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“Solas, Bryce,” Hunt growled, pumping into her in a long, luxurious stroke. “I can’t—” She didn’t want him to. She gripped his ass, nails digging in deep in silent urging. “Bryce,” he warned, but he didn’t stop moving in her. Lightning crackled and snaked around them, an avalanche racing toward her.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded.

Their magics collided—their souls. She scattered across the stars, across galaxies, lightning skittering in her wake.

She had the dim sense of Hunt being thrown with her, of his shout of ecstasy and surprise. Knew that their bodies remained joined in some distant world, but here, in this place between places, all they were melted into one, crossed over and transferred and becoming something more.

Stars and planets and rainbow clouds of nebulas swirled around them, darkness cut with lightning brighter than the sun. Sun and moon held together in perfect balance, suspended in the same sky. And beneath them, far below, she could see Avallen, thrumming with their magic, so much magic, as if Avallen were the very source of it, as if they were the very source of all magic and light and love—

Then it ebbed away. Receded into muted color and warm air and heavy breathing. The weight of Hunt’s body atop hers, his cock pulsing inside her, his wings splayed open above them.

“Holy shit,” Hunt said, lifting himself enough to look at her. “Holy … shit.”

It had been more then fucking, or sex, or lovemaking. Hunt stared down at her, starlight shimmering in his hair. Just as she knew lightning licked through her own.

“It felt like my power went into you,” Hunt said, eyes tracking the lightning as it slithered down her body. “It’s … yours.”

“As mine is yours,” she said, touching a fleck of starlight glittering between the sable locks of his hair.

“I feel weird,” he admitted, but didn’t move. “I feel …”

She sensed it, then. Understood it at last. What it had always been, what she’d learned to call it in that other world.

“Made,” Bryce whispered with a shade of fear. “That’s what it feels like. Whatever power can flow between us … my Made power from the Horn can, too.”

Hunt looked down at himself, at where their bodies remained joined. She had a pang of guilt, then, for not telling him all she knew yet about the other Made objects in the universe—about the Mask, the Trove. “I guess it flows both ways: my power into you, and yours into me.”

Hunt smiled and surveyed the room around them. “At least we seem to be past ending up somewhere new every time we fuck.”

Bryce snorted. “That’s a relief. I don’t think Morven would have appreciated our naked asses landing in his room.”

“Definitely not,” Hunt agreed, kissing her brow. He brushed back a strand of her hair. “But what difference does it make? That we’re connected this way?”

Bryce lifted her head to kiss him. “Another thing for us to figure out.”

“Team Caves all the way,” he said against her mouth.

She laughed, their breath mingling, twining together like their souls. “I told you I should have ordered T-shirts.”

51

Tharion stood in the old-timey stone bedroom, complete with a curtained bed and tapestries on the wall, and had no idea what to say to his wife.

Apparently, Sathia Flynn had no idea what to say to him, either, because she took a seat in a carved wooden chair before the crackling hearth and stared at the fire.

They’d barely exchanged more than a word all day. But now, having to share a room—

“You can take the bed,” he said, the words too loud, too big in the chamber.

“Thank you,” she said, arms wrapping around herself. The firelight danced on her light brown hair, setting golden strands within it shining.

“I don’t, uh—I don’t expect anything.”

That earned him a wry look over her shoulder. “Good. Neither do I.”

“Good,” he echoed, and winced, walking to the window. The starless night was a black wall beyond, interrupted only by a few glimmering fires at farmstead cottages. “Does it ever get … not gloomy here?”

“This is my first visit, so I can’t say.” Her tone was a bit sharp, as if unused to speaking normally to people, but she added, “I hope so.”