Page 110 of A Hunt Bound in Blood

With a rattling crash, we hit the wooden deck, my body coiled around Glory’s, my hand behind her head to keep her safe. My shoulders heaved with desperate gasps for air and sweat spilled from every pore, but we’d made it.

Alive.

With the amulet.

A choked cry of relief rushed from my lips, and I tucked my face into Glory’s neck.

Footsteps struck the deck, and I raised my head to see who had approached, staying protectively wrapped around my unconscious mage.

But this was no enemy, no threat. Just the ship captain staring at us with a mixture of surprise and alarm.

“You’re the ones we were sent to fetch?” he asked.

I nodded, unable to speak.

He cleared his throat. “Close call, especially with this one running off the way she did.”

Anger swelled in my muscles, and red swam across my vision as I debated whether I should dismember him or simply throw him overboard.

As though he heard my thoughts, his face reddened. “I won’t mention it to His Majesty.” He looked us over, took in the blood, the wounds, the woman beneath me. “Does she need help?”

I snarled, disliking the idea of anyone touching her aside from me, and he blanched and took a step back. “Right, well, I imagine you’d like a place to dry off and clean up? We had cabins prepared for you.” When my narrowed eyes, he cleared his throat again. “Perhaps one will do. Mine, in fact. Yes, that would probably be best. If you’ll follow me.”

I dragged myself to my feet, gathered Glory against my chest, and staggered after him. Everything was pain and exhaustion, but underlying the discomfort was a hum of elation.

“We made it, Buttons,” I whispered against her temple. “I told you we would.”

Glory

LIII

I woke to the taste of blood.

Unmistakably Cammon’s blood. There was no confusing it with anyone else’s, the way it sparkled on my tongue and set fire to my veins like nothing else I’d ever had.

It was even sweeter with the two-way bond running between us. I wasn’t familiar enough with his emotions to recognize them by name, but they tasted bright and clean and satisfying. Every gulp from him was an offering from the gods, and I had to restrain myself from clawing at Cammon’s back and draining every drop.

Memories swept over me of our battle. All that blood and mud and death. I’d wielded my magic and unleashed chaos, just as I’d always been terrified I would, and it had been just as extreme as I’d feared. But I’d controlled it. In letting my vampiric nature out at the same time, I hadn’t needed to divide my concentration, and with that freedom, I’d harnessed all my fury and fear and love for Cammon and directed the storm. I had been walking destruction, but the destruction had been my choice.

When I blinked my eyes open, I found myself in an unfamiliar room, and it took me a moment to appreciate that it was a room. Not a destroyed, washed-out valley filled with horrifying, mutated corpses, but a simple, wood-panelled room. Not much larger than the bed, with a narrow table wedged against the wall, a desk across the way, and a porthole above it.

A ship cabin.

I pulled away from Cammon on a gasp and looked around us. The portraits on the walls depicted the Golth skyline and the Never Sea in all its seasons. A map hung over the bed, and through the porthole I made out a bright blue sky alight with sunshine.

I turned back to Cammon to find him smiling at me. Dark bruises of exhaustion lined his crimson eyes, but he was breathing. He was here. With me. And he was… happy? The emotions running between us hummed with the identification, and I knew I was right.

I threw my arms around his neck and ran my tongue over the punctures in his throat to hurry their healing. He groaned at the sensation of my gentle licks, and the sound woke something else within me. A deep need I doubted would ever be sated.

He turned his head into my neck, to where my bond mark now rested, and when he kissed it, I felt that kiss all the way to the tips of my toes. My head dropped back to allow him better access, and his mouth skated across the column of my throat, nuzzling and nipping and leaving soft kisses that had me writhing with want.

He lay me back against the pillows—actual pillows on an actual mattress—and slid his hands under yet another wrecked shirt. The last of Kalla’s gifts. Not that it mattered. I didn’t intend to be dressed at all until the ship arrived in Golth. Maybe not even then. Maybe I’d greet Evaniel as naked as the day I was born, hand him the amulet, then return to Cammon’s arms, never to leave again.

I laughed at the image, and when Cammon pulled back, questions in his eyes, I answered with a smile and a kiss. We were alive, and we were together. Everything else was irrelevant.

He tugged my shirt over my head, and I shimmied out of my torn breeches before moving on to his ruined clothes. Most of his wounds had closed thanks to the bond, but we moved gently with each other. He spread my legs and settled between them, his hard, throbbing length pressed against my aching sex.

My need for him was almost a physical pain, but he teased me by taking his time. His large hands followed the lines of my body, then cupped my breasts, his thumbs playing with my nipples until they were stiff peaks. At my whimpers of protest, he chuckled against my skin but didn’t hasten. As though he were lingering over every moment, every taste.