47. Scythe

Chapter 47

Scythe

T he dart in my neck immediately seeps venom into my system. I have no idea what type of snake venom it is, but I have a pretty good idea considering it was Aurelia's great grandfather who put it there. It burns, sharp and fierce, where it sits in the thick muscle and luckily not the carotid artery so close by.

Aurelia's eyes are wide and panicked when she tells me she can heal me. But the footsteps behind us need to be dealt with.

"Kill them," I instruct Savage and Lyle.

They nod, darting behind me down the corridor. It was likely that Ben had failed to come up with a convincing lie about his absence from his guard post. He clearly loves Aurelia and wouldn't have betrayed her if he could have avoided it. Even so, the only thing that kept him alive tonight was Aurelia's request not to execute him.

Consciously lowering my heart rate to slow down the venom's rate of movement towards my heart, I watch as Aurelia goes up on her tiptoes to reach my neck. But I'm about a foot taller than her and she can't reach the dart.

On some primitive instinct, I bend down and pick her up, my hands cupping her hips. On her own instinct, her legs wrap around my waist, her hands coming around my shoulders.

Without warning, she rips out the dart and slams her mouth over my neck. I let out a groan, completely involuntary and wanton. Aurelia's lips against my skin are velvet and soft, yet the pressure she's applying is deliciously firm and determined. My hands slip around to cup her ass, giving her a seat and keeping her core close to me.

I know how well she can suck. Know how well she likes to suck me , and even here, with poison threatening my life, I can only think of her lips, her tongue, the movement of her thumbs around my neck, stroking our mating mark as if to reassure me. Her power bleeds through her mouth, oozing into my skin and penetrating the muscle, the vessels. It neutralises the poison and brings with it a pleasant sensation that goes right to my cock. My eyes flutter shut and I sway a little before slamming a hand against the wall and righting myself, keeping us upright. Her pussy pulses against my lower stomach, her heart rate jack-hammering against my chest.

Aurelia groans, her legs tightening around my hips, and I squeeze her flush against me.

"Let's go," Lyle says, suddenly striding past, the faint smell of blood lingering behind him.

"It won't hurt her to swallow that?" Savage asks, stopping to peer at us.

"I'm immune to all venom," Aurelia says into our minds.

"Okay, well…walk and suck," Savage says, prodding me in the shoulder.

I tighten my arms around Aurelia and start walking, blinking hard to bring the world back into focus. My cock is hard and straining. Without the zipper of my regular business pants, obviously so.

"Almost done." Her voice is husky in my mind.

A pang of disappointment syphons through my core as I follow my brothers down the corridor.

I can tell the exact moment that the venom is gone, but Aurelia doesn't stop sucking. She's consuming a little bit of my blood now, tasting it in the same way I'd once tasted her.

And although the shark in me thrashes, begging to take over, begging to make me mindless and empty our balls into her against this very stone wall, I ask quietly, " Are you a vampire now?"

She releases her vacuum on my neck with a slight pop, and when I turn to look at her, those perfect lips are wet, swollen and bright pink. A thing of dreams. A thing of nightmares.

Slowly, so slowly, I lower her down to the floor. "Thank you," I say, suddenly unable to resist and kissing her lightly on the lips.

Her cheeks bloom pink before she whirls around and hurries after my brothers, my eyes tracking every movement of the parts of her body that I'd so reluctantly let go.

Her invisibility shield falling around our group feels like a warm blanket settling around my back. I'm still amazed by her ability to do this so effortlessly. The fact that she'd been doing it for years under her father's instruction to do his work for him.

Now she's using these very skills against his entire institution. I wonder if that angers him. Because not only is she using them, but she's using them well. Xander has always thought of Aurelia as clumsy, but the truth is that she wields her power with the grace of the Wild Goddess herself. It's clear she's had a handle on it for some time, and clearer still that it came about from being under constant duress.

" I'm sniffing out the sciency stuff," Savage says from ahead. Eugene is on his shoulder, his tiny beak raised, sniffing the air too.

