Page 61 of WitchBorn
“Surprise for all of us then.” I struggled to parse how they were related. Finn, with his steel resolve and sweet kisses, and the shadow beast dripping ooze, maddened with Winter’s curse and madness.
Seb had dropped off a picture of Xander, but they looked nothing alike. Glamour? Or something else? Finn’s memories of himself left no physical impression, and using Google to search for cursed forests and a time frame left me with too many options to narrow. “Sebastian gets the king of calm, and I get the monster broken and distorted.” The comment bit deep, and felt like a half lie. Finn was Xander, Xander was Finn. But were they really? How much was the cursed wolf and how much the mortal soul along for the ride?
Ari shifted, their form morphing into one similar to Seb, not a mirror, but an obvious relation, smaller, long red hair, resting bitch face on tap. “Would it help to be angry with me like this?”
“That’s almost as creepy as the puck.”
“You made daddy cry.” Ari folded their arms across their chest, expression cold.
“He’s Summer king. With a strong link to Autumn.Heshould be able to break through the barrier and reach Finn.”
“But Finn is the Autumn king.”
“Right now, he’s human,” I continued to pace. “Is it normal for the kings to have the power to tear their soul apart and give it new life?”
“Autumn has always been a transition. Life and death, hot and cold, light and dark,” Ari said. “Never considered the strongest. Summer and Winter receive those titles due to the extreme shift, but we’ve already seen how incredibly powerful Spring is. Autumn would at least be his match.”
And Spring had accidentally called a dozen hurricanes to fruition when Winter dared harm his mates, then ripped his lovers from the jaws of death, and resurrected them as if they were flowers to rebloom. If Summer and Winter had power to match that, I hadn’t seen it yet, and it scared the shit out of me. Then there was Autumn, who was meant to be mine. A curse of fate, or something else?
“Witchchild, don’t play with me. I saw Finn’s dreams. The first nightmares of his parents’ deaths. He became something, I don’t know what it was. A bane over the land, some sort of nightmare to keep the humans out. Is that Winter’s curse?”
“No. Autumn is like daddy… part elemental chaos. Winter’s curse feeds on energy, that’s why she took you. With the rise of each new king, her power lessens and she drains anyone she can to hold on to it.”
She’d kept me chained to the floor and drained me dry over and over like a refillable juice bag. The biting memory of cold made my nerves ache, though it had all healed thanks to my heat and Finn’s intervention. Now I couldn’t get the idea of Finn sliding into me out of my head. Had a heat ever been that good? No one previous focused on giving me pleasure during a heat. A thousand times more satisfying than my dozen of encounters with Zephyr at Winter’s command.
Of all my visions I hadn’t a single one of the new rise of Winter. The last round had been queens, this time all kings.Which I thought was a dumb idea of the fates since men thought with their dicks more than their brains sometimes, myself as proof since I could still taste Finn’s kiss. But maybe that’s why they were all gay so far and mated? Who was Winter and his mate? “That hag needs to die already. Where’s the new fucking Winter king?”
Ari flinched, but made his way to a small table in the room, in which a teapot sat. The strawberry blend wafting with warmth and magic. Seb trying to soothe me with his baked goods, sweet teas, and omega magic. Bastard, I cursed him silently.
A tiny fox appeared on the chair beside the table, white in color, with a small red patch over one eye and his right ear. Ari set the tray of cookies on the table and the fox swiped two, peering over the tabletop at me.
“Xiao, I presume?” A dozen puzzle pieces falling into place as the fox morphed into the kitten I’d had in the Autumn realm, and then the white leopard. Free of Autumn’s influence I could sense his power, and my gut flipped over with instant worry. I met Ari’s gaze, their expression giving a silent warning to not overstep, but here before us was the Winter king, or at least the one meant to step into the role. And his mate. Ari reached over and scratched Xiao’s ears, the cat returning to his fox form and cooing at Ari.
Did Seb know?
“Fuck,” I muttered.
Xiao tilted his head in my direction, studying me. How old was this king? Kiran had been the first of the courts to be reborn after Spring passed centuries ago, then Autumn, though I hadn’t known it was Finn or Xander, broken as he might be. Summer passed shortly before Seb was born, and Winter still lived. How many other young Winters had she killed to keep her choke hold on power?
“What can I do to help you protect Finn?” I asked Xiao instead.
Xiao stuffed the cookies in his mouth, and leapt off the chair, shifting with insanely fast magic to a young man, maybe mid-teens with white hair and the icy gray eyes. He looked more like a true kitsune of story than any of the other kings had, even Seb, who often cursed how much his fox bled through to his human form.
“Bond,” Xiao said, touching his forehead. He still had fox ears, which I had to fight the sudden urge to touch. I took a step back, his magnetic pull as king muddling my thoughts. Holy fuck, this baby king was powerful. No wonder he was mated to the Witchchild.
I shook my head to clear out the waves of magic rippling through him like chaos. If Sebastian’s hadn’t been suppressed as a teen, he would have been as wild with power as this fox. “We fucked, but if there’s a bond, I can’t seem to find it.”
“A bond is more than sex,” Ari said.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about sex with the Witchchild. I’d end up on the wrong side of the werewolf alpha wizard and his grumpy mate. “Explain to me how it works? How to get back to Finn, or find our bond or whatever? I may be a seer, but right now I’m as blind as the rest of you.”
“He won’t be able to complete the bond until restored,” Robin said, appearing in his creepy kid form and taking a single cookie from the plate, to which Xiao looked on with sadness at the loss.
“I have more downstairs,” Ari assured him.
“If I can only find him through the bond, and we can’t complete it until he’srestored, which I’m assuming you mean not torn from his wolf half, whatever that might mean, then we are screwed.”
Someone knocked on the door. I continued to pace thinking it would be Seb or Liam, but it was Toby, Spring’s wolf. He held out a bottle filled with a clear fluid. “This is the best I can do without testing him for side effects.” He glanced my way.