The Phoenix chirped and took flight, hovering for a moment. Her beating wings sent ash flying in all directions, just before she vanished.
Mai squeaked. Aria sneezed.
Lucas grinned. “Nothing like a little Phoenix ash to clog the sinuses.
Aria shook bits of it out of her hair. “Time for another sharding shower.”
Lucas brushed ash off his face. “I should join you.”
It was meant as a reference to needing another himself, but Lucas’s throat closed up when he realized how it sounded.
She shot him a startled look and laughed. “Thanks, but I prefer my sex on the wing.”
The reply had been so fast that she couldn’t have taken the time to think, either. An impression confirmed when her eyes widened. She met, and held, his gaze. And the surge that passed between them could have rivaled any crystal-dust high. Raw. Primal. It pulsed through Lucas and set every nerve on fire.
Dammit.Back to square bloody one.
Aria cleared her throat as she quickly moved away to the roof’s edge. “Um... Shower first, and then food. Gyros sound good, now. You coming?”
Her choice of words was somewhat unfortunate. “I’ll be there in a bit. Got some stars to talk to.”
She bit her lip and looked away. A moment later, she vanished as she jumped from the roof to the balcony.
Lucas dropped back to a sitting position on the roof and got himself ready to salute the stars in a time honored, and momentarily desperate, tradition.
29
Nikolai stepped into a meadow filled with flowers of every color and description.
Their scent almost overwhelmed him. The entire place buzzed, hummed, and chittered with life in a way he’d never before experienced. The energy filled his soul, permeating his every fibre as it chased away the last vestiges of darkness.
Taking a deep breath, he gazed at the horizon, where mountains rose, capped in snow. It allowed him, for a moment, to ignore the horses standing in the meadow. When he finally permitted himself to notice them, Nikolai stopped dead three strides from the gate.
Because they weren’t horses.
They stood six feet at the shoulder, with rippling muscles beneath steel-gray hides. Pale manes wreathed powerful arched necks, the hair moved as though animated all on its own. All very horselike, in a romantic-fantasy kind of way.
What blew his mind were the two-foot horns emerging from the center of their foreheads. They glowed with burgeoning power.
Ngubi’s words echoed through his head. “But she was dying, with a sword buried in her chest. It was all one piece, the hilt the same material as the blade, which was strange—like a spiral, and very sharp.”
Nikolai’s eyes were fixed on those horns—even from where he stood, he noticed the gleam of tiny, razor-sharp teeth along the outer curve of the spiral.
His mother had been killed by a Unicorn.
His heart raced. These weren’t the gentle, life sustaining, virgin-loving creatures from his childhood books and teenage fantasy novels. Their eyes, so pale they were almost silver, fastened on Nikolai, and their horns lowered to orient on him.
Bellatis,his inner voice stated.The warriors of the Liberis.
This was what Demeti had hoped to capture? Nikolai’s breath hitched. They were magnificent. And deadly.
This is what I am meant to be?he asked.
No. You are something much greater.
Greater? Nikolai swallowed. How could that be?
Cara moved to stand before him, and Nikolai looked down at her—physically so tiny, yet in this place, she glowed like the sun. All the Watchers did, and with such purity—no violence in their energy, only peace and healing, life and death in its natural, balanced cycle.
