Blood-Bonded by Force (28 page)

She flipped her eyelids open.

Idyll stopped thumping her drum. “What happened?”

“I…” Pändra broke off. As imperative as this ritual was, an excuse like
I wimped out
seemed dreadfully insufficient.

Idyll set the drum aside again. “Out-of-body travel requires complete vulnerability, Pändra. You have to bare yourself to the Otherworld forces in order to be allowed passage. Otherwise there can be no trust between our world and theirs. Do you understand this?”

Complete vulnerability
.
Bare yourself
. She understood. She just couldn’t do it. She hadn’t allowed herself to be completely vulnerable since she’d been out of nappies, so the idea wasn’t the freshest.

Tonĩ cast a sidelong glance at Thomal. “Maybe we should clear the room,” she suggested softly.

“No.” Pändra stood up, her throat constricting. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.” She’d rushed out of the office. Her guilt over letting everyone down had been somewhat relieved by the cessation of Symbol Killer slayings. She’d thought she was off the hook. It appeared not.

“I’m sorry,” Pändra repeated now to Tonĩ. “I know I’m the one who’s supposed to prevent these killings. I’ve tried to perform the ritual again on my own, but—”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Tonĩ interrupted. “Rituals of a supernatural nature are tricky. I know you want to help. In fact, Ãlex has an idea that involves you. It’s…a bit racy, though.” Tonĩ glanced at Thomal.

A scowl began to build on Thomal’s brow. “What is it?”

Ãlex stepped forward. “I’ve been monitoring Pändra’s topside email account,” he said, then aimed at Pändra, “As you approved.”

Pändra gave her half-brother an
it’s okay
nod. A couple of months ago the Council had deemed Pändra sufficiently well adjusted to community life to be allowed access to her old email account. She’d declined—unable to think of a single soul she’d like to have contact with—but, aye, had agreed to let her account be monitored.

“A man named Edgar got in touch with you,” Ãlex said.

Pändra arched her brow. “Truly?” Before she’d been wrangled down to Ţărână, she’d heard Edgar fell off the grid.

“From the nature of the email, it was clear that he’s…uh, attracted to you.” Ãlex’s cheeks stained pink.

Edgar must’ve been extra-descriptive this time.

“We thought maybe you could persuade him to take you to one of Videön’s hideouts, then the warriors can storm in and deal with the rest.” Ãlex dipped his chin and gave her a pointed look over the rims of his glasses. “I assume you realize that by persuade, we mean seduce.”

Pändra quirked her lips. “You did say racy.”

Thomal’s scowl deepened. “We don’t need her for that. The warriors can follow this dude on our own.”

Ãlex spread his hands. “Besides this email, I haven’t been able to unearth traces of him anywhere. I can’t tell you where to find this Edgar in order to follow him. If we want to get to Videön through Edgar, then Pändra is our best bet.”

Tonĩ cupped her belly with her palms, probably trying to relieve pressure on her lower parts. “Would you be willing to email Edgar, Pändra? Set up a meeting?”

“That would raise Edgar’s suspicions,” Pändra answered. “I stopped answering his emails ages ago. But I know of a sex club where he ponces about. Happens we could find him there.”

“No,” Thomal said shortly.

“Thomal,” Dev interceded. “You heard Ãlex. This is our only way to Videön.”

Thomal swung around. “So you’d be all kumbaya about Marissa doing something like this, Nichita?”

Dev regarded Thomal without expression. “Marissa lives with me in Ţărână’s family neighborhood and is pregnant with my child. I’d say our situations are vastly different.”

Thomal’s eyes flashed and the skin across his cheekbones reddened.

Pändra nearly sighed.
Jolly
. Such fun to discuss the sorry state of her marriage in front of everyone.

“It’s still my call,” Thomal gritted. “I’m also not thrilled with letting her go topside. If things get hairy up there, she can use the distraction to her advantage.”

Jaċken’s black brows drew together. “Are you saying you think Pändra’s a flight risk?”

