctantly urging his mouth away from its slow passage down her torso. His gaze shifted to hers, eyes swirling and drunk with need.
“Can we take too much?” she asked.
Aodh lifted his mouth from her breast and glanced at Neph, his lips a tight line. “We’ll take what we need to win,” he said. “So it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” Vrishti said. “I need to know what the consequences are if we don’t take full advantage of the time we give ourselves. It can’t be infinite, can it? There has to be a limit.”
Neph leaned on one elbow, leaving his other hand resting lightly over her swollen belly. “There is and there isn’t a limit. The temporal bubble doesn’t stop time. It simply shifts the parallax so time moves differently around us. It could go slower or faster, but we’ve chosen to make it go slower.
“The consequences can be catastrophic if we take too long. We are taking power from the troughs of the waves and feeding them to the crests. If we don’t give the power back at some point, the crests become too big to control. Think of it like a tsunami. If we don’t maintain control over the crest, it can destroy us. So we have a limit on how long we can let it build before it becomes too much power to rein in.”
“How long?” Vrishti asked.
“With the three of us fully mated, we can buy ourselves quite a lot of time. The blood meld is only the beginning.”
“I want enough time to save my mother,” Vrishti said.
“Then let’s not waste more time,” Neph said. “The power isn’t beyond our control yet—far from it. Look again at your vision, but pay attention to the very surface of it—the ripples at the edg
e of the bubble.”
She closed her eyes and focused again, first acutely conscious of the way their hands still roamed gently down her body and back up, but they refrained from more distracting touches and soon she found their rhythmic caresses calming and reinforcing her focus on the rhythm of the waves that made up the bubble around them.
After some time, she saw the pattern rippling over its surface in a continuous flow like the tide traveling across the surface of the ocean. The ripples were tiny, but after a few moments, they grew. With the slightest effort of will, she discovered she could control their size. With each adjustment, she observed the world beyond the bubble. Time slowed down the larger the ripples became, and at a certain height, she was sure time had stopped.
“It isn’t possible to stop time entirely, kitten,” Neph said, sensing her question. “Nor can we reverse the flow. But it takes power to maintain this state. If we aren’t diligent, the power feeds on itself, and the ripples grow larger until we no longer have the power to control it.”
“But we can control it, can’t we? The three of us together are powerful enough.”
“Once we’re fully mated, we can maintain the bubble long enough to work out a solution, but not indefinitely. A day of our own time is worth the years we give back to the lives we can save.”
A day. Vrishti stared up at the cascade of hanging leaves from one of the big trees that arched over the pool. It was the beginning of Spring today, and the hanging tendrils were covered with tiny pink flowers amid the pale green leaves that signaled new awakening life. She would have given more if she could, but every second was worth taking advantage of if it meant she could protect the ones she loved, protect her home, and save her mother’s life.
“All right,” she said.
Warmth bloomed in her belly when Neph pressed his lips to hers again. She hummed into his mouth as their tongues slid together, caressing and tasting before he pulled away and Aodh took his place.
