I’d only seen Cas laying down so far, and of course, I noticed both his height and muscles, but nothing could have prepared me for the colossal hulking figure as he stood before me.
His eyes were eerie, one ink black, the other, glowing blue just like the lightning marks running along his skin.
I was too busy gawking and he moved so fast I couldn’t even think to defend myself, his hand clutching my neck.
Instinctively, I reached for his wrist to push him away, not bothering to restrain myself. It was only when he didn’t even budge that I realized I was using my full strength. In vain. There was no curbing his iron grasp.
“What age is this?”
I blinked, not because I didn’t understand, but because the low, slow, rumbling growl brought a million memories all at once.
“Age?” I croaked, his fingers pressing against my pipes. “What age? And how about youfucking let me go, asshole.”
That was what I got for trying to protect a big, bad deity who woke up crankier than me—which was saying something.
The man I called Cas swore colorfully, in yet another language I couldn’t identify but understood perfectly.
“English, huh? I take it I wasn’t gone for long.” Now that he’d switched to our common tongue, he sounded like the poshest Brit ever, potentially even fancier than Lucian and the other Regises.
He still made no sense whatsoever. “Is your brain damaged or something?” I asked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Those unsettling eyes narrowed at me.
I pulled his wrist down with all my might, but to my everlasting shame, I could tell that he simply chose to let me move his hand, lowering it to his side. “The year, doll.”
“Then why didn’t you just ask that? And I’m no doll,” I grit between my teeth.
The asshole snorted before looking at the door behind me.
I’d completely tuned out the healers’ threats, but they were still shouting at me, demanding I open and promising a variety of reprisals if I failed to obey.
“You protected me,” Cas gleaned after analyzing the current situation.
He seemed both amused and incredulous, as though he didn’t understand why I would bother doing something this stupid.
That made two of us.
“Well, you were all pathetic and helpless, weren’t you?” I shot back.
The corners of his eyes hiked up.
There was something deeply unsettling about the whole affair. I decided I didn’t like it at all. It completely changed his face, giving it a degree of warmth that didn’t compute with the rest of what I was seeing and sensing.
My mind screameddanger. Someone I was afraid of shouldn’t be this fucking hot.
“Adorable,” the stranger drawled, waving his hand towards me.
The sea glass pendant exploded, shards flying so fast some of them cut my skin.
My skin.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my blood, which was silver, like my eyes and my hair, but it usually took an ancient weapon covered in many spells to make the slightest dent on my iron skin. I knew there was nothing special about the sea glass, otherthan the magic Kleos had imbued it with. What managed to hurt me was his power.
I wasn’t even the target. Behind me, the door I’d been blocking had disappeared, leaving us in front of a group of shocked healers who stared at the monstrous thing towering over me.
Gone was the smirk, the hint of warmth. His blue eye glowed brighter, the black one flashing a little, and the marks dancing along his skin.
The man who looked past me didn’t have to issue so much as a single warning for the healers to start shaking in their boots. I would have laughed if I wasn’t almost as frightened as the idiots.