There was a tick of a weird pause, like the room was thinking that such a thing wouldn’t have been a consideration if Thomal and Pändra were a proper couple.

Tonĩ shifted in her chair and grimaced. “This baby
lives
on my bladder. Pändra, don’t you have
The Three Little Pigs
play to put on?”

Pändra paused over that comment, then realized what Tonĩ was saying and chuckled. “Ah, indeed. Best I come back, then.”

Thomal’s eyes narrowed down to thin slits.

Jaċken crossed his arms. “Look, Costache, you got something to say about this that outweighs the loss of all Fey power on earth, then by all means, let’s hear it. Meanwhile I give your wife high marks for her willingness to step back to her old ways. Personally, I’m not happy about having to ask her to do that.”

At least Jaċken recognized how far Pändra had come in the last eight months.

Thomal’s jaw flexed, muscles rippling up and down his cheeks. “I go with her. Every step of the way.”

A snort slipped out of Pändra.

Thomal glowered at her. “You got a problem with that arrangement?”

“It’s just that…you don’t exactly fit in with the Iron Cock’s usual clientele. They’re a bit on the gritty side, and you’re…” She shrugged. “Pretty.”

“Then I guess you’re going to have to hooker me up or slut me down or however you want to say it.” Thomal’s upper lip tightened at one corner. “You remember how to do that, right?”

She met his icy blue gaze for a long moment. “I remember.”

Chapter Thirty

Faith carefully smoothed open the vellum page on the top of her desk, lightly brushing her fingers over the raised gold lettering as she read the invitation. Idyll O’Shaughnessy and Garwald Istok, the distinguished part-owner of Garwald’s Pub who’d stolen Aunt Idyll’s heart within three days of her arrival in Ţărână, were throwing a bonding celebration.

Faith smiled weakly. She was happy for her aunt, sincerely. Idyll was giddy as a schoolgirl, madly in love, and mated after spending her whole life unmarried because of being a Dragon. It was just…Faith closed her eyes, feeling an ugly coil of jealousy. Everyone who wanted a man around here seemed to have one.

Except her.

She wouldn’t have thought it possible to be even more unhappy and lonely than she’d been before, but here she was, reaching new lows of miserable. And stuck. Leaving this backward town had gone from highly unlikely to extremely improbable now that both her twin sister and her adoptive mother lived down here. Not only that, but there was nothing left for her to do topside anymore. After eight more months of nurturing along her MCL with no improvement, she’d finally had to accept that her knee was permanently disabled. It was over. No more professional ballet.

“Acceptance” was one thing, though. “Moving on” was another. She just couldn’t seem to find anything to fill the hole that’d been bored out of her soul by the loss of dance. What made matters worse was that all around her people were
living
, making lasting friendships, fashioning new careers, dating, falling in love. Getting mated.

Except for her.

She’d held out for Nỵko for months, never dreaming the wait for him would be so interminable. In eight months that big lummox of a Vârcolac had never made even one move in her direction. She’d finally given up about a month ago and gone on a date with the owner of the community diner, Dănuţ Marga, who talked about himself the whole time and wasn’t at all like an oversized teddy bear, and then Oszkar Vasilichi, Ţărână’s head gemologist, who couldn’t stop bragging about how much money he made for the community and had neglected to gaze at her as if she smelled like someone he’d get along with very well.

She’d given up after that. For good.

She’d tried to find meaning in other areas of her life by helping teach at Kacie’s new dance school. But being at the barre reminded her of all her losses and failures, and she ended up just trudging through the motions. It was especially painful when Lysha, Deandra, and Kristara skipped in for the kindergarten class, dressed in adorable pink ballet gear. As the little ones rushed into the studio, Faith would rush out, choking back tears. Now that her name was forever off the ballet marquee, her maternal urges were on loudspeaker. She wanted babies, lots of them, and right away. But the only man she wanted as genetic contributor to her offspring—as mate, provider, and all-around hero—she couldn’t have. Why was the cosmos so determined to destroy her life on that score, too?

A tear spilled from her eyes and landed on Idyll’s vellum invitation. Faith quickly sat back and—

She nearly fell off her chair when an ear-splitting siren started wailing.

