Chapter Twenty-Seven
There was a lengthy pause.
Perfect time to tell everyone to go do other things and do them somewhere else so Breen could get to feeding already—the inside of his stomach felt like it’d sprouted stubble. But Toni was too intrigued by the topic.
“All right,” she said, “go back to the beginning for a moment. What is a warded land?”
“It is a land within a land,” Octav explained. “A place where two lands exist while there appears to be only one, the second land lying hidden from normal human perception beneath a magical warding cloak. If a regular strolls through this area in the Carpathian Mountains, he will see one view of existence—of trees and hillsides, maybe the odd shack or two. He won’t see what exists right on top of it—many buildings and streams and whole populations of people. Unless, of course, he can pass through the ward into the secondary world, but he can only do this if the ward has been coded to allow him through.”
Toni paused, a thoughtful frown creasing her brow. She glanced at Breen when she finally spoke. “This warding system sounds like how Videon is keeping you warriors out of his depraved playland. Jacken described being blocked by an invisible, impenetrable bubble. He says he’s seen people disappear into thin air in certain parts of the city, but when he goes to the same spot, nothing happens. Doesn’t that sound like a ward?”
Breen didn’t answer. Just fuck me dead already.
Octav looked skeptical. “If so, this Videon would have to wield the powers of a Solomonori.”
“What’s a Solomonori?”
“Mages or wizards. The wards are created and controlled by them. There are only eight Solomonori total. When we Vârcolac first arrived in the warded lands, Zalina was in one of her Sleeps, so Ştephan Dragoş was able to gain us two. The Pure Dragons also have two, and the Shapechangers used to have two, but Zalina stole one. She wants all of them, you see, and this is a great source of strife among us all. There is an antidote for every spell Zalina casts, unless she controls all the Solomonori. Should this apocalyptic turn of events ever occur, she would have ultimate power.” Octav looked toward the heavens. “Then woe betide us all.”
“Moreover,” he added, “Zalina seeks to breed with the Solomonori. Through them, she creates the most powerful of the Nature Spirits as her daughters: the Iele. The Solomonori understandably don’t want Zalina to have their offspring. She trains them to be Warrior Witches like herself. Whenever possible they hide their girl children. But this isn’t an easy endeavor. Every Iele who is spawned of a union between Zalina and a Solomonori is born with an identifying symbol: a Z.”
“For Zalina, I presume?” Toni asked dryly.
“Exactly. Except the Z is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, so it will resemble a 3.”
Hadley, quiet until now, exhaled a loud gasp. “Oh, my God! I have a birthmark like that!”
Breen stared at the wall across from his bed. A new topic to discuss. How fucking great was that?
Octav transferred his attention over to her. “Indeed?” he drawled, clearly doubting it. “Although…” He surveyed Hadley from head to toe. “The Iele are beautiful and voluptuous women who exude great seductive powers over men. You fit those parameters.” He made a casual gesture at her body. “Might I be so bold as to ask to see your birthmark?”
Hadley hesitated. “Yes, all right.” She angled to the left and tugged down her scrub pants just enough to reveal a lopsided “3” on her hip.
Octav intently studied the mark, then slowly raised his gaze to Hadley. His eyes glittered. “That is it.”
Hadley yanked her scrubs back up. “But that’s impossible. My mother is…my mother. You know. I mean…” She tinkled out an awkward-sounding laugh. “My mother isn’t Zalina the Warrior Witch, right? Hahahahaha.”
“Child,” Skunk Streak asked quietly, “were you perhaps born early?”
Hadley choked off her laugh and swallowed audibly. “I… Yes. I was eight weeks premature.” Her lashes were moving very rapidly. “How did you know that?”
“Because you, specifically, weren’t born early. Another baby was, and that premature infant actually died.”
Hadley whitened. “What?”
“The Solomonori who is your father put you in the child’s place to protect you from Zalina.” Skunk Streak folded his hands in his lap. “You, my dear, are a changeling.”
* * *
Breen stared down at his lap and messed with the IV tube trailing out of his wrist.
