Hels's Gauntlet [Forbidden Legacy 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (8 page)

“Stop,” he murmured into the quiet tirade. Her voice added to the magic treating his aching wounds. “I’m fine. Are you all right?”

“Hels.” The catch in her voice smashed into the violent rage brewing in his belly. The rage kindled by the Danae’s threats and fanned to flames by Kyrian’s betrayal. His name, filled to the brim with unspoken affection, love, lust, and need.

He wanted to go to her, right now.

“I’m fine. I promise you. Rest.” Like Jacob, he avoided using her name. Closing his eyes, he found the tie that connected him to her, deep inside, and sent a wordless pulse of love racing along it. Her answering echo tingled over his injuries, stealing away the acidic sting.

“Come home soon, okay? I need to see you’re all right for myself.”

“I promise.” It took everything he had not to slip into Underhill and back out into her arms. He bottled up that emotion, letting none of it leak into his voice. “Go rest. Take care of you. That’s an order.”

“Or what?” Laughter tinged the worry. “Will you punish me?”

“Yes.” He opened his eyes and met Jacob’s knowing gaze.

“Good. I promise to be terrible until you are here again.”

Desire trumped agony and frayed the ends of his control. “Remember that when my hand is paddling your ass.” He cut off the rest of the conversation with a click. Their woman liked the last word.

It would gnaw at her, flushing her skin pink and her pussy damp. He looked forward to that particular reward.

“Something to look forward to.” Jacob slid the phone into his pocket. Vanagan returned, fresh damp towels, a bowl of steaming water, and the requested iodine in hand. “Treat his injuries and let’s get a look at what we caught.”

Vanagan said nothing, using the damp cloths to clean away the sticky residue of blood and half-scabbed injuries. The iodine he used more judiciously, but Helcyon focused his attention and ignored the ache. He could handle the pain.

Jacob studied the hooded figure for a moment before he reached over and plucked off the hood covering. His back stiffened with a jerk, and Vanagan swore, hand stilling on Helcyon’s battered shoulder.

A woman with a riot of purple hair that matched her violet eyes glared up at them groggily.

A woman.

Magic surged toward the center of the room, and Helcyon braced, tossing a mental hand toward Jacob. They barely shielded before power fountained up through her to slam into them. The world tilted crazily to the right, but the onslaught, like a spring shower, ended as abruptly as it began.

The woman sagged in her bindings, and her chin drooped in defeat.

“Well, hello there.” Vanagan’s awed voice punctured the stunned silence.

“Go to hell.” Blood bubbled at the corner of her mouth, each word riding a hissing breath. Helcyon slanted his vision, looking at the ebb and flow of magic that scrolled over her skin.

And it scrolled.

Tendrils of violet and purple energy shimmered on the surface of her skin, coiling into scripted text and unraveling before the words could quite be completed. The hiccups of power shuddered, and he leaned forward, maintaining a firm mental and magical brace should she suddenly surge up to blast him. Awareness of Jacob hummed in the back of his mind, like the weight bearing beam in the structural support of a building. Jacob shored up the weak points in his shields. The Wizard blended seamlessly along the fringe of Helcyon’s sense of self. The effort to protect him gave him a mental and magical boost, but the silver twining his connection to Cassandra intensified. They were linked through Cassandra primarily, but the vaguest sense of a strand, a bind, stretched between them.

It flared with each pulse of power, as though trying to negotiate a ping between their uneven heart rates. It would bear further study to see if his oath to Cassandra, an oath soaked in passion and love, transformed the oath of alliance between he and Jacob or if it went deeper.

For now, Helcyon concentrated on his breathing. Forcing his heart rate to steady and match pulse with Jacob. The flares pinging back and forth between them calmed. Like a metronome, the energy began to ebb and flow like the ocean, pushing from Jacob to Helcyon, from Helcyon to Jacob and back again.

His aching body soaked up the energy, channeling toward his hurts. Thankfully, he never failed to replenish it before he had to return it. After a few minutes, it became automatic and he didn’t have to split his attention.

