by Callie Rose
I waved my dripping wrist in front of his nose. He pulled away, but I followed, cornering him against the wall between two shelves. I pressed my body against his, my wrist millimeters from his lips.
“All you have to do is stick out your tongue,” I told him, my voice throaty. “And all of this will be yours.”
“Piper.” He was whispering, pleading with me, but his hunter’s eyes were locked on the trickle of blood.
“Just one taste,” I murmured, moving my body against his, making sparks dance through me even as pain still throbbed where I had cut myself.
With a snarling growl, he took my wrist into his mouth. Sharp teeth pierced my skin, and his hot lips pressed against my flesh. His tongue worked, lapping at the blood with little sensual motions. It ignited my blood, turning the sparks of arousal into a raging inferno. I pressed closer to him, straddling his thigh, reveling in the feel of him. His breath quickened as mine slowed—the blood loss was making me dull-headed and sleepy, but I didn’t care. This was the best damn wet dream I’d ever had, and I never wanted it to end.
His powerful arm was like a vise around my waist, and I could feel how hard he was through his clothes. His cock pressed against me, hot and demanding, as his thigh ground against my clit. I wanted him more than I’d maybe ever wanted anyone. Every cell of my body wanted to be taken by him, every molecule of my essence—
Just as my vision began to darken, he pulled away. I whimpered, the sound desperate and broken. I’d been so close, so fucking close, and I ached for him to finish it. The French call orgasms la petite mort—the little death. I’d never understood why until now.
“Piper,” he whispered through lips stained with my blood. “Shit.”
He licked his lips then kissed me hard. I writhed against him, trembling with what felt like decades worth of pent-up desire. He held me close, letting his hands wander over my body as he returned my life force to me—every bit he’d taken, he gave back tenfold. I wanted him to take it farther, wanted everything he had to give, but the moment my head was clear and the cut on my wrist had healed completely, he pushed me away.
We stood staring at each other for a long moment, breathing hard, the foot of space between us vibrating with energy. His pupils had gone back to their human shape, his black irises round and dilated, no longer slits.
He almost looked… ashamed. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
Still breathing hard, he held up a finger and gave me a stern look.
“That was the last time.” Although his voice shook, it was so full of conviction it made my chest ache. “Never again.”
Chapter Nine
Weeks went by with no visible progress toward our goal of getting home.
Actually, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure that was the goal anymore. The teachers who had remained optimistic the longest had finally succumbed to the same sort of hopelessness the others all seemed to have. Everyone was grimly preparing us for an eternity in the underworld, and it was beginning to wear on every single student at FU, from second-years to fourth-years. Tempers were shorter, emotions ran high, and people were late to class more frequently. The very air here had a way of making you want to sleep forever.
There were other little changes too. People were having more difficulty maintaining their human appearances, and every day there was another student who had given up and come to class looking like the devil. What used to be a classroom full of normal-looking adult humans was now full of hellhounds and hellbeasts of all shapes and sizes. It was colorful, but it was also disturbing.
Wyatt—a kid who had come to the pub in the little village on Mönkh Saridag with us more than once and had always seemed a little aggressive and twitchy—usually sat next to me in my last class of the day. It was one of those softer classes, focused on maintaining your inner light or whatever. Wyatt had spent the last few weeks making snippy little comments under his breath, but he hadn’t acted out much.
But on a Tuesday five months into the school year, he came to class looking for a fight. He flopped down next to me with a snarl and glared at the professor, a pale-faced woman named Serena Bowman.
“Hello, class,” she intoned in her breathy voice. “Today we’re going a little further into our guided meditation. That silver strand we created yesterday needs to be strengthened, so that no matter where you are or what you come up against, you can always find your way back to yourself. Now—”
“Sure. Great. But we couldn’t find our way anywhere else even if we wanted to though, could we?” Wyatt spoke out loud, not even bothering to whisper.
“Excuse me?” Professor Bowman blinked her owlish eyes at him.
“You heard me. There’s us, there’s the school, and there’s…what? Fire? Lava? Trees made of fucking bones? Everybody we know is everybody we’ll ever know forever. Your class is as useless as the nightly patrol.”
“Take a breath, Wyatt,” she said soothingly. “It might not be as hopeless as all that.”
“Might? It might not be? Then it is! You’re lying to yourself with this ‘might’ bullshit.”
“Yo,” Frankie, the student in front of Wyatt, turned around and addressed him with a grimace. “Chill out, man. You’re killing the vibe for everybody in here.”
Wyatt crossed his arms and glared. Class went on, but my attention was focused on him. Something definitely wasn’t right. He felt unstable. Dangerous.
After a few moments of silence, he muttered to himself, “I’ll kill something.”
Oh, shit. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out slowly, trying not to immediately suck in another lungful. Wyatt had the same look in his eye I’d seen in school-shooter mugshots, and his skin was rippling unsteadily between a human color and a bright, football-textured tangerine color. He kept his mouth shut for the rest of class, but that didn’t ease my mind any. His silence was only building pressure on the inside, making him more likely to blow at any second.
