Page 61 of Bizarre Bonds
A needy sound I can’t hold back slips out, and then he’s kissing me again, even more thoroughly than before. As if he never plans on stopping.
He does though, with his breath coming roughly and his arms tucking me close against his well-muscled frame. Glittering joy passes between us, airy as champagne fizz.
Jonah brushes one more kiss to my temple. “I think if I keep going, it’ll be very hard to stop.”
“Who says you have to stop?”
He chuckles and tightens his embrace around me. “We do have a rampaging rogue shadowkind to bring in. I’m supposed to be helping you work out your plans. Whatever else we have between us… There’ll be time for it once the catastrophe is over, won’t there?”
Is there a tiny thread of fear in his voice—the anxiety that I might reject him? I have to melt it away.
I set my hand on his chest and peer into his eyes. “You make me so happy that I tapped you right to my soul. I’m not going anywhere.”
Jonah grins back at me, so genuinely pleased the sensation radiates through every part of my body.
I’m still reveling in the joy when a shout of alarm rings through the trailer wall.
“It’s happening again!”
22
Periwinkle
Iburst out of the trailer with a blink through the shadows. Jonah’s right behind me, throwing open the door I skipped beneath.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my heart in my throat. Has Viscera made another attack already?
One of Rollick’s assistants is standing at the edge of our pretend movie set, wringing her hands in the growing dimness of the falling evening. As my other men materialize nearby and the six shadowbloods lope over to join us, she gulps for air.
“The rift. It’s spewing out that shadowy substance again, all over the factory yard.”
My pulse stutters. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than Viscera lashing out.
At least with her, we have some idea what’s driving her and what she’ll do. The bizarre rift vomit is still a total mystery.
Jonah takes charge with the confident air that served him so well when he was a teacher. “Let’s get over there and see what we can do to mitigate the damage. Anyone who can carry silver and iron, there are chains in the storage trailer. Grab them fast and get in the vans!”
He hustles off to follow his own orders with the shadowbloods darting alongside him. I dive into the nearest van and reform my physical body on the bench.
Raze, Hail, and Mirage follow me. Another of Rollick’s assistants leaps into the driver’s seat.
As the assistant starts the engine, his voice wobbles. “I don’t know what’s going on with the rifts. We got a report that the one up in Canada did the same thing a couple of days ago—just upchucked a mass of shadow material over about an acre of forest.”
I shiver. “Did anyone get hurt?”
He shakes his head and yanks at the steering wheel to guide us toward the road. “No one was around except the shadowkind keeping an eye on it. The other odd rifts are all pretty far away from humans. But it warped the bark on the trees and frightened the animals. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve never seen rifts act like this—any of it. And we still haven’t been able to get at the rifts from the shadow-realm side.”
His words tie my stomach into a knot. I’ve never seen anything like this either, but I’m relatively young as shadowkind go. A lot of Rollick’s people have been working with him for centuries.
This is a brand-new flavor of strangeness. Which means no one has any idea how to deal with it, not really.
We just have to do our best to whip it into something palatable.
The van’s headlights streak through the thickening darkness. Dusk fell quickly while I was talking—and doing other things—with Jonah.
Do the other men I marked realize how close I was getting with the sorcerer? I can’t imagine my joy was all that subdued.
None of them mention anything. Raze slides his arm around me to tuck me close with his usual protective fierceness, and Mirage flicks out his ears with a mischievous twitching when he catches me looking at him, maybe in an attempt to make me smile.
