Today, he had to fight fury.
The instant his blood stopped rushing through his ears and his heartbeat settled, his senses flickered back to life. It took him mere seconds to catch Andromeda’s scent.
Loping over the mountain’s craggy surface in his secret skin and staying low again, he looked down to find her just below an outcrop. He grinned; his mate was clever. She was hidden from aerial view and she was nowhere near the cave mouth the wing brothers had to be watching.
About to jump down, he remembered Honor’s shock that day he’d jumped onto her balcony, and looking around, found two small pebbles and threw gently. When they hit Andromeda’s shoulders and she jerked up her head, her smile at seeing him was luminescent.
Jumping down to join her, he cupped her cheek with a clawed hand slightly chafed from his low-ground lope. “Did you get hit?”
She shook her head and threw her arms around him, holding on tight. He wrapped his own arms around her and squeezed, breathing in her scent. Her life.
Drawing back after a long time, she pushed at his shoulders. “A chimera? And you couldn’t have told me? You pretended it was a ridiculous thing!”
“The one in the legends is ridiculous,” he grumbled. “A lion with a goat’s head on its back? What idiot thought that up?”
She glared at him, then blinked and shook her head. “You weren’t an ordinary tiger, were you?” she whispered, seeming to notice his secret skin for the first time.
He realized at that instant that Andromeda saw him, regardless of the skin he wore.
Gentle fingers brushing over his chest, her honeyed skin dark against skin of a silvery white striped with black that made him all but impossible to spot in the glare of sunlight.
“A white tiger?” An even softer whisper.
He grinned as he allowed his usual skin to emerge. “It’s a good skin for daylight, but I don’t look ‘human’ when I wear it, so I normally wear my night skin.” One came from the boy. One from the tiger cub. Both belonged to Naasir now.
“You are a walking, talking impossibility.” In spite of the temper in her eyes, she kept stroking his hair, his shoulders.
“There’s a reason for that, a reason my kind doesn’t exist in nature.” He made her spread her wings so he could confirm she hadn’t been hit. Walking around to check the surface of her wings, he said, “I could as easily have been an insane beast or a crippled monster.”
Pain and vicious fury tore through him so suddenly that he had to press his chest to Andromeda’s back and bury his face against her neck. “There were many before me . . . my brothers and sisters in a way, though we were never alive together. I saw many of their twisted skeletons.”
Andromeda’s hands closed over his where he had them locked around her waist.
“Osiris executed all the others when they proved flawed. Of three thousand attempts, I was the only one who was physically whole and appeared sane.”
Andromeda’s fingers trembled. “He killed three thousand children?”
Nuzzling her, Naasir shook his head. “He killed six thousand children. Not all wore a human skin.” Like the tiger cub who had given Naasir his secret daylight form. “To be a chimera requires two ‘base’ entities, one human, one other.”
Tears rolled down Andromeda’s face. “How? Why wasn’t he stopped?”
Hugging her close, rocking a little, he said, “I will answer all your questions, Andi, but we must first complete our task.”
Wiping away her tears as he went around to pull on his T-shirt, his mate nodded. “I saw a possible entry into the cave system when I flew over. It looks like it’s relatively new, perhaps caused by a rockfall or a small earthquake, but it could still be a trap.”
“Show me.”