through with Aaliyah. “Do you think it could help with his blood madness?”
“It wouldn’t hurt.” Bash shrugged his shoulders, gently placing a hand on
Jax’s bicep to lead him in the direction of the hut. “Though I’m worried
Paco’s just going to tell him to feed. But fuck, maybe he’d be right—maybe
it’s time for Jax to embrace his nightmare and feed on blood the way he’s
supposed to. It can’t be healthy to resist.”
“He fed on blood when he was with Aaliyah,” I pointed out, the only
sound in the forest the crunching of leaves beneath our feet and the roll of
Dair’s tires. “But the second he was away from her, he fell right back into his
madness.”
“I think that has something to do with Z,” Dair confessed. “He was
coherent until she fell unconscious. And now that she’s sick…”
“There might not be anything we can do to pull him out of this,” Bash
finished.
“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here.” Jax’s voice was
colder than I ever remembered it being, a slash of air that cracked open skin
like a whip of fire. His sharp eyes swiveled in my direction, and I found
myself tongue-tied, unable to speak around the man who had been my best
friend for many, many years, even with his madness. “I know what you guys
think, and I’m not mad. I’m not.” He turned away from us, his gaze fixing
firmly ahead as he shrugged himself out of Bash’s grip.
“We’re not saying—” I began diplomatically, but Jax cut me off.
“Yes, you are.” His gaze turned vacant, and he quickened his pace so he
was a few steps ahead of us all.
Silence settled between the four of us as we finally reached the entrance
to the tiny hut, then Bash knocked on the wooden door. Like before, I
couldn’t hear anything besides our own hearts beating, so I focused on my
other senses. I wasn’t as skilled as using them as some of the other incubi, but
through the closed door, I picked up a heady amount of…lust?
Was there someone with Paco?
The lust inflated significantly, usually a sign that the person had…um…
completed, and then footsteps pounded against the floorboards.
“Whatcha want?” a snarly voice demanded as the door was thrown open,
creaking on its rusty hinges.
I blinked at the tall man standing before me, unable to formulate any
thoughts or words.
For starters, he was huge, his upper half practically bending in half,
despite the hut being tall enough to fit two of me. He had peach-colored skin
with dozens of intricate tattoos wrapped around his forearms and the hairiest
chest I’d ever seen on a man before. His white hair was tied back in a long
braid that touched his lower spine, though his beard was an untamed mess,
caressing the middle of his pudgy belly.
And he was naked.
Completely and utterly naked.
I wanted to say that I wasn’t a prude, but that wasn’t true. I totally was a
prude. I didn’t like naked bodies, unless that naked body belonged to my
beautiful mate.
And I definitely didn’t like old guy penises. They were…flabby. And
strangely colored. And his was pointing straight at me.
“You brought Paco a present?” the man asked with a salacious sneer my
direction. I blanched, trying to hide behind Bash’s broad shoulders and
pretend that there wasn’t a withered and gray penis poking at my eyeball.
“Not for you, Paco,” Bash said with a huff. “Can we come in?”
The man—Paco, apparently, who liked to speak in third person—actually
pouted, his hand moving down his hairy chest to touch his…err…manhood.
But instead of stroking himself like I thought he was going to do, he began to
spin it like a windmill, the movement almost absentminded.
“Fine. Fine. Yer may come in.” He had a thick accent that I couldn’t
place, but all thoughts of accents fled my mind when he spun on his heel to
step back into his house and I saw his flabby ass.
“Is that…?” I began, my eyes widening in horror.
Dair turned green. “Bash, why the fuck did you bring us here? And why
does that man have anal beads sticking out of his crack?”
“Paco is the best at what he does,” Bash said, though he couldn’t quite
hide his grimace of disgust as we entered the healer’s home.
To say this place was humble was an understatement if I ever heard one.
forest, cut down a few trees, and used the bark to make the home and
furniture. The only color I could see was a leaf stuck to the wall, the green
turning brown with decay.
Paco bent down when he reached what I believed to be a kitchen.
“Yer want something to drink?” he called, his ass in the air, which gave
me an unwanted view of his sac. Was that a…was that a bump? On his sac?
He should really get that looked at.
“We want to talk, Paco,” Bash said, just barely containing his irritation.
“Paco waz buzy.” His accent turned even more pronounced, changing all
of the Ss into Zs.
Remembering the lust I felt before he entered, I searched the room for his
partner. Instantly, I had a vision of a similarly tall woman with gray hair and
a long beard leaning forward to put anal beads in his ass. In this horrible,
disgusting vision, her breasts were so large, they scraped against the floor,
and her entire body was covered from head to toe in coarse white hair like
some sort of monster.
Bile raced up my throat, and I coughed to hide my reaction.