Hadley had just hotfooted it out of the room, and soon after, Pettrila wheel-chaired Skunk Streak out to the hospital courtyard to “take air.”
Finally. Time to feed.
When everyone was gone, Toni turned to Charlize and said, “Due to the severity of Breen’s wound, he’s going to need to take in more blood than usual. He’ll have to feed from your neck instead of your wrist this time.”
And that’s when Breen discovered a fascination with his IV.
Because Toni was making shit up about Vârcolac culture again, same as she’d done when Breen and Charlize met with her after Breen punched Amza.
Truth was, Breen could get all the blood he needed absolutely fine from Charlize’s wrist. Her throat was just way better, the skin softer there, her blood especially aromatic, the contact more intimate, and… Saliva flooded his mouth. Yeah, way better.
Now, as before, Toni was probably trying to force Charlize’s hand when it came to getting closer to Breen.
Now, as then, he kept his mouth shut about it.
Toni folded her stethoscope in half and stuck it in her lab coat pocket. “Okay?”
A tendon flexed once in Charlize’s neck, like maybe she’d swallowed. “Yes, okay.”
“I’ll give you two some privacy, then.” Toni left.
Charlize went back to standing at the end of Breen’s bed and just staring.
What was she thinking? That she wouldn’t be able to handle the closer contact of the neck feeding? Or was she wondering what it’d be like to face down two feedings in a row, something they’d never done before? He didn’t know what the extra fiinţă would do to her, but he could reasonably predict that his dick—always pissed at him these days for subjecting it to nothing but beating off—would substantially up the volume of its complaints over the lack of follow-on sex.
“So, uh…” Charlize’s tongue smoothed across her lips, and blood rushed into Breen’s groin. Shit-nuggets. Yeah, he was going to hear extra grief from his dick, for sure.
Without another word, Charlize moved woodenly to the side of his bed, bent over, and stuck her throat in front of him.
Her long, curly hair tumbled around his head, and her scent exploded through his sinuses, aerosoling his brain with such intense pleasure that both his fangs and his dick reared—fangs down, dick up.
Shoving her hair aside, Breen gripped the back of her neck, pushed his face into her throat, and inhaled deeply. He growl-groaned and nuzzled her, savoring what might be his last time in this special place.
She released a muffled, urgent sound, and the stiff appendage between his legs grew more adamant about finding its way inside her. His fangs gave a huge, painful, stop-fucking-around throb. He plunged in and groaned again as her rich blood flowed over his tongue and glided down into his stomach, washing a drugged contentment through him and filling his body with life at its purest. Much better than when he’d fed on her yesterday, half gone to a blood-coma.
Snarling softly, Breen sucked hard, squeezing his fingers rhythmically around Charlize’s nape. The rapid beat of her heart pulsed against his lips, and the aroma of her arousal bombarded the room. He swayed back against his pillow. Grids momentarily uploaded across his vision as the predator within him stretched into muscle and sinew, its nostrils flared wide, as if scenting a female in heat.
He drank until he was forced to stop—when his fangs retracted—leaving him no choice but to pull back. He stared at her with hot eyes while he licked the residue of her blood off his lips. He was breathing heavily.
So was she, her cheeks pink, her lips wet and parted.
His sex bucked.
She lowered her eyes to his crotch. His jutting dick was straining the fly of his pajamas open.
Her jaw flexed once, then she hissed. “Fuck this screwed community and its sphincter-tight rules.” Hiking up her skirt, she dropped her panties to her ankles and flicked them aside with one foot. “I can’t stand it anymore.” Climbing onto his hospital bed, she straddled him.
He grabbed her hips, aiming her into a rapid entrance position.
A bell in his brain banged a sideline warning.
Wasn’t he supposed to be following through on something Toni set him up for? But…but, he couldn’t seem to get the picture of it clearly in his mind now that Charlize’s panties were off, releasing more of her clean and salty scent. The aroma struck him on the brain with a hammer. His next breath caught in his lungs.
Charlize darted a quick glance down at the bandage on his leg. His wound was near his knee, far enough away from his lap that she wouldn’t hurt him if she planned to give him a good trouncing.
