I stood on my private stretch of beach, staring at the Pacific Ocean without truly seeing it. A rock wall extended into the water on both sides of my property, providing privacy, and exotic flowers, including vibrant bird of paradise and sweet-scented vanilla orchids, bloomed in my backyard behind me. The salty breeze coming off the water lifted my hair and should have cooled me but my cheeks remained flushed. My whole body felt flushed and it had nothing to do with the midday sun.
I'd gone to Hawaii for refuge of a sort. Not that there was anything wrong with my life or my relationships with my husbands and fiancé. Yes, fiancé. Slate had proposed and I'd accepted. We were in the midst of planning our wedding but were taking our time with it. There's no rush when you're immortal. It would likely be held in his zone, the underground Beneather sanctuary run by Slate and policed by his army of Gargoyles. But I couldn't be there right now. Nor could I be anywhere my men were. Because another man would be coming to see me at any moment.
King Verin of the Azure Court.
By some strange stroke of fate, we ended up in a complicated romantic relationship. The spell that bound my men to me and unified us in power and love—the Rooster Spell or RS for short—had been gaining strength and when she gained strength, she needed more fuel. More fuel meant more men but every man who was brought into our union added their power to hers, making the RS stronger. It became a vicious cycle.
We tried everything we could think of to stop the RS' growth and consulted everyone we thought might be able to help us. We were getting desperate when the Witches came up with a solution—a spell to suppress the one inside me. Not destroy it, just keep it from growing. But by the time the Witch Leaders were able to cast the spell on me, it was too late. The RS had been weakened by losing Slate—he'd been possessed at the time, long story—and didn't have the strength to survive the grueling casting. As the RS and I are connected, when she started to die, so did I. In short, the spell that was supposed to save me, nearly killed me. Immortal doesn't always mean invulnerable. In my experience, it rarely does.
Before the casting, Verin and I had shared a powerful physical attraction—one that I'm certain would have turned into love if we had given it the chance—but neither of us had wanted that. So, we stayed away from each other. What's that saying about the plans of mice and men? Yeah, things went awry. Big time. Dragon-sized big.
Verin had been present at that nearly-fatal casting and when I started to die, he valiantly offered himself to the RS as fuel. Except there was one little problem: we didn't love each other. We admired, respected, and cared for each other, we found each other incredibly attractive, but we'd gone out of our way to ensure that there was no love between us and we'd been successful. The RS feeds on love and without it, she couldn't add Verin to our family.
I started to slip away despite Verin's efforts, but Vivian, the Witch Leader of Water, used Verin's water magic to connect with him and then with me. Through that connection, she cast a love spell on us. It was slapdash, to say the least, and Vivian assured us that it would be temporary—just something to get us through the casting of the suppression spell and hold me over until I was able to get Slate back and then could let Verin go. She meant that temporary status to be a comfort and it would have been if Verin and I hadn't fallen so deeply under her spell. My men accepted that Verin had joined their ranks but only under the premise that it wouldn't be forever, and they asked Verin and me to stay far away from each other until the spell wore off. They didn't want us forming an attachment that we wouldn't be able to break—one that made the lie of the spell into truth. Totally understandable. My mind told me they were right but my heart vehemently disagreed.
Rational thought and love for my men won out in the end and I sent Verin away with the promise that if our love proved to be real, if we had somehow truly