To save the Valkyrie who broke his heart, the Fae Sea God makes a deal with the Demon Prince of the Aerial Kingdoms, but Pazuzu has a history of stealing the women Manannan loves.
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When Mist visits her parents' home in California, she assumes th...
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Lightning flashed a white glare across the red skies, but the clouds blurred, and a dark mass above grew smaller. Yet, I couldn't bring it into focus. Why was that mass so important? Instinct shrieked at me, screaming my need to get there. Why? Why was everything a blur? Flesh and bone crunched and parted between my teeth as I locked my jaw tighter, the mass beneath me bucking and writhing. Air howled around us, and I knew we were falling.
Still, my gaze was drawn upward. A knowing I couldn't fight. Deep within me, my seidhr roiled and churned, tightening and heating to searing intensity. Like gravity drawing all light into a black hole, it compressed ever hotter, building the pressure higher and part of my mind wondered at the significance. I couldn't remember it ever reacting like that within me, not in all my long eons of life. But my thoughts were fleeting, again pulled upward, a desperate yearning for something... someone...
Anna!
Like her name was a talisman, a key to unlock the supernova within me, a blast of black smoke exploded out from my centre, through every cell of my body. Everything sharpened instantly. The scent of putrid dragon, blood, and volcanic ash seared my nose. My eyes focused on Dragon's Breath, the sky island above us, and my wings spread, smoke spreading as the surrounding air responded to my call, halting our descent.
And the dead body of Lamashtu pierced with my talons and teeth.
I'd almost severed her neck in two. I released my jaws and spat, then finished removing her head with a swipe of claws. She would not be regenerating. Apkallu dragons could regrow body parts, but there was no way I'd allow her to come back from this. With a curl of my lip, I flung her body from me and used the air like knife blades, rending her body into a tiny blood rain to fall on the desolate land below.
The vile bitch had poisoned me, using a toxin to attempt to defeat me when she knew she couldn't win in honourable combat. How could my father have wanted her kept alive? Asag was going to mate with that? I shook my head, rocketing upward with my wings and power. Better to remove her filth and keep her from adding her perversion to our gene pool.
As much as I attempted to reassure myself, the weight of potential repercussions lay heavy on me. But I couldn't worry about it now. Not when Anna needed me. Already it had taken me too long to deal with Lamashtu. Had Mist and Manannan been successful in getting Anna out? I had to believe she was still alive. The blood on Lamashtu hadn't been Anna's, that much I was certain of when I'd finally scented it.
Volcanic ash covered the surface of the sky island as I rounded the rocky underside, plumes of fine grey particles swirling in the air as I flew past. The central mountain range with her underground palace came into view and I angled toward the black yawning maw. Her mutant demons, a bastardization of the Lahmu, the massive furred humanoids that had given rise to their own myths on Earth, and the winged gargoyles flew up to challenge me. It was easy to see why Manannan had named them some kind of gorilla-type demon. With a flick of seidhr, I sliced three apart and bit the fourth in half, letting the rest of the body fall where it would.