Which she clearly did.
Not even bothering to tug his bottoms down, she fumbled his engorged dick through the fly of his pajamas, then propped him up and lowered herself down. Her wet opening met the head of him.
His fangs pounded down again, and a guttural sound broke from his throat.
She started to sit.
He snapped his fangs together. She was only a quarter of the way down his length, and the suctioning power of her inner muscles was already staggering.
She lowered her lips to his. “I fucking love your cock,” she whispered against his mouth. “It’s so big and thick and powerful. It feels so good.”
His dick kicked so hard, he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just jacked some pre-come inside her. Feels so good. Understatement. He squeezed her hips and tilted her forward, putting her in a better position to—
He stopped.
Feels so good.
What the hell was he doing?
He was letting himself get overwhelmed again by how fantastic Charlize felt, that’s what, once more just being led instead of doing the leading himself. No thought was going into having sex with her. Again. And how great was it that he was ignoring death’s door epiphanies to keep messing up the same shit in his life? He exhaled slowly from his nose. Not great at all.
It took him two hard swallows to get the one syllable out, but he finally managed it. “No.”
She startled. Her eyes opened all the way, her gaze looking puzzled for the length of two heartbeats. Then her lids narrowed. She snatched up his face in a strong, one-handed grip, her fingers stretching over one cheek, her thumb extending high across the other. “You want this,” she gritted at him.
Yeah, he did, more than he wanted to breathe, but there was something he wanted way more than sex. Her. And the only way he’d even come close to getting her was to stop doing more of the same stupidness.
“And I want this.” Her blue eyes fierce, Charlize flexed her powerful runner’s legs and tried to force herself down lower onto his shaft.
Damn, she was strong. And determined. And he was in for the fight of his life, because his dick throbbed out its own opinion on this battle, and his predator entered the fray, making Breen’s grip go slack on her hips—for two more inches’ worth of descent.
Make decisions. Decide a course. Act. Bracing his jaw, Breen got his shit together and held Charlize off with strong hands. “I just want you to be sure about us before we do this. That’s all.”
There can be no halfway within the bonded relationship.
A wild panic darted across Charlize’s face. She shook her head at him.
He showed her gritted fangs. His balls were eagerly pumping semen up his shaft, creating a painful back-jam at the exit portal. “Then we probably shouldn’t.”
Tears leapt into her eyes—angry, frustrated tears. She uttered a low growl and flung herself off him.
He winced, her sudden departure tugging his dick out of her painfully fast. Not the response he’d been hoping for. Grimly, he tucked himself into his pajama bottoms.
She stomped away two paces and whirled around. “Why does it have to be this way, Breen? Why can’t we just fuck? Would it really mess you up so bad if I don’t act like your bonded mate? Explain it to me.”
And join in on Toni’s white lies? Bad enough that he was going along with the setup. He didn’t need to compound his involvement further. He countered with his own set of questions. “Why can’t we be in a relationship, Charlize? What’s so awful about the idea of being married to me? I’ve never understood it. I mean, it can’t be about me, because you’ve never bothered to get to know me.”
Her complexion flooded red.
“Is it because our hooking up was a colossal mistake? Okay. I get that part. It was a huge fuckup. But here we are stuck with each other anyway, so why not give us a chance? What harm could trying do?”
“The harm is that I don’t want obligations and worries and stressors. And that’s what relationships are. A bunch of crap.”
He heard the slight tremor in her voice—a thread of fear beneath the anger and disgust—and searched her eyes for more. What stupid son of a bitch had made her think that? “Maybe I’ll be different. But you won’t know it if you don’t—”
“Oh, shut up, would you?” She stomped back to his bed. “You’re no different from anyone else.”
What? “How am—?”
She leaned so close to his face her shout stirred his hair. “You disappeared for three days!”
He slowly shut his mouth. His stomach waited, clenched so tight it hurt.
