Stone's Kiss (3 page)

He was winning, but there were too many to fight his way free, and half his attention was trained on his lady. She was losing her battle to live. Why was her magic not healing her as it should?

Another dire wolf female darted at him. His tail snaked up and speared her in the throat. He didn’t have time for a prolonged battle. This needed to end, now. He directed his magic at the encircling horde. Threads of power condensed in the air and the silvery wisps latched onto any warm–blooded creature near enough to touch. The scent of burning flesh filled the air and the screams of his enemies echoed in his ears.

Seeing he had devastated half their comrades, the other creatures vanished into the shadows of a surrounding maze. He curled his lips and caught their individual scents on his tongue, committing each to memory. When he had them all, he sent his magic to hunt them.

Back at his lady’s side, he lifted her into his arms, gathering her closer so he could share some of his heat. She was far paler than she should have been. Why wasn’t her magic healing her?

While she’d been injured by creatures of darkness, her injuries didn’t look great enough to cause this kind of weakness. For that matter, her attackers shouldn’t have been much of a threat. Even in the Mortal Realm she should have had power and instinct enough to destroy what he had dispatched with ease.

Detaching a portion of his consciousness from his body, he sent it into the woman lying senseless in his arms. Her power still drained away.

He checked the weavings he’d placed over her wounds, but they were holding. No power hemorrhaged from those points. Elsewhere then, but where? His consciousness stretched beyond his body, following the scent trail of magic back to its source. A tree. Two long gashes. Heartwood deep.

By the Light, his lady was a dryad!

Blood leaked down the tree’s majestic trunk and saturated the ground at its roots. Instinct jerked him into motion and he summoned wards to shield the wounds. The prickle of power danced along his skin a moment before he directed the spell. An insubstantial webbing spun out between his outstretched hands, like a delicate blue lattice. It adhered to the bark and sealed the wound, preventing further loss of the hamadryad’s blood.

A hamadryad in the Mortal Realm. Impossible. A dryad’s spirit tree required magic to grow.

Yet, here his lady’s young hamadryad grew, defying everything he knew of magic. She must have had a small seedling with her when he’d rescued her from the Black Kingdom and brought her here.

Her soft moan brought him back to the present. It didn’t matter how her spirit tree came to be here. Here it grew, and here it bled its lifeblood upon the ground. He dropped to all fours and padded over to the tree. Circling, he sniffed at the ground until he pinpointed the area where the greatest concentration of magic saturated the loam. The scent of sap and blood trigger instincts and dragged him back to memories of his infancy.

He had first come to awareness hearing his mother’s deep slow heartbeat and the sounds of wind and lashing rain in her branches as he grew within the heart of her tree.

There was something here he needed.

Safe in his watery cocoon, deep inside his mother’s wooden heart, he’d grown strong.

Ah, yes.

Alone with the food and water of the earth, he had absorbed his dryad mother’s memories.

There it was—the knowledge to heal his mistress. More of his memories returned, both recent and ancient. Heal her hamadryad and the dryad should live.

Tonight, the second time his lady had called him had been as chaotic as the first. Worse. Now she lay dying along with her tree. If her hamadryad had been older, he could have put her in the tree to rest and heal, but such an attempt in this magic–less place might kill the tree. He scrounged his mother’s memories for other healing methods. He needed to find another way, something that would work in this realm.

And quickly. The power was dissipating, sucked up by the earth like water on drought–cursed land. He dropped into a trance, and summoned his power for the delicate work of separating his mistress’s magic from the magic–starved land.

The greatest concentration of magic pooled just below the grass, in the layer where small fibrous roots sought food and water. With one hand pressed against her trunk and the other on the ground, he flexed his talons. After he absorbed the magic from the ground, he drew it up into his body, purified it and returned it to the spirit tree. He drained the small pool and reached deeper. His mind rushed down into the earth, probing for the smallest tendrils of power. He continued until the smallest scrap, every little fragment no matter how small, was returned to the hamadryad.

