The vaulted hall was terrible even as it was beautiful. The wildness of time had completely reclaimed it. Where the Chartres Cathedral had been built out of the natural world, this space had fallen long ago and been replaced by nature. As Layla turned, taking in the hall’s gargantuan reaches curling through with mist and slowly-wafting clouds, she felt a presence enter.
Turning in her dream, she saw a man move into the hall, stepping quietly through the trees. Barefoot upon the moss, his high-arched feet crushed flowers as they walked toward her in a slow, steady approach. A scent Layla couldn’t identify filled the air, both from the crushed flowers and his body, and Layla’s only thought wasstarlightas she smelled it. Draped in a robe that shimmered like the one she’d seen on the tall man, this man was somehow darker – as if he’d tried to imitate that luminousness but was unable to quite replicate it. His robe shimmered with darkness through the white, like the hard-edged light of Heathren Merkami. For a moment, Layla thought he was a Fallen Archangel, when a mist around him cleared.
And she saw his face.
Beautiful like the sun, strong like the world, Hunter’s lion-fierce grace was unmatched in the heavens or earth as he came to Layla. She could smell a hot scent in him now, like the superheated scent of comets searing through the sky; a tang like smelted metals in a forge. As his dawn-colored eyes found her, his long golden waves of hair flowing loose around his incredibly handsome face, his full lips smiled. It wasn’t an angel’s smile like Rake André, or even a Fallen Ephilohim’s smile like Heathren Merkami.
But the fierce, deeply pleasured smile of a Dragon – a creature Layla understood to her bones.
She was swept to Hunter as he smiled, blazing through her life. Layla didn’t know how it happened, but she was suddenly in his arms, his massive hands cradling her close to his ultra-fit yet intensely elegant frame. His scent was all around her now, diving through her as she breathed, filling her mouth and rolling over her tongue as he held her close. As he beamed down at her with the pleasure of suns being born, Layla felt something inside her roar. Rushing up fast, her Dragon was surging up through her body, expanding out a hundredfold to be in his hands. Celebrating all through her to have given him such pleasure by her mere arrival, Layla’s drakaina was a force of nature as she thrust outward.
Roaring and coiling and dancing.
Delight. It was pure delight Layla’s Dragon enjoyed as she flowed around Hunter in a vast wave. She felt his Dragon roar in return, strong and huge as it danced through hers. As his drake’s coils stroked her drakaina’s, twisting and rolling through her in an incredible passion, Hunter’s eyes lit with dawn fire. Reaching up, he brushed a curl from Layla’s face, his touch lingering like the tremendous warmth of summer solstice bonfires.
“You came.” He murmured, his voice deep and strong, yet awed.
“I came.” She answered, not knowing how exactly she had come here, only that she had responded to his call.
“I didn’t know if you would.” He breathed quietly now as he watched her. “So much history lies between us… I didn’t know if you would come to my summons or fight it. I’m glad you chose the former.”
“I didn’t know I was choosing.” Layla spoke plainly. She hadn’t consciously known she was making a choice to come to him when she’d been torn out of the veranda-realm. But she knew now that she had made a choice.
A choice to respond to Hunter’s summons – because he and she had unfinished business.
“We do have unfinished business, yes.” He seemed to sense what she was thinking as he brushed her curls again, watching her deeply like a lover. “And I wish to address it. Do you?”
“Yes.” Layla’s response was immediate, though she didn’t know if she wanted to fuck him or tear his throat out as they watched each other. “I want to finish what we started.”
“So do I.” Suddenly, Hunter reached down from Layla’s face, moving his hand to the collar of his robe. As he pulled one side of the bright-dark fabric open, Layla saw his chest. There amidst the blaze of his golden-tan skin was a ragged red scar searing over his sternum and extending to his heart, still raw and barely healed. Like the mark Layla had just seen earlier that day upon Fury, it was a burn-mark from magic – a bad one, Layla saw as she lifted her hand, her fingers gently perusing it. But rather than Reginald’s mark upon his twin, this was Layla’s mark upon Hunter.
Seared in right over his heart.
“You have marked me, Layla,” Hunter murmured in the vastness of his fallen castle, his voice echoing through the vaults. “I have been able to heal the rest of my body from the damage you dealt me at Deep Harbor, but not this. This remains beyond any healing arts I can muster; beyond any meditation I can perform. Your mark upon my skin burns day in and day out… and it is a burn I cherish.”
“Why?” Layla breathed, her fingers still inexplicably drawn to her mark upon him.
“Because you have burned your way into my heart,” he breathed softly back. “And I am a man forever changed because of it.”
Wordlessly, Hunter’s long fingers stole beneath Layla’s chin, lifting her up to look at him.
And then be bent down, giving her the softest kiss.
“Come to me.” He murmured at her lips as they parted. “We have much to speak about, you and I. But first, I give you a gift. Not a terrible one as I did before at Deep Harbor, but a true gift.”
“What gift?” Layla breathed, entranced by him even as much as she still wanted to thrust her jaws right through his chest and bite out his heart.
“The gift of your origins.” Hunter spoke, watching her with sadness now. “You will know who you are, Layla Price, before you arrive at my door. And you will hear who I am, from all those who tell the story best, before I tell you my own. So you may make a decision about me with your fullest self-possession, when you and I finally have a chance to talk.”
“What do you mean?” Layla asked, frowning in the dream.
“Turn.” Hunter spoke gently. “Look past the gables and tell me what you see.”
In the vast hall, Layla did as he asked. There, beyond one huge arched ingress, she suddenly saw an enormous palace of ice that hadn’t been there before. It was like the White Deeps, yet such an astonishingly impressive version of it that Layla was floored. An ice-palace every bit as enormous as the ruined hall they stood in now, Layla stared at it, amazed. As she did, she saw the vague waver of a man walking through it. Though he was indistinct, he was also somehow familiar. As Layla stared at his mirage, she felt the deep call of blood. That glimmer was her father, she knew suddenly.
And Hunter was showing her the way to him.
“Remember.” Hunter’s voice came to her urgently now, as the vast ruined space around them suddenly began to disintegrate. Just as Layla had felt a pull to come here, she now felt a pull to return – back to the universe once more.
