Hunger Untamed (18 page)

Beside him, Ariana gasped. His gaze slammed into hers as understanding arced between them. To dream of the temple, Hookeye had to have been there. But when?

Recently?

As if in answer, a cat ran through the room. No ordinary cat, but a small, dark-spotted jaguar.

Jag.

Kougar stared at the animal, chills racing over his skin, triumph flaming in his mind. Hookeye had been in the temple when Jag raced through with him a few hours ago.

He's
here now.
We have
the bastard!

"Get us out of here, Ariana," he said under his breath. The moment they were free of the dream, he'd get the other Ferals and attack. This was the break they needed.

Ariana made a sound deep in her throat, a sound of denial, her body tensing to be free of his restraint. Clearly, she'd had enough. She jerked free of his hold and sprang at the man who was little taller than she, lifting her knife as if she would cut out the Mage's heart.

But Hookeye was more aware than he appeared. Before Ariana could reach him, his hand flung out toward her, palm out. Ariana stopped as if she'd hit a brick fence with a guttural cry that was half fury, half pain. And suddenly she shot three feet into the air, her head flinging back, a look of agony on her face.

With a roar of fury, Kougar leaped at the Mage, shifting into his cougar in midair as he soared over the table and slammed into him, his jaws clamping around the bastard's neck. His fangs sank into the Mage's jugular, but no warm blood filled his mouth. He'd forgotten it was dream.

A dream that ended abruptly. He found himself once more sitting beside the pool in the queen's chamber far beneath the temple. Beside him, Ariana collapsed, her hands clawing at her throat as she gasped for air.

Kougar reached for her. "What's the matter?"

"Whatever . . . he did . . . was real."

The pounding of his heart deepened into a sickening thud. "He has you. He's locked onto you with his magic. Can you break it?"

"No."

Dammit. He needed to break out of the lower chambers and go after the damned sorcerer. But Ariana came first.

He shot to his feet, lifting her into his arms. "Then we're getting out of here."

How?
He set her back on the floor. "Go, Ariana. Transport yourself back to the Crystal Realm. Once you're there, I can follow."

She met his gaze, then nodded, her hand sliding over the moonstones as she choked out the magic that would carry her to the Crystal Realm without turning to mist. A moment later, she was gone.

Focusing on her through the mating bond, Kougar curled his hand around his Feral armband and whispered the same incantation. Moments later, he was sitting in the Grand Corridor of the palace in the clouds, Ariana seated on the floor beside him.

Unlike a moment ago, she no longer gasped for air.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes." She took a deep unsteady breath. "He must have known we weren't part of his dream."

"He knew."

Kougar rose to his feet and pulled Ariana up beside him just as Brielle came rushing into the pine-scented corridor.

"Did you reclaim the memories?" Brielle asked, her face radiating a desperate hope he was certain every Ilina shared.

Ariana glanced at him, the truth thick between them that she hadn't gotten them all. And now, probably never would. A truth they would keep to themselves for the time being.

"Yes," Ariana said, glancing at him, then back at Brielle. "Yes, I reclaimed the memories. I'm sorting through them now."

A smile bloomed on Brielle's delicate face. "Wonderful." She clapped her hands together. "We must celebrate, Ariana. We've not had a true celebration in far too long."

Ariana dipped her head, a small gesture that was all Brielle needed. She hurried away, shouting out names, a four-star general calling her troops.

Ariana turned to him, her eyes at once hard and haunted. "Hookeye has to die."

"And he's going to. Right now. Gather your maidens, six of them, and meet me at Feral House. We're going to need transportation back down to the temple."

Ariana frowned. "What? Wait. You can't kill him. Not until we know whether killing him will help or hurt our ability to destroy the poison." She took his hand. "Wait, please? I may have the answers we need once I sort through this mess in my head."

"He's there, Ariana. In the temple. We can't afford to let him get away."

"Where's he going to go? He's on the top of a mountain in the Himalayas." She gripped his arm. "We can't attack him. Not yet. I
know
that."

"How?"

"I'm not sure, I just know it's true, and it has something to do with my memories. Give me another day to sort through what's in my head. If I haven't come up with the answer we need, I'll order my warriors to transport yours to the temple."

Kougar's teeth ground together beneath the force of his impatience.

"One day, Kougar. I feel like I'm on the edge of something vast. Like the veil is about to be lifted, and I'm going to see what I've been missing all this time. It's going to happen. Tonight." She squeezed his hand. "It's going to make the difference between success and failure, it's that big."

He pulled her into his arms. "Twelve hours. That's all."

"Deal. Then we'll reassess."

