“TAKE YOUR PLACE.”
“No.”
The blood armor surged up, sheathing my body. The image of me wearing a crown burst and shattered.
I raised my head. “This is my city. Get out.”
The coronal fire in front of me swelled. A spear shot out, colossal, forged of golden light and power, aiming at me. The claiming.
I lunged, swinging my new blood sword. Sarrat connected with the spear.
Magic revolted, bursting and screaming around me. The impact nearly took me off my feet. It was like playing tug-of-war with a tornado. The blade shook and shuddered in my hands.
The spear of power pushed. The enormity of my father’s magic pressed on me, crushing me, grinding my bones into dust. Pain started from the tips of my fingers and washed down over me. I burned. From the top of my head to the soles of my feet, I burned. My eyes couldn’t see any damage, but my senses screamed that my skin was bubbling from the heat.
If I gave up now, Roland would claim Atlanta. I couldn’t let that happen. He would not take this city. People I knew, people I loved, wouldn’t bow and kneel to him as long as I stood.
“Amehe,” I whispered to my blade. “Amehe. Amehe.” Obey. Obey. Obey.
My bones cried out. In my head my muscles began to unravel, fiber by fiber, frayed nerves shaking in the raging wind. But I would not move.
I would not move.
“This is my city. These are my people.”
I tasted the sharp bite of my magic on my lips. My nose was bleeding. Tiny red drops rose from my cheeks and floated to join the blood coating Sarrat. My eyes were bleeding, too.
My arms shook. My feet slid back half an inch. Another half an inch.
A muscular arm wrapped around my stomach. Another closed over my chest. A deafening lion roar, proud and furious, thundered over my shoulders. Curran braced me. His magic mixed with mine.
My feet stopped moving.
My father pushed and we pushed back.
Thin, painfully bright cracks appeared in the spear where it met my blade.
The strain was ripping my body apart. I poured even more of my magic into the force of my strike. I thought I had given it all I could, but it kept coming and coming, fountaining from inside me.
The cracks widened.
Just a little more . . .
The spear shattered.
I tried to pull back, but I couldn’t. The magic continued to rush out of me, as unstoppable as a flood, more, more, more . . . I struggled to contain it, but it refused to stop. It ripped me out of Curran’s arms and jerked me off my feet into the air. My blood armor crumbled into dust. Words appeared on my hands and arms, strange words written in dark ink. The air around me turned red. The ceiling above me exploded. My body bent back, my arms opened wide, my back arched. The building swayed, shaking. Below me, people crouched by the walls, trying to hide from my power.
The magic inside me erupted. My voice rolled like the sound of an enormous bell.
“HESAAD.” MINE.
A pulse of pure red shot out of me, spreading in a ring over Atlanta. The blast wave rolled with a sound like thunder. I felt it slide over the city all the way past the outskirts, past the Keep until finally it dissipated. The magic soaked into the ground and it responded, sending a surge of magic back to me.
Oh no.
I had claimed the city. I had marked Atlanta as my dominion.
My father smiled and disappeared.
I plunged down and landed on the hard floor in front of Curran, still in his warrior form. The two of us looked at each other. Chunks of something that probably used to be the roof rained down around us.
Curran unhinged his monstrous jaws. I braced myself.
“Show-off.”
I just stared at him. My brain couldn’t string any words together.
He grinned at me. “Come on, baby. We’re going home.”
? ? ?
WALKING DOWN TO the bottom floor of Lakeside and then to the Pack Jeep was a lot harder than anticipated. Someone had already started the enchanted water engine for us. I got in on the passenger side. I was so numb. I just kept moving forward on autopilot. I should’ve felt something. Relief, fear, some sort of human emotion, but there was nothing there. Only cold detachment.
Curran pulled a spare set of sweats from the back of the Jeep Wrangler, shifted into human form, put them on, and slid into the driver’s seat. He shifted the Jeep out of park and steered it onto the street. A caravan of Pack Jeeps joined us.
The storm clouds had long since dissipated. The sunset had burned itself out, leaving a mere smudge of red in the sky, a distant memory of its dying. The sky above us turned a deep purple.
