My skin glowed golden, and I felt myself grow heavier, as if I had changed into… something. When I lifted my head to see what I had become, my vision was filled with a fire that reflected off the floors and fixtures in the room. My fingertips burned and I expected to see my hands formed into claws, but my fingers were unchanged.
My wyvern sent me a thought.Protecting our soft mate.My wings though… They felt heavy, fuller, as if they had grown. My head lowered to her breast again.
“Mine.” The wyvern rasped through my lips, for the first time, in a voice not like my own. This was guttural, double-toned, and for a moment, I was no longer in control of my own body. I forced my focus onto my eyes, my teeth, as he leaned to take her for himself alone.
No,I thought, as loud as I could.She is mine as well. She is ours!
Slowly, intentionally, with my seed still bathing Roya’s walls, and her hot slick nearly burning both of us, I set my teeth to her breast. My teeth were sharper than they should be and slid easily into her flesh. Her sweet blood, tasting of oranges and sugar and the sea, slid into my mouth, and my wyvern trumpeted his approval. “Ours!”
I felt the magical web of the sky bond wrap around us, spinning us together in a blanket, a cocoon. Taking slivers of my soul and attaching them to hers… to her back?
Roya’s bright blue eyes were filled with fear, and I wondered if she would always fear me, fear what I had inside me, but then those strange sapphires flashed. “Mine,” she purred in a voice that was as foreign as mine, two-toned and grating. And then she struck, her neck moving sinuously to mine, her teeth digging deep into my flesh.
It was agonizing. It was heaven. As if I had died and become a new creation in my Goddess’s arms. Fire raced through my wings as I felt the bone that had been broken straighten and fuse together. Every pain I had felt dropped away.
I may have slept; my consciousness felt diffuse, as if I had become a part of the wheeling, endless skies.
When I finally came back to myself, I slid down on her body, marveling at the gold that lay on her flesh… No, that was her skin.
“Little dove?” I sat up, my knot sliding free of her, a puddle of her wetness and mine pooling on the sheets. My wyvern growled at the sight, insisting we scoop it back up and stuff it inside her, keep her filled. But Roya was sitting up, too, unfolding her… “Goddess!”
Roya frowned. “What, Icarus?” She sounded like herself now, and was acting as if everything was normal.
But it wasn’t. I tried to think of what to tell her.
“I think it helped,” she murmured, looking at her arms, that were covered with flecks of shining gold, like mica. “I feel amazing. I… I’m golden, Icarus.”
“Yes, darling,” I said, sitting on my knees in front of her, and taking her hands in mine. “You are. And there’s more.”
“More?” Her head tilted, and then those strange, glowing blue eyes flew open again. “I… Icarus, what’s on my back?”
“Wings, little dove. You have wings.”
She had just opened her mouth to reply when the sounds of swords clashing and men shouting broke through.
“Hope you’re done in there, little brother,” Talon yelled from outside. “I need you to use a different—oof!—kind of sword right now, if you have a minute.”
ROYA
Icarus pressed a quick kiss to my brow, shouted, “Coming, brother,” and jumped off the bed. Before I could ask what he thought he was doing, he’d grabbed a bamboo pole from the corner of the room and raced for the door. Stark naked.
“I’m mated to an idiot,” I growled. The heat that had torn my guts apart had died down, but I could still feel the roiling of lava inside.
Lava outside, too. My eyes had the strangest golden glow, painting everything I looked at with light. I refused to think about the heat that pulsed and swirled in between my shoulder blades. Later, I would consider the lunacy Icarus had spouted about me having wings. Much later. In a year or two.
I couldn’t be some sort of wyvern creature. There was no weight on my back, so if I did have something there—something that was definitely not wings—it wasn’t like the folded, enormous ones Icarus had.
I shivered, remembering how he had grown heavier, larger, before he bit me. As if thinking about it made the pleasure return, the mating bite on my breast throbbed, sending an answering pulse of ecstasy to my core.
“That’s going to be inconvenient,” I muttered, trying to find my trousers. Where had they gone? There was nothing in the room other than my cloak, the bed, and a bunch of tattered… Oh. My clothes lay on the floor, torn into pieces, some so small I wasn’t certain they could even be used as rags. When had that happened?
I grabbed one long scrap of cloth to tie my sweaty, matted hair back. My cloak was there at least, but I needed something, anything, to wear under it. The sheet was soaked with Icarus’s seed and my slick, but it would have to do.
I bundled it off the bed, wrapped it around my waist, pulling a corner up and over my shoulder and tying it to itself. It was not nearly enough fabric to cover me decently, but I didn’t care. The fighting outside had gotten louder, closer, and it was my turn to join in the fray. Time to use the skills I had learned.
I took a deep breath, folded my cloak over my arm, and reached into the seams for the last packets I had that would help today.
The deadliest ones. Adderbane and bladewort.
