Kings and Sirens (The Blood Falls Book 2)

Leena

I was grouchy. That’s what happens when I get all hot and bothered but don’t have anywhere or anyone to relieve it. But leaving Atsila hard and throbbing was the right call. Not the hard and throbbing part, but the leaving.

He wanted me. I knew he wanted me. But he couldn’t get past this wall he’d thrown up. This challenge. I suspected it was a residual effect of the attack. Some coping mechanism he’d given himself to deal with the tragedy. Some sort of logic along the lines of, If I survived it is because I must be King. And if I must be King, I must be the best King to make up for the sacrifice.

I dunno. It’s what my oldest brother Dray would do. Not that I wanted to compare Atsila to Dray, but the men had some uncanny personal beliefs about right and wrong and duty and honor. It was stupid. What would sex change? I wasn’t fertile. It’s not like there’d be offspring to contend with. We had no sexually transmitted diseases. Sex was just sex. We could have relieved so much sexual tension in that beautiful cave of wonders.

But no. He was stubborn and now we were deep in the forest. And Klah kept calling Atsila Tee.

“Hey Tee. See that hive?” Klah pointed at the massive beehive ahead. The buzzing was hard to miss.

“Why are you calling him Tee?” They’d never once used the nickname before now.

Klah frowned. “That’s what we always call him.”

Kuruk shook his head. “I guess when we were in battle mode we didn’t.”

Klah nodded a few times. “Yeah, makes sense. We were locked and loaded. Probably felt wrong to be familiar. Especially with outsiders.”

Klah and Kuruk were as fun and friendly as they came, but it irritated me that they still called me an outsider. Couldn’t I just be Leena?

Fuck, I was grouchy. I needed to let it go.

It was so pretty out here with the towering trees that hid the sky. Vines trellised up their trunks and ferns and air plants made little pockets here and there home. There were birds and bees and bunnies. The air was crisp and cleaner than anything I’d ever breathed in my whole life. I could almost taste the flowers and maybe the honey. We stopped by a river with clean, refreshing water, and even though it was even colder than Blood Falls, I had an impulse to strip down and bathe in it.

Anything to cool down the fire burning inside me.

I didn’t even know why I liked this grump of a man!

“Check this out,” Atsila said softly. Klah and Kuruk stepped closer. I was the furthest away and I used the caution in his voice to guide me in moving quietly. When I finally drew close enough I saw that he had a bird in his hands. “She’s hurt.”

So beautiful and fragile in his giant hands. He moved his fingers and my psychic connection to the Plane lit up around me. The world faded a little and the Plane appeared as a fuzzy superimposed energy field. As Atsila moved his fingers the Plane heated, the molecules of the bird’s wing rearranged until she was healed.

He released her and she flew away.

“Good work.” Klah clapped him on the shoulder.

“Still not enough,” Atsila grunted, a sadness suddenly radiating out of him. Since I was tapped into the Plane I could see how it affected the metaphysical environment around him. The deep emotion bent the field around his body.

His grief was overwhelming.

“Let’s go on the hunt. Maybe we can track down some dinner,” Kuruk said with a wave at Klah.

Atsila gave them a nod. “See you soon.”

“Be safe, Tee.”

They bounded away, Heida at first, then bears. I waited until they disappeared. “Why do they call you Tee?”

“The hard T sound in the middle of my name. When we were kids it was a quick way to say my name.”

I didn’t like it. His name was too perfect to shorten. “You can heal birds?”

“Sort of. I learned I can use my shifting ability to manipulate the Plane.”

So not all Heida could do what he did. An ability so very similar to an Axl ability. Interesting. “You taught yourself to do it?”

He grunted and nodded in reply. “This way. There are deer close by.” He led me into a clearing of sorts. The trees weren’t as thick, and the grass was able to grow up to hip height. Atsila wandered a few yards away.

I let the breeze wash over me as I took in the untouched beauty around me. It was so quiet that when a deer stepped on a branch it sounded like a gunshot. I spun around just in time to see some waving branches. A moment later I saw movement somewhere else.

Then the deer appeared. She was beautiful. Her fur looked so luscious I wanted to run my fingers through it. Without thinking I psychically masked myself to the deer, making her see me as a deer as well. Thinking she was safe she moved closer, nosing through the grass, lifting her head into the air to sniff the wind, taking another step.

Atsila’s brow furrowed but he watched without saying a word. It was so natural for me to use my ability that I forgot it might seem very strange to him.

The deer and I shared a moment. She came right up to me and while she was smart enough to know something wasn’t quite right, she didn’t spook or run away. It was a rush to be so close to something so rare. Here was this massive creature who would normally run far away from me and all the danger I represented, but instead it walked right up to me and let me touch it.

Remarkable.

Eventually she sprinted off, continuing her daily rituals. I was so excited I couldn’t contain myself, basically sprinting through the grass like a child. “Oh my goodness! Did you see? So beautiful.”

“How—” Atsila froze, clamping his mouth shut and swallowing the question he wanted to ask. Frustrating male!

“How…did I get the deer to come up to me?” I clasped my hands behind my back trying to seem unthreatening as I explained the mystery of why the deer treated me so nicely. “I made it think I was also a deer.”

