squeezing, squeezing, squeezing until it bursts from my chest in a rush that has me crying out around Rylan’s cock.
Glass shatters. A great pressure pushes against my skin. In the distance, I think I hear screaming.
And then Rylan curses and he’s coming down my throat. I drink him down without thought, sucking on his cock even as he begins to ease away. Malachi shudders between my thighs and then he fills me in great spurts that have me moaning. Holy shit, what is happening? He barely moves out of the way before Wolf flips us, pinning me to the bed as he drives into me. I’m too loose to do anything but take it, and I have the distant thought that even this feels amazing. He pulls out a bare second before he comes across my back and then he slumps down beside me.
For a long moment, only the sound of our ragged breathing filled the room.
Then Malachi gives a choked laugh. “It worked. It fucking worked.” He pulls me up and kisses me hard. “You did it, Mina.”
I barely have the strength to cling to his shoulders as he pulls me into his arms and grabs someone’s shirt to wipe down my back. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. The blood ward is gone.”
Wolf stretches and his fingers feather along my thigh. “He’ll have felt the rebound of it shattering. It’ll put him out of commission for at least a few hours.”
Him. My father.
I shiver in Malachi’s arms. My body doesn’t feel like my own. My skin is so sensitive I simultaneously want to shove him away and also rub myself all over him. “I don’t think I can walk.”
“You just got fucked to within an inch of your life. No shit you can’t walk.” Wolf laughs. “That was work well done, if I do say so myself.”
“Malachi.” For the first time since I met him, Rylan sounds…shocked. “Do you recognize what she is?”
I twist to look at Rylan. His eyes are still blazing silver and he’s staring at me like I’m a poisonous snake that just slithered into his bed. It stings, but I try to rationalize my response; it’s not as if he liked me to begin with. I take a shaky breath. “What am I?”
“Seraph,” he says the word like a curse.
“A seraph?” Wolf throws himself onto his back and laughs so hard he has to clutch his stomach. “Our little dhampir is a fucking angel.”
Seraph.
Malachi’s arms tighten around me. “Are you sure?” He doesn’t sound particularly happy about this, either. When I look up at him, his expression is tight.
“Can’t you feel it?” Rylan rubs his chest. “Focus.”
Malachi goes still for a long moment, but it’s Wolf who speaks first. “Fuck.”
I look from one of them to the other. “What? What are you talking about? What’s going on?” My body has started to feel more like my own now, but the strangely light feeling inside me is still there. I clutch Malachi’s arms. “Malachi?”
“A long time before I was born, the seraphim were hunted to extinction by the other supernatural creatures.” Malachi’s arms tense around me. “Or so everyone thought.”
I’d heard of seraphim, of course, but I thought they were just another fictional part of the human’s religion. No one ever talks about them as if they were real. “Why?”
“Among their abilities is one that links them with their partners.” Once again, it’s Rylan who answers. “It might have started out as some kind of mating bond, but they used it to create courts of supernaturals around them. A seraph could do whatever they wanted to a bonded supernatural and that supernatural couldn’t fight back, couldn’t harm them in return, couldn’t break free. Vampires, in particular, are susceptible.”
“I heard they had godlike powers.” Wolf sounds uncharacteristically serious. “There’s a reason they scare the shit out of the humans, even if history has defanged them out of sheer self-preservation.”
I start to pull away from Malachi, but he hugs me tighter to his chest. His voice lowers, deepens. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The longer she lives, the stronger the bond will grow.” Rylan scrubs at his chest as if he can dig through flesh and yank the bond out by its roots. “The best bet we have is to scatter and get as far away as fast as we can before she calls us back.”
What they’re describing is a monster. If I’m a seraph, that means I’m a monster. The only thing I’ve ever wanted is freedom, and if what they’re saying