Page 92 of Commanding Blood And Bonds

He chuckled low, the sound vibrating against my lips. “Can you be quiet, wife?” he teased, and then slammed into me, stealing my breath and any ability to reply. His thumb circled harder, faster, and when my orgasm detonated, it was his name that filled my throat.

I just couldn’t let it escape.

NINETEEN

STORKS

AUGUST

We were a pile of sweaty, tangled limbs, panting into the softly glowing guest room of Terramyst’s king, and there was nowhere on the planet I’d rather be. Ally’s hair fanned out around her in a rich brown halo, strands tossed every which way. Her fair skin was painted a delicious shade of pink, and the lips I craved with every incessant beat of my heart were bee-stung and parted as she caught her breath. Our lives may have collided when I was at her mercy, but with every reading that took us deeper, I realized this life was unique in that. My mate was right. Whether I wanted it or not, every incarnation came with two constants; brutal, bottomless bloodshed, and the soul so pure and bright she outshone the darkness.

I wasn’t sure what I’d done in my first life—or what it was about my creation—that had granted me a gift like her to circle back to, but it was in her solace that I thought the rest of this hell might just be worth it.

“Mmmm,” Ally purred softly as the pads of my fingers continued their dutiful patrol of her curves. I didn’t want to believe this life was just as damned as the rest of them. But if it was, I wanted to remember the lines of this warrior’s body so deeply that she was written in the marrow of my next one when I woke.

A smile threatened my composure as gooseflesh pebbled to life in the wake of my touch, and I guided that chill up between her breasts and over her collarbone, satisfaction curving my lips as her ribs expanded in a wanton breath before I swept the rogue strands of hair from her face. She was teetering that line of ecstasy between sleep and wake, her body so sated not even her mind was whirring when I finally stroked a petal soft touch over her eyelids, down her cheek and over the bow of her lips. A soul as fierce as Ally, trusting me with this level of vulnerability, was a gift I would not be taking for granted.

I would worship at this woman’s altar after erecting the damn thing myself. There was nothing she could ask of me I wouldn’t break my back to give her.

Nothing…except for that. Her plans might take us to the ends of the earth, but in no universe could I carry on if we were cleaved apart again. Some fates are truly worse than death, and her back in our enemy’s hands…

As I memorized the subtle give of her swollen lips beneath my thumb, I decided once and for all, that was the one reality I couldn’t live with. If our enemy was mad enough to strike that particular match, I’d burn this realm to ash myself.

“This guy? Really?” Kingsley asked a few mornings later, tapping on the headshot he’d just slid across the wood table with a sigh. Ally leveled him with a glare that I hoped knocked his ego down a few pegs before ignoring him altogether. We’d spent the last few days testing the water, breaching an unspoken pact between all clans that humans could not know of our existence in the pursuit of preparing them for the war to come. But humans were a stubborn breed, dedicated to remaining so deeply steeped in their cognitive dissonance that the knowledge of creatures more powerful than them didn’t seem to settle well. Not even for Ally.

“We’ve had minimal success thus far.” That was her understatement of the year, unfortunately. Thus far, our only victory was that we’d been able to contact more than half of Grayshell’s globally deployed souls, and they were righting their affairs before heading to Chicago to report in to Marcus until we found our damn door. “The visions show Mr. Mori is our best bet from Japan, and I have high hopes for Lochlan, but our odds are truly stacked against us at converting most bureaucrats. Their need for control will supersede the good of their people.”

“And Adrastos has people on the inside,” Kingsley deduced. Correctly, if the visions were indicative.

“He wouldn’t be much of an opponent if he didn’t,” I stated simply. “The bastard was right about one thing, though.” When Kingsley’s gaze flicked to me, I explained, “Adrastos believes that humanity has, by and large, given up. The bureaucrats will hear what they want to hear where power is the prize. Our enemy will use that to their advantage. Meanwhile, the populace is so beaten down…” my words wandered off, and I shook my head. “They are so blindly inured to the system that, should our enemy possess their governments, they will defend their own impending enslavement. They’ve lost too much of their courage to fight for anything beyond what they think they know.”

“So…are you saying we’ve already lost?” Rose asked tentatively, her eyes round with the kind of bone-deep terror of someone staring down death itself.

I guessed that’s what it had felt like for me lately, too, if I was honest. Problem being, these souls would look to me to guide them through it. “No,” I said, eyes dropping to the table where I rotated an empty cup in my hand. “I’m saying our enemies have been planning this for centuries, and if they have infiltrated the human world as deeply as we believe they have…we are in for an uphill battle.”

“Don’t Aren and Marcus have braids in the system as well?”

“Yes they do,” I assured. “And they have them trying to sift through suspects, but even if we can turn politicians our direction, I don’t think that’s how we win this.”

Alvara’s face morphed into the same scowl she wore while outmaneuvering Adrastos the first go around. “This resistance is going to be from the ground up, or not at all.”

“That sounds…promising,” Kingsley growled sardonically. Ally was startlingly quick to forgive his temper in my opinion, but I couldn’t deny he’d minded his mouth since. Still surly and generally unpleasant to be around, but he had our back in this, albeit begrudgingly. It had grown quickly apparent Kingsley was begrudgingly alive, though, so I couldn’t take it too personally.

“So, how do we connect our people and theirs?” Rose asked from where she braced herself on the edge of the table, brown eyes trained on the images splayed across its weathered surface.

“We show them who we are,” Ally said simply.

“We expose ourselves?” Kingsley’s tone turned disapproving. “Holding out hope for a better explanation than that.”

“They’re going to know soon enough,” Rose pointed out. “Inevitable, really, once Adrastos and his keeper make their move.”

Stomach growling, I eyed the tower of muffins our wives had prepared, wondering if we’d actually break our fast at some point. Training these last days had been harrowing at best, the readings damn near bringing me to my knees every time we tried to break past the wall in our history. The Bond seemed to have a mind of its own, and didn’t seem eager to bend to our wills.

We’d risen at dawn. While the coffee percolated in a gurgling worn out machine, Rose and Ally warmed the kitchen baking muffins and whipping up lemon poppyseed pancakes that smelled divine. I fried up a pack of bacon to the sound of their chatter, only for all of it to get set to the side when Kingsley slapped a newspaper down on the table.

Attempted explanations for not only the mysterious ‘tectonic shift’ we’d left in the Rockies, but also the recent weather anomalies consumed the headlines. Whoops. My bad.

Worse yet, conspiracies were already getting out of hand online—the most concerning of which regaled the stories of the old gods, and the fact that perhaps those lost tales weren’t so lost after all.