Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE TRANSMUTATION

“ A lright,” Jana said, after we all re-mounted our horses. “We should cross over the peak in the next hour and be back in the Fae and Witch realms. Once we pass the tree line on the other side, we’ll make camp for the night. Tomorrow, we send scouts to the valley. Should everything look undisturbed, we will descend at dusk, hopefully crossing the valley during the dark of the late evening. Understood?”

We all nodded and urged our horses to walk on.

As we made our way to the pass, an overwhelming sense that something was off clung to my every nerve. Not only did the bizarre and wild itching hit me time and again, but my head tightened, and my breath shortened.

I breathed through the itching spells and pillaged my canteen, determined not to let my sickness slow the group down. Blackjack whinnied and pranced as if he, too, felt the wrongness, or at least my unease. I dug my heels into his sides and swallowed my nausea, my eyes trained on the horizon.

At some point, Ezren may have asked me if I was okay, but I only jerked my head, focusing on getting through the discomfort. I survived the better part of an hour like this, relieved that we were about to cross the peak and make our way down the other side. If it was altitude sickness, descent would be the only cure.

And then it came into focus—the shimmering, faint glow of whatever magical barrier had been erected to keep humans in their realm, and away from the Fae. I could still see the valley through the blur—it looked the same as it had from the previous hundred vantage points I’d seen it. Close to the barrier, however, the vista was obscured by a slight sparkling haze.

I expected a sensation of tingling, or maybe nothing, as Blackjack set his hooves over the line. Instead, when my mount made his way through the webbed film, the pressure in my head became searing pain. My vision blurred, and I tumbled from the horse, screaming in agony. Everything hurt; it felt like the cleansing all over again, but without Jana’s magic attempting to block some of the pain from registering.

Ezren leaped off his mount, crouching before me in an instant. “Terra, can you tell me where it hurts?”

I couldn’t form words, couldn’t do anything but cry out. I pressed my palms to my temples, signaling at the pressure in my head. Voices were all around me now, and Ezren yelled at the Witches to do something, to fix it . Dane tried to take my hand, but he yelped upon touching me, jumping back.

Although the pounding in my head was ruthless and unending, I heard Dane exclaim. “The bitch’s power bit me!”

Ezren spat a frosty reply. “If I ever hear you call her that again, I will make sure that Fire of yours burns you from the inside out.”

Then Jana’s voice cut through my cries, which were now alternating between whimpering and screaming. “I think there must be a small part of the cleansing that we couldn’t complete in the human realm. The spell must be trying to finish itself now. Ezren, can you see if Terra’s power rejects you? It needs outside magic to fuel its working. I fear Terra’s power is feeding on itself.”

Tears streamed down my face, and I wished desperately to lose consciousness. “Please, stop it, Ezren, just end it,” I begged, hysteria bleeding into my voice. A thousand knives shot through my skull, the pain reverberating down the rest of my body. I should have been numb or passed out, but it seemed the spell was determined to make me feel every slice, every ounce of pain. “Or just kill me if you can’t,” I whispered.

He pulled me into him, cupping my wet face and forcing my dull eyes to meet their antithesis in his. “You are a fighter, Terra. You need to help me, so I can help you. Can you do that?”

I nodded, my eyes shut tight, and tried to open myself to his power. It was difficult, unlike just hours before. We had been intimate then, and my guard was down. Now, I had walls thrown up in reaction to the most excruciating physical pain I’d ever experienced. I cried out and panted, battling to force them down and let him in. It seemed the more I fought, the less ground I won.

“She needs to open, Ezren, and she’s exerting herself too much,” Jana said. “You need to join with her.”

“No,” Ezren replied.

“It is not enough just to send your Fae power into her, and you know it. You have to take hold of hers and join them; it is the only way she’ll feel your strength,” Jana protested.

“You know I can’t do that, Jana,” Ezren hissed.

“Oh, for the gods’ sake, it’s not a coupling, it’s a joining, and it’s the only way to end her pain,” Jana shot back. “Unless… there is one other way,” Jana said bitterly. “You could grant her request.”

I was shaking now, my voice hoarse from screaming, my face streaked with tears. Ezren looked at me, and I looked back through hooded eyes as he brushed the moisture from my cheeks. “Forgive me,” he said to himself, or to me, I wasn’t sure. And then he bent his face to mine and tilted up my chin in his thumb. He kissed me, hesitantly at first. And though my pain remained, the rest of my body reacted, and I relaxed. At that opportunity, I felt all of his magic flow into me. His magic took mine into his, weaving them together in what felt like a more… deliberate way than before. It had been an accidental exploration of our magics when we kissed last. This was more intimate—like an intentional claiming.

