Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Nine

Havermouth, The Next Day

Aislen watched the water flow around her feet, swirling over the paving stones and tarmac of the main street of Havermouth, ripples casting shadows through the water that looked like screaming faces. She walked through the water, bewildered, feeling its cold drag against her legs, and its weight tugging down the fabric of her dress and sticking it to her skin.

The traffic on the street had stopped, cars, like islands in the flowing water, and pedestrians came to a standstill, everyone turning towards the river in astonishment.

Where had the water come from?

Something brushed against Aislen’s leg, and she looked down and cried out in horror as a pale, fish-nibbled face passed by, cheeks flapping in the movement of the water, the eye sockets vacant, carried along in the tide of the water.

Aislen woke on the end of a jump and gripped the sheets, breathing heavily.

“Morgana,” Talen rose from the recliner and leaned over her. His hair was loose, brushing over her cheek, and his eyes were concerned. “Are you in pain?”

“No,” she reached up to touch his cheek, the texture of his beard against the heel of her hand, his skin soft against the fingertips. Her body ached, but it was not one of pain.

She saw the expression in his eyes shift, and his lips curled. “Little demon,” his cheeks lifted with his smile. “This is hardly the most private of locations, nor are you strong enough to…”

“I feel fine,” she told him. She did. He had given her a second dose of the blood when he had arrived the night before, taking the opportunity to use Heath and Cameron as lookouts before they had left for the night.

Rhett had dropped in briefly between the evening meal and had read to her from an old classic about mermaids, surprising her with both his book choice and his skill at recounting the story for her. She had enjoyed the peaceful time with Talen, who in the recliner on his tablet doing whatever it was that Talen did for Zeus, and Rhett, the book propped against her thigh on the bed. Rhett’s dark hair was pulled severely back from his face and his bone structure and jaw line was sharpened by the dark lines of tattoos.

His absorption in reading had given her the opportunity to observe him immobile for the first time in five years, to take in the details of the tattoos that sleeved him, and then crept down his hands and fingers. It was oddly erotic to see those markings. Perhaps, she had thought, because each had been carefully chosen for its meaning before being indelibly engraved into him.

She had recognized many of the symbols on his fingers for their witchcraft origins and wondered how far he had researched what to place where: she suspected that he knew a witch, as the placement was appropriate.

Rhett was a man of secrets, she had thought, even from the Triquetra, into which he was bonded. He was their wild card, in a way, and she did not doubt that Heath worried most about him, from the expressions she had seen on Heath’s face. Rhett was the least easily anticipated of the Triquetra, the least reliable, the least influenced by the pack, to which he was a late addition. A true wild card, with its appeal and disadvantages.

Rhett was the one that Heath had worried would break the Triquetra when they’d considered letting Aislen go. Rhett was the one whose reactions Heath watched. Rhett was also the one that Talen watched most, Aislen had thought, her eyes flicking to her vampire, who seemed very absorbed in his work, but whose eyes travelled with regularity to where Rhett sat.

Rhett was the one that she had been most drawn to when she had been a teenager, she confessed to herself, and because of that, he had been the source of disruption within the Triquetra. Was Rhett the lodestone of the group, or it’s weakness?

She focused on Talen, on a vein that stood out against his skin. She remembered the flavour of his blood on her tongue, the velvet of swallowing that part of him down. “Daddy,” she whispered, her eyes meeting his.

“Ah, little demon,” he laughed at her ruefully.

“I want to taste your cum on my tongue.” She saw his pupils dilate in response to the words. “And I want your tongue on me,” she added. “But, better still, I want to feel your cock deep in me…” She wrapped the fingers of both hands around his upper arms, digging her fingertips into the muscles and pulling him closer to her at the same time.

He groaned, his mouth resting on hers in not quite a kiss, but close. “Little demon,” he murmured. “If you only knew the restraint that it takes not to take you up on that. However… despite my blood, despite the fact that it is obviously benefiting you, and I, like our werewolf mates, can smell that you are much better, I cannot take you in a hospital bed, wired to drips and with a bandage over a wound in your stomach, whilst a nurse might walk in at any moment and discover us…”

“Fuck,” she sighed the word out as she arched up towards him, drawn to his body like metal filings to a magnet. “Daddy… I ache for you…”

“Oh, I know,” he agreed ruefully. “I know, believe me. You ache for me, and I for you, and for our werewolf mates, also. The bond between us is strong,” his eyes closed as he swallowed and groaned. “So strong. It is a good sign,” his eyes burnt with needful desire as he opened them. “It is a powerful sign, little demon, that the need burns so hot. So hot,” he growled the last.

“Mhmm,” she closed her eyes, the broken tone in his voice ripping through her. “Fuck.”

His lips grazed her cheek. “It is only natural, entirely in the nature of werewolf and vampire,” he breathed the words out against her skin. “And, apparently, in your own nature as well, that once such a bond takes for, that there is an undeniable attraction, and also a deeply rooted loyalty to your mates.”

“Wh…at?” She felt as if she was drugged by her need for him, her eyelids falling heavy and her head rolling back to expose her throat. “What, Talen?”

“Hmm,” he laughed out his breath against her neck. “Did you never wonder, little demon, why you had a five-year dry spell? It is no coincidence that you met your Triquetra, and after, no other man was able to replace them, until me. We are your mates. Your body knows to whom it belongs.”

She dragged in a breath. “There was another,” she confessed. “Another man. But I didn’t want him. I just…”

“Little demon,” his lips grazed her cheek. “Sex is not a relationship. You might have fucked another, but he did not have space in your heart, and he did not possess your desire or regard.”

“No,” she sighed out her agreement, the knot of tension relaxing within her.

“You could crave steak, and eat a carrot,” he murmured. “But that doesn’t make your desire for steak any less, or your preference for carrot anymore."

"No,” she laughed. “Says the man who has not only filled my fridge with carrots, but also,” her hand slid down his stomach and closed around his cock. “Is doing a fine job of resembling one.”

Talen laughed. “You are my mate,” he growled. “And I want you.”

“I want you too,” she replied lifting her lips to his. “And I’d really like to do something about that.”

“Excuse me,” said Pastor Gale tightly from the doorway. “Who the fuck are you?”

Talen straightened in a slow and impressive display of vampire prowess, his eyes flashing red. “I am Talen Gawaine of the Concordia nest,” he said, his voice rumbling deep within his chest, the growled tones heavy with threat. “Who the fuck are you?”