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So much fucking power it was terrifying. Bringing him to my side had increased my base exponentially. I wasn’t great at estimating queens’ power, but I’d felt the blaze of sunfires like a molten sun crashing against my shields. I’d stood in the storm of Marne Ceresa’s locusts as she tried to bait me into defending myself.
Neither of which matched the feel of Sekh pouring into me, while he fed from me. There was no end in sight. No easing ebb to the cresting wave blasting through me. Feeding on each other, clutched together, skyrocketing beyond anything this world had ever known.
And he was only one of the multiple new Blood I had called.
Gripping his throat in my jaws, I fought the urge to bite him again. Just to force him to climax inside me again and again.
Still gripping my shoulder in his jaws, he tugged his head backward enough for me to feel the power in his bite. The knowledge he could crunch through bone. Shear off my entire arm with a casual shake of his head. A lion bringing down his kill. :Fucking do it.:
Which only threw gasoline on my inferno. I released his throat. My fangs shot down so fast and hard I cried out, a guttural gasp as if Guillaume had buried his sword in my belly. But no, it was me, sinking twin blades into Sekh. His throat again. His shoulder. Messy, hard, deep bites, each one sending a brutal cataclysmic climax through his body.
He roared around my flesh in his mouth and sleek fur sprouted beneath my hands. So massive, his sphinx swelled up out of the man. Giant paws folded me close, and he rolled toward the edge of the bed.
Away from Rik.
We crashed onto the floor, but I fell on top of the sphinx. His huge chest billowed beneath me, lifting me up and down like ocean swells. His heart a timpani drum slamming a rapid, frantic rhythm. I felt a surge of fury from Rik, his concern when I disappeared from his sight.
:I’m fine.:
Some of his rage eased, though he touched my back, checking on me for himself. I lifted my head, swiping lion mane and thick wooly curls out of my eyes.
Golden eyes blinked up at me, deceptively sleepy and relaxed as the sphinx licked vicious lion teeth. On his back without a care. Cleaning up my blood dampening the wool and fur around his mouth. :You said not to damage the bed frame.:
So I did. “Brace yourself.”
His eyes narrowed, his forelegs tightening around me. Letting my head droop down against him, I closed my eyes and called all the blood in the room to me.
All the droplets that had splattered from his torn wrist. The wild spray from my thigh. The gushing wounds I’d made in his throat. Even the stab wound that Xin had given him.
But a bottomless ocean already rippled inside me. I barely felt the gentle plops of all the blood we’d spilled settling back into me.
:For what?:
I touched his bond, intending to heal his wounds, but they’d healed already when he shifted. A deep, resonating gong echoed through him, rolling me under. I sank like a stone. Not concerned—not when I still felt him with me, his fur soft and thick beneath my skin. The gentle prick of his claws on my back, along with the heavy weight of Rik’s hand. They were both still with me, even as I fell deeper through Sekh’s bond until I bumped into something like solid ground. A jolt caught me, shifting the world upside down and around in a crazy tilt.
A square cobblestoned plaza firmed under my feet, but it was only a few paces wide with a drop-off so steep I couldn’t see anything below. The sphinx stood above me, his front paws on either side of my body. His muzzle lowered to touch the top of my head. The air was thin and dry, oddly empty of any scents. Clouds billowed far below, as if we stood on a mountain. I looked above us into nothing. Emptiness like space though it wasn’t black. Devoid of any color. No sun or stars or moon. Just endless silence.
“Where are we?”
:Here stands the guardian,: the sphinx replied. :All Seeing. Never Sleeping.:
The complete and utter silence was deafening and more than a little maddening. I reached over my shoulder to twine my fingers in the shaggy ram curls beneath his chin and leaned against his leg, seeking his touch. The warmth of his body. “This is where you’ve been for five thousand years?”
:Longer. What would you like to See, Your Majesty? Direct your All Seeing eyes.:
My heart clenched at the thought of him being alone for thousands of years. No one to talk to. No one to touch. Nothing to smell or hear or taste.
Only seeing everything.
“Can you show me where the Dauphine is? She lived as Leonie Delafosse in New Orleans.”
He breathed deeply, ruffling my hair. :While I know place names on signs and maps, I don’t recognize people by their names unless they show it to me in their daily lives. However, I See her face in your bond. Let us look for her together.:
The cobblestone platform swung in a slow circle. Clouds thinned to reveal landscape flying beneath us as if spinning a globe toward a set of coordinates. Or perhaps we were the ones moving, though I didn’t feel any sensation of air around us. The landscape sharpened with detail, as if he zoomed in the lens. I saw a peach stucco three-story building with green shutters and immediately recognized it as the place where the Dauphine had been living in New Orleans as Leonie.
I’d seen this place through Nightwing Starlight’s eyes when she gave me the scrap of scarf and letter her kin had intercepted.
The sphinx’s vision sharpened, lifting to a window on the third floor of the building. Zooming inside to a woman sitting at an old-fashioned writing secretary. Short, curly brown hair, the same youthful face and warm brown eyes. Such a nice smile for a woman who’d trapped Mom’s soul in a rotting corpse and sent her shuffling like a fucking zombie on foot hundreds of miles to make a fucking point.