I felt a disturbance deep inside of me, a small well of power that must have still been buried there. My mind seared with pain again at that power fighting for release, but I didn’t scream or cry out or resist. I just kept focusing on Ezren’s touch, his exploring tongue in my mouth, his arms tight around me, and his magic flowing through me. And I pulled on that magic more, needing his strength, which he gave willingly. I was giving and taking, and so was he. Our magics churned together, to the point I did not know what was his and what was mine. And then, as if they’d always been, our powers were one, and a shock reverberate through him and me. The pain was gone, just a small throbbing whisper of memory.

He held me there, our sweaty foreheads pressed together while we panted for minutes before untangling our magics. And when it felt safe to pull away, I saw more than my tears on his face. He looked at me in disbelief, like I’d changed somehow.

“You have,” he whispered, and I was too confused to realize he’d answered my silent thought.

I scanned the group—everyone else stared at me, too. Ezren reached up, outlining the shape of my ear. My hand shot to the other.

And felt the soft but distinct point of a Fae ear.

We resumed our descent, but this time Ezren held me at his front, Blackjack tied off the back of his stallion’s saddle. I ensured them all I was fine to ride, but he’d insisted.

Not just my ears changed. I could feel additional length on my limbs, and the strength they now carried. I never possessed a fully human body, just a constrained Fae one, Jana said, so the change was not so extreme that I grew a foot and multiplied my strength by a factor of ten.

But what Jana hadn’t realized, she told me with an apology, was that during the cleansing, she should have freed more than just a Witch’s Earth magic and memories. Fae magic lingered there, buried by Fayzien, which demanded release the moment we entered the Fae realm.

What that magic was, what it meant, remained unknown to us all.

I hadn’t fully appreciated the advantage the Fae held over me when we fought, just because of their bodies, so being several inches taller and stronger than before made a vast difference. Ezren still stood a head above me, but he didn’t have to bend more than a small tilt of his head for his eyes to meet mine. And there were my ears, which now formed sharp points. No streams of water presented themselves, nor pools, nor mirrors, so I had no opportunity to admire them. Ezren, however, indulged himself. Many times on our ride, I found him smiling at them, or reaching up to give them a gentle touch.

“What is the matter with you?” I demanded, half annoyed, half delighted, turning around as much as I could after the third caress. I was also being driven a bit mad by the hand that rested firmly on my belly, holding me close while we rode. That was the issue with a single saddle; given we shared it, my womanhood pressed into the pommel far more than it typically should have.

I sighed, attempting to think of anything to distract my mind from the massive male body pressed into my back. “Your turn to ask a question.”

I could almost feel his smile radiate from behind me. “I believe I’m owed two questions, Bellatori. ”

“Fair’s fair.”

“What was your favorite thing to do in the human realms? In your free time, I mean. Chase boys? Knit quilts? Or perhaps you were a skilled carver, always whittling by the fire.”

I snorted. “I think I was more likely to chase frogs than boys.” I paused a moment. “I loved to read—stories mainly, but anything I could get my hands on. We were a small town, but so many passed through to buy our silver. The head schoolteacher knew I was one of the few girls whose family had bothered to teach her literacy, and he always found new material for me.”

The arm that wrapped around me tightened almost imperceptibly. “A curious mind, then,” he murmured into the back of my head.

I grinned. “Always.”

“So you know—silver is a magic suppressor… it is made and spelled in the form of cuffs, chains, binds.” The Dragon-shifter’s tone darkened slightly. “You should know that if you don’t already.”

A breeze blew stray strands of hair into my face and I cleared them with a pff. “Jana thinks that’s why Fayzien chose Argention—the town suppressed my magic. Even so, I don’t think I could remove my necklace. It’s all I have left of my mother.”

“I would never let you, firebreather . In any event, it’s likely too small to make a real difference in your power.”

A minute passed, and we rode in silence, me leaning back into his warmth. “You have another question, Dragon shifter.”

His chuckle wrapped around my ears. “I suppose I do…” He hesitated. “What do you desire most in this world?”

I considered. “If you’d asked me a month ago, I would have said to be free. Free of a life of boredom in Argention, an arranged marriage, and tedious labor. But now… I don’t know. It seems silly to want safety, but after my family, after everything…” I trailed off.

Ezren’s hold on me tightened more, his hand a protective grip on my abdomen. “It is not stupid at all to want to feel safe, Terra.”

I pressed my eyes together, desperate to shift the topic to something lighter, something that didn’t weigh on my heart as heavy as thoughts of my mother’s hair slipping through floorboards.

“My turn. What’s ‘a coupling’?” The word still floated in my mind from my painful, exhilarating change.

I felt him still behind me, silent for a few beats of his horse’s hooves. He cleared his throat. “It is like a joining, but ehm, more personal, shall I say.”

