So. Fucking. Be it.
They broke through the cloud line and Evander wrenched free, leaving chunks of skin and muscle in Nicolai’s grip.
Satisfaction hurtled through him at the rogue’s furious anguished caw. But his contentment was short-lived. Before Nico had time to wheel out of the plunge, Evander rushed down, a black bullet cutting through the shrieking wind.
Fire erupted across Nicolai’s throat.
He coughed, lifted his talons. Fluid flooded his lungs, choked him.
Copper filled his beak, coated his tongue as the obsidian cloak of death encroached on his vision, his brain.
The strength bled out of his limbs, wings and body along with his life’s blood.
A loud, harsh cry reached his ears as he plunged toward the jagged rocks and unyielding land below.
His last thought was of Tamar. Her beautiful face as she touched him in the forest.
Once again, he’d failed to protect her.
The black arms of death and grief enshrouded him, claiming him in their bitter embrace.
* * * * *
He stared into the face of a dead man.
Sorrow welled inside him like a bubbling geyser.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. In order to see his best friend again he had to lose the woman he’d fallen in love with.
Rage and grief battled in his chest, surged in his throat, racing to find out which would release its howl first.
Grief won.
“You keep that up and security is going to stick a nose in our asses,” a familiar voice drawled. “And when they knock on the door, I’m going to let you explain why your neck’s been filleted.”
Security?
Nico grabbed for his neck and simultaneously broke off the cry of pain.
His fingers encountered a ridge of flesh about an inch thick.
Where his neck had been sliced open.
“How?” he croaked and winced at the slight soreness.
The ghost of his best friend Bastien Sarris smiled down at him. He seemed so…corporeal. His green eyes were as bright as Nicolai remembered, his tall, rangy length as solid. Even the white-blond hair fluttered on a ripple of air.
Everything was the same—except for the wide puckered scar that bisected the right side of his face from hairline to jaw.
“Bastien?” Nico rasped, his hope so raw and tender fear gripped his voice and squeezed. He nearly choked on the word. Desperate fear stabbed his heart. Terrified if he spoke his best friend’s name aloud, if he dared reach out to touch him, Bastien would disappear like smoke through Nicolai’s fingers.
The ghost grinned, his white teeth flashing in his olive-skinned face.
“In the flesh.” He shrugged. “More or less.”
“But…” Nicolai pushed to sitting, his gaze riveted on the man he’d mourned for three months. With a swift glance around the room, he took in the standard hotel-issue brown dresser, round card table and two straight-backed chairs. But nothing captured his attention more than the man he’d believed eternally lost to him. “You’re dead. I saw your blood. You’re…” His voice failed him as a mixture of disbelief and fearful joy churned within him.
Bastien’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I’m very much alive. Although,” he tapped the wound, “not as pretty as I used to be.”
“You weren’t all that pretty to begin with.” Nicolai chuckled, breathless, before lunging off the bed and crushing Bastien to his chest. He wrapped his arms around a man who had come back from the dead and held tight.
His best friend. Alive.
Bastien laughed, the sound husky and soggy. Nicolai finally released him but only the distance of an arm’s length. As long as he held on to a part of him, Bastien couldn’t disappear again.
“I can’t believe this.” Nicolai shook his head and again felt the twinge of newly healed flesh at his neck. He grazed his fingertips over the reminder of just how close he’d danced with death. “How?”
Bastien arched a blond brow, held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “Magic.”
Nicolai snorted. “Magic my ass.”
Bastien grinned. “Still the difficult and ungrateful patient, I see.”
Nicolai reluctantly dropped his arm and lowered to the bed. But not before flipping off his friend. His recovery from what should have been a mortal injury didn’t surprise him. Not when Bastien was a master healer. Only he could have brought Nicolai back from the brink of death. When they’d believed Bastien had fallen, Nicolai hadn’t just lost a friend, the race had lost the most gifted healer in their long history.
“How are you here?” Nicolai asked. “What happened? Where have you been?”
His friend sank into the garishly patterned hotel chair next to the bed with a sigh. With his long jean-clad legs sprawled in front of him and fingers linked over his abdomen, he seemed to settle in for a helluva story.