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“Leave him be,” Sorin rumbled low.
Kai could kiss the male in gratitude.
“But we’rebonding!” Ere exclaimed, sounding wounded. “I’m showering him with brotherly love! Don’t you miss him at all, once-and-never-again-Eagle Prince? Surely you recall his scaly, mountainous self, lumbering into battle like a slow-moving avalanche while we provided air cover?”
Sorin made no response. Wise male.
Kai frowned.
He never lumbered. He wasn’t slow. He supposed that, compared to Rai and the eagle squadron’s lightning-fast flight, he was often left in the dust. But it was all about perspective. He was undefeatable on land.
“At least you must remember how he squashes enemy soldiers like a great boulder under foot,” Ere went on.
Kai didn’t know if the male was singing his praises or disparaging his abilities. Even when Ere complimented, it was almost always backhanded.
Except with his Mate. He waxed poetic about Sorin like the male was his entire universe.
“It wasn’t pretty, the blood and gore and mangled corpses, but it was effective. I especially like how he rips monsters apart in his bare claws and tear their heads from bodies with those gigantic jaws. Far more primitive methods than our fire and lightning, but, well, what can you expect from land-dwellers—”
“SHUT. UP,” Kai growled threateningly, his thin patience worn threadbare by now.
Ere clearly took a breath to keep expounding, but his voice was muffled as if Sorin had clapped a hand over his mouth.
Smart man.
Any more of this blathering, and Kai would have gone over there to stomp Ere into the ground, giving the male an up close and personal reenactment of the memories he described.
He hunched his shoulders and shut his eyes, determined to block out all other sounds, focusing only on the whistle of air as the breeze sifted through the tall grass, the chirps of nocturnal birds and insects, and the deepening rhythm of his own breaths.
He let sleep take him.
Dreaming of glorious battles and triumphant deaths. Most of all, he dreamed of those brief moments when his soul departed his body, drifting into the unknown.
In those instances, he felt a euphoric sense of release after the agony of death. There was nothing to mourn that he left behind, and nothing to look forward to wherever he was going next. For the cycle always repeated itself.
Only here, in these barbaric, pagan lands, did he linger longer in the in-between.
When he’d been here before and died, he’d seen a half dozen women like ghostly memories through the darkness of death. Each and every one of them was bold and beautiful, though he never saw their faces and forms in detail. He simplyknew. And he never dealt with them in life.
They watched him curiously as his soul departed. He never understood why. He didn’t know who they were.
One of the six was always turned away, her back facing him.
Each time he died, he waited breathlessly for the moment when she arched her neck and turned in profile to slide her gaze his way.
There was something about her…
Something that made his stone heart beat with lava and life.
And the moment when those crystalline green eyes speared through him—
That was the moment worth dying for.