But alas, there was no woman. Only something that looked suspiciously
like a pancake with a hole in it on his bed.
He couldn’t…?
“I’m sorry for bothering you,” Bash said cordially, his tone much kinder
than I ever remembered it being with Z. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he
ignored me, addressing the healer with earnest eyes. “But we were hoping
you could help us with a few issues we have.”
“Paco may be able to help.” He scratched absently at his bearded chin
before coming to a decision and nodding. He smiled at me. “Paco whip him
with his cock and then help.”
Wait…
The fuck?!
Dair snorted on laughter as I stared in wide-eyed terror at the giant of a
man. Did he really just say…?
“You want to hit Killian with your cock?” Bash asked cautiously, like he
was actually considering it.
“Just one slap,” Paco insisted, once again twirling his cock in his fist. I
was beginning to think he wasn’t sexually pleasuring himself, he was
winding himself up to penis bitch-slap me.
“No!” I protested immediately.
Bash took a step closer to me and hissed under his breath, “Do it for Z.”
“I’m not allowing him to whack me with his cock!” I whispered-shouted.
“Just one little whack on the cheek,” Bash insisted. “It’s not like he’s
going to fuck you or anything.”
My eyes turned even wider with horror.
“You don’t think…?”
“Paco is getting impatient.” Paco folded his arms over his che
st and
tapped his foot against the ground.
“Just bend down and take it like a man,” Bash told me, but I was already
shaking my head vehemently.
“Killian…” Dair twisted his head to give me a severe look. “We don’t
have a lot of time.”
I grumbled under my breath, cursing out my brothers and life and Paco,
as I squeezed my eyelids shut and leaned forward. I’d never been hit in the
face with a penis before. Would it feel like a fish on my cheek? Not that I’d
been hit with a wet fish either…
Boisterous laughter had my eyes snapping open.
Paco and Bash were holding their stomachs as they died of laughter. Even
Dair was chuckling softly, though Jax remained stone-faced as he stared
blindly out the only window looking back into the forest.
“Gullible little incubus.” Paco clicked his tongue, still laughing, and
moved to pat the top of my head condescendingly. It was then that I realized I
was still leaning forward, putting my face only a few inches away from his
cock, and I scrambled backwards with a…manly scream. Yup. Totally going
with that. It wasn’t a squeal at all. Men didn’t squeal.
“What the…?” I glanced back and forth between Bash and Paco, my eyes
narrowing into slits. “You tricked me!”
Bash offered me a sheepish smile. “Sorry, brother. I wasn’t lying when I
said Paco was…a strange mage. He does require payment, but that payment
isn’t whacking incubi with his cock.” A bark of laughter escaped him
unbidden, but when he noticed my thunderous expression, he quickly
sobered. “He requires humiliation.”
“Humiliation?” I practically screeched as I watched Paco amble towards a
cauldron bubbling in the corner of the room. A wide grin split open his
whiskered face as he turned back to us.
“Humiliation is Paco’s secret ingredient,” the crazy mage explained, his
white braid swinging behind him. “Makes a delicious memory wiping
potion.”
“I really am sorry,” Bash murmured to me, lowering his voice so as not to
be overheard by the healer. “I knew that we had to play along with whatever
happened here. Last time I arrived, he made me dance around the living room
while calling myself a pretty pony.”
“Fuck you,” I grumbled, and his eyebrows rose at my swear word. As a
general rule, I didn’t swear if I could help it. But I was freaking pissed at him
for doing this to me. Granted, I knew my reaction had to be genuine or else
Paco might not have helped us, but he still could’ve given me a heads-up.
Obviously Dair knew, if his amused smirk was anything to go by.
Bash flashed me another guilty look before schooling his features and
addressing Paco.
“Now that you’ve received your payment, can you help us?” Bash asked.
Paco straightened, wiping off his hands, before nodding once.
“Yes. Yes. Paco helps. Come.” He gestured us forward, and just when I
thought he was going to take us to some supersecret lab underneath his shed,
he took one step to the right. Literally one freaking step. I found myself
shoulder to shoulder with Jax and Bash as we clustered ourselves around
Paco in the smallest corner of the living room.
“You like Paco’s shop?” The healer turned bright eyes on to each of us,
and unsure what the desired response was to this situation, I nodded.
“Yes. It’s…” Literally the corner of your house. “Nice.”
“Paco like nice.” The healer winked at me, and I swore I felt myself die a
little inside. Especially since with the way we were positioned, all he had to
do was thrust his hips a tiny bit and his thing would be touching me.
“Killian likes…um…his mate,” I stuttered out, mentally facepalming
myself.
Paco’s eyebrows touched his hairline. “Mate?”
“Our sick mate,” Bash explained. “Which is why we’re here.”