My mouth finally moved. “Don’t.”
Curran looked at me.
“Don’t take me back to the Keep. They’ll want an explanation. I can’t do it right now.”
Curran made a sharp right turn into a snowed-in lot between an office building and a ruin. The car screeched to a stop.
Behind us the caravan of vehicles stopped. The leading vehicle’s door opened and Jim trotted out and to our car. Curran rolled down the window, letting the earsplitting noise of the enchanted water engine into the vehicle.
“What’s the problem?” Jim yelled over the noise of the motor.
“No problem,” Curran yelled back. “Go ahead without us.”
“What?”
“Go ahead without us!”
“Why?”
“Because I want to spend some time with my wife in peace!” Curran roared.
Jim nodded, gave us a thumbs-up, and went back to his Jeep.
Curran rolled the window up. “It’s like living in a fucking fishbowl.”
The Pack vehicles passed us. Curran turned the Jeep and drove in the opposite direction, southwest.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
The city slid by the window, the dark silhouettes of buildings, some crumbling, some sturdy and new, highlighted by the blue glow of feylanterns. It was my city now. Truly mine. I’d claimed it and now I was responsible for it.
“I claimed the city,” I told Curran.
“Would you like me to build you an office?”
What? I stared at him.
“You could have a little plaque with your name on it. Kate Daniels, City Owner.”
“It’s not funny.”
“We can get you one of those bank line setups with stanchions and velvet rope and a little pillow in the front, so people can form a line and kneel before you in humble supplication . . .”
“Will you stop?”
“We can get Derek one of those dark suits and aviator shades. He can look menacing and give out numbers. ‘You are seventh in line to bow before Kate Daniels.’”
“I’m going to punch you in the arm,” I growled.
“We can get you a throne with snakes. I’ll stand next to you and roar at anybody who fails to grovel. Fear Kate Daniels. She is a mighty and terrible ruler. Grendel can anoint the petitioners with his vomit. It’ll be great . . .”
Oh God. I put my hands over my face.
“Come on, baby,” he said. “I’m just trying to cheer you up.”
“I claimed territory that my father wanted. He’ll lose his shit completely now. Not only that, but every ambitious idiot with a drop of magical power will know that this area is claimed and will look for whoever claimed it. Not to mention that right now the Witch Oracle, the neo-pagans, and the People are all having a fit of apoplexy. I was supposed to prevent the claiming, not take the city. The Pack Council will be having kittens.”
“The Witch Oracle and the neo-pagans can bite me,” Curran said. “They’ll get over it. If anybody comes to challenge you, we’ll kick their ass. We’ll find a way to handle Roland. And if the Pack Council produces any kittens, we’ll give them to Jim to raise. He needs to mellow out anyway.”
I looked at him.
He took his hands off the wheel and held them apart about six inches. “Cute fluffy kittens. Just sitting on Jim’s lap.”
I pictured Jim with his badass-chief-of-security expression covered in small fluffy kittens. It was too much. The numbness inside me broke, like a dam. I giggled and laughed. Curran laughed, too.
“Cute kittens, meow-meow,” I managed. In my head, Jim held up his finger and sternly lectured a pack of kittens. Oh God. “He’d make them all hard-core.”
“He’d take them to the Wood to hunt deer,” Curran said between the bouts of laughter. “They’d . . . pounce.”
I would’ve doubled over if the seat belt had let me.
We were still laughing like two idiots when he pulled into a parking lot before a dark apartment building. The place looked familiar. Oh. This was my old apartment building. I had inherited an apartment from my guardian, Greg Feldman, and made it my own during the time I worked for the Order. But my aunt had gutted it. The last time I saw the place, it was completely destroyed.
“There’s nothing there,” I told him.
“Let’s go see anyway,” he said.
Why not?
I got out of the car. Surprisingly my legs held me. We went up the stairs together. A new door barred the access to my apartment. A mechanical combination door lock secured the door. A column of numbers, one through five, each with a button by it, waited above the lock.
“Four, four, one, two, three,” Curran said.
I pressed the buttons in order. The lock clicked. I swung the door open.