Her lips trembled. Just once, and then she was glaring at him. “When I was six years old, my mother disappeared for three days. Do you have any idea what that was like? Struggling to take care of my little brother and sister, running out of food but knowing I couldn’t ask anyone for help because Mom would get busted and then I’d be in trouble and probably taken away from her. For three days I thought my mom was dead.” Tears dampened her eyes. “I thought you were dead! Three fucking days you were gone, Breen, and when you finally came back, you were covered with so much blood it was…it w-was…”
His tongue gnarled up. Not in the way of his usual silence, not purposeful or watchful or careful. He also wasn’t just lost for the right response. He was utterly dumfounded by what he was hearing her say…by what he was seeing in her expression.
Immersed in the horror of her memories, Charlize’s defenses had fallen away, allowing the real woman to peek out through slim cracks. And this was more than a glimpse of Charlize’s softer, scared and lonely side. This was a revelation of the most profound vulnerability he’d ever seen, an unveiling of the self-hatred that lived at her core.
His heart began to beat in a funny way. “I didn’t know, uh… I didn’t think you cared. Thomal and Gábor’s radars picked up on their mates’ worry while we were in the forest, but I never felt anything from you.”
She moved a wobbly step back from him. “Because I don’t care.”
He studied the muscles twitching all over her face. She was trying to harden herself up, but she couldn’t do it this time—her eyes remained bewildered and too young. Haunted. “You do care,” he told her in a soft voice. “You’ve shown it to me, Charlize. You can’t take it back now.”
Her hands balled into rigid fists. “Then let me rephrase. I won’t care. Not when you could die at any second.”
That one tripped him up. How could he assure her he wouldn’t get hurt again? He was a warrior. He couldn’t promise her that, but…but, hell, she obviously needed to hear something comforting. Moving his tongue around inside his mouth, he searched for some fancy words to tell her, but as per his usual MO, he didn’t find any.
Why hadn’t he paid better attention to females in his life, gained more XP points? Then maybe he would know the right things to say and when to say them. He just never figured he’d have a woman of his own. What woman would pick him when there were so many other great men in the community to—
He bowed his head. No woman had picked him.
“Look,” she said, exasperated. “I’m going to go. We’re obviously not going to fuck.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed it. He didn’t know what to say to stop her from leaving. He just didn’t. But the hell if he could give up, either, not after the deeper glimpse she’d given him. He’d seen someone inside her he could really love, a woman who wasn’t all about the sex, like she acted—
He brought his head up. Holy shit, that was it.
This guy was just supposed to be a fun lay.
I’m going to go. We’re obviously not going to fuck.
He needed to focus on what she wanted—sex—not what she didn’t want—permanence. He finally knew what to say. “We can fuck, Charlize. You just have to agree to try to be in a relationship with me. Just try. It doesn’t matter if we succeed.”
She stilled.
His heart thudded. He had her attention.
“So you’re saying if I try with you, we can fuck? No matter the outcome?”
“Yes.”
“How do we try?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Because the hell if I’m moving into one of those white picket fence houses and playacting Mr. and Mrs. Beaver Cleaver.”
“We won’t do that.” We’re really talking about this! “Just throwing ourselves together probably wouldn’t work out so well. We need to iron out some rough edges first.”
“Okay. I repeat—how?”
“Well…” He hadn’t exactly cracked that specific nut yet. “I don’t know how.”
“Great.” She sniffed. “It’ll be like the blind leading the blind.”
“So, we get help.” Maybe Toni would be willing to sit down with them every day to—
“Oh, I see where this is going.” Charlize crossed her arms, although it looked more like she was hugging herself. “You’re talking about couples counseling with that Karrell woman, aren’t you?”
Uh… He sat up straighter. That was actually a great idea. “Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”
Her crossed arms tightened. “I don’t want some stranger poking around my private business, Breen.”
“Do you have another idea?”
Her chin stiffened. She paused for a long moment. “So if we go to couples counseling together, we fuck? That’s the story?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck regularly?”
“Yes.”
“Like…starting right now.”
The muscles around his hips flexed. “Sure, why not?”
