Reaper leaps upward, tearing at them with her claws and teeth. I slash as hard as I can, unable to avoid the acid that cuts across my skin—my face, my chest, my back—until I’m screaming, forced down onto the ground next to Reaper.
She wraps her body around me, her violet eyes glinting opposite mine, a hard stare, but her growl inside my mind startles me.
“Crone will be sorry she fucked with him.”
Him… who?
I’m still processing Reaper’s statement when a blast of power washes across the air above me, approaching like thunder that grows louder and louder and then explodes into light.
For a long moment that stretches out, the bats’ furred bodies and leathery wings are cast into glaring light, every detail visible, from the earthy-brown wisps of their fur to the glassy, black orbs of their eyes. An energy crashes through them, ripping them away from me, lifting and suspending them to spiral, shrieking, above us.
I reach for Reaper, needing to make sure she’s safe as the force grows, nearly lifting me with it, but to my shock, she steps away from me. Her fur is splattered with acid, but the liquid doesn’t seem to have penetrated to her skin, except for one burned patch across her shoulder where she defended me before.
Growling low in her throat, she backs away, never taking her eyes from me. The three claw marks across her right eye glow brighter in the light of the force suspending the screaming bats above us.
“You’re safe now, Nova,”she says.
I reach for her, but my arms won’t respond to my commands. My entire body is numb and it doesn’t feel like a good thing. I should be in excruciating pain right now…
My outstretched hand claws at the ash as I try to move it. I hunch over, my body too heavy to hold myself upright.
The storm of light growing above me is now too bright to look at, and I drop my head to the ash while the bats’ shrieks fade into…
Nothing.
Pure silence. As if… they simply ceased to exist.
As the light fades, darkness returns. The clearing is burned apart, trees split and bent, foliage razed, and ash falls like snow.
Before the darkness takes me, a hand brushes my cheek, stormy-green eyes meet mine, and Roman pulls me into his arms.
“I’ve got you, Nova.” His voice breaks across me, a deep rumble as my eyes close and everything finally fades. “Thank fuck I’ve found you.”
CHAPTERNINETEEN
Iwake to silence that’s broken only by an occasional soft, crackling sound—logs burning in a fireplace, maybe?
My face feels puffy and my eyelids are too heavy to open right away, but there’s a lot I can tell without sight.
I’m not in pain. The air I’m breathing is clear and slightly warm, but not overly so, the scent of cedar filling my senses. I’m lying on my stomach. A soft cocoon of some sort of material encloses my body from my neck to my toes and my arms rest at my sides within it. A pillow cushions my right cheek, since my face is turned to the side.
When I finally attempt to open my eyes, the room comes in and out of focus.
Roman sits in a chair facing me, pulled up so close that his knees press to the side of the bed I’m lying on.
His eyes are closed. He’s leaning back a little, one arm across his stomach, the other at his side, as if he fell asleep despite trying to stay awake.
It occurs to me that I’ve never seen him without his emotional and physical guards in place. Never seen him sleep. I don’t think I knew for sure that he even needed to sleep.
He’s a mystery to me. I’ve glimpsed parts of his nature—his ability to manipulate others with a calm suggestion; his power to create runes that give him wings, armor, and weapons; his physical strength and rage when he annihilated the group of Strike demons in the vampires’ territory in Vegas. I know that he could challenge my father for the crown, but he chose to control Mortem’s beasts instead.
I know that he can hide his emotions from me.
Most of what I’ve seen of him has been his effect on others—manipulation, magic, death. Even in the brief moment when we left the eagle shifters’ territory and he told me his mother was a demon… even then, he gave me no further glimpses of who he really is.
I’m too tightly wrapped for sudden movements, but I test the cocoon around me, some sort of silken blanket that shimmers when I inhale a deep breath.
I watch carefully as the material’s color changes with every inhale and exhale I take, the colors reacting to every small movement, cycling through reds, pinks, purples, and then back to pink and red. It’s calming and doesn’t seem to be a threat to me.