A clean, furnished apartment looked back at me. The floor in the hallway was wood. I could see a little bit of the kitchen through the doorway, backlit by feylanterns. New oak cabinets had replaced the broken wrecks of the old ones. I stepped inside. On the left, the living room, which I had used as a bedroom, stood perfectly intact. The walls had been repaired and painted in soothing blue-green. A queen-sized bed with a dark, soft comforter stood against the wall. Another feylantern hung above it. A plush beige rug lay on the floor. Across the room, by the window, a flat TV set was mounted on the wall, next to bookcases filled with books. Gray curtains matching the comforter framed the window. Outside the glass windows, steel and silver bars glowed weakly, reacting with magic and the light of the rising moon.
I moved through the living room and glanced into the small room that Greg had used as his bedroom and I had turned into a library. Bookcases lined the walls, waiting for books to be put in them.
“I know it’s not an exact duplicate,” Curran said, turning the valve on the radiator. He’d had a radiator installed. Wow. The super must’ve finally caved and fixed the damn boiler. “But I thought you might want to come back here one day.”
It wasn’t an exact duplicate. It looked like a brand-new apartment and that was so much better. Too many memories had been tied to the old one.
Curran strode through the room, coming closer. He moved with a kind of smooth contained power. His gray eyes focused on me. He looked at me as if I wore nothing.
We were alone. In an apartment. The door was locked.
I unbuckled the belt that kept Sarrat’s sheath on my back, slipped out of it, and put it on the night table.
He closed the distance between us. His arms closed around me, one across my back, the other pressing in on the curve just above my butt. He pulled me to him. My breasts brushed against his muscular chest, my legs bumped against his hard thighs, and the rigid length of him pressed against my stomach. I was caught in his arms. He had collected me and trapped me. His body caged me. I could barely move.
My survival instinct kicked in, screaming at me to escape. My eyes widened. My breath quickened, each rise of my chest pushing my nipples against him. My body tightened, as if before a fight, the muscles gathering themselves in anticipation. I breathed in his scent, familiar and tempting. It said Curran. Male. Sex. Lust flared inside me like a well-laid-out fire.
He stroked my ass, pressing me closer against him. A narrow predatory smile lit his face. He caught me. I was his and he was determined to enjoy every second. A tiny spark of instinctual alarm flared in me and mixed with an overwhelming need to have him, like spice adding a punch of heat to a dish. A needy warmth spread through me, turning into liquid heat between my legs.
“Mmm,” he said. “Kate Daniels, the great and powerful.”
I raised my chin. My voice was a challenge. “What can I do for you, Your Majesty?”
He grinned a crazy feral smile and kissed me. His mouth sealed on mine, his lips hot, capturing my breath. We connected and the pure exhilaration of that contact resonated through me in an electrifying rush. The dread of the claiming’s consequences and the memories of Mishmar that hung around me like a dark tattered shroud vanished, annihilated in a rush of lust, need, and love.
He buried his hand in my hair, pulling me closer. My body snapped to attention as if I had been asleep for ages and suddenly woke up. I loved the way he kissed me. I loved how he tasted. His tongue thrust into my mouth, possessing, seducing, enticing, pulling me in, deeper and deeper. I loved him so much. I loved him more than I could say. I locked my arms around him and kissed him back. I love you. I want you.
We broke apart. He made a low masculine noise, halfway between the happy half-growl of a predator catching his prey and the deep chuckle of a man confident he was about to get laid.
“I’ll tell you what you can do for me,” he growled. “Better, I’ll show you.”
My breath was coming in ragged gasps. My nipples tightened. I wanted him in me now. “Decided to do some claiming of your own?”
“Yes.” His eyes shone with gold. “Mine.”
He pounced on me, trapping me again, and kissed me. His hands roamed my body, caressing my back and my butt. It wasn’t a kiss; it was an assault. If I had put up any defenses, he would’ve demolished them, but I offered none. I just let him ravage my mouth and I reveled in it. He tasted male, hot, and eager. He tasted like Curran, my Curran. If someone threw a mountain between us now, he would rip right through it just to get to me and I loved it.
I slid my hand into his sweatpants, found the hard length of his cock, and ran my hand up and down its shaft.