Page 49 of Magpies & Mayhem
“One drop of my venom in your blood would damn you to the same darkness, the same diet, the same shadow of a future that I have. I have some control over its release, but that is not a risk that I will ever take with anyone, let aloneyou. It won’t ever happen. Don’t offer it again.”
The desire to be obstinate just because I didn’t like being told what to do warred with my racing heart, which told me just how much I liked his bossy tone. Only the knowledge that this subject was a trigger for him and I shouldn’t push him on it made me bite my tongue.What is happening to me? Who is this person who cares what someone else thinks?My whole thought process derailed when Jordan leaned down and pressed the lightest kiss to my forehead, then brushed another across my cheek. “I’m healing just fine,” he said, with a hint of humor in his voice. “Have some patience. It’s taking about three hours instead of my normal thirty seconds.” His quiet humor made my blood race. Until he skimmed his lips down my cheek and pressed them to my mouth—then it felt like my heart stopped altogether. I know I stopped breathing, not wanting to make any sudden moves and startle him.
He pulled back far enough to look me in the eye, and I ran my hands up his arms, wanting to maintain some level of contact. “You came for me,” he stated quietly.
“And don’t forget it,” I said. “Nobody takes what’s mine. I will chase you down every time.” I gritted my teeth as that flare of anger took hold again, and Jordan seemed puzzled by it. There was something behind his eyes that I didn’t understand. Some emotion that he seemed to be struggling with.
“Why?” he asked.
My fingers clenched lightly around his biceps, and this time I did bare my teeth, glaring daggers at him as I cringed into the bed. “You know why.”He had better not—
Jordan shook his head, narrowing his eyes at me as the hint of a smile played at his mouth. “Tell me why.” It was the quietest murmur I’d ever heard from this stubborn man.
I took another deep breath and made myself force the words out through my teeth. “Because I’m in love with you, jackass.” I hated the wave of defensiveness that swept through me. “You gave me astick,” I said by way of explanation—or maybe excuse—feeling every bit as petulant as I sounded.
Jordan’s laughter rang in my chest as he cupped my jaw and kissed me, softly at first and then deeply and hungrily. His lips were covetous and jubilant as he smiled against my mouth. He tightened his grip on me, and my body finally relaxed, melting into the mattress beneath him. Enjoying the feel of his heart beating against mine. This was what I needed. “I could kiss you like this for the rest of my life,” I murmured against his lips, my eyes suddenly stinging. “I just wish I could kiss you for the rest of yours as well.” The piercing ache at the thought of the disparity of our lifespans sucked the breath from my lungs and I kissed him harder, a kiss that surely tasted of desperation and heartache.
Jordan broke our kiss to hold me still, comforting me and waiting for me to calm before pulling back to whisper, “You have utterly wrecked me.” He stared into my soul as he said it, but the intensity in his eyes gentled and faded as he watched me, and his expression made it hard to breathe at the forlorn sadness suddenly painted across his own features. “But I can’t give you what you need, Sidney. Or what you deserve. I can’t give you a life, or children, or happiness.”
I shoved him off me. I needed room to sit up because I wasn’t having this discussion on my back. “You,” I started, as I pushed myself up to face him squarely, “are worth more to me than the children we can’t have.” I spit the words out as I thought them, but once they were out, I realized how much I meant them. Biological children with Jordan would have been lovely, and I knew I would need to grieve the loss of that possibility at some point. But he mattered to me as a person, and my disobedient heart was too attached to walk away from him over that grief. As for my family, well, I didn’t owe my genetics to the future generations of my people. I didn’t have to please anyone but myself with my choice of mate. My life wasmine, and my happiness was one more thing I wasn’t going to let anyone take from me. “If you want children, we can figure that out together,” I argued huffily, “but you already make me happy. And whycan’tthat be enough?” I said it to myself as much as to him. I had recognized the wisdom in Elara’s words adequately enough to pass them on to my brother, but it had felt selfish and fruitless to apply them to myself.Why?Why didJoshdeserve happiness, but I didn’t? Why couldn’t I take my own advice? Jordan was enough for me.
He looked like he wanted to argue, but I cut him off. “I don’t have all the answers, Jordan. I don’t know how it’s all going to work. All I need to know is that you’ll be there for me, and you’ll stop disappearing on me. Justbe with me.”For as long as we have.
His mouth opened and closed several times, his gaze locked with mine as I brushed my fingers back up his arms, coaxing, pleading. His expression was torn, but I could tell he was thinking hard and fighting his own defensiveness.
I huffed an agitated breath as he wrestled with his thoughts. “Please, let me talk to my brothers. You’ll feel more comfortable if they’re on your side and you aren’t feeling like they’re out to get you.”
Jordan’s eyebrows pulled together in a frown, and he started to pull away from me. I slid my hands down to his wrists, keeping contact but loosening my hold so he didn’t feel trapped. “They aren’t going to like me,” he finally responded with the slightest shake of his head.
“Sam has always liked you. He was your teammate!”
