Ecstasy Untamed (Feral Warriors #6)(49)

Faith. He smelled her sweet scent, felt the brush of her hair along his cheek.

"Fight, dammit!"

She yanked him forward, plucking at the creatures at his back and hips. "Are you sitting on any? Of course you are." She shoved him toward the window. "Lift up!"

He barely heard her and wasn't certain he was doing anything at all, but he was trying. Goddess, he was trying. The red haze slunk away as blackness came for him.

"Do you feel any more? . . . Hawke!"

Her voice disappeared, then slid back into hearing. He felt her weight in his lap, her hands sliding down his legs, lifting his legs, her fingers burrowing under him, behind him.

"I got them all." Soft fingers stroked his face. "They're gone, Hawke. You'll get better, now. Please get better."

The feel of her hands on his face, warm and caring, would assure it. His head was still too heavy to lift, his eyelids too weighted down to open. But he managed to reach for her and pull her close. She melted against him, her arms curling around his neck, her head pressing against his shoulder.

"You should have gone with Olivia," he said softly, when he could make his mouth function. His body's natural healing abilities were beginning to kick in already. In a minute or two, he'd be himself again. "Do you know how close you came to dying?"

She pulled back, but he kept one arm close around her as he opened one eye, then the other, and glared at her. Her face was covered in small, unhealed bites, making her look like a measles victim. Draden bites always took much longer to heal.

"Helping you was more important." An impish smile lifted her mouth, a shadow of one of her grins, but it was enough to raise his spirits. She pressed her palm to his cheek. "You needed me."

As much as he hated to admit it, she was right. Without her there, he'd almost certainly have shifted. And the way things had gone tonight, he could have easily ended up as polar-bear food.

His hands slid up her back. "I did need you. I still do."

Mine. The word was a fierce growl in his head, echoing through his body, wrapping around his heart like a steel band. He curled his hand around the back of her head and pulled her close, kissing her soft parted lips, branding her, marking her his.

"If I can interrupt . . ." The caustic, feminine voice came from the backseat. "You're needed elsewhere."

Faith jerked back. Hawke swung around to find the Ilina, Melisande, sitting in the back, more ghostly mist than form. He'd met her once, the day he came back to himself after the spirit trap, but he was still astounded by the fact that the Ilina race existed at all. Dressed in the traditional dress of an Ilina mist warrior - brown tunic and tan leggings, a knife strapped at her waist - Melisande reminded him of a female Peter Pan with a long blond braid.

The tension went out of him. Faith scrambled back to her own seat, staring at the woman as if she were a ghost.

"Can you get this bus in gear, Feral?" Melisande snapped. "Kougar's injured. They're all injured, some too badly to mist out. We need corporeal transport."

Melisande's words cleared his head as nothing else could have. His brothers were injured. Badly. He shoved open the car door - the cloud of draden having dispersed the moment he closed them out - and bent to snatch the key out from under the mat, then jumped back in, started the car, and took off down the drive.

"The battle?" he asked.

"Is over. The bad guys ran."

He glanced over his shoulder. "Melisande, I need your maidens to do something for me. There's an injured lynx in the foyer of Feral House. I need him moved to the basement and locked in one of the prison cells. Pink can show you where the prisons are."

Melisande made a sound that made it clear the request put her out terribly. "Anything else? Shall I clean the house while I'm at it?" The woman made no bones about her dislike of all Therians, including Ferals. But her queen, Ariana, had pledged their full support. Melisande had little choice but to work with them. That didn't mean she had to like it, and she made certain they all knew that.

Melisande disappeared as silently as she'd appeared.

"What was she?" Faith's eyes were as big as saucers.

"The Ilinas are another immortal race, one we all believed went extinct a thousand years ago. They'd faked their extinction."

"But . . . are they ghosts?"

Hawke smiled. "No. Their natural state is mist - noncorporeal - but they can turn to flesh and blood at will. The entire race is female. Their queen, Ariana, is Kougar's mate."

As Faith settled back, taking all that in, Hawke turned his attention to his driving, to reaching his friends before it was too late. Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached for Faith's hand, twining her cold fingers with his, holding on tight. Mine.

His hawk screeched in agreement.

Neither of them was letting her go again.

Faith held tight to the door handle with one hand, clinging to Hawke with her other as he zipped through the tree-lined, hilly roads near Feral House. Her skin stung in a hundred places from the draden bites. But she was alive. They both were.

Never had she imagined so many draden in one place at one time. But as horrific as the draden attack had been, it was something else that preyed on her mind.

"Hawke?"

"Hmm?" His thumb brushed the back of her hand in a tender caress that stirred the warmth in her chest, squeezing her heart with affection.