Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,84

us dislike it right off the bat.” She shrugged. “Before we can drink too much. But with sweet food, we don’t have that same reaction because it takes us longer to eat it, so our body has a chance to adjust and send us other warnings against eating more. Like… acid indigestion and gas.” She smiled.

“Leia? Has your body ever in your entire existence sent you a warning of any kind whatsoever against eating more candy?” he asked with only a little sarcasm. “Ever?”

She grew very serious. “No,” she said point-blank. “It has not.” Then she dumped the remainder of the bag of M&M’s into her mouth and crumpled the wrapper. He willed it to simply vanish, and it did. She grinned again, revealing a smile filled with the multi-hued mess of chocolate and various colors of candy shell.

He couldn’t help but laugh.

As he did, Annaleia looked down at her drink again and he was rewarded with another expression of pleasant surprise. “Damn, Ares. You’ve got some nifty tricks.”

They could be yours too, he thought. Stay with me.

He blinked as the thought moved like the sober police through his head and Annaleia upended the bottle and downed several swallows of the not-quite-as-sweet caffeinated beverage. His little dragon wanna-be was going to be bouncing off the walls any second now.

“Anyway…” she continued. “Sterling told me that he could help me save them both. He told me how he was a seer – I bet you didn’t know that about him.”

Ares frowned. A seer, huh? That would actually explain a lot – like how in the nine hells the bastard had managed to track Annaleia down. The first time and the second time. “No, I didn’t.”

“Well, he is. Incubus, warlock, seer. He’s a whole hat trick of magic. That night he told me about everything, the supes, the realms... and he made sure to show me proof here and there. I think he could tell I’d be a hard sell otherwise. I learned about the world and everything that was really in it. Like vampires, wardens, fae… dragons.” She looked at him meaningfully, then looked away, licking her lips nervously.

Ares cleared his throat.

“Then he told me that my brother would stay alive long enough that if I could save my mother, I would be saving him. So I asked him how the hell I was supposed to do that if I was dead too.”

Ares leaned forward and very softly brushed his fingers across the light moon-shaped birthmark on her temple. He heard her breath catch when he did. “And he told you about Withered.”

She stared up at him as he lowered his hand. When she nodded, he saw more questions in her eyes. She was wondering why Ares hadn’t told her first. She was wondering whether he had known all along. The truth was, he hadn’t had a clue. Withered weren’t discovered by the general supernatural population until years later.

She took another drink from her bottle and cleared her throat. Her voice was soft. She was slipping into the past again. Her gaze was on the floor between them, but he knew she was seeing things from long ago. Unpleasant things. “Then he told me that I didn’t have to be afraid. Things were going to change, but he would be there to help me through the process, and in return I only had to give him one thing.”

Antares didn’t want to hear this part. He didn’t want to go there. Not now. Probably not ever, but definitely not right now. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as sudden hard tension reached the point that his head was actually hurting. That almost never happened.

It was just that… he really didn’t want to know. Because he already fucking knew.

Here he was with the woman he’d fallen in love with, the woman who’d caused him to die inside a little, sitting in front of him two feet away, real and breathing and driving him as nuts as she always had – and this? This was the one goddamn thing he didn’t think he could do right now. Talk about how another man wanted to have sex with – and got to have sex with – his girl.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she told him.

Ares looked up, meeting sharply cut amethyst, perceptive as ever.

“He didn’t just want to sleep with me. He needed to sleep with me – to save a life. The life of a child, no