She hesitated another second, then put her hands on her hips. “You’ll have to talk in therapy, Breen. You can’t just do your usual and sit and say nothing.”
His face heated. “I know.”
“I’m not going to do all the talking.”
“I’ll talk.”
She moved her lips together. “Okay.”
Okay. The word sucker-punched him. What exactly did she mean by it?
She climbed back on the bed and moved to straddle him again.
“Wait.” He stopped her. “So you agree?”
“Yes. Jesus. I agree. Can we stop talking about this now?”
Astonishment or triumph? He didn’t have the chance to experience either. Charlize was rooting around inside his fly.
His dick had lowered to half-mast during their negotiations, but the moment her hand curled around his length, he reared back up to full power.
She drew him out into the open, straddled him again, then—no giving him another chance to stop her—just, pow-whoa! She sat down hard on his dick, encasing him completely in her wet heat.
A growl barked from his throat as a shattering tide of pleasure rushed through his pelvis and along his thighs. His fangs shot down.
What followed next wasn’t a good trouncing. It wasn’t in the realm of fucking, and probably couldn’t even be defined as rough sex. It delved too far into animal barbarity to be anything but a pummeling, plunging, grinding act of violence that hammered her body into his and jolted the bed so hard that the locked wheels screeched in metallic hysteria and the frame thundered up pieces of plaster dust from the wall.
Breen hung onto her ass with everything he had.
Without warning Charlize climaxed, her sheath convulsing around him aggressively and with impossible flexibility.
His legs went rigid as her inner muscles milked ecstasy up from the very root of his shaft. He squeezed his eyes shut, just letting himself be taken by her orgasm. His spine bowed. His hips strained. A guttural shout exploded from him, and his whole body shuddered with the power of his orgasm, his dick jerking and pumping against all of her soft inner tissues. He shuddered again. And again—damn—then finally sagged back into his pillows.
Charlize collapsed on top of him, her hair spraying all over his chest, a few strands tangling around one of his biceps. Her hot breath streamed across his pajama top. Her breasts surged in time to his own labored breathing.
He worked at evening out his oxygen intake while his leg wound throbbed along with his nuts, one irritating, the other throb pleasing.
“Well, Costache,” Gábor drawled. “You were wondering if Dalakis was okay. Guess we have our answer.”
Breen angled his head toward the door.
Thomal and Gábor were standing just inside his room. An amused shine was in Thomal’s eyes. Gábor was smirking.
“Shit,” Charlize hissed. Scrambling off Breen’s lap, she snatched up her panties and darted by the two warriors, performing some fancy footwork to maneuver around Octav, who was being wheeled back inside.
So much for taking time to savor a post-orgasm high. Breen quickly stuffed his dick back in his PJs.
Jacken was coming in right behind Octav, shouldering past Thomal and Gábor to get inside the room. He cut a swift glance at Breen, long enough to see he was okay, then stalked over to the foot of Octav’s bed, waiting while Pettrila helped her brother settle under the covers.
Jacken observed Octav with a dark look in his already very black eyes.
Octav pursed his lips at Jacken. “What kind of creature are you?” He elevated his nose, as if Jacken was a pile of excrement left behind in a bedpan, his scent offensive to more delicate sensibilities. “Not a pure Vârcolac, that is for certain.”
“What I am is head of security here.” Jacken’s voice held the kind of razor edges that suggested very little control was being maintained over his temper. “You fucked with the safety of my people, Rázóczi, so now you and I are going to talk. I ask questions. You answer them.”
“Sounds scintillating.” Skunk Streak gestured Jacken onward, like a king granting audience to a simpering plebian. “How might I assist you?”
Jacken crossed his arms. “How did you get the email address you used to set your trap for Nichita? That’s a private account.”
“Someone gave it to me.”
“You don’t say.” Jacken showed the tip of a sharpening fang. “Who?”
Octav looked pointedly at Jacken’s forearm tattoos. “Oh, someone who very much wants you dead.”
Jacken uncoiled. Leaning forward, he braced his palms on the rail at the end of Octav’s bed, then leaned forward some more, his jaw jutted. “Who?”