Jordan grunted, the unhappy sound so like my own brothers that I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. “That was before… all this. I heard them say that you’d better not be with a vampire while we were dancing.” I started to argue, but he kept talking. “No. I cut out my own family so that I wouldn’t have to listen to their abuse. I won’t put up with it from yours either.” His posture was all rigid tension as he sat back on his heels.
I rubbed my thumbs lightly across the back of his wrists and worked to keep my voice gentle and beseeching. “Jordan, listen to me. I understand your choices. That’s completely fair, and I agree. But I’d like the chance totry.I haven’t even discussed you with them because you wanted your privacy, so they had no idea how I felt about you when Aaron said that. Let me talk to them and smooth things over. If they can’t be kind, then you don’t ever have to see them,” I assured him, and I meant it. I wouldn’t subject him to unkindness, even from my own family.Especiallyfrom my own family. “We can buy a cabin in the mountains somewhere and go be hermits together.”
He stopped pulling away, but he still looked doubtful.
“But let me try. My brothers—my family—are important to me, and I want to give them a chance to get to know you without you disappearing when they inadvertently say something they shouldn’t. It might take me talking to them a few times before they come around to the idea, but I believe in them.” I would burn the world down for my brothers, but I was grown enough to make my own decisions, and I expected them to respect those decisions. The same went for the rest of my family.
“Come here,” I said, tugging him back down with me so I could play with his hair while he thought about what I’d requested and the dragons finished soaking. Jordan was enough for me… even if we had some work to do.
We lay quietly, lost in our own thoughts as I ran strands of his hair through my fingers until he broke the silence to ask, “If I played Mario Kart with Sam, would he let me play Peach?”
This felt like some kind of test I didn’t understand. “He’ll let you play whoever you want, because if he doesn’t, I’ll pinch his nipple off.”
He sat up and looked at me likeIwas somehow the crazy one.
Chapter 36
Weleftatduskto take the first night train into the foothills. It had taken a week of searching, but Augustus had finally found a dragon-specific wildlife refuge with space for our babies. My heart was broken, and I was exhausted. I’d tried to prepare Huck for the inevitable transition, but the more I’d tried to distance myself, the more stubbornly he had clung to me. If I was laying down, he wanted to be next to me, and if I was up, he wanted to be in a nest of my clothing or following me around the compound. He hadn’t even let us cage him for transport, thrashing and flaming so much that we’d all caved and found a harness for him so he could ride alongside me on the train. But of course, even that hadn’t been enough, and now he was trying to prove he was still egg-sized by cramming his scaly bulk into my too-small lap. I pushed his snout over my shoulder so it wasn’t in the way and stroked his neck.It’s not like I’m ever going to get to do it again.
Lucas lifted the wool blanket covering one of the sibling’s cages to peek in and immediately got flamed in the face for his troubles. “Ow! Shoot, ow!” He scrubbed the sticky accelerant off his face with his arm, and I watched with fascination as the burns healed nearly instantly. Too bad his eyebrows and the front clumps of his dark hair would take longer. Augustus watched the entire interaction with little more than a sigh before returning his gaze to the darkening windows. I guess when you’d known each other for however many hundreds of years, it wasn’t worth your breath to tell someone to knock it off.
The brakes engaged with a screech, and Jordan reached over to give my arm a reassuring squeeze as we slowed to a stop at our station. I didn’t respond as I waited for Augustus and Lucas to wheel their two cages out, my jaw set and the backs of my eyes burning. I hated this. My skin prickled as I stood and adjusted Huck’s grip on the front of my jacket, hoisting him up higher so he could see over my shoulder as we walked.I probably shouldn’t have gotten him used to being carried like a baby in the first place,I thought as I pushed his wings out of my line of sight again. This was going to be a good change for my little dragon. He was a wild animal, and he needed to be able tobea wild animal. I just had to trust that this place would treat him right and rehabilitate him well, and he’d have a long, happy dragon life—which I didn’twantto trust anyone else with.
We stepped off the train into a little town nestled in the Ardac Mountains called Thranum’s Reach. It was nearly full dark as we made our way through the town to the outskirts where the rehab facility sat on a rocky hillside. Only the double moons lit the road between the scrubby bushes that dotted the otherwise barren ground. A tree line in the distance separated the tall, wrought-iron gate that surrounded the sprawling property from the mountain peaks in the distance. A large guard with tusks and light-green skin met us at the front entrance and called for someone inside.So far, so good, I thought as Huck squirmed to get down so he could sniff around in the dirt. Several large mastiff-type dogs, like the ones that Elara’s dad bred, came loping up to the fence while we waited for entrance, barking and making a ruckus until a dark figure approached from behind them and called them off.
He was a big, burly, handsome older man who wore his hair in flat twists against his scalp with a gray-streaked beard and a proud nose, his skin bearing a warmer brown hue than Lucas’s grayish cast. He grabbed the thick metal bars of the gate and gave us a warm grin, quickly cataloging our group and the cages as he hauled it open with the help of the orcish guard. I patted my thigh to call Huck, not wanting to risk a violent interaction between him and the dogs.
