Page 47 of The Unseelie War
“You don't have to share me.” She started gathering her clothes and putting them on. “Not really. This”—she gestured between them, encompassing the web, the room, the profound intimacy they had shared—“this is only ours.”
Ours.The word sent something warm and fierce blooming in his chest. Not just his obsession with her, but something mutual. Something shared. Something that belonged to both of them equally.
“Ours.” The word was glorious.
As they prepared to face whatever awaited beyond the costume room door, Serrik watched Ava catch sight of herself in a cracked mirror. Her hair was thoroughly mussed, her lips swollen from his kisses, and faint marks decorated her throat where his fangs had claimed her.
She looked thoroughly debauched.
She looked happy.
More than that—she looked likehis.
“Ready?” With a breath, he reluctantly resumed his human appearance. It was, unfortunately, simply more convenient to walk throughdoorsas a human. Buildings were not designed with his shape and size in mind.
She took one last look around the room—at the golden threads still glinting in the corners, at the space that had become sacred ground—and he felt an echo of her sentiment. This room would always be theirs now, marked by what they had shared here. “Ready.”
Whatever awaited them beyond this door, they would face ittogether. No longer as captor and captive, or even as allies of convenience, but as something far more powerful.
As two creatures who had found in each other something worth more than revenge or power or survival.
They had found love.
And Serrik would tear apart anyone who tried to take it from him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Humans.
What a fascinating species.
Valroy loathed them as a concept on every conceivable level.
Well, save perhaps except for what they were capable of creating when they put their minds together in mass numbers. Much like ants, he supposed. Tireless in their ability to reuse their surroundings to create fascinating workings. Architecture. Artworks. Literature. False religion. Science. Technology. Music.
What he saw before him was no exception.
Ingenuityinspired by sheer desperation was its own kind of work of art. For before him at the exit of the woods his meagre-but-plenty-deadly-enough-forces gathered sat a cobbled-together structure. It had tents, lean-tos, and shelters from the bizarre weather that could not decide if it wanted to rain water, coins, or, most amusingly, human teeth. But the encampment also had a rampart surrounding it that stood some ten feet high. He could see humans standing atop it, posted as guards.
They had managed to construct it in a very short amount of time. It was hasty, sloppy, and ugly. But itwaseffective.
Much like ants, they were enjoyable to observe…and equally enjoyable to destroy.
The scent of their smoke and fear that carried on the wind was pure perfection.
Leaning against the tree beside him, he stood at the crest of what had once been a manicured suburban hill, now transformed by the merger into something far less mundane than what the humans considered aesthetically appealing.
The grass beneath his feet had turned the color of dried blood, and trees that sang discordant lullabies swayed in the breeze. Below them, the human outpost sprawled like a wound across the landscape—their hastily constructed barricades, military vehicles that had been repurposed into mobile fortresses, and the pathetic flicker of fires made to beat back the darkness that surrounded them.
It would do nothing to aid them.
Their slaughter would be total. Whole. Unstoppable.
It would be a thing of true beauty.
Even with his lesser force, it would be more than enough. Behind him, his forces gathered in the growing dusk. Two hundred Unseelie had flocked to his banner the moment word spread that the treaty was broken. Amongst them were constructs born from human nightmares, twisted things of shadow and hunger that had found substance in this new reality.
And even some strays from Earth who had decided his flavor of chaos and bloodlust suited them better—some were not precisely human, but mostly they were mortals who needed little excuse to pick up a weapon and point it at their fellow man. Sadists and creatures whose hearts were full of hate enough to rival his own.
