A Meet of Tribes (A Shade of Vampire #45)(5)

He looked at the Daughter and smiled, and she mirrored his expression with a violet glimmer in her eyes and rested her head against his chest.

Connection is the understatement of the day.

“Then we fought those shape-shifters to rescue a woman, and I think I got hurt, because I blacked out,” Phoenix continued.

Anjani bowed before him with gratitude.

He didn’t seem to recognize her, but that didn’t come as a surprise. He’d banged his head pretty hard.

“And for that, I am in your debt,” the succubus replied.

Phoenix’s face lit up as he looked at her, then at Jovi, and he smiled with delight. “Good to see we all made it out of there after all,” he said.

“Yeah, Field swooped in and saved your ass,” I shot back, still a little mad.

We’d all been through so much to protect Phoenix, save him, and keep him alive. To hear him sound so capricious about it… But in all fairness, he’d been a good friend, almost getting himself killed to save Jovi and a complete stranger. I had to push harder and get my emotions under control. I had to at least give Phoenix a chance to tell us the whole story.

He looked at Field, nodded his thank you, and glanced at the Daughter again.

“After that, it was all like a dream. I saw her down there in her egg. I kept hearing the Daughters telling me that I had to sacrifice my own blood to bring her to life. I couldn’t bear the thought of her stuck in that shell, shut off from everything. I don’t even remember waking up, really. I got out of bed, and I went to the garden, knife in hand. It was automatic, like my brain had no control over my body. I drove the knife into my chest, and I wanted to scream and shout, but I was powerless. Then it all faded away. And I woke up here, with you guys,” Phoenix concluded.

It took us all some time to process everything.

I connected the dots in my mind, wondering about the connection he said he’d felt with the Daughter. Looking at them now, it made sense. He’d basically sacrificed himself for her. And even in her slumber, she probably didn’t want him to die, so she’d sucked him into the shell with her.

My guess was that she’d kept him there and healed him, as if her consciousness had transcended her body. Her power seemed spectacular from that angle alone. What she was capable of, however, seemed like a distant idea compared to her current state.

She’d been pulled out of her shell instead of being allowed to hatch. No wonder she was confused. And yet, she seemed so affected by Phoenix, so tied to him, as if he was the only creature in the world. They’d shared an egg together, after all. It was a fascinating thing to observe—this unexpected relationship between them.

As I watched them, I noticed her affectionate gestures toward him, as if Phoenix were her protector and the only one she trusted.

The memory of last night crept back to me.

I sensed Field standing next to me for the first time in hours. We’d been so brutally broken out of our moment when Vita’s screams pierced through the mansion that we hadn’t had a chance to process everything.

Now that the tragedy had subsided, and we were all back together, I remembered everything. My stomach churned, recalling how close our faces had been, how his lips had parted, inches from mine. What had happened, really? What had he been thinking? What was he going to do?

I looked at Field and was surprised to find his gaze on me. Shadows fluttered over his turquoise eyes, his expression firm and unreadable. For the length of a lazy second I wished I’d had Serena’s sentry abilities, so I could look into his mind and understand what was going through his head.

I had a feeling he was thinking about the same thing. His gaze softened. I wanted to say something.

The back of his hand brushed against mine, and billions of little electrical currents ran through me, forcing me to take a deep breath in order to maintain some form of control over my senses.

I realized that whatever had happened between us in the basement had been real, but it was completely unexpected, and I didn’t know how to react—a predicament I’d been getting myself into quite frequently since we’d arrived in Eritopia.

He’d gotten so close to me that I could hear the wall I’d meticulously built around myself crumble piece by piece, as I stared into his greenish-blue eyes. Something had changed dramatically in our dynamic, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with it, or where it would lead.

With all the madness around us, I wondered if I needed this one thing to stay the same. I wondered if I ought to keep the wall from crumbling.

But there was a trace of hope blossoming inside my heart, whispering ideas that I had abandoned long ago about Field. One by one, thoughts of something intense and incredibly meaningful started to bubble up to the surface—forgotten desires and feelings that only Field could untangle.





Jovi





The horror of losing Phoenix had finally dimmed to a mild ache in my stomach. Everything had happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I didn’t have time to process each moment properly. My internal systems were slowing down, signaling the need for food and rest so that I could wrap my head around it all.

I stood motionless next to Anjani, Vita, Field and Aida. I watched Draven, Bijarki, and Serena talk about what we were going to do next, giving Anjani the occasional sideways glance when she wasn’t looking. Her skin had this beautiful shimmer in the sunshine, and I had a hard time looking away.