Page 14

“ R emind me who the celestial mages are again?” Anna took a sip of her drink, a hot water, lemon, and ginger concoction that had seen her through many a rough gastrointestinal spell, and studied the man across from her as he scrutinized the game board and tiles on the coffee table between them.

“They’re what you would call the Empyrean’s governing bodies and spiritual guides.”

“Ah. The top brass,” Anna mused.

“Essentially.”

“They always doled out your marching orders, I take it?”

Iron grunted, adjusted his position on the floor, and dropped two tiles onto the Scrabble board. “We serve at the pleasure of the mages.”

Not knowing what to make of that statement, Anna let the subject drop and leaned over the coffee table. Her brows dipped low. “A double word score with wyvern ? How long were you hanging onto that w and y for?”

“Since you played the word uvula several turns back.” Iron took a swig of a beer he’d also brought with him.

“Bastard. I thought I was being so clever.”

“You were. Just not clever enough.”

A swath of rich brown leather peeked through the cuff of his flannel as he brought the bottle to his lips again, but Anna just chewed the inside of her cheek and went back to staring at her tiles. It was one of the few curiosities she had about him that he would always blatantly skirt around, and that was saying something given the Dateline-worthy interrogation she’d put him through all day.

Since the pyrotechnic display that morning and still with little in the way of proper power or provisions, she and Iron spent the entire afternoon unwrapping all things supernatural. She’d asked him questions about his brothers, the demon ruler Cyro, the war, how mortals played a part in it all, and then, to her ever-loving glee, they got to the demonstration portion of the lecture.

Wings. Metallic wings. Never in a million years would she have imagined the stunning beauty of Iron’s wings or how they functioned. When he first showed her, she’d had to change into her good glasses, the ones with the most up-to-date prescription that she usually kept on her desk for work. She was convinced the grungy frames and lower-power lenses she usually wore when putzing around the house weren’t doing justice to the single most breathtaking bit of actual magical realism—unrealism?—she’d ever seen.

When Iron had placed his hands on her shoulders and positioned her into the corner of her living room, she hadn’t known what to make of it, until he backed up as far as he could and translucent skeins of energy rippled from behind his back. Once they consumed the room, they’d solidified into enormous sheets of charcoal-gray feathers.

Anna hugged her mug closer to her body, recalling how her eyes prickled at the sheer awesomeness of it all. Iron’s presence, strength, power, they radiated off him in magnanimous currents that made sense of every action he’d ever bestowed on her, twisting the meanings of their interactions into something she wasn’t entirely certain how to interpret.

So she leaned into the tactics that had always served her well: escape and evade.

It was her idea to bring out the board games. And as the afternoon light faded into the chill shade of night, with the storm showing no signs of slowing down despite what the meteorologists claimed was an earlier squall, they pulled out a few lanterns, threw a bunch of drop pillows on the carpet around the coffee table, and fell into a happy little rhythm of good, clean, and entirely unassuming fun.

Anna shifted the tiles around in her holder, trying to come up with a word that would play well with what Iron had left her to work with. The move wasn’t strategic so much as distracting. Despite all the questions he’d graciously answered, there were a few she hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to say out loud.

She picked up a tile and went for the only easy points available, in the game or otherwise.

Iron arched a brow. “ Wyverns ? Really? There are, like, four S tiles in the entire game and you blow one on pluralization? I’m going to need you to show your work on that one.”

Anna shrugged. “Points are points, and my strategy is my own.”

“Silly me. I thought you wanted to win.”

“Who says I don’t? It would be unwise to assume I don’t have a plan just because you can’t see the complexity of my moves just yet.”

“Hmm.” Iron tracked her fingers as she plucked out her replacement tile. “Didn’t figure you for the ruthless type.”

“You, my friend, have a lot to learn.”

Iron took another pull on his beer. “Can’t wait.”

The tone of his declaration sent an unsettling chill coursing down Anna’s spine. For anyone else, those two words, spoken in a lighthearted and casual manner, would have been dismissed as quickly as they’d been said. But for her, they dredged up memories of another man who, just a few short months ago, in this very living room, had echoed sentiments that had plunged her life into one of sorrow and solitude.

“Can’t it wait, Anna? I’ve got a call in ten minutes.”

“It’ll be quick, I promise. I want to show you something.”

That something had been a positive pregnancy test and the biggest irony bomb to ever hit her, for the destruction it wrought contained very little in the way of anything positive.

Turned out, Travis had had no interest in waiting nine months for the next chapter, but she would. So, yes, she could wait. She’d waited for Travis for six years, until his enthusiasm ran out. She was still waiting. She was the fucking queen when it came to waiting.