“Sick mate?” I swore his eyebrows didn’t move an inch from where they
now rested at the top of his head, confusion permanently splayed across his
face.
“She was poisoned,” Dair explained, and his words turned the atmosphere
somber. I didn’t think any of us thought too closely about Z’s condition. The
thought of her not pulling through, of not opening up her beautiful eyes and
spearing us all with a cocky look, of not surviving…
It was unfathomable.
Like, I literally couldn’t wrap my head around a world without her in it.
Paco’s eyes drifted to Dair as if noticing him for the first time. His lips, if
it were even possible, turned thinner.
“You need Paco’s help too, no?” Paco turned—I barely jumped out of the
way before his dick could whip me—and began to sift through his cabinets.
He muttered under his breath as he sifted through shelf after shelf of what
appeared to be potions. Each one was in a translucent jar with no label,
making me wonder how he knew what he was looking for.
“This help.” Paco grabbed a jar on the top shelf and all but threw it at
Dair. The mermaid’s eyes widened as he struggled to catch the glass
container.
“What is it?” Dair made a face as he stared at the slimy, green substance.
“Help fix legs.” Paco nodded towards Dair, and I watched my brother’s
face closely, his incredulous expression giving way to unreadability. “One
spoonful every day. Not permanent. Will help,” Paco instructed.
“I…eat it?” Dair’s expression was carefully blank, and I wished
desperately I could get him alone and ask him what he was thinking. I hated
to see any of my brothers like this, but him most of all. He’d gone through
hell, and I blamed myself every day for not noticing sooner how much pain
he’d endured.
Paco gave Dair a droll look, as if questioning his mental stability, before
he mimicked spooning soup from a bowl and swallowing it whole. There was
a whole lot of tongue licking going on, and I shuddered in revulsion.
I took that as a resounding yes.
“Now, the poison,” the old man continued. “Paco needs to know—”
Something roared in the distance, the noise nearly shattering my
eardrums, and the earth began to shake erratically.
“What the…?” Bash murmured.
All four of us exchanged wide-eyed looks as one name passed our lips.
One word. One letter.
Our entire lives tied up in it.
“Z.”
TEN
BASH
I raced outside, my magic crackling in my hands. Green light emitted
from my palms as I stopped to inspect the scene before me.
Z was awake, standing outside the van with Ryland beside her. Her
head was tilted upwards, a look of utter horror etched onto her face. I
followed the direction of her vision, a curse spilling from my lips at the
monster nosediving for us.
A dragon.
A motherfucking dragon.
I’d never seen one before outside of the occasional history book. They
were one of the species that had become extinct over time. But now it was
here in the flesh, looking just as menacing and goddamn terrifying as one
would expect a mythical
creature to look.
Its scales were a verdant green, a few shades darker than my own magic.
Its body was easily the length of the capital and the width of a small car. Dark
horns erupted from the top of its head, directly over its pitch-black eyes, and
its tail was covered in a number of pointy triangles.
Only one person had the power to bring extinct supernaturals back from
the dead.
Aaliyah.
The bitch was attacking us again.
“Get her in the car!” I bellowed at Ryland as I stalked across the
driveway. Z whipped her head in my direction, her stare indignant while her
eyes spewed vitriol.
“Fuck off, Bash-hole.” She had a dagger in each hand, and her legs were
bent slightly as if waiting to pounce.
“I just want you to be safe!” It was hard to speak over the roaring
reverberating across the sky from the rapidly approaching beast.
“And what better way to be safe is there than to save myself?” she
retorted immediately, and I growled, wanting nothing more than to spank her
ass into submission.
Instead of doing any of that, though, I moved to stand beside her. I could
hear Killian speaking in hushed tones to Dair and Jaxon behind us, but I
couldn’t focus on what was being said. My attention was consumed by the
monster bearing down on us.
“Does anyone know how to kill a dragon?” Ryland asked almost lazily, as
if he were discussing the weather and not an immensely dangerous creature
bearing towards us with death in its eyes. Because this monster totally wanted
to eat us.
I didn’t know about the others, but I would be a horrible dragon meal.
Absolutely disgusting.
“Um…are we supposed to?” Killian’s voice trembled ever so slightly, but
he stood firm, one of his hands resting on the hilt of a dagger in his
waistband. Jax was beside him, standing slightly in front of Dair, who was
staring into the jar Paco gave him with wide eyes, his expression inscrutable.
“If only Lupe were with us…” Z muttered, her brows furrowing together.
Sweat beaded on her forehead as she swayed precariously to the side. I was
there in a flash, placing one hand on her upper arm to hold her upright.
“Z…” I warned, my voice a rumbling growl. She was right—if Lupe and
Devlin were here, you could bet your sweet ass that they would’ve forced Z