Twelve hours.
His fingertips itched with the need to draw claws and rip out that bastard's throat,
now.
But Ariana was right. If there was a chance she held the key to the battle in that head of hers, not giving her a chance to find it was a rash, foolish move.

Too many lives hung in the balance.

Fury roared up out of nowhere, ripping through Hawke's mind, white-hot. A vicious rage.

The hawk's anger had become his own.

How long he roared and thrashed, he didn't know. Time held no meaning. But as quickly as the fury rose, it abated, leaving his mind throbbing with pain and the echoes of his hawk's pulsing anger.

He'd never had the relationship with the hawk spirit that his father, the Wind, had claimed to have. Then again, his father had been the hawk shifter for nearly three thousand years until a Confederate mortar explosion ripped his heart out of his chest a century and a half ago. The hawk spirit had flown to the son, but Hawke had never possessed the faith in the wildness that his father had.

The Wind used to tell him that once a man was marked, the animal spirit shared the man's body. It was only fair to give him his head from time to time. And his father had, disappearing sometimes for hours, even days, on a wild flight.

For years after he was marked, the hawk had demanded more freedom, but Hawke refused. The hawk spirit had never entirely forgiven him. But he wasn't giving rein to that kind of wildness again. Not after what happened to Aren.

The last echoes of the fury slipped away, leaving him with nothing but thoughts. And regrets. There were so many things he'd hoped to do with his life. Things lost to him now.

He'd been born with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and had studied the natural world extensively, but there was so much more to learn. So much more to know. The humans were discovering things every year, every day, and he wanted to know them all.

Trapped in that miserable darkness, he thought again of the dream he'd held close for decades. A dream of a mate of his own. He'd never been like many of his brothers, who'd been determined never to be tied to one woman for eternity. Though, of late, four of them had fallen to that fate, hadn't they? It was often like that. Watching that kind of love in another had a way of softening a man's heart. Of making him wonder what it would be like to know that kind of contentment.

He'd always wondered, always hoped he'd someday find the one meant for him. A woman with eyes that flashed with strength and intelligence, and turned liquid with love when she looked at him. Only at him.

Pain turned to agony, stealing his thoughts.

The other animal spirits, too, cried or roared with distress. Were they really in pain, or merely raging against the loss of more Feral animals to the trap?

Were they even there at all?

They were like ghosts in the room, leaving him to wonder if all he was hearing were the echoes of their death cries from hundreds of years ago.

Chapter Sixteen

Ariana paced the solar in the Crystal Realm, frustration lending a weight to her steps. Why had she expected anything to go right? She'd remembered the Crystal of Rayas being stored in the jewel-encrusted box that sat upon one of the bookshelves that lined the walls of the room. But when she'd opened it, she'd found nothing. Empty.

Dammit.

Kougar stood at the window overlooking the garden as she paced, trying to come up with another memory of where it might have been moved.

Of all the rooms in the Crystal Palace, the solar was perhaps the most Earth-like, with its rows upon rows of books, brown velvet sofas, and plush, vibrantly colored floor rugs. It even boasted a window with real glass. Only the floating crystal lights might have looked out of place in a mortal's home.

The room had been her gift to Brielle more than a century ago, knowing her friend's insatiable appetite for books, an appetite many of her maidens shared.

Those same maidens were turning the palace inside out looking for the crystal while she sorted through the jumble of memories, trying to make some kind of sense of them.

With a frustrated sigh, she went to stand beside Kougar, looking out on the grounds behind the palace, a sea of rocks and waterfalls. She called it the garden, but no plants, no trees, no flowers would ever grow there. It was the Syphian Stream itself that possessed a scent reminiscent of pine.

Kougar's hands gripped the windowsill until his knuckles had turned white.

Ariana slid her hand across his back. "You're thinking of war, aren't you?"

"I'm thinking of all the ways I'm going to kill that sorcerer."

"I know that waiting to go after him is driving you crazy."

"You have no idea," he growled.

A sharp pain pulsed in her temple as another of the myriad memories crowding her head broke through. She groaned at the revelation.

Kougar lifted a brow.

"We can't kill Hookeye, not while I still hold the poison. It will absolutely ensure I'm never free of it."

Kougar pushed away from the window. "Hell."

"Another queen faced something similar." She turned, talking to his back as he paced away. "The queen sent her mist warriors to destroy the sorcerer. But the poison killed her the moment the sorcerer died. I'm afraid if you kill him, you'll kill me, and possibly yourself, too. If I die, the poison will escape and infect my maidens. We'll all die."

He swung around to face her. "You can't know that. It might not be the same poison."

