Page 46 of Bright Soul

“Phaeron,” she whispered with such hope and longing.

She shifted her weight up and used my arm to guide her hand to one of my horns, leveraging it to drag me into a kiss. I shouldn’t have allowed this, not when she was wounded and her soul so tempting just a nibble away…

My body heated at the merest brush of our lips; it was like emerging from the cold Void onto Earth for the first time. Warmth suffused me down to my tail-tip, and the animal in me took control. I cupped the back of her neck, drawing her in deeper. I could taste the change in her magic; it was like drinking sunshine, harmless but spicy to my otherworldly senses. My fangs nibbled on her bottom lip, my forked tongue twining around her blunt one for more.

She squirmed from the sensation. It was only natural to pin her hips and pull her closer, until the tube attached to her left arm was taut. Jostling it had her gasping, the pained sound melting to a needy whimper as I trailed sharp-edged kisses down the side of her jawline and neck.

I growled.Mine. In my impatience to have more of her, I pulled the needle and tape off her arm.

The machine released an ear-splitting shriek. We startled apart, and I cursed myself as I took in her kiss-swollen lips and the indentations my fangs had made on the column of her throat. I’d stopped a breath away from biting right over her half-healed bruise. Was I even thinking? She needed to rest, not be subjected to my lack of control.

Light flooded the room from someone coming to check on us. Instead of it being a nurse, the heavy footfalls and the gritty sound of his transformation betrayed Geo. He pointed an accusing finger. “Phaeron,” he rumbled. There was more,something about a “streem” and “away,” but the blame was clear from just the weight he put behind my name.

I smoothed my hand over Cress’s hair in apology before standing and stepping away from the bed. I coiled my tail around my legs and put my hands behind my back, head angled at an accepting angle. He had all the body language of a man about to strike me. I deserved it.

Geo didn’t hold back. With a fist like a brick, the force of his blow had me tasting blood from the tear of my own teeth. I slammed into the bedside table. A lamp and her phone went flying when the cheap wood splintered under my weight.

I groaned, feeling the twinge of several bruises old and new. Cress half fell out of the bed to get between us. “Geo, no!” she yelped. His broad obsidian palm descended to nudge her out of his way.

That was about the time a nurse rushed into the room and shouted. Geo’s wrathful expression doubled from whatever the woman was saying. Cress was breathing a sigh of relief and picking up her phone, just to tense as she turned it over to reveal several cracks on the screen. She made a distressed noise and tapped an intact section several times, producing a whirr of static and bands of color under the glass.

The combined noise and light was a little too much for me. I put my arms around her from behind, murmuring a promise—“I’m sorry. I’ll buy you another.”—before taking her into my shadows and carrying her out of the room, leaving Geo behind to argue with the nurse.

She struggled, and I had to drop her in the hallway, the two of us reforming out of dark mist. “No,” she said, stabbing a finger at me sternly.

I gazed at her, desperate to retreat somewhere dark and safe. There was only one place to go, really. Gesturing between us, I said, “Braza.”

Her face softened, and she nodded, not fighting when I took her into shadows again. It was the fastest way to the library and the embrace of the powercore’s crackling energy. Braza pulsed a feeling of welcome when she read my intentions, already formed within the powercore’s inner chamber when I arrived and placed Cress back on her feet.

“I’m glad to see you whole once more, my prince,” Braza said with her usual polite distance.

She tilted her head toward Cress and smiled warmly, replying in English to something she’d said. My mate plucked at her hospital gown and waved at me, stepping out of the powercore.

“She is going to get changed,” Braza explained.

I couldn’t blame her. I’d tossed aside the ill-fitting garment as soon as I could, too. “Will you take a look at my back?” I asked. If anyone could fix the rune that’d appeared on my skin in the Void, it’d be Braza. We called the Void’s work the “mark of language and humanity” from the benevolent way it’d warped us, and I yearned to have it back.

“Lie down on the bed. Let me see what she did to you,” Braza said with sympathy. I did as she bid and turned my head to watch her face, fearing the worst as her energy-formed eyes skimmed over the skin of my mid-back.

“She did not touch me,” I murmured.

“And yet she harmed you all the same. I see the trauma in your soul, my prince.”

I closed my eyes, shuttering my reaction. Braza knew my regrets all too well, but I would not think about that time and inadvertently burden her further.

After a short pause, she added, “But the mark can be repaired easily enough. I shall tell Cress when it’s done.”

I drew breath to tell her that it would be all right if Cress witnessed her work when the first spike of pain struck me. Brazahad to forcibly transform me back, her purple-black energy shoving my nails to retract into the sockets and manipulating my teeth and bone structure. It felt like she ground and broke and healed me in stages through the process.

It took fifteen minutes at most, and by the time she finished, I was panting in a damp circle of my own sweat. I pressed my fingertips into my mouth, probing at the flat line of teeth and the points of two fangs. When I opened my eyes, I perceived the glow of her magic as dimmer. The disorderly use of light by the humans around me wouldn’t be so painful.

“I added the ability for you to switch back and forth at will,” Braza told me.

She told me how it worked as I sat up, head tilted. “Why?” I asked.

Instead of answering, she turned toward Cress’s reappearance. Her arrival came with the damp smell of soap and flowers—she’d showered and changed into clothes a little too big for her. She’d pinned her purple hair back from her face, and there was some color on her cheeks. “I, uh, thought it was wrong to keep you from your old self,” she said.

“I’m flattered you found me attractive at my most different, bright soul,” I replied. For a breath, I expected her not to understand.

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