Both lights fizzled away into the dark sky, the night’s silence heavy in the wake of crashing powers.
“Ophelia?” Jez said.
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I want to use this magic anymore tonight.” Starlight paled her features. Her eyes were wide and frightened in a way I rarely saw.
“We don’t have to, Jez,” I said, shoving all my fear aside to assure her. “We’ll figure out what it means another time.”
“Can we go back to the cottage?”
I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or her khrysaor, but I nodded, and we coasted back toward the beach, clinging to the clouds.
Neither Jezebel nor I spoke—neither had anything worth saying—but the constellations and their legends wrapped around us. And I couldn’t help but replay the golden light reflecting off Zanox’s armored scales—the ones deployed when he sensed a threat.
Chapter Seven
Tolek
“You never get over it,”Erista said dreamily, watching the khrysaor and Sapphire take flight as she emerged from the willowing cypher branches at my back.
I raised my brows, turning away from the view as Sapphire’s blue tail flicked into the clouds and disappeared. “Didn’t want to stay in the cottage either?”
“The stone walls grew crowded.”
That was an odd way to phrase it, but I huffed a laugh. “It’s sort of nice having everyone back, though I could do without the fae.”
“Such meddlesome tricksters.” Erista perched at the base of a cypher, leaning back against the ash-white trunk with her feet tucked beneath her. “Did you fly much while we were traveling?”
“I told Ophelia to go on her own with Sapphire,” I said, ignoring the abrupt change of conversation, “but she dragged me along with her almost every night the weather permitted.”
A half-smirk twisted my lips at the memory of her pulling me onto her pegasus when I said they should enjoy the time together. Of Sapphire’s impatient scuffing of the ground, agreeing with Ophelia.
Of how, hidden up in the clouds, I’d dipped my fingers beneath the hem of her skirt, teasing the slick heat between her legs until she was practically begging me to touch her. How I’d made her bepatientuntil we landed and then given her an orgasm that could have shattered the stars and nearly had me following without her even touching me.
I cleared my throat, shifting to adjust the now-uncomfortable stiffness in my leathers. Spirits, would that girl ever affect me any differently?
I hoped not.
“It’s magnificent.” I cleared my throat again—damn the roughness. “The flying.”
Every second of these weeks, being forced to pause the physical hunt for the emblems and be alone with Ophelia, had been magnificent truthfully. The unfamiliar domesticity I hadn’t been sure we possessed. It certainly wasn’t natural for us given it took a fae queen threatening an attack on the warrior continent to prompt it. But it had been a welcomed change.
“It’s unlike anything else,” Erista reflected, a bit mournfully.
“When she does fly alone, I don’t even bring my journal,” I said. “I just watch.” This phenomenon that shouldn’t be possible and yet somehow was with the Alabath sisters.
Erista hummed in agreement.
“Were you able to visit the desert on your way back?” I asked.
The Soulguider shook her head, curls bouncing. In only the moonlight, her eyes seemed as dark as night. Her unusual silence had me flicking a narrowed look her way.
“The Rites of Dusk have stopped?” I asked. She and her brother, Quilian, had explained that the swirling, sky-born dust storms were used to recharge Soulguider magic, but had been occurring more frequently as of late. Concernedly so.
Oddly in time with Ophelia’s use of the emblems.
“Artale is quiet.” Erista spoke softly, a waver of what I thought might be uncertainty passing through the words, but she recovered, slipping easily back into her usual lively demeanor. “I’ve studied them.”
