I reached up, my fingers tracing over the defined edge of his jaw. His gaze softened, sending tremors racing through my chest.
“I should never have brought you here in the first place.”
“I’ve been telling you that, you stupid man.”
His smile shot wide at the insult. “I’m listening now.”
The question was, how much was he listening now? Had he thought more about what I’d said regarding Eros? Curiosity burned me up like a fever, but I wasn’t about to bring that up again.
Not yet.
“You’re not pissed that I set your home on fire?” He glanced down at me, his irises that brilliant viridian I’d come to love. “It’s not my home. Not anymore. It deserves to burn. And one day, from its ashes, it will be reborn.”
Chapter thirty-three
Acid
Whentheairgrewcolder and my mate’s marks hotter, I knew we were close to home.
We had been in the fae realm for two days, barely even that. Since time passed by at approximately five times the speed there, we’d only been away for a little more than half the day.
The late afternoon sun was rising high in the sky over the ocean, making me grateful—for the first time—that Vincent was in his fae form, where the sun couldn’t scorch him.
My heart thudded heavily in my chest when the Knight Mansion came into view. It sat high on the cliffside overlooking the sea, the sunlight catching on the windows, causing them to glitter like diamonds against the rocky beach.
For a second, it felt like the sun was bounding off the glass and straight into my chest, hot and blistering like I had a heart made of golden light.
Home.Finally.
It was an evolution of the sensation I used to get whenever I watched a sappy movie with one of those homecoming enders. The character’s home would sit in the distance with the bright blue sky and perfect white clouds, and their dog would run up the driveway parking, and this happy music would play as the character’s family ran out.
Okay, so this wasn’t really like that. If my family ran out to greet us, they’d be burned to shit.
But I still felt happy, like I had when watching those movies. Only now, the joy was my own, not for some fictitious character and their fictitious homecoming.
Iwas going tomyhome.
And soon, I’d be in the arms of people who were mine.
“Until recently, I’d spent all my life in Quincy, Vin. But three months here has felt more like home than that room ever did.”
“I understand,” Vincent said with a bend in his cadence that had my heart aching.
As the mansion drew closer, Vincent dipped lower toward the ocean. I knew it wasn’t intentional by his jerky movements. I turned my attention to him, seeing the beads of sweat split down his temple. Dark magic pulsated around him like flickering energy, ready to give out at any moment.
He was losing his grip over his true form. “Really?” I shouted at him over the wind. “Nowyou’re going to shift back?”
His jaw flexed. “T–trying to keep it together. G–getting harder now that we’ve left Fairie. Haven’t f–fed…”
Terror gripped me as my gaze dropped to the dark, tumultuous waves below. I was a vampire princess with the ability to rip off a full-grown man’s head like it was a toilet paper square. It was yet another fucked-up joke from the universe. With all my strength and magical power, I couldn’t so much as dog paddle.
Maybe I could figure it out. I was pretty damn good at saving my skin in dangerous situations. What worried me more was Vin. I couldn’t do shit about the sun.
If Vincent couldn’t keep his monster form up, at least until we got inside, he was going to burn to death.
“Hold out for a little longer! You’ve got to.”
I felt his flesh crawling as he internally began to shift. His feathers shrunk until they disappeared. His muscles shrunk. His wings were the very last thing to go. Just as we reached the shore, we plummeted from the sky. Wrapping his arms around me, he twisted so his back would hit the rocky sand, cushioning me with his body.