After he reinforced the wards on the hamadryad’s larger wounds, he healed the small punctures his talons had made. Those larger wounds would need intensive healing, but must wait for now. Mending the tree would be useless if—

No, he would not permit failure.

Returning to the prone dryad, he sat on his hunches and lifted her into his lap. He licked at her face. Feeling her skin’s clamminess and noting the shallow coloring, he knew he didn’t have long to prepare for healing.

But before he began the arduous task of healing her, he’d need to find a shelter more defendable than this maze. He repositioned the small dryad in his arms, and broke into a ground–eating stride. He navigated his way free of the leafy corridors and emerged into a lush garden. The serene shadows beckoned to him, offering a way to hide from the sun’s revealing rays, and he summoned a weaving of invisibility.

He exited the gardens and encountered a stone home, large and spacious but surprisingly empty of people. He wondered where the servants were, and the guards. There should have been some defenses guarding this house, yet he detected nothing.

After one more probe of the house and surrounding lawn, he tightened his hold on his lady and entered the stone cottage by a back entrance. As a precaution, he placed a ward around the entire structure and keyed it so only he could pass. Then as an added measure, he mentally scanned the area immediately around the building. Still no one.

The house as safe as he could make it, he turned his attention to the inside of the dwelling. A stone–tile floor stretched out under his talons. He made a soft clicking sound with each step. A large table of polished wood sat at room’s center and a counter stretched around two sides of the room in an
L
shape. The table held a loaf of freshly baked bread and a basket of sweet–smelling fruit. It lacked a hearth, but if he was to guess, this was a kitchen of some sort.

He laid his burden upon the table. The rapid beat of her pulse worried him and her breathing was too shallow. Dropping into a deeper trance, he summoned his magic. At his silent command, the magic flowed out from his body. It was less than he’d hoped, lacking the wild turbulence he was accustomed to, but it would be enough to heal the Sorceress. It had to be. He bowed his head until his muzzle touched her breastbone and he breathed more power upon her.

Nothing happened. His magic didn’t even penetrate her skin. Panicked, he leapt upon the table and hunched closer, willing the power into her. She jerked awake, her chest heaving as if a nightmare suddenly gripped her. Her eyes focused on him and her expression softened in recognition.

A shaky hand caressed his muzzle, then reached back into his mane, circling his neck. Still she didn’t take what he offered, power she desperately needed. He bumped her face with his muzzle and licked at her skin, but was careful not to sip the smallest drop of her dryad blood for fear of losing his concentration. She moved; her arms tightened around his shoulders as she nuzzled the underside of his jaw. Her fingers grasped his shoulders and clung there a moment before sliding down one arm, grazing the slashes from one of the dire wolves. Gentle fingertips paused in their downward descend and reversed, gliding back over the broken skin. Light caresses turned to a savage prod and he grunted at the sharp pain, but her hand dropped away in the next moment.

Slowed by his shock, his reflexes didn’t spur him into action until her bloody fingers were halfway to her lips. She no longer looked at him. Instead her gaze riveted to the bright smear on her fingers. Before they reached her lips, he snatched her wrist. She cried in frustration, struggling weakly before falling back against the table, her energy spent.

Trying and failing to understand her bizarre behavior, he reared away from her. He dropped to all fours and began to pace with his wings mantled, tail whipping with agitation. He froze at what his mind tried to tell him. She craved his blood, hungered for its power like a mate would. They were not mates. They could never be mates.

Sacrilege.

A soft sound, followed by a watery gasp dragged him back to the table. She was paler than before, gray, and her breath came in a death’s rattle. Gathering her into his arms, he carried her over to a corner and sat with his back braced against a wall, her slight form resting in his lap. She was so light, so fragile. What if he could share blood without forging mating ties? If there was even the slightest chance he had to try. He slid her hand closer to the warm dampness he could feel making its sluggish way down his arm, but her fingers didn’t tighten upon the wound as they had before. She was too weak even for that.

