What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(52)

“Why do humans kill the Fae Marked?” I asked, a hush falling over the woods with my words. It was as if Caelum forgot to breathe for a moment, the tension claiming his body bleeding through to me. “What difference does it make to them if we’re dead or taken? Why isn’t that our choice to make?”

He sighed, tilting his head down as we walked, and I felt his chin touch the top of my head. “Being mated makes the Fae even stronger. That’s what the Viniculum is—why it protects us. Somewhere, there’s a mate looking for us, seeking to claim us as theirs. The establishment of a mate bond increases a Fae’s power. If you can keep a Fae from their mate, you can keep them stagnant. Unable to increase their power, and if you do successfully manage to kill the mate, some Fae don’t survive.” I’d heard that mates strengthened their Fae, in whispers, but I’d thought them the dramatic whispers meant to cause fear.

“They die with us?” I asked, staring up at him as he pulled his chin away from my head.

“When it’s the final death? Sometimes,” he answered. “Sometimes they’re lost to madness. Sometimes they seem to go mad before they ever find their mate.”

“Are mates ever other Fae? Or is it always humans?” I asked, peppering him with questions and not even caring that it implied I was more interested than I should have let on. All the rules of my past were null and void, now that being Marked was my reality.

Knowledge was my only power.

“Sometimes,” he said with a shrug. “It happens, but not nearly as often as a mating pair between a Fae and a human. That was the consequence of the witches’ curse to maintain the balance between realms. I’m sure you can imagine what mating to another Fae does for both their magic, if a human soul acts as an amplifier. Two Fae being mated is even stronger than that.”

“Having a mate who has a very limited lifespan must be terrible, if they have any feelings whatsoever for the human, anyway,” I said, hating the thought of belonging to a male who would watch me age and wither and die while he remained eternally young.

“Human mates do not age, Estrella. Once the bond is completed, the life forces of the two are joined. So long as our Fae live, so would we.”

“But the Fae don’t die,” I said. Unless you stabbed them through the heart with iron or severed the head from their shoulders, anyway, I didn’t add. They could be killed, but diseases and aging didn’t touch them. From what I did know, the Old Gods were at least a thousand years old.

“No, they don’t,” he agreed, walking up the last of the stairs until he reached a plateau on the side of the butte. He took my hand, helping me up the last of the steep steps until my feet fell on the stone landing.

All thoughts of living forever immediately fled my mind at the wonder before me.





18





“What is this?” I asked, staring at a natural pool in front of me. Water trickled down the face of the butte, falling into the steaming pool in front of us. The carvings in the rock walls surrounding the pool were different than those below. A mix of humans and the same faces of the Gods we’d seen on our journey up the path, entwined in positions that left little wonder to the purpose this place had once served.

“According to my father’s books, this place was sacred to the Fae, once upon a time. The Old Gods were born from the Primordials, the first beings who didn’t have a human form unless they willed it for a time. This mountain was sacred to the Primordials Peri and Marat,” he said, gesturing to the couple at the center of the carvings in the rocks. A male and female Fae embraced, her legs wrapped around his hips and her back curved in ecstasy. “They were lovers once, before their only son was killed in one of the first Fae wars between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. They celebrated his birth every year by coming to the place of his conception and joining together amongst the Fae and humans who joined them.”

His fingers swept the hair off one side of my neck, his breath warm against my chilled skin. He chuckled as he undoubtedly watched my skin pebble with his proximity. “I think you can guess how they celebrated.”

I cleared my throat, stepping away from him and the canvas of rock that detailed every sordid event. The faces of the Old Gods stared back at me, twisted in pleasure as they toyed with one another or with the humans who had come to partake.

I’d never seen pleasure the likes of which was stamped onto every human’s face, with no traces of the pain I would have expected after everything I’d been taught about the ethereal beings. “How old are these carvings?” I asked, glancing at the haunting face of the God of the Dead. He sat on one of the chairs carved from stone at the side of the hot spring, two humans kneeling at his feet between his legs. His hair barely skimmed his bare shoulders, the rippling muscles of his physique bulging with effort. One of his hands was buried in a woman’s hair, pulling her toward his bare waist, with the entirety of his swollen cock revealed.

Holy Gods.

I turned away from the erotic image, my eyes landing on each of the Gods engaged in similar acts. It wasn’t only the male Fae who enjoyed the partnership of more than one human at a time; female Fae were shown grouped off with two to three human men at once, as well.

“I take it the Fae don’t believe in monogamy?” I asked, snorting as I gave the carvings my back. Facing Caelum, I watched his eyes drift down from the sexual art on the side of the mountain, a smirk on his lips as he met my gaze.