"No, I can't know for sure, but what she suffered was hauntingly similar to what I'm going through except that the poison she'd taken never spread to her maidens."

Kougar looked at her quizzically. "I thought you said the Mage had never attacked your race before we were mated."

Ariana frowned. "I didn't think they had. I didn't remember." She made a sound of frustration. "There's so much I don't remember."

The memories flitted and fluttered, brushing the insides of her skull like bats fighting to be free. All she could do was hope the answers were already in her head, because returning to the temple was impossible now, with Hookeye waiting to snare her, body and mind.

What she needed to do, as she had in the temple while Kougar slept, was take some time to sort through the new memories, to take each one out and look at it, replaying it fast-forward style. It would take time for the mass of thoughts to filter into her brain and become part of her consciousness. And time was something she didn't have.

Kougar had given her twelve hours to come up with an answer, and only ten remained. But Hookeye could attack again at any time, if he hadn't already. She feared that his insidious poison might be working on her even now, in ways she couldn't begin to guess. How long did she have before it bloomed? The thought terrified her. But she wasn't without warning this time. A thousand years ago, she hadn't known what was happening. She hadn't known she was under attack until far too late.

And by the time she knew what was happening, she'd no longer had Kougar by her side.

Her gaze caressed the man, his strength the only solid thing left in her world. And she knew she wouldn't make the same mistake again. Though she had no illusions that his primary concern was saving himself and his friends, she knew deep down he wouldn't turn away from her when she needed him.

He was her strength, her rock.

"They're lighting the festival lights," he murmured, back at the window. "They think you're on your way to beating this thing."

"Brielle's no fool, Kougar. She knows we're far from safe. But an Ilina celebration empowers us, don't forget. Beautiful lights, music, dancing. All feed the Ilina, body and soul, and we're likely to need all the strength we can come by. Brielle was looking for an excuse, and my renewed memories serve her purpose. We have the possibility of victory locked inside my head. And that's worth a celebration, a badly needed lift of spirits."

He turned to her, his gaze pensive. Thoughtful. Slowly, his pale gaze moved down her body, a physical caress. "Will you dance?" In those eyes, she saw a memory of another time and the echoes of that pleasure.

"Perhaps. Once I find the Crystal of Rayas."

"Once
we
find it."

"I thought you might enjoy watching the celebration."

"I go where you go." He closed the distance between them slowly, moving with the silent grace of the cat he was inside, and came to tower over her, a solid wall of muscle and willful male. He closed his hand around the back of her neck. "Who knows when you might feel in need of strengthening." Though he said the words without inflection, a gleam shone in his eyes.

A smile lifted the corner of her mouth. "You think you have what it takes to pleasure me, Feral?"

The gleam brightened, crinkling the corners of his eyes. "I do." The hand at her neck slid into her hair as his other arm snaked around her back, hauling her against him. He covered her mouth in a hot, luxurious kiss, a tangle of tongues that ended far too soon. But the passion of those few brief moments did, indeed, energize her.

He pulled back, but didn't release her, watching her with a look that questioned, demanding acknowledgment of his skill, if not outright praise.

She smiled at him with a quick roll of the eyes. "You do, Feral. You absolutely do have what it takes."

He watched her with keen eyes, his hand moving to her face, his thumb stroking her lower lip as if he'd forgotten what her smile looked like.

Goddess, how I need
this man.
"My life would have been so much easier these past centuries if you'd been part of it." She hadn't meant to verbalize the thought, but the growl in Kougar's throat was all agreement.

"You should have told me." The words were more growl than voice, but his thumb continued to play with her lower lip with exquisite tenderness.

"I know. A hundred times I nearly sought you out, once I was myself again. I missed you terribly."

How would she live without him if he died? Even if he lived, she had no doubts that their responsibilities and their lives would pull them in opposite directions even if they wanted to stay together. And Kougar had said he didn't. He'd said that he wanted nothing to do with her when this was done. Whether that was merely anger speaking or the truth of his heart, she couldn't be sure. At that moment, she'd felt the same.

Now, she felt nothing but empty at the thought of them going their separate ways. And yet, at its heart, their relationship had never changed. Kougar was still as closed and contained as he'd ever been. If they tried again, he'd still wind up shutting her out of his world as he always had.

As her mind traveled that dismal path, another memory popped out of the fog, whole and bright.

"The Crystal of Rayas," she murmured.

Kougar raised a brow.

Ariana pulled out of his arms. "Come. I've just remembered where it is. Or another place where it was." She started to turn, to lead the way, then found herself turning back and reaching for his hand.

