Page 7 of Brimstone

Ruefully, I shook my head. “Some magics don’t work that way, Osha.” I would explain it to her some other time. There was still a shocking amount that she didn’t know about this realm, its people, and its magic. But that could wait. Onyx was in much better shape, and she had stopped crying. For now, that was all that mattered.

“You sacrificed that magic, then? To help him?” Saeris asked. Gods, she was so fucking beautiful. The moonlight painted her skin silver until she looked like she was glowing.

I nodded.

She didn’t seem to know what to say. She buried her face in Onyx’s coat for a moment, breathing him in. When she lifted her gaze to meet mine again, she arched an eyebrow at me. “Why?” she asked. “Why make that sacrifice?”

I wouldn’t have answered her before. I wouldn’t have been able to lie, and so I would have kept my mouth shut. So much had happened now, though. So much had changed between us. The truth slipped out with ease. “Don’t you know? There isn’t much I wouldn’t sacrifice to make you happy, Osha. A little healing magic is the least of it.”

Before Gillethrye, we’d been dancing around the tension between us for weeks and weeks. Now, God Bindings marked her hands and her wrists. They were wrapped around my wrists, too. We wereofone another, bound to one another, in a way that felt strange and thrilling.

There was so much more to be said.

The weight of that hung between us . . . but the female I had been terrified to fall for simply nodded, trying not to smile.“I see. And here I was thinking that you’d changed your mind about Onyx.”

I tried not to smile, too. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her. Gods, she was fucking beautiful. “Oh no,” I muttered softly. “I still think he’d made a great hat.”

1

HELL’S TEETH

SAERIS

THE DRESS WASmade for sinning.

Black.

Strapless.

Sheer.

The slit up the side was cut so high that there was no way I could have worn underwear. The fabric clung to my frame like a second skin, shimmering when it caught the light as if tailored from the night sky itself. Long gloves of the same material covered my arms as if I’d dipped them past the elbows into shimmering ink. This was nothing like any of the ensembles Everlayne had dressed me in when I’d first arrived at the Winter Palace. This was elegant. Stunning.Painfullysexy.

I didn’t recognize the woman in the full-length mirror of my dressing room . . . and there was a reason for that. The strange creature staring back at me wasn’t a woman. Not anymore. Once she might have been, but now she was a Fae-vampire hybrid, touched by the gods.

I was the same as I had ever been, and yet I wasn’t. Immortality might have cleaved the meat from the bones of others and made them willowy. It had filled out the parts ofmethat Zilvaren had starved. My cheekbones were rounder now, my lips fuller. Hips, breasts, ass: I’d had all three before, but now Ireallyhad them.

As it did every time I had caught myself in the mirror over the past forty-eight hours, my attention snagged on my tips of my pointed ears, poking through the dark waves of my hair. Reality seemed to warp and snap back into place whenever I saw them. In the end, I was just as Fisher’s mother had drawn me.

This was real.

I wasFae.

I wasa vampire.

The sound of a voice clearing at the back of the room broke the silence. “Well, I suppose if no one else is going to say it, thenIwill. You look downright fuckable, Saeris Fane.”

I turned, wearing a chagrined frown, already preparing for the fallout that would follow on the heels of that comment.

Three males occupied the large dressing room with me, each of them emitting so much testosterone that the air swam with it.

By the large window, the last rays of sunlight burnished Taladaius’s silver hair and limned his features in gold. I could sense his emotions now. I was connected to him in a way that I didn’t enjoy. Sometimes, as dusk was falling, I would feel him wake on the other side of the palace, and his sadness would steal my breath away. My maker cringed at the male on the other side of the room, sprawled out on a chaise longue like he owned the damned place. “Are you out of your mind?” he asked. “I don’t know a single person stupid enough to hit on a newly bonded female, let alone aGod-Boundfemale. But to do it right in front of her mate? In front ofhim?” he added, jerking his chin toward the last male leaning against the wall by the door.

I paused before allowing myself to look athim.

Paused before I even allowed myself to think his name.

Kingfisher.