“She’s a Wizard.” Vanagan started forward, but Helcyon’s hand on his leather-clad arm held him in place.

“Have care, nephew. She already tried to blast us out of existence. Female or not, she is not our friend.” He spoke to Vanagan as though he were a child, but the seven-hundred-year-old Wizard should know better than to press forward into the unknown.

“She’s a
Wizard
.” Vanagan emphasized the word as if Helcyon hadn’t already grasped the import. Unfortunately, he was already ahead of his nephew. Kyrian called in these assassins. They’d attacked Helcyon, not his brother. They’d been hell-bent on killing him, not his brother.

That the others included members of the Fae from Elves to the lesser species as well as Wizards did not bode well. New alliances forged in the shadow of the greater powers’ shift could lead to deeper problems for the world.

“You don’t get it. It isn’t just the pretty Elves coming back into the world, Cassie. The Fae are many, and so many are dark, twisted and ugly…”
Jacob’s argument echoed in his ears. He rarely spoke it anymore, not since it was
fait accompli
. The Fae were public knowledge.

“We’re aware, Vanagan, but if you want to say it a third time just for the hell of it, consider what happens when you say Beetlejuice.” Jacob’s dry observation sailed over Helcyon’s head. It must reference something in the popular culture, but unlike his brethren, the only thing in humanity that fascinated him was Cassandra.

“I’m not a Wizard.” Low and thick, the woman’s voice scratched across the words, scrabbling for purchase. Her chin came up, and the scrawling script on her body fought to come together but melted away each time a word nearly solidified. Energy sputtered in the feeble attack she lobbed. A pebble at a tank.

“Then, what are you?” Jacob inserted himself into the conversation. His professional voice—the same cool and measured tone he used when questioning Cassandra in the hospital. The irony that it had only been a few months since the explosion in the park brought Jacob to her side wasn’t lost on Helcyon. Irony that the hostile, but armed ceasefire between Wizard and Fae exploded overnight into factional warfare, plotting, assignations, and love.

Helcyon jerked Vanagan back as he started forward again. Pain flared through his arm, oozing more blood from his wounds, but he didn’t release the Wizard. “Let Jacob question her.”

“Yes, let me question her. You tend to his wounds.”

The female laughed, and a chest-rattling cough seized her. The back of Helcyon’s neck tingled. “Her injuries are deep. She is buying enough time to die.”

“Yeah, I got that, too. What do you want to do?”

“We can stabilize her and ask the Brownies to treat her, but that may be what she is seeking. Her body scrolls magic, she cannot piece the spells together yet, but even in her weakened state she is trying to.” Admiration slid along the underside of his words. The female was young, younger than him—definitely younger than Vanagan—but maybe not quite as young as Jacob.

That made her old enough to be very, very dangerous.

“Or we could kill her.” Despite the bravado in the words, Jacob didn’t want to execute the purple-haired female. They’d questioned whether other female Wizards existed. Cassandra seemed to be breaking down all the doors.

It remained to be seen what monsters came screaming out of the closets as she did.

“No. We can’t let her die.” Vanagan finally stopped pulling at Helcyon’s arm, relaxing back onto his heels. But he didn’t seem quite able to pull his attention from the woman.

“The Brotherhood has healers in it. We can take her there. It will reduce the risk to Underhill.”

“And increase her exposure to the order. This isn’t a power fight, Wizard Marcus.” Jacob’s stern words served as a reminder. Their alliance was fragile, tentative, and subject to any number of flaws.

“That’s not the point. You can’t take her Underhill. If she’s a Changeling, it could destroy sections of it, and we’re already trying to fix what the blight has done. You cannot take her to your home, and you know why. That leaves the Wizard Council.”

The woman jerked, a glimmer of fear ebbing around the fury in her eyes.

“Which we all know would be a mistake. That leaves the Brotherhood. We can contain her. We can heal her.”

“But we will interrogate her.” Jacob spoke the words before Helcyon, his tone chill and hard. Despite the nearly five–hundred-year age gap, Vanagan did not seem the elder in this situation.