Their gazes met, his eyes so hard to read, but his hand went around hers firmly, filling her with a sense of rightness as together they walked through the wide doorway and back into the Grand Corridor.

Melisande floated toward them, her body mist, her expression at once demanding and vulnerable with hope. Ariana started to pull her hand from Kougar's, knowing how much Melisande hated to see her with the Feral; but he held fast, refusing to let her go.

Melisande didn't seem to notice either way. She barely seemed to notice Kougar at all, forgetting even to scowl at him.

"Did you really do it, Ariana? Did you learn how to beat that asshole? Hookeye?"

Ariana hesitated, unable to lie to her second, yet hating to dash her friend's hope.

Melisande read the truth in that hesitation. And more. Her expression turned grim. "The situation's that bad, is it?"

Ariana opened her mouth, then closed it again, unable to deny it. "I don't know, Mel. He's attacking me again. We had to leave before I'd finished receiving the memories. And, no, I haven't learned what I need. Yet. But that doesn't mean I won't. I have thousands of memories I didn't have before, but they're still a jumble." She glanced at Melisande's feet. "How long did it take you to get free of that chunk of temple floor?"

Her friend's brows drew together, her expression almost bemused. "About an hour. I tried to turn to mist and couldn't, not with my feet bound. Lyon suggested we wait. If the magic didn't wear off in a couple of hours, he'd call the Shaman. But the magic dissolved on its own, suddenly. One moment my feet were bound in stone, the next, the chunks fell away, littering the chaise and the patio, nearly knocking over one of the pitchers of lemonade. Olivia grabbed it just in time."

Ariana lifted a brow. "Pitchers of lemonade?"

Melisande shrugged diffidently. "They had questions. They wanted answers. It's not like anyone's seen an Ilina in a thousand years."

"So they plied you with lemonade."

Melisande scowled, changing the subject. "What now, Ariana? How do we stop the poison?"

"The answer will come to me, we have to believe that. In the meantime, enjoy the celebration, Mel. Soak up all the pleasure you can."

"
While we can?" The words were quietly said.

"Yes."

With a grim nod, Melisande turned and continued down the corridor. When she was out of earshot, Ariana looked at Kougar. "Tell them thank you for me. Lyon and Jag for getting Mel out of there, and Olivia, or whoever offered her the lemonade. Did you notice she didn't scowl at you?"

"I noticed."

It pleased her. Melisande's violent objection to Ariana's mating a Feral a thousand years ago had poisoned the entire race's feelings toward Kougar.

Ariana led Kougar up the wide stair to the observatory, then turned right and led him down a long passageway to the room that had always been her favorite, the place she'd missed most during her long absences, forced to live her life as flesh and blood.

The observatory was round and not overly large, furnished as it had always been, with a profusion of pillows in various sizes, covered in bright silks, the walls long ago painted with a full-sized mural of a lush, tropical garden, the flowers seeming real enough to pluck from their stems.

But the thing she loved the most was the ceiling, for there was none. The Crystal Realm might sit in the clouds, the sun shining bright and warm, the stars glittering brilliantly at night. But the air, air that shimmered with myriad colors, remained a constant temperature. Never was there wind or snow or rain.

In the middle of the room stood the great golden urns of Barse, the fourth queen. And if the latest memory proved correct, in the middle one, at the very bottom, lay the Crystal of Rayas.

Ariana released Kougar's hand and strode to the urn which stood higher than her waist. "I think it's in here. Want to help?"

"Of course." With no visible effort whatsoever, he lifted the heavy urn, making whatever was inside rattle and clink, then tipped it upside down over one of the cushions. The crystal she sought tumbled out, the shape of a large faceted teardrop, attached to a thick silver chain.

"Found it. Thank the heavens something's going right."

As she placed the chain around her neck, Kougar set down the urn. "Maybe you've remembered more than you think," he said. "Maybe we should test you."

"Test away." Ariana fingered the crystal settling heavily between her breasts.

"Have there been any other times the Ilinas were poisoned by the Mage? Times the Ilina queen overcame it?"

Ariana tried to seek the answer but hit a tangled mass of thought and backed off. Closing her eyes, she repeated Kougar's question in her mind, concentrating on the question, not the answer. And a pair of memories tore free of the mess with a rip of pain.

She grimaced, the discomfort fading as she examined them. "Yes. Another queen suffered Mage poison twice. A poison similar to the one I'm fighting. Both times she killed it by starving it."

"Starving it how?" Kougar watched her intently, no emotion visible on his face, but he couldn't quite hide the flicker of excitement in his eyes.