“That does not at all explain what it is.”

He shifted in the saddle, exhaling. “It would be a joining where one would, um, enter the other.”

I cocked my head, confused. “But you did enter me.”

“I did not enter you!” Ezren whispered. “With my magic, yes, but not in that way. I meant—I meant in the male way.”

“Oh,” I said, heat blooming on my neck. “Have you ever done it?”

“Once,” he said, his voice low. “And I will never again.”

“Why?”

“Not your turn, Terra,” he said, forcing lightness into his tone.

His words sent a pang to my chest, a small wound. He didn’t trust me enough to share the experience. I sensed pressing him would be futile.

“I haven’t seen you use your magic yet,” I said, changing the subject. “Which I guess isn’t unusual, as Leuffen told me Fae usually save it for battle. Will you show me?”

His mood relaxed. “Mine is a light of sorts. Not sunlight. There can be a heat to it similar to my Dragon Fire, I’ve been told. It has a precision and breadth; it does not need to be one thing nor the other.” He opened his tanned broad hand in front of me. “Like your power,” he whispered into my hair, “it can be used for destruction or creation.” A small glow omitted from his palm, a ball of moving light, more beautiful than any magic I’d seen before. It seemed to dance on his skin, not flickering like a flame but ebbing and flowing—pulsing. And then he closed his hand, the light vanishing. “Better not let Jana see,” he said, his voice low. “She’s rabid about us conserving our power.”

“Mine does not feel like it needs conserving, though she keeps saying so. When I use it, I feel stronger. I know it sounds unusual…” I shrugged.

Ezren chuckled. “That doesn’t surprise me. Can I run my power and strength dry, calling on my strange magical light? Yes—it’s limited by what’s inside me. But you? An Earth Witch has no worry of running out of Earth.”

We reached the tree line and made camp. Tomorrow we would cross the valley. We arranged the bedrolls in the usual way, six around both fires. Parson volunteered for first watch, and I lay on my mat, eyes wide open and listening for the breathing around me to become routine.

It did finally, and I rolled to my side. “What are you doing?” he breathed as I crawled in his direction.

“You know exactly what I’m doing,” I replied hotly. He pulled me on top of him, and I let my hips rock slowly back and forth.

“Terra,” he whispered, his hands skimming my waist. I felt a slight twitch from underneath me, and my insides stumbled. “Not like this.”

My body tightened in anticipation, and I exhaled in frustration. “Why not?”

He smirked and something mischievous glinted in his expression, which had the unfortunate effect of making him more attractive. “Once you’ve lived more than a hundred and fifty years, you learn some things are meant to wait.”

I gaped at him, seeing his face clearly under the night sky, given my newly enhanced eyes. Leiya had mentioned his age was above that of a Witch, but hearing the number cross his lips had me in awe again. “One hundred and fifty! But you don’t look a day over twenty-eight… in human years, of course.”

Ezren brushed the strands of hair from my face, and brought his lips close to my ear. “While I may have the looks and stamina of a young male, there are certain things in which I am far superior to a twenty-something.” Strong hands pressed into my hip bones, pinning me in place, his tone turning lethal. “And when I show you them, you will scarcely be able to hold in your power, let alone your voice. So no, not tonight, nor any night until we get to Valfalla. No matter how much you beg.” And then he stood easily, taking me with him—laying me on my bedroll.

“And feel free to beg, Bellatori. ” His whispered words tickled my skin, sending a shiver down my spine. “It will only serve to delight me more.”

He kissed me on top of the head, like that was that.

But of course, that was not that—I was fuming with desire and mortified at the denial. In no world was I going to beg him, but I had a better idea. I almost lost the nerve to lack of experience, but I looked back at Ezren, eyes closed with a stupid smirk pasted to his face.

If you tease, I tease, Dragon shifter.

I unbuttoned the top of my trousers, noting the twitch in his ears. I slipped my first two fingers into my mouth, wetting them. And then, I ran them down the opening of my pants, making small circles on my point of pleasure, like Leiya had instructed me so many days before. A bolt of something foreign ran through me, and my body jerked. The feeling seemed to coil through my abdomen, all the way to a heat in my throat. I continued for longer than I’d planned—delighted by the unexpected lightness the new sensation conjured—before I remembered why I’d begun in the first place. I looked back at Ezren to find him staring at me with what I could only describe as murderous lust.

He rose, slipping underneath my blanket in the blink of an eye. He towered over me and drew my hand from my trousers. “Do not move a muscle,” he growled into my ear.

Before he replaced my hand with his own, Parson appeared out of nowhere.

“Oh good, you’re up,” he said to Ezren. “We have to wake everyone. Fayzien is almost here.”