TWELVE

When the sun finally rose over them, Daiva and Hassir were two of the first wolves to greet it in their copse of trees near the beach. Neither of them had slept, and when the sunlight touched them, their human forms returned easily, both of them settling in to relax where they had fallen in a mixture of sand and scrub grass.

For his part, Hassir looked just as well-contented with himself as his thoughts throughout the night had suggested, and he leaned back against a young sapling with one hand around Daiva’s shoulders and the other running through his hair.

“The stone ring will remain intact through the remainder of the Fulness if you would prefer to return there to rest for the day.” The words felt almost forced, but only because the two of them had spent so long cherishing their most basic and animal aspects. Anything so human as showing consideration for each other’s welfare felt entirely foreign.

“I’ll be close by.” She ran her hands over his skin, since it was strange for her to see him back in his human form. “I would enjoy spending the rest of the Fulness with you.” It was the first time she had made herself any kind of vulnerable to a male during the Fulness, but all the rumors had been quite true. Intimacy was so much better during the Fulness.

“Our gods are yours as well. Some of them, at least. You are more than welcome in their company.” He clearly wasn’t in much of a hurry to go anywhere, as he brushed back her dark hair to see her face. She was a beautiful wolf and a strong woman, and he thoroughly enjoyed both parts of her. “If you conceive this Fulness, my people here in the Isles will notify me, and things will have to progress more quickly. That would not be ideal, but it is not a possibility that worries me.”

As soon as he brushed back her dark hair, she quickly leaned in and captured his lips in a violent kiss. She didn’t let him free until her cheeks burned. “Nor me. For the first time in my life, I am more than glad to take the risk.” She looked him up and down before she looked into his blazing eyes. “You are the match I need. I have no doubts.”

“That’s what I admired about you first.” He ran his fingertips in a single caress that started along her cheeks and worked its way down over her neck and shoulder, tracing the curve of her side to her hip and the leg that was still stretched out over him. “Most wolves have perfected the art of appearing as though they fear nothing, as though they know precisely what they are and what they want. Very few truly do. Nothing seems to make you question your place in this world. I respect that.”

“And you know exactly what you want, and how you intend on taking it, with no regrets and no hesitation.” She growled her satisfaction even in her human form. “Though do not think for a minute that I will just give you the opportunity to kill Melyssa. You will still have to battle me for it.”

That made him laugh against her hair, and he kissed her neck afterward. “One war at a time. I will fight that battle with you when you are mine. Not before.”

Daiva smirked, which was a rare sight in itself, before she started to pull herself away slowly from him. They needed to spend their day recharging from the night before. She glanced over at the circle made of stone once before she looked back at him. “I am curious.” She mused as she looked toward the smaller fire afterward. “Would you take me through the flames?” Her brother Devon didn’t like doing it, helping her walk through fire, but she wasn’t afraid to do so.

That broadened his grin to mischievous proportions as he allowed her to help him stand, and he only took a moment to stretch from the way they’d been tangled together for most of the night. Hassir started walking back toward the stone circle without answering her. Most of his people were still asleep in various places around the area, a few men and women half-buried in the stone as they rested for the day, a large number of Skyborn sleeping completely exposed to the cool morning breeze both on top of the stone ring and just outside it away from the fire.

Within the ring, the fire had expanded from where she had last seen it the night before, but burned lower, with wolves sleeping soundly on stone pallets throughout. Wood was still piled high between the pallets to fuel the flames, carried in by the Stoneborn who were still on watch. The heat was already suffocating just standing on top of the ring, but Hassir breathed it in hungrily as he took Daiva’s hand. He willed the flames not to harm her, though that hardly lessened the heat she could feel from them.

Daiva gathered all the strength she could from the heated stone beneath her feet, and she let out a groan of contentment when the stone shifted slightly underneath them. The heat that rushed past her from the fire caused her skin to flush, but it also had her holding tighter to Hassir. Though she couldn’t explain it, the flames created a reaction of arousal in her that no sane female would have enjoyed.

He gave her a moment to adjust to the feeling, then moved along the stone with her until they reached the steps that had been formed for them to descend into the firepit. He squeezed her hand as they stepped down together, the heat increasing with every breath.

“I don’t know how much your brother told you when he returned home from his time among my people,” he said without looking back at her, picking his way carefully between the sleeping bodies of his people to allow them to rest as they saw fit, “but my court stands along the caldera of one of the great fountains of the Reef. My people and I make these shrines every time we visit the Isles in order to make this place the tiniest bit hospitable.”

A sheen of sweat already covered Daiva’s body, but she just looked around at the flames, fascinated as ever. Daiva reached out to touch one, since she had full trust in Hassir that he wouldn’t let it burn her. “He didn’t talk about the Reef when he came back. He was unconscious for days, and when he finally woke up, he ran off, and eventually ended up dying for sticking his seed into Chiara.”

She looked around at the sleeping wolves and shivered slightly as beads of sweat rolled down her bare back and down the center of her chest. “There was something about the Reef that he knew he couldn’t handle. That was the only time my brother avoided anything, when he knew he couldn’t defeat it.” She stepped up and kissed Hassir again, her skin slick against his. “I’m not afraid.” She emphasized when the kiss broke.

There was no sweat on his own skin, but his body was every bit as heated as the flames that licked along her skin. The sweat evaporated from the line it had formed along her spine in a rush of vapor that set her nerves tingling, but the heat still didn’t scald her as he walked her into the heart of the bonfire. His power moved through her to claim her, for the time being, on behalf of the flames around them. They would no more burn her than they could him.

“The reason you aren’t afraid is because there is nothing and no one in this world who should not fear you.” He growled with the voice of the fire around her echoing his sentiments. It curled in patterns of sensation along her legs and around her hips in ways that reminded her of an Oceanborn’s touch, playful and yet much more dangerous coming from a Fireborn. “There is nothing about the Reef that you cannot handle. Or any other place in this world I have any knowledge of, for that matter.”

Daiva gasped softly as the flames licked up her skin, and she held even tighter to Hassir. The sensation felt so thrilling, so daring and dangerous, she never felt so hungry for another wolf in her life. She jumped up and wrapped her legs around his waist, unable to stop herself from attacking him.

In the midst of the kiss, he laid her down on her back against one of the stone pallets that was shaped in the middle of the flames. They were surrounded on all sides by a wall of red and orange light and heat, the grey of the new day hanging over them like the ashes that would remain when the fire died.

Daiva was a woman who could match him in every way, who knew no fear, and would fight the wars he intended to fight. In all his scheming about how best to take his vengeance on the Isles, she had never once entered his mind, but he could not have conceived of a woman so perfectly suited to his needs as the one beneath him. He would do whatever was necessary to keep her by his side, and with the help of her people, he would have everything he had desired for nearly a century.

But first, it was going to be a very pleasant Fulness.