Page 1 of Conquering the King of Storms

Chapter 1

There was mud everywhere.

Everywhere.

Between my toes and fingers, dried in my hair, in the small crevice between my nearly-nonexistent boobs… and every other unpleasant place it could possibly be.

“Please tell me we’re almost to the castle,” I said to Margo, as I plopped down on the small patch of overgrown grass we had decided to sleep in.

Bugs?

Yeah, they were definitely there.

I was covered in enough mud that I didn’t think they could get through to my skin, though. Seriously, it was everywhere.

“If you kiss your king, maybe we can find out,” she shot back.

I gave her a dead stare, which she mirrored, until we both snorted and gave up on that.

It had been around two months (if my math was right, which was questionable) since we woke up in Bluhm, a magical world full of fae. Each of us had been holding a powerful sword that belonged to a different elemental fae king when we woke up. The swords had proceeded to disintegrate in our hands and in the process, connect us to said fae kings.

As in, a magical, permanent kind of marriage connection.

The kingIwas connected to was called Storm. He was the leader of the wind fae. The man could create tornados with the blink of an eye, and there was always at least a little wind rippling off of him.

Our magical marriages were a problem, obviously, but not the biggest one.

The biggest problem was their glowing eyes.

Years earlier, the four kings had teamed up to destroy some kind of big baddie, but when they’d killed him, they ended up soaking up his magic somehow. And considering they were already crazy powerful, the extra magic had been enough that the power took control of the men and made them… insane.

Well, not quite insane. We called them insane, when their eyes were glowing and their magic was in control, but it wasn’t as if they were actually crazy. Their power was just strong enough to take over the men themselves.

Storm, my… er… king, had adopted his niece, Dove. When we first met, I had assumed she was his daughter, because they looked a lot alike, but she wasn’t. Her parents—Storm’s sister and her mate—had died when Dove was young according to Flame (AKA Tariq, Ivy’s mate), and kids in the elemental fae lands didn’t gain their own magic until well into their teenageyears. But magic was a requirement for survival in Bluhm, so the little six-year-old girl was tied to Storm’s magic.

Hisinsanemagic.

Which made her slightly insane too.

She was herself more often than he was though, so that was nice.

The back of my head met the overgrown grass, and Dove snuggled up beside me. I wrapped my arm around her, pulling her in closer. She was quiet, and tended to stick with me over the other girls or the glowing-eyed kings when she was awake—which was one of the terms we used for the kings when they were their normal selves. Margo was always pissed at something, and Ivy was always holding hands with or in the arms of her king, so I was kind of Dove’s only option.

Ivy, the human chick who was mated to Flame AKA Tariq (but I wasn’t supposed to know his name because of weird cultural shit), had somehow managed to kiss and fuck her king back to sanity. His eyes hadn’t glowed in ages.

Would that work for me and Storm?

I didn’t know.

Nor did I have any intention of finding out.

If Storm wanted to wake up, he was going to have to pull his head out of his ass himself, because my hands weren’t going anywhere near that thing.

Even if it was a really,reallynice ass.

Anyway, Tariq and Ivy had ditched us a few days earlier to go to the center of the water fae lands. She was injured, and his magicwas pretty damned destructive. They were hoping she’d end up turning into a water fae so that her wounds would heal at fae speed—almost instantly—and they could make vows and shit to complete their mate bond.

I didn’t see why the mate bond needed to be completed, considering it was already fucking permanent, but hadn’t asked for more details that I probably didn’t want to know.

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