Small hands, heading for his-
Phury woke up on a body jerk that sent his pillow popping off the bed.
“Shit.”
Underneath the roll of blankets, his cock throbbed, and not with the usual ambient need that was a male’s evening wake-up call. No… this was specific. His body wanted something very specific from one particular female.
Cormia.
She’s right next door, he pointed out to himself.
And what a prize you are, the wizard shot back. Why don’t you go to her, mate. I’m sure she’ll be just thrilled to see you after the way you let her leave last night. Not a word to her. Not even an acknowledgment of her gratitude to you.
Not able to argue with that, Phury looked to the chaise.
It was the first time he had ever fed a female.
As he felt for her bite mark on his neck, he noted that it was gone, healed away.
One of life’s great milestones had been met… and it saddened him. Not that he regretted it was with her. Not at all. But he wished he had told her that she was his first at the time.
Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he looked at the clock. Midnight. Midnight? Man, he’d been asleep for about eight hours, clearly because of the feeding. He didn’t feel refreshed, though. His stomach was rolling and his head was pounding.
As he reached for the wake-up blunt he’d prepared before he’d crashed, he stopped short. His hand was shaking so badly, he doubted he could pick the thing up, and he stared at his palm, willing it to still, making no impression whatsoever.
It took him three tries to get the hand-rolled off the bedside table, and he watched his fumbles from a distance, as if it were someone else’s hand, someone else’s blunt. Once the twist of leaves and paper was between his lips, he struggled to get his lighter in position and work the flint wheel.
Two tokes in and the shaking stopped. The headache evaporated. His stomach calmed.
Unfortunately, another rattling went off across the room and all three came back: The Primale medallion went into its dance routine on the bureau again.
He left the thing where it was and worked his way through the blunt, thinking about Cormia. He doubted she would have told him she needed to feed. What had happened during the daylight hours in this room had been a spur-of-the -moment combustion generated by her bloodlust, and he couldn’t take it as evidence that she wanted him sexually. She hadn’t turned away from the sex last night, true, but that was very different from her wanting him, wasn’t it. Need was not the same as choice. She’d needed his blood. He’d needed her body.
The Chosen needed both of them to get with the program.
Stabbing out what little was left of the hand-rolled, he stared across his bedroom at the bureau. The medallion had finally stalled out.
It took him less than ten minutes to shower, dress in white silks, and put the Primale medallion’s leather thong over his head. As the slab of gold settled between his pecs, its weight was warm, probably because of its workout.
He traveled directly to the Other Side, having special dispensation as Primale to skip being routed through the Scribe Virgin’s courtyard. Taking form in front of the Sanctuary ’s amphitheater, where the whole thing had started five months ago, he found it hard to believe he really had taken Vishous’s place as Primale.
It was kind of like looking at his shaky hand: This just wasn’t him.
Yeah, except it totally was.
Up ahead, the white stage with its heavy white curtain glowed in the odd, relentless light of the Other Side. Here there were no shadows, as there was no sun in the pale sky, and yet there was plenty of illumination, as if everything were its own light source. The temperature was seventy degrees, neither too hot nor too cold, and there was no breeze to brush over your skin or ruffle your clothes. Everything was a soft, eye-soothing white.
The place was the landscape equivalent of Muzak.
Walking over cropped white grass, he headed around the back of the Greco-Roman theater toward the various temples and living quarters. On the fringes, all around, there was a white forest bracketing the compound that cut off any long vistas. He wondered what was on the far side of it. Probably nothing. The Sanctuary had the feel of an architect’s model or a train set, as if, were you to walk to the edge, all you would find was a steep drop-off to some giant’s wall-to-wall-carpeted floor.
As he went along, he wasn’t sure how to get the Directrix ’s attention, but he wasn’t in a big hurry to make that happen. To delay, he went to the Primale’s temple and used his gold medallion to unlock the double doors. After stepping through the white marble foyer, he went into the temple ’s single, lofty room and stared at the bedding platform with its white satin sheets.
He remembered what Cormia had looked like tied down naked, a white sheet falling from above and pooling at her throat to mask her face. He had torn the thing down and been horrified to meet her tear-filled, terrified eyes.
She’d been gagged.
He looked up to the ceiling, where the draping that had covered her face had been hung. There were two tiny gold hooks embedded in the marble. He wanted to take them out with a fucking jackhammer.
As he stared upward, he randomly thought back to a conversation he’d had with Vishous right before all the shit had gone down with this Primale business. The two of them had been in the dining room at the mansion, and V had said something about having had a vision of Phury.
Phury hadn’t wanted deets, but they’d come out anyway, and the words the brother had spoken were oddly clear to him now, like a recording replayed: I saw you standing at a crossroads in a field of white. It was a stormy day… yeah, lots of storms. But when you took a cloud from the sky and wrapped it around the well, the rain stopped falling.
Phury narrowed his eyes on those two hooks. He’d torn the sheet down from there and wrapped Cormia in it. And she had stopped crying.
She was the well… the well that he was supposed to fill. She was the future of the race, the source of new Brothers and new Chosen. The fountainhead.
As were all of her sisters.
“Your grace.”
He turned around. The Directrix was standing in the doorway of the temple, her long white robe brushing the floor, her dark hair coiled up high on her head. With her calm smile and the peace that radiated from her eyes, she had the beatific expression of the spiritually enlightened.
He envied all that serene conviction.
Amalya bowed to him, her body lean and elegant in its Chosen dress code. “I am pleased to see you.”
He bowed back to her. “And I you.”
“Thank you for this audience.” She straightened and there was a pause.
He didn’t fill it.
When she finally did, she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “I thought perhaps you might wish to meet some of the other Chosen?”
What kind of meeting did she have in mind, he wondered.
Oh, just a bit of high tea, the wizard chimed in. With cunnilingus sandwiches and sixty-nine scones and handfuls of your nuts.
“Cormia’s doing well,” he said, deflecting the meet-and-greet offer.
“I saw her yesterday.” The Directrix’s tone was kind but neutral, as if she didn’t agree with him.
“You did?”
She bowed low again. “Forgive me, your grace. It was the anniversary of her birthing, and I was required by custom to give her a scroll. When I didn’t hear from you, I appeared to her. I tried to reach you again during the day.”
Good Lord, Cormia’s birthday had come and gone and she’d said nothing about it?
She had told John, though, hadn’t she. That was what the bracelet had been for.
Phury wanted to curse. He should have gotten her something.