“Everything okay? Where’d you go?” Iron asked, assessing her with those bicolored eyes that spoke more of concern than condescension. To her surprise, she realized he wasn’t hurrying her along but genuinely wanted to know if she was all right.

So she answered him.

“When you were dreaming about me, what was it like?” Mortified and totally clueless as to why she asked, Anna held up her hands and started shaking her question away. “No, scratch that. I didn’t mean to?—”

“Waiting, mostly.”

Anna’s mind roared to a stop as she swallowed past a gathering of emotions and was beyond grateful her abrupt halt in speech didn’t do the same to his.

“I never knew when I was going to see you or how much of you I would see. I’d never heard you speak, not until recently, so I had no way of knowing if you ever would. I had no intel on what caused it all or what you were to me. All I knew was that every night I would fall asleep with an eagerness to just . . . wait. Waiting to see whether the dreams would still come or whether they would finally get pulled out from under me. And after many weeks when the dreams didn’t stop, I knew that, eventually, if I waited long enough, I’d see . . . something.”

Iron dangled the beer bottle from his forefingers and let his eyes haze over. “Usually, it all started off as a bunch of smoke and mirror bullshit. Just a lot of white mist and ether, with nothing to touch, nothing to orient myself toward. But then the mist would part, and I’d see a beacon of golden copper.” He gestured with his drink at her braided hair, his gaze lingering over the bound strands. “You would float over to me sometimes, and it almost seemed like your hair wanted to greet me, the way it would drift toward me. But every time I tried to reach for it, reach for you, the mist of your form just . . . darted away.”

“It was the same for me, mostly,” she said. “I only ever saw the suggestion of you. I knew you were there but didn’t know what was happening.”

A pointed silence seemed to sustain the conversation. Then he asked, “Were you afraid?”

“No,” she answered, and the truth of her words stunned her for a moment, until an unfamiliar courage found the rising nugget of her anxiety and, for some reason, sat on that shit like a high school linebacker squashing an eighth-grade bully. “I felt . . . safe. Alarmed and a bit uneasy, sure, but always safe. Like I knew you wouldn’t harm me but also that I was being shown something others normally weren’t. I remembered your”—she bit her lip—“form.”

Iron halted the beer traveling toward his mouth but said nothing.

“I couldn’t see anything, mind you. For months, you were just this suggestion. In the dream, the mist would kind of swirl around you, painting an abstract picture of a strong masculine frame. Muscled but also tense, like you were bracing for something. It always worried me.”

“Why?”

Anna shrugged. “I didn’t know whether you were expecting an enemy and whether that enemy was me.” As she slid her mug back onto the coffee table, it shifted the coaster beneath it, sending two tiles tumbling to the floor.

She bent forward to scoop up the tiles, but Iron’s hand was already there, covering the pieces. Their knuckles bumped each other, but when she went to pull her hand away, Iron lifted his thumb and lightly trapped the tip of her thumb against his index finger. Stuck, the rest of her fingers fell on top of his.

Iron was on one knee again, but this time, there wasn’t a living room’s worth of space between them or the foggy mist of a limitless dream world. There was just him and her and the pulsing waves of magnetism that beat off him like a drum’s rhythmic seduction. He dipped his head lower, closer to hers, until his light breath tickled the exposed column of her throat, pulling up sensations she had no framework for.

“Anna,” he whispered, letting the fingers that covered the tiles lift and cocoon hers in a soft embrace that was as overwhelming as it was subtle.

Subtle and terrifyingly exhilarating.

“Is this the soul bond thing? Is that why you’re still here? Because you can leave now, technically, right? Can’t you fly out of here or something?” she asked, filling the minute space between them with fractured words that had always ever been the only weapons she’d been expert in.

Iron didn’t say anything, nor did he pull away, and Anna had exactly no idea what to make of any of it other than the fiery flutter of hope that kept blazing within her chest.

She missed this, even though she had no idea what this even was. It felt familiar on some level, like the ethereal warmth of her dreams whenever she’d drifted close to him through the fog. Had she really drifted, or had she been pulled closer by something?

“I’m not sure I believe any of this,” she confessed, desperate to fill the silence and search out answers she wasn’t sure he could give, but she’d try for them regardless. “I feel silly.” Then she dipped her head down, tearing her gaze away from his. “Sorry, it’s the hormones talking.”

She slipped her hand out of Iron’s grip, and he let her but only so he could grasp the side of her face, his fingers grazing over the underside of her jaw in comforting strokes.

“I got you, Anna. I got you.”

He sealed his lips firmly against hers, crowding out any remaining questions.