"What is sciency stuff exactly?" Lyle asks. It's funny how, not that long ago, he and Savage hated each other.

"You know, plastics and medicines and lab coats. Hand sanitiser. Blood."

"Good bet," Aurelia says. "Which way?"

We've come to a space with a staircase leading down on the right and a corridor leading left.

Savage heads down the stairs without another word.

None of us like this. The further down we go, the more difficult it will be to extract ourselves and Athena Boneweaver back out.

Lyle lets me pass him so he once again takes the rear as we'd planned, subtly sniffing me as if to check for the presence of poison. An air of satisfaction appears in his aura when he can't find any of the offending substance.

We're about halfway down this set of stairs when we hear low voices up ahead. Even with Aurelia's scent shield surrounding us, the scent of serpent has been thick this entire time, so we knew there were people down here, attending to their prescribed nefarious duties.

Because nothing good ever happened in a beast's home that had to be hidden in the dark, and these serpents are careful.

In our surveillance of the Naga mansion, it had taken us months to identify the employees coming in and out. Marduk and I realised that Mace had his people living down here for extended periods of time. They came in and out of black vans, the same staff on a rotating roster that varied between one and six weeks. That told me Mace was paranoid. He knows the possibility of people watching him is high, and so he keeps the movements of his staff unpredictable.

Thus, we expected to come across staff workspaces.

Sure enough, Savage warns us as we reach the end of the staircase and we stalk down a wide, well-lit corridor with walls made of glass.

Glass, so the master of the house can observe the prisoners kept inside the padded cells. Aurelia walks stiffly ahead of me, her head darting left and right as she realises that her father had kept prisoners under her home for her entire childhood. There are emaciated, gaunt-faced men and women of every order in the first five cells and they all smell of death. But the smell of brine penetrates Aurelia's scent shield and reaches my nose too late so we get no warning before we come to it.

In the final cell sits an aquarium, though really, it's a cell made of water. Ten feet by ten feet, and a single swimming shark shifter. A tiger shark, by the faint markings on his skin. By the look of his aura, dark grey with patches of sickly black, he's been in here for some time. And by the scars and fresh wounds marring his sides and fins, they've been testing him. Nausea rolls through my gut and the horde around me suddenly roars their heinous chanting. My hands fly to my ears before I check myself and breathe, breathe, breathe.

My name is Scythe Kharkorous. I am real. My brother is Savage Fengari, my brother is Xander Drakos. My brother is Lyle Pardalia. I am real. The apparitions are not. I am real. They are not.

"We have to get him out," Aurelia says above the lessening din.

I don't realise that we've all stopped outside this window until she speaks close to me. Savage is staring at me with wariness, but it's not him I'm worried about. It's the sudden feeling of gratitude that's spreading through my chest as I look upon my regina, her eyes upon the tiger shark, nothing but sadness and compassion rife within those ocean-blues.

I reach for her cheek, brushing it gently. "Let's get out of here."

"But— "

Placing my fingers under her chin, I force her to look at me. To see that we cannot help beasts like this one. "We need to go, Aurelia."

She seems to understand that time is running out and inhales to calm herself before continuing forward. We have to use Ben's swipe card to get through one set of sliding doors, but the swipe does not work on the second set.

"Looks like this is above Benjamin's paygrade," Lyle mutters as we make way for him to muscle the steel door open. Between his own tendons and telekinesis—and Aurelia's, though she won't admit she's better at her telekinesis when she's angry, the doors sag open like broken window shutters.

If any alarm goes off at us forcing the door, it's silent, and we proceed through a low-ceilinged stone corridor and out into an area that's clearly shut down for the night. Gun powder is thick in the air and huge locked doors tell me this is where Mace keeps his own stash of finished arms.

Aurelia shivers, perhaps remembering the night we'd almost all succumbed to such weapons.

I'd thanked Minnie for saving our lives by putting a silent protection detail on her parents. Both tigers are bankers and hence very much at risk from the Clawsons.

We force the next sliding doors open only to stop dead?—

Because it turns out we had indeed triggered a silent alarm.