Chapter Thirty-one

Topside: downtown San Diego, three hours earlier

Pändra gave her best effort to viewing Thomal with merely a clinical eye as he stepped out of the dressing room of her former leather clothing store haunt,
Rufskin,
located in Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay district. But as her interest traveled down to his crotch, her stomach went base over apex into some strange gymnastics because—

“Daaaamn, Costache,” Gábor observed. “Those pants are way too tight, bro. You look like you have a vagina, but, like, a mutant one that’s been injected with silicone or something.”

Dev snorted.

Nỵko didn’t react. He was staring in horrified fascination at a mannequin wearing leather pants with the arse cheeks cut out of them. But then Nỵko hardly talked anymore, anyroad.

“Screw this, I’m changing.” Thomal took a backward step into the dressing room.

“No, it’s perfect,” Pändra interjected. “Your trousers need to be that tight for where we’re going.” And he didn’t look like he had a vagina, rather the tight black leather formed a pronounced vee at his crotch, drawing focus to linger on the hefty bulge there. She exhaled tightly as her stomach did another backflip-double-tuck. Hells bells, she really needed to get some pull. After more than eight months without sex, her nethers felt like they’d dried into an old husk. “Now let’s put on your shirt.” She pulled out a can of specialized spray paint and shook it with a
rattle
,
rattle, rattle
.

One of Thomal’s golden brows hiked up.

Gábor chortled. “Oh, this I gotta—”

“Say, mate,” she said to Gábor. “Why don’t you pop out and buy me my cigarettes. Camels. I’ll need a lighter, too.” She turned back to Thomal and gestured to their private dressing room. “Let’s duck back in here. You’ll need to take your real shirt off.” And exposing a scaly dragon tattoo to public scrutiny was a topside no-no.

Thomal stepped inside and stripped off his shirt.

The door shut, enclosing them together. Alone. In intimate proximity. With one of them half-naked and wearing sexy leather pants. She heard herself breathe. She should get credit toward her debt of amends for this torture, shouldn’t she?

She cleared her throat. “Turn around,” she instructed him. “I need to spirit gum a layer of fake skin over your scaly dragon.” Of course, she had to
touch
him to do that.

He gave her a dark look and didn’t move.

She busied herself twisting open the bottle of spirit gum, just as casual as could be.

He turned around, and heat flushed through her. Cor blimey, her hubby had an outstanding rack of muscles cutting grooves into his v-shaped back. She licked her lips and went to work, begging her naughty bits not to juice up. A Vârcolac could scent that. After ignoring how firm and supple his skin was, she moved on to the rest of his getup, applying a temporary tattoo of a scorpion on the left side of his very kissable-looking throat, then preparing him for his spray-on shirt. She taped off his neck and halfway down his biceps, then tucked a towel around the waistband of his pants, her fingers brushing against the taut muscles of his lower abdomen. Her belly tightened. A few centimeters lower and…
best not to think about it, girl
. She chanced a glance at Thomal’s face.

His eyes were focused across the dressing room, and they were dark and intense, his nostrils flared wide.

She swiftly moved on to the next task. Picking up the paint can, she proceeded to cover Thomal’s torso in neon blue. That done, she added the finishing touches, dabbing purple hair dye onto the tips of his blond hair. Removing the tape and towel, she stepped back to view the finished product, and—

Love a duck
.

“Well?” Thomal asked.

She couldn’t answer, momentarily robbed of speech. She’d turned him into a one-thousand-horsepowered sex machine. Considering that his shirt was, quite literally, painted on, every chiseled, carved, cut, and sculpted muscle on his upper torso, along with the flat discs of his nipples and an old bullet wound on the left of his abdomen, were displayed for all and sundry to drool over. The getup accentuated the steely blue eyes and dizzying handsomeness that were already his claim to fame. He looked hotter than a sauna in Hell, and there wasn’t a man, woman, or animal on earth who wouldn’t want to jump his meat and two veg the second they took a gander at him.