His talons rested cool against his breastbone. Then uncaring of the consequences, or that he was breaking one of the sacred laws binding them, he dragged the point of one talon down his chest a finger’s length. With his other hand, he lifted her head to the wound. He could live as an oathbreaker. He didn’t think his sanity would survive her death again so soon.

Eyes still closed, she shivered in his arms and inhaled a deep breath. Then following the coppery scent to the wound, she sealed her lips over his blood–dampened flesh. At the first lap of her tongue, his concentration shattered like mist before a strong wind. Magic surged and flowed into her. She drank his magic along with his blood, growing stronger with each heartbeat.

His little dryad pressed against him, becoming more demanding in her feeding. Ecstasy threatened to destroy his discipline. The soft caress of her fingers feathered along his abdomen as she stirred in his arms. Her gentle touch shocked him to his core, rousing instincts better left to slumber. Fire settled in his groin. He groaned, then cursed his response. His horns racked the wall behind, sending white dust and bits of debris raining down upon them both. He tightened his arms around her, wanting her closer while at the same time trying not to crush the life from her. His tail coiled around her leg as if it had a life of its own. It seemed endless, the pleasure–pain of her feeding on his power. Yet it was over too quickly. With one last lick along the length of the wound, she tilted her head back and looked at him. A half–smile graced her lips, and then she tucked her head against his shoulder. A few moments later, her breathing evened out as she drifted into sleep.

Rest was far from his thoughts with his lungs working like a great billows and his pulse thundering in his ears. He called on what remained of his discipline and fell into another trance to order his body’s rhythms to calm—it would last moments at best.

Once he was calm again he opened his eyes and checked her wounds. They were healed. All that remained was a faint pink scar. She may have been healed, but her dryad blood still called to him, its coppery sap–sweet scent enticing him down a dark and forbidden path. He shook himself, fighting deeply rooted instincts. He stood and deposited her back on the table.

He needed to get clean of her blood, her intoxicating scent. Now.

Sniffing the air, he scented water, but couldn’t pinpoint the source at first. He paced around the room, and continued scenting. Then he heard the faint plop of water dripping onto an unyielding surface. He headed in that direction, tossing his arm and wrist bands on the ground as he walked. His knee–length loincloth landed on the carpet. Its beads rattled against each other for a moment before falling silent.

Following the sound of water to its source, he entered a large room. A silver spigot of some sort dripped water into a white basin. On one wall a glass alcove took up a quarter of the room. It smelled of soap and dampness.

Blessed relief.

Chapter Four

A coppery taste coated Lillian’s tongue. Her mouth was dry, gummy with old blood. She must have bit her tongue, and unless her mattress had suddenly turned to stone, she’d managed to knock herself out and was lying flat on the floor. Of all the stupid things to do, bashing her head hard enough to lose consciousness had to be one of the clumsiest. She ran her hands out to her sides. Cool, polished woodgrain took shape under her searching fingers. Interesting. None of the floors felt like that. She cracked an eye open and peered to one side: the honey color of oak met her vision. Kitchen table?

Yep. Kitchen table.

She’d somehow managed to knock herself out and land on the table?

Not likely.

She scrounged her memory. A void blocked her way. She panicked, fearing she’d lost her memories for the second time in her life … but she remembered that, so her memory still functioned. Something else then. Something so frightening her mind didn’t want to remember.

She could deal with frightening. Fear was better than the nothingness of vanished memories. She scanned her surroundings. The kitchen looked normal. She wasn’t sure what she sought, but nothing in this room jogged her memory. Sitting up, a wave of dizziness swamped her. She curled her fingers around the table edge in a death grip. The deep pounding of her heart and the crackle of white noise hummed in her ears. She blinked once, and again.

The room came into focus. Okay, that’s better.
I can do this
, she thought. No point postponing the inevitable. She jumped down from the table and wobbled around until her legs remembered they had bones in them. It felt like she’d donated half her blood to the blood bank. The thought of blood summoned an image of her grove, her favorite tree dripping bloody gore onto the ground. Her mind shied away from the vision.