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Syrinox answers for me. And I’m a bit aggravated by how accurate he is at speaking my feelings out loud, or signing them.
She has been trying to ignore the fact that we are her mates and you all just took that away from her. Now she has to actually decide if she is going to accept the bonds or reject them. She wants mates, but being that she is an assassin, she doesn’t think she deserves us.
Well, fuck. Now they all know the whole truth. What the fuck am I going to do now? They all know I’m an assassin, and they know I’ve been on the fence about the whole mate thing and there is nothing I can do to change any of it, so I stomp off and decide to ignore the issue completely.
We walk in silence for the rest of the day and my head is spinning. I thought I’d have more time to decide, but I just lost it all with one conversation. It’s time to finally make up my mind. Mates or no mates, that is the question.
Chapter 13
It takes three days for the weird silence amongst the group to become too much. I don’t know how to tell them I’m open to getting to know them, and they don’t seem to want to push me. Everyone knows the truth, but nobody wants to be the first to bring it up.
We’re walking through a particularly dense group of trees, when I stop suddenly. Something in the air is different. I feel a tension from my magic that wasn’t there a second ago. I turn in a slow circle, barely moving my feet as I try to figure out what is wrong.
I am walking ahead of everyone, so as soon as I see the guys getting closer, I hold up a hand, demanding they stop. Dree and Syrinox stop immediately, like their magics can feel the weird atmosphere too. Glavior and Onyx both stop when they see my hand, but Cerise, that foolish hound rushes up to my side. He rests his hand on my hips and opens his mouth, no doubt to ask what’s wrong, when the forest floor gives out beneath our feet.
“SHIIIT!” We screech as we go tumbling down a deep hole.
The air puffs from my lungs as I hit the ground hard on my back, Cerise landing on top of me with an ‘umph’! I shove the foolish man off of me and stand to look around, I try to light my fingers with my magic to see what’s around me, but nothing happens.
Closing my eyes, I look inside myself for my magic but it’s not there. My magic is just gone! I can still feel my bond with Fowlynn, Az, even the tug towards the guys, but the well of magic that usually sits in my chest is dry, nothing to pull from.
I have to take several deep breaths to keep from panicking. I’m sure there’s a spell on this damp hole and I just have to get out of it to get my magic back. As I’m taking a few more deep breaths, I hear a sound that’s so quiet I almost miss it. Like a human in the air.
I listen harder and suddenly it’s like the volume of the earth is turned up.
“Sssssss. Hisssssss!”
Thousands of hisses ring out around us, below us, even some above us on the walls. Snapping my eyes open I look around me and blanch at what I see. Now, I know my patron Goddess rules over the night and all creatures of the dark, but snakes are fucking creepy. Especially Vipers, thousands of Vipers, all huddle in a pit with no way to escape!
“Oh fuck!” The words are belatedly more than a whisper, but Cerise heard them. He wraps his arms around my waist and lifts me so my feet are off the ground and away from the deadly creatures.
Between the thick canopy above us and the depth of the pit, there's barely any light down here. When my eyes adjust to the darkness, I’m disturbed by the amount of wiggling, slithering knots of serpentine bodies around us. A few of the snakes raise their heads looking at us. When one of them, close to our legs, raises its head, a bright lime green hood flares in the dim light. It opens its mouth and lets out a loud hiss. Large fangs hang from the snake's mouth and Cerise squeezes me tighter. The color of the snake, and the size, tells me that we’ve found ourselves in a pit of Goddess Vipers. Their skin is impenetrable and they are siphons that make using magic against them impossible.
“A-a-astra, I should, um, I should tell you that I really don’t like snakes.” Cerise stutters his way through the sentence, his whole body shaking.
Thick, warm, scaled bodies slither over our feet and I have to roll my eyes at the girly screech that comes from his mouth. Cerise jumps a foot in the air, jerking my body back against his. I swear the man is trying to climb me like a tree, despite the fact that he is well over a foot taller than I am. Shoving him off my back, I look around the hole again, hoping to see a way out of here without getting killed.
“Ugh! Ahh! Eww!” Cerise keeps jumping, pulling his foot up into the air just to jump again and snatch the other one up.
Rolling my eyes again, I turn to him, putting both of my hands on his shoulders. “You have got to calm down, Cerise. We need to figure out a way out of here. These snakes are the most venomous reptiles on the planet and they can only be killed with hell fire.”
“Well, gee, that’s fucking helpful. We’re gonna die!” Cerise cries out, fully panicking as he wraps his arms around me again. The man is practically burrowing himself into my body in his attempt to get away from the serpents that don’t seem to give a shit that we’re among them.
“We aren’t going to die. Look at them, they don’t care about us. We just need to get out of this hole. The problem is, I can’t get us out without my magic, and with this many of them down here, I can’t use my magic.”
“So, what you’re telling me is,” Cerise says, slightly calmer now that the snakes around our feet have slithered off, leaving us a clear patch on the dirt. “To get out of here, we need to kill the snakes that only have one weakness.”
“Basically. And I don’t have a Hell Fire bomb on me. Besides, that would kill us along with the snakes.”
I turn in a slow circle again, my mind racing trying to find a solution to this problem. I’ve been in tight jams before, but I don’t think I’ve ever been quite this fucked before. And this is so not the fucked I wanted to be on this trip.
“Well, I don’t have a bomb, but I am a Hellhound. I can get hell fire that won’t kill us, I’m just not sure you’re going to be happy about the how.”
I stare at the man, my patience with him growing thin, but I’m still willing to hear him out because I really don’t want to die here. Now that I’ve found my mates, I kind of want to see where we could end up. I want to kill the sick son of a bitch kidnapping, selling, and killing children. I want to watch my brother with his mates, start a family, and live the life our parents tried to give us.
“Yeah, how?” I snark at him, fully expecting him to tell me he would have to strip and shift. All though, with the snakes siphoning powers, I’m not sure he could shift.
“We um … Well, uh …” His eyes dart around the pit and I huff out a sigh, rolling my wrist in a circle to indicate he should just fucking say what his idea is. “We could … mate.”