“And that’s all for today, class. Keep practicing those meditative techniques, you will need them.” Bowman blinked, then shifted her gaze to my right. “Wyatt, could you stay behind for a moment?”
He froze, and so did I. I always sat in the corner, and he had the seat beside me, so I couldn’t really get out without squeezing past him, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. Not without a plan anyway.
“Try and make me,” he growled at Bowman, curling his lips back.
He stood up and grabbed his things, tearing his bag with one long claw. He looked down at it in confusion for a second, like he couldn’t quite understand what was happening or where the long, sharp claw had come from. Hell, maybe he didn’t. His body was shifting all over the place in anxious little ripples. It was actually more terrifying to think that he had no control at all than to think that he was doing it on purpose to be intimidating.
“Wyatt!” Bowman’s large, round eyes got even bigger. “I will have to speak to the headmaster about this.”
“Fine. Who’s stopping you?” Wyatt shoved the door open and burst into the hallway, knocking someone over in the process. I ran after him, shooting a worried glance at the professor. She was already picking up the communication charm all professors kept in their classrooms—to call Toland and a bunch of big fourth-years, I hoped.
“Watch where you’re going!” Wyatt was screaming at a smallish, nervous-looking man when I caught up to him.
“You ran into me,” the nervous man stuttered. I gave him points for balls, but I wished he would’ve just taken the hit and walked away. He was poking a bear, whether he realized it or not.
“Then you shouldn’t have been standing there!” Wyatt shoved him, then shifted into a rough-skinned tangerine dragon. He looked more like an iguana than a classic dragon, but he spewed flames, so he was dragon enough.
The small guy squeaked, morphing into a little armored demon—kind of like an armadillo. As Wyatt drew his head back, preparing to unleash a ball of flame, all I could think was that the li
ttle guy was about to get boiled alive in his own plated skin.
“Hey, Wyatt!” I pushed between them, shoving the large iguana-dragon just a bit. I let the hypnotic hum of persuasion enter my voice, focusing on what I wanted him to do. “Leave him alone. He isn’t worth your time.”
He growled, and his eyes focused on me. Shit. Wrong move.
“You’re calm,” I told him, throwing every bit of persuasion I could muster into it, but he wasn’t listening anymore. The fire he’d built up to cook the armadillo man exploded through the air in my direction. I ducked in the nick of time, only losing a few hairs in the process. I rolled away, then scrambled to my feet and tried again.
“You’re calm,” I told him, holding my hands out. “You want a nap. You’re so tired.”
Or not.
He roared and charged at me, swiping me aside before I could react, his long claws slicing deep into my flesh. It hurt like a bitch, tearing a ragged cry from my lips as I stumbled back.
Goddamn it. Are you fucking kidding me?
My poor torso had been through so much shit just in the last year, up to and including having a piece of rebar shoved clean through my body. It pissed me off, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.
I was bleeding freely; the entire front of my raggedly torn shirt was soaked through in seconds. My body felt numb and cold at the same time, and I vaguely recognized that I was going into shock. I couldn’t reach the parts of my mind that knew how to persuade.
“Stop,” I gasped, holding up a hand again as if that would stop him.
Wyatt gave no sign that he’d even heard me. The orange dragon bore down on me, building another inferno in his chest. I crawled backward, trying to ignore the blinding pain in my chest and abdomen as the deep gashes pulled and shifted with the movement.
The corners of my vision were going dark. All I could see in front of me was that ugly, bumpy tangerine snout.
Then, out of nowhere, a flash of emerald darted between me and the charging dragon. Twin spouts of fire blasted, and iguana-Wyatt bellowed in anger and pain as the new dragon’s fireball left singe marks on the side of his body. The other dragon roared.
Kingston. Thank fuck.
“Enough!” The sonic boom of Toland’s voice radiated through the hallway.
Kingston stopped, crouching on the floor between me and Wyatt. But Wyatt was too far gone for even Toland’s authority to reach him. He reared his head, working on another fiery blast.
He never had the chance to unleash it.
Through hazy, wavering vision I watched as Toland and three other staff members disabled Wyatt with surgical precision and efficiency. Paralytic spells and transmogrification spells worked together, followed by a levitation spell. In less than a minute, Wyatt was back in his human form, frozen solid, hovering above the professors and the students cowering in the hallway.
Toland gave a sharp gesture, turning on his heel to stride away. The professors followed him, with Wyatt’s body floating docilely behind them. The little group passed me on their way to wherever they were taking him, and I strained my ears to pick up the low words they murmured to each other as they left.
“Is it the atmosphere? Is he turning evil?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe he’s just short-tempered and stir crazy.”
“This isn’t cabin fever. He’s evil.”
“We shall see. Hurry, we need to get him downstairs before he comes to.”
Wow. Maybe Xero was right after all.
The school admins and staff obviously still believed that the atmosphere here could turn otherwise good creatures evil. Fantastic. Maybe it was just a matter of time before we were all signing up to slaughter humans for Gavriel’s army. Or maybe…
I lost track of my thought, my mind going fuzzy and blank. Wyatt’s swipe had damaged me more than I’d thought, and I was still bleeding heavily. I pulled my hand away from my torso to see that it was covered in bright red blood.
