“How are you not burning up right now from Arini’s protection mechanisms?” Layla growled, aware that King Arini’s wards were not functioning as intended.
“Because I can assume Falliro Arini’s vibration completely.” Hunter’s words were said with a tone so dead that Layla wondered if he had any heart left at all. “Even the vibration of his most recent physical body is something I can approximate.”
“So what do you want from me?” Layla snarled. “Why all this subterfuge – again?”
“Because I want you to see my side, Layla.” He spoke quietly, still making no threatening moves towards her. “If I came to you as just me, would you ever hear me out? If I didn’t trick you, make you feel close to me, would you ever give me a moment of your time? I just want to talk, Layla. No more games – just a conversation.”
“Why did you even let me come to the Aviary, if all you wanted to do was talk? Why not just talk in Manarola or back in Paris?” Layla growled, furious.
“Because Arini’s bower is the most magically-protected place I know from prying ears and prying minds.” Hunter’s gaze was still level with her.
“Whose?” Layla spat.
“You’ll understand if you listen, if you hear me out.”
“Fine. If you want to talk, talk now or talk never, bucko.” Layla spoke, a furious nimbus of scalding air building around her now. Her lungs felt like they were on fire with her hatred of him; her veins burned with dark fury as her entire body trembled with a rigid tension. As she breathed, a hot mirage began to waver the air, as if it might create a wall of fire around her.
She saw Hunter note it, a smile touching his lips. “That mirage. You’re channeling Adrian’s ability to fire-breathe,” he spoke softly.
“It’s mine now.” Layla growled back, her voice dropping an octave into a dark, nearly non-human register. It was a sound she’d never made before; a sound Adrian and Dusk made when they were channeling their Dragons, close to shifting for a fight.
“Not quite.” Hunter corrected as he regarded her with Tempeste’s face and his own hunter-green eyes. “But your power is growing if you’re learning to adopt the abilities of your bound men. I wondered how you were able to crack the sapphire door in the Paris Hotel’s Vault. Now I see you were channeling Dusk’s formidable talent. But there are still countless mistakes you might make with your magic, Layla, and I wish to save you from that darkness. If I can.”
“Don’t act like you give two shits about me.” Layla spat back, furious, balling both hands into fists now.
“But I do care about you.” His green eyes deepened, so dark they were nearly black. “And I will do anything I can to make you see just how much you mean to me.”
“Like killing my friends?”
“If I must.” His eyes really were black now, only a trace of green still shining from them in the light reflected off the thousands of dangling baubles. “May I tell you my story?”
Layla paused. Hunter hadn’t made a move to touch her yet, or lobbied any threats against her personally. It was clear he was here to talk, not to attack, perhaps unless he was provoked. Plus, the more Layla kept him talking, the more time there was for someone to discover what was happening in Arini’s bower. With her mirage of power still seething around her, Layla glanced at the large ruby set into the outer wall of the bower, wondering if she could get close enough to touch it and raise an alert. “Ok. Talk.”
“It would be easier… if I showed you.”
“Showed, what do you mean?”
But before Layla could say anything else, Hunter lifted his hands, steepling his index fingers between his eyes. Drawing a deep breath, he closed his eyes. And on his exhalation, a wave of memory suddenly pummeled into Layla. One moment, she was standing in the bower with Hunter.
And the next, her mind was spinning; careening back through the ages.
Vast deserts rolled away from her. Vistas, arroyos, canyons; a land before time had ever been counted. And yet, the desert had beautiful oases – amazingly green and lush, Layla felt that they were her home. A Desert Dragon clan filled her mind; a tribe of caramel-skinned, dark-haired people dressed in luminous silks, living like Bedouins out in some nameless desert. Fighting in enormous temples of sandstone, practicing their powers, they laughed and danced out under the stars and the swaying palms; celebrating life around the fire at night.
She felt the ancientness of Hunter’s memory – magic had been young when Hunter was born long ago. Powers had been volatile; Lineages had not been charted. There was no Intercessoria and no High Court, and she saw his clan traveling as nomads through the desert, fucking and fighting as they flew from oasis to oasis conquering rival clans.
She saw Hunter’s parents, dark-eyed and caramel-skinned; beautiful. Tall and elegant, they wore cascades of red and turquoise beads and little else in their human forms, and she saw how they adored their only son. She felt how they knew he was different from the rest of their tribe; how they had tried to keep it a secret from their King and Queen. But young eighteen-year-old Hunter was magnetic and compelling. Fire burned in his green-black eyes and passion in his heart, the young Royal Desert Dragon possessing an ability to draw others to him with a power his parents didn’t understand – a charisma that was unprecedented.
Layla saw them take him to the tribe’s human shaman, to see if he could help the young man contain his magics. The shaman found out Hunter could imitate others; could change his face and body as he willed – and had heard of a Seer deep in the desert who had this strange ability also. Layla saw the young man taken from his parents, to find this Seer. She saw the caravan waylaid; two enormous black Dragons with red-gold stripes burning the shaman’s belongings and camels. Layla felt terror consume her as those Dragons touched down to the desert sands, though it wasn’t Hunter’s terror. He ran to them, and Layla understood what they were. His Bound lovers, his two Bound mates, one female and one male – snarling as they faced off with the shaman to take Hunter back to the tribe.
The shaman resisted them, but he was a human, and they burned him to death. When they brought Hunter back and the tribe’s King and Queen learned of their precious shaman’s death, they feared Hunter’s influence over his Bound lovers. Layla saw their stern faces; their rejecting gestures. She saw the clan vote – Hunter had to go train with the Seer or be banished for his unpredictable otherness.
With wrath in his heart, he went, roaring up into the skies as an enormous black Dragon with golden stripes – forsaking his beloveds to learn at the feet of the Seer. But what Layla saw next was pure torture. Hunter, chained in the bottom of a cistern, drowning as magical manacles prevented him from shifting into his Dragon and escaping. Hunter, starving out under the cruel desert sun in a deadly fatigue, two breaths from death and hallucinating. Hunter, buried up to his neck in a copper tub full of scorpions – stung over and over and screaming in pain.
Abuse, denigration, and misery had been inflicted by the tall desert Seer with the corkscrewing white dreadlocks and jagged teeth. The tests had been meant to break Hunter, to make him rage and flare his powers as far as they would go. Layla felt fury build inside the young man. She felt his rage; black and horrible at the abuse he suffered. She saw the cruelty of the Seer – and how he was able to convince Hunter over and over with his terrible mind-magics to engage these tests.
She saw the final straw. She saw how the Seer took the face of Hunter’s female Bound lover, how he came to Hunter in her body, making the sweetest love. And how he brought it all crashing down, exposing his true form in the middle of it.
Tricking Hunter; driving him mad.
