Page 138 of Obsidian and Frost

Unhinged.

A beast unleashed.

At first there was only pain and the violation of it.

The sensation was completely new to me—shocking and beyond overwhelming.

But those flicks of his tongue… they added something more. And, as I clamped my hands down on his shoulders to rip him off me, I hesitated.

Other sensations sparked.

Pleasure.

Pleasure in the pain?

No. It was the way he was devouring me so desperately, so incredibly all-consuming, how badly he needed me in this moment.

His draw slowed a little, but it wasn’t his rabid state calming. It was him deepening it, the feed taking on another level, becoming about more than merely ingesting my prized blood.

I was vaguely aware of Sylas yelling, trying to talk Lazriel down, trying to even appeal to me to use my Immortal strength to extricate myself from his unexpected situation.

His magic flared.

But then shadows wove around Lazriel, sweeping around his head, down to his mouth, spilling inside.

He choked and pulled his fangs from my flesh, then staggered back as the shadows moved to his throat, down to his shoulders, until they were encompassing his entire body, then binding him within them.

He thrashed and roared, and even howled in protest.

And thenshematerialized.

Her back to me, she spoke calmly to Sylas. “Get him some blood bags. Now. Mix it with his favored whiskey from his dorm room.” She gestured at me behind her. “I’ll deal with him.” She reached out, making me tense for her safety as she stroked Lazriel’s cheek while he was in a rabid state only held there by her shadow magic. “It will be okay, sweets. You’ll be okay. I’ll see you in a little while. Drink and relax.”

His eyes flickered, his humanity briefly breaking through, before he then started snarling and struggling again.

Velra reached behind her and grasped my hand, her teleportation enveloping us.

Her head tilted slightly toward me. I saw it then—the barely suppressed anguish in her eyes. It wasn’t just about Lazriel. It was aboutmetoo. About the sight of me bleeding, hurting. Her grip on my hand tightened.

In the midst of it, just before it took us, she told Sylas, “Now.” Then she dropped her shadow magic, Sylas snagged Lazriel with his, then she swept us away.

23

~Velra~

“You felt my distress through our Soul Brand?”

I stilled on gathering wipes and towels in the ensuite bathroom of my dorm.

Not just at the way his voice rolled through me, but the worry in his question, how much he seemed to hate that it could be the truth of the matter.

“No,” I ground out, clenching my fingers around the hand towel. “Which means you’re muting yourself, stopping me from feeling anything from you. Because you were most definitely in distress when I showed up.”

Instead of speaking to that, he did what he’d taken to doing all the fucking time and circumvented the issue, asking instead, “How did you know to come to that specific spot at that key time, then?”

“I spelled Sylas with a Nexus Band. Well, a Nexus ring. I felthissuffering as he used a mass amount of his power to do damage to you, an Immortal being.”

He was silent for several moments.