He blinked once. “How—” He slammed his mouth shut again. It was truly amazing how desperate Atsila was to be rid of me even though with every lingering gaze, each electric moment together it was obvious he was as attracted to me as I was to him.

I waved my hand through the air. “I tell the mind what to see.”

Atsila’s gaze locked on my hand and heated for some reason. I poked at the Plane—at him—and was hit by a wall of lust. I wasn’t surprised to find he had a reaction to me, but I was shocked by the force of it, which made me wonder what brought it on. As I probed the moment I realized Atsila was having an instinctive response to my size.

Heida were sexually dimorphic after all. So it made sense…but wow, this level of response was extreme. Heida males were significantly larger than their female counterparts. It was rumored the males found this extremely attractive—sometimes to the point of making the most of it in sexual encounters.

Which, of course, piqued my curiosity.

What would Atsila think of me if I were Heida, too? Using my gift of visual manipulation, I made Atsila see me as a bear. “Do I look more appealing like this?” The Plane vibrated with his lust. So I tested him some more, becoming an even smaller wolf. “Or perhaps you simply prefer fur?”

To my great pleasure, the vibrations changed. Part of him was revolted by the idea of me as a Volci, but the rest of him about came apart when I shrank in size before his eyes. I erased the mind games and allowed him to see me as myself again. “Or is it animal instinct that gets you going?” I tried one final test, shifting into my cat form.

Only instead of becoming a tiny house cat, I transformed into a panther. “Do you like me now?” I was still significantly smaller than a Heida, but now I was on equal footing. One powerful animal to another.

And he liked it. Quite a lot. So much so he drew his own blood to keep from shifting and taking me right where I stood.

“Stop.”

His pain was palpable and I didn’t want to hurt him, only to understand him better, so I returned to normal. “I only tease you because you’re an asshole.”

“I am not an asshole.” The Plane stopped vibrating as he took a breath and relaxed.

“You are. But I kind of like that about you.” I circled him, taking all of him in. The physical and the metaphysical. He was so hard to understand. “You’re so…loyal. So steadfast. You’ve made your decision and that means you can’t like me. Not even a little.”

“I like you,” he growled.

“You tolerate me.” And if I kept pushing him like this he probably wouldn’t tolerate me much more.

“Thought we’d find you two here,” Klah and Kuruk wandered out of the trees, smiling like they knew a secret.

“Hello boys. How was the hunt?” Because I was also kind of an asshole, I decided to play along with whatever game the boys were playing. I gave each of them a hug, which I suspected drew Atsila’s attention, once again, to the fact that I was much smaller than all of them.

“I was thinking…” Klah pretended he was just coming up with an idea but was clearly toying with Atsila instead, “that you should show Leena the Line.”

He bared his teeth in anger. “She does not need to see the Line.”

I was utterly fascinated by his extreme response to this idea. “What’s the Line?”

Atsila glared at his brothers before speaking to me. “Don’t worry about it.”

“She should see it for herself,” Kuruk agreed.

And now I was absolutely fascinated to know what this line was. “Oh my. What is so important that Atsila doesn’t want to take me to see it? Is it because,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, “we’ll be alone together?”

Kuruk and Klah laughed long and hard.

“Yes, I think so,” Kuruk said with a nod.

“Absolutely,” Klah agreed.

I kept whispering loudly, my hand cupped to my cheek. “He’s scared of sex, isn’t he?”

“Aw come on, Atta.” I tried out the nickname and found I hated it as much as Tee. “It’s just fucking. I won’t hurt you. Promise.” Unless he wanted me to hurt him. Then that was an entirely different story.

“She does not need to see the Line. I will explain it to her later. We should head back.” He stomped off, ending our conversation and all the teasing at once.

Klah gave me a shrug. I returned it with an oops, did that annoy him? Kuruk laughed and started teasing Atsila some more. When he stopped dead in his tracks I almost ran into his back.

That’s when I felt it. A coldness to the air that shouldn’t be there. Then a sense of a shadow moving across the Plane. The psychic vibration almost hurt. A large creature moved through the trees. I’d never seen anything like it. Samhain but not. Animal, but too samhain to be so. It was neither and both at the same time. For some reason I was terrified of it.

“Salishan incoming. Down!” Atsila grabbed me and forced me to the ground beside him. Then he removed a knife from his boot and shoved it into my hands. “Just in cases,” he whispered.

Every muscle in his body was coiled tight, ready to spring into action. Only it felt like more than hunter and prey. There was something else about him…a scent or movement, something that made him even more attractive than he already was. Atsila was a killer. A protector. And right now I was the female he was protecting.

The creature came to a dead stop only meters away from where we crouched. I must have reacted because Atsila put a calming hand on my back. It soothed me, but it also aroused me. I wanted more of his touch—just not at this moment.

It took a step toward Klah and Kuruk. Atsila grabbed me up in his arms like I was a doll. His eyes locked on mine and with a growl, he kissed me hard and fast. Poured all the lust and protective instinct into a brief moment of relief.

And it only lasted a moment, because then I was flying through the air. I landed in Klah’s arms. He turned and ran us toward the homestead. Toward safety. As I looked over his shoulder I saw Atsila shift and then tear the creature to shreds.