“Come on.” Kingston’s voice was gentle. He slid his arms under me and lifted me like a princess. A demonic, blood-covered princess.
As he carried me through the corridors, his touch held me together. I wasn’t healed, but I wasn’t dying either. Hovering in some sort of stasis, I relaxed against him, letting his energy wash over me.
I half expected him to bring me to the infirmary, but when I lifted my heavy eyelids, I realized that wasn’t the direction we were headed. A momentary flood of relief hit me as I realized that, whatever Kingston might think of the bond between us, he knew me well enough by now to know what I really needed. And it wasn’t a damn healer.
When we reached his dorm room—he’d been lucky enough to get one of the rare single-occupancy rooms—he laid me down on the bed and kissed me.
Pain brought my consciousness sharply to the forefront. I whimpered against his mouth and he pulled away, gazing down at me with worried emerald eyes.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No, it’s fine. Healing hurts sometimes,” I murmured, trembling with shock and need. “Come back. Please…”
He did. He didn’t even hesitate, and he didn’t shrink back from the blood soaking my tunic. Instead, he leaned over the bed and poured sweet life force into me with deep, tender kisses and gently roaming hands. I swallowed my gasps of pain as my torso and chest stitched itself back together, not wanting to scare him off again.
After several long moments, he pulled away slowly, then slid his fingers down my torso to where I’d been hit. The wounds had closed, but they were still visible through the torn, bloody fabric.
“I’ll be right back.”
He grabbed a towel from his closet and disappeared through the door, returning less than a minute later with a small bowl of water. He must’ve filled it up in the shared bathroom down the hall. I hadn’t moved from the spot where I lay, conserving my strength as my body continued to heal itself, drawing on the power his kisses had given me.
Taking a seat on the bed next to me, he lifted my shirt over my head and tossed the wet, bloody garment to the floor. Heat flashed in his deep green eyes at the sight of my bare torso, but his hands were gentle as he dipped the towel in the water and began to clean the blood from my chest and stomach. When he’d finished his work, he tossed the towel—which was now stained red and pink—onto the floor with my ruined tunic.
His fingers brushed over the marks Wyatt’s claws had left, and he shook his head in concern.
“Think this will scar?”
My skin seemed to buzz where he touched me, and it was hard to keep my breath steady and even as I moved his hand to my other side, to the spot where the piece of rebar had pierced me the year before.
“I doubt it. This one is hardly visible anymore.”
Then I turned my head, bringing his hand to the back of my neck where four little freckles marked my skin; one for each of my bonded men. The marks had formed the day they’d saved my life.
“Remember? You got to me in time.”
He made a soft noise in his throat, then lowered his head to kiss each of the scratches Wyatt had left on my body, one after the other. As he did, the skin there softened ever so slightly, healing beyond scar tissue.
“I remember,” he murmured, his voice husky. He ran his fingers through my hair and cupped the back of my head, tilting my face up to look at him. “I remember never wanting anyone or anything more than I wanted you in that moment.”
A surge of power rippled through my body as he kissed me once more.
Chapter Ten
My tongue swept into Kingston’s mouth as if life, death, and everything in between could be found between his lips. In a way, they could.
This man held one of four keys to my soul, and when he kissed me like this, it felt like he had used his key to open a door to a part of me I hadn’t even known existed.
I held onto his shoulders, physically restraining myself from hauling him down onto the bed with me. The dragon shifter had been uncertain about the succubus bond
from the start—maybe not as actively resistant as Kai was, but nowhere near Jayce’s enthusiastic acceptance. I had decided a long time ago to take what this man would give me without pushing for more. It felt a little like deciding to live without a piece of my heart, but I resolved to make do. Succubus bond or not, it didn’t sit well with my stubborn feminist streak to admit I needed a man for anything.
Kingston had already taken my shirt off to clean up the blood on my torso, and now he took full advantage of that fact. Pulling his lips away from mine, he trailed open-mouthed kisses down my neck, across the line of my collarbone, and over the swell of my breast before latching onto my nipple with his teeth.
My back bowed off the bed, and my clutching fingers moved from his shoulders to his head, sliding through the chocolate brown strands of his hair to press his mouth closer, to keep him from pulling away. My heart hammered against my ribs so hard that I was sure he must be able to hear it. Hell, he could probably see my chest vibrating with each heavy beat as he pushed against the pressure of my hands to move over to my other breast.
When he drew that pebbled nipple into his mouth, I let out a ragged cry, scraping my fingernails against his scalp and eliciting a shudder from him.
He would pull away soon, I knew he would.
I knew how much he valued control—as the heir to a massive business empire, I supposed it had been ingrained in him since birth—and everything about this succubus bond went counter to that. He had eaten my pussy and let me suck his cock, but still, neither of those things represented a complete capitulation to the magic that bound us.
Shoving aside those thoughts, I ran my fingers through his silky hair, determined to enjoy the blaze of incredible sensations coursing through me for as long as they lasted.
When Kingston pulled away, I didn’t try to stop him. My fingers slid through his hair and trailed down the line of his jaw as he sat back on the bed beside me.
