Page 50 of Renegade Kings
“I just want to keep you safe. I… the lion… we need to know that you’re safe.” I didn’t know how to explain the urges that were rushing through me. They weren’t exactly new, it was more like they were heightened. But I was so entangled with the lion inside me now that I didn’t know where I ended and he began. Or if we were even supposed to be separate.
I needed to talk to Tank. He’d tried to explain some of this to us before, but I hadn’t known what questions to ask back then. Besides, if I was being honest, I hadn’t entirely been listening. It was hard to concentrate when you were realising you weren’t alone in your body anymore.
“You know I can protect myself, right?” She reached for a plate and loaded up some food onto it before looking at me as if asking permission to eat.
The lion surged to the front of my mind again, gleefully happy at the way his mate was deferring to us. In reality, I knew she was just waiting to see if I was going to slap it out of her hand again like a madman, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the fluffy fucker who was practically making heart eyes at Alyssa right now.
I shook my head again and when she started to lower the plate, thinking I was about to deny her, I picked up a piece of cheese that she’d put on her plate and brought it to her lips. Unfortunately, this didn’t exactly convince the lion to back off. As her lips closed over the food, brushing the tips of my fingers, I felt my body ache for the shift as he tried to take control.
“Back off,” I snarled into my mind, only to be met with an answering roar. “We can’t shift in here. I need to talk to her first, anyway, and see how she’s doing. A lot happened last night. A lot changed. We need to make sure she’s okay.”
I knew it was the only thing that would make him accept defeat, and I was right, because, as he withdrew this time, my mind felt clearer than it had since the moment I’d awoken.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her hand coming to my knee and drawing my attention back to her. “You seem like you’re having a… I don’t exactly know how to describe it without potentially insulting you.”
I grinned, realising exactly how I must look to an outside observer.
“It’s not easy sharing a body when you’re used to being alone in your head,” I admitted. “But… It’s strange. It’s not that he was always there in the background, but he doesn’t feel like a stranger. I don’t even know if that makes sense.”
It was true, though. The lion hadn’t always been with me, but it felt like I knew him. It scared me how much he felt like a part of me rather than a separate being. Was it supposed to be that way? It was almost like he was the part of me that thought the things I’d always felt guilty about feeling. The aggression, my basest needs. The things society had taught me to suppress because it didn’t belong in the human realm. But we weren’t in the human realm anymore. This was Nymeria, and only the strongest survived here.
“We’re all changing,” Alyssa muttered, lifting her arm and examining the mark which now extended from her hairline to cover her neck, shoulder and right arm. It was a beautiful pattern of swirling vine, symbols nestled between the leaves, one in particular catching my eye. When I reached out to touch it with my fingertips, I felt it like a caress inside my chest and I knew it represented the bond I had with her.
“My magic feels so different now,” she admitted.
“How so?”
“It’s stronger to start with. I feel like a wall has finally cracked and crumbled inside of me and whatever potential I once had is just at my fingertips. I don’t even feel like I need to reach for the magic anymore. It’s like electricity flowing through my body, waiting to be unleashed. It wants to be set free. Almost like it has a specific purpose, and I just don’t know what it is yet,” she calmly explained.
Personally, I’d be freaking the fuck out if I felt the way she was describing. She sounded like a person-shaped bomb, and that could never be a good thing.
“Do you think it’s dangerous? For you, I mean.”
She thought for a moment and then shook her head. “No. It will always be my magic. It would never do anything to hurt me. Like when you summoned the flames back at the Winter Palace. You felt the warmth, right? But being that close to the flames should have burned you. It should have burned us all.”
She was right. I hadn’t realised it before.
“Your magic is still you, like your animal is you,” she added.
She leaned forward then, grabbing the note from Rhidian I’d been trying to ignore. “It seems the rest of the palace felt the wave of magic when we completed the bond last night. Fizzle is going to be pissed about that.”
It probably should have pissed me off that Rhidian had felt the magic of our bond being formed. Instead, I got a smug satisfaction out of him knowing Alyssa was even further out of his reach. I’d seen the way he looked at her, even if Alyssa seemed oblivious to it.
“Should we be worried that anyone else felt it?” I asked, wondering how far the wave had actually travelled.
“No. It will have been contained within the court but I doubt it reached as far as the outer edges.” She seemed so unphased about the whole thing and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a facade and deep down, she was freaking the fuck out.
I could feel Alyssa through our bond and she seemed calm, but could she block things from our connection? This felt like something the woman I’d first met would freak out about.
“Alyssa?” She looked at me curiously when she heard the question in my voice. “The widow back at the swamp… was she…?”
“She had the same bond that I have with you, with the others,” Alyssa confirmed, already knowing what I was talking about. “I think if one of us… I think the bond with the others would sustain us.”
“So we only need to worry about you if we all die?” It was a morbid question, but I needed the answer.
“No one is dying,” Alyssa growled. Then her face softened, and she smiled. “We’re getting through this together.”
I nodded, pulling her close and wrapped my arm around her. We both ate quietly from the plate she held, and I traced the pattern of her mark with my fingertips as we soaked up the comfort of just being together.