Page 42 of Hearts of Stone

“Fledgling…” The pup’s wings flared out with a snap. “I am no—”

“No, you didn’t.” He was a canny thing, this Daniel. He regarded me steadily and then leaned forward. “Is this one of those fated mates things? I’ve been reading these porn books where like fourteen werewolves rail some unsuspecting guybehind a dumpster, and they talk about shit like that all the time.” He scanned the two of us. “Is that what you are to Jade?”

“And if we are?” I countered.

“The way it works in the books is that once the werewolves scent their mate, they’ll do anything to claim them and keep them.” He wrinkled his nose. “That usually means drowning them in buckets of cum, but, whatever.” His gaze sharpened as he turned it from Seneca back to me. “So that’s how it is with you guys?”

Seneca made a strangled noise, the pathetic little fledgling. For all his posturing, I was fairly sure he’d expire on the spot if our mate looked at him for too long.

“More or less,” I replied, with a shrug.

Daniel smiled slowly, then nodded. “Niiice. OK, here’s the plan. I’m gonna scarf down the amazing food we ordered, because, damn, I’m starving. Haven’t eaten all day.” I sat there patiently, waiting for this man to finally come to his point. “Then I’ll slink off to bed early, because…ouch.” He moved gingerly on his chair. “I mean, guys like me talk about getting someone to wreck our holes, but the guy I saw last night really did a number on me.”

At that information, I sat forward. I’d seen this kind of thing before, men who seemed to get pleasure from pain. Under Luther’s not so benign rule, the inmates of Z Ward had been forced to endure it, whether they liked it or not. But as Daniel noted my attention, his cheeks flushed red.

“But I’ll make myself scarce as soon as I’ve had something to eat.” As Daniel said that, Harold walked back in, toting many plastic bags of food. When we all turned to look at him, he paused, his eyes touching on the colour in Daniel’s cheeks, but he simply raised his eyebrows without comment before moving forward to set down his load. “Alone,” Daniel clarified, before turning back to us. “You’ll have free rein to woo my bestie, but…”

He was a small man, this Daniel, even by human standards, but, as he defended his friend, he didn’t look it. He drew himself up as if he came from a long line of kings, and considered the two of us down the slope of his nose.

“But you’d better put the effort in. No ‘wham, bam, here’s your monster dick, ma’am’.”

Though he was but a human, he seemed to see everything that I was struggling with. That my desire, myneedfor my mate was so strong that in my haste to get to her I might be at risk of losing my control, ignoring my duty to protect her first and foremost. She was like a long draught of water to one who has wandered lost in the desert. I wanted to gulp her down, swallow everything she was, because that was the only way I’d be satisfied. But he was right in issuing his warning. Daniel was only saying what my mother and the other women of my village had always said.

“The world treats women like things,” she’d told me, as she stroked my hair. I was just a boy, a child who hadn’t discovered the other side of his nature yet. “Things to be used as a man sees fit. Don’t be one of those men, Carrick.” I’d snuggled in tighter into her side.

“Never, Mother.”

My lips moved now to make the same vow, even though my mother had been returned to the earth many hundreds of years before now. When I blinked, I came back to The Eyrie’s kitchen, and I met Daniel’s gaze calmly.

“You can count on us to treat your friend with every courtesy,” I assured the man.

“Grub’s up,” Harold said, dropping the many bags on the benchtop, just as Graven returned with Jade. Like the precious stone for which she was named, she gleamed as she entered the kitchen, her shining beauty worthy of a crown, totally at oddswith the menial tasks she busied herself with, as she found plates and bowls and cutlery.

“All is well?” I asked Graven in an undertone, when he drew closer.

“As good as can be expected,” he told me. “We have a long way to go to convince our mate that we are worthy of her.”

“I, for one, am up for the challenge,” Seneca said, coming to stand by Graven.

“Of course you are, fledgling,” I said, grinning when he started to growl. “You’ve never known a woman’s touch before. But…”

I looked across the counter and watched Daniel and Jade squabble over the food with a closeness and familiarity that I envied. Harold hovered, a step away from the two of them, a satellite to their twin planets. But he wanted to get closer. I knew that because I felt the same urge. She was the sun I never got to see. She warmed my skin, drove out the cold of night, the same way that she drove the ache from my bones.

And my heart.

“Whatever it takes,” I replied honestly. “We know she belongs to us, but Jade does not possess our instincts.” As I stared at the woman in question, she seemed to sense my gaze, looking up from the process of dishing up food, her cheeks growing pink at my attention. “So we must show her how good it can be.”

“Are you guys hungry?” Jade asked. When I stepped forward, so did my stone brothers.

“Always,” I replied, remembering the taste of her on my tongue but not really wanting to replace it with food. “For whatever you have on offer.”

Chapter 23

Wulfstan

I have always preferred the stillness, the silence of being one with stone. Though not when I was young. The first time my body turned to stone I was caught frozen in a scream, something the younger boys mocked me for the next night when I came back to flesh. I’d flapped my wings and bared my fangs at them, and that had put an end to that. But since then, I craved the perfect unending nothingness of being stone, because it was my only escape from the memories.

The walls of the asylum still echoed with the screams of inmates, long dead. If I didn’t apply my energy to block it out, I still heard Luther’s insidious voice inside my head.

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