His gaze twitched from the female to Jacob and then back again. “Agreed. You can even stay and keep her in custody or send your men to guardian her. But she can’t die.”

A wordless pulse of question flashed against Helcyon’s awareness. Jacob wanted to agree, but did Helcyon? The woman was an enemy. She would kill them all given just the slightest opportunity.

But she was female.

She held magic.

“Agreed. She will live, in chains if necessary. Bind her with salt and iron before we move her. She goes by human transport.” Although he’d already slipped her Underhill, the brief exposure hadn’t shattered reality, so they had that small hope to cling to.

“No!” the woman screamed, blood flying on her spittle. The words across her center hardened into one solid line, and power reared up. Like a hooded cobra, it fanned out and then struck. The poison flew straight at Helcyon, digging angry talons deep into his flesh, and even as his shields rotated to compensate, exhaustion and injury sucked him under.

The world went black.

Cassie paced the length of the living room window. She lifted her gaze from the wooden floors and thatched rugs intermittently to stare at the gravestone beyond. She’d slept all of two hours before Jacob slid into bed with her.

Exhaustion dragged her heels, but she refused to sit. Worry fractured her concentration. Aside from the one cell phone call, she didn’t give in to the urge to plague them until they came home where she could see they were all right. Whatever happened, they needed their concentration. She clung to the whisper of Helcyon’s voice, the order to “stop” which lasted a scant few minutes after she hung up the phone.

She paced.

She wanted to be where they were. She wanted to help them. But she couldn’t leave their safe haven, not when danger threatened. A flutter in her belly reminded her of the reason why she needed to stay put and calm down. As surreal as the pregnancy seemed, the reality of it weighed heavily in her mind. They wanted to keep it quiet, from enemy and ally alike. According to all the books, she shouldn’t even be showing this early, yet without the looser fit of clothing, the swell of her abdomen seemed screamingly obvious.

“I don’t get it. How can piercing someone’s carotid and sucking out the blood be sexy? Aside from the hygiene issues, it hurts.” Jude flopped lazily on the sofa, one leg slung over the arm, the other on the floor. Flat on his back, he read as long as she stayed in the room. Whenever she wandered off, he wandered right behind her, grumbling particularly after she interrupted the sex scene to head into the kitchen for a cup of decaffeinated coffee. The swill hardly did the trick, but the activity filled her empty hands with the illusion of accomplishment.

“It’s not just biting. It’s the intimacy and the sensuality.” She spared him a dry look.
If he didn’t like the book, why the hell was he reading it?

“Yeah and sticking your teeth into a blood bag like they’re straws, that just screams ‘let me fuck you silly.’” Jude grunted, but flipped to the next page. “I feel bad for her though. I mean her husband was apparently a douche, and her so-called friend is such a bitch. They’re in tropics, but she doesn’t want her to have fun ’cause all she can do is puke? She should just kick her ass to the curb or get her own suite.”

“There’s a point to it, just finish the book.” Impatience tethered her feet to the spot as her toes tapped, rolling a wave of drumming from big toe to pinky toe and back. Sooner or later, she wouldn’t be able to see her toes. That would make shoe selection and pedicures a pain.

“I’m working on it, but why doesn’t he just tell her he’s not gay? I mean, I get why the cousin did it, but all he’s doing is digging himself a bigger hole by going along with it. Just rock her world, already, and let the rest of it sort out later.”

“Rock her world?” Cassie pivoted and pinned Jude with a look. “How romantic. Do you walk up to women in bars and say ‘nice shoes, want to fuck’?”

Blissfully unaware of the danger he was in, Jude flashed a grin. “I don’t pick up women in bars. And they already said she was his life mate, so fuck her silly and she’ll know it, too. Women are really pliable after an orgasm. Or five.”

She just stared at him.

Jude scratched his head and flipped the page. “Course the dream sex is hot. But he should be able to hold her in the dream, you know, weave it around her, and then he can fuck the worry right out of her. Hot guy plus multiple orgasms equals problem solved.”