Mom popped a fist on her waist, and waved her free hand, ordering me to eat the fat, wiggling thing. "Go on."

My stomach clenched in revolt. "Gods, mom, no,"— fucking—"way."

She angled her feather duster at me and the ends caught my neck, wisping against my skin. "This is punishment for stealing. How can I take you anywhere if all you're going to do is thieve?"

Despite the foul thought of crunching on the creature, excitement barreled through me. "So we can come back here? It's so cool."

"It is very cool," she agreed with a wide smile, sweeping her gaze briefly about the room.

My excitement evaporated when I realized what I was going to eat. "I don't want to forget this place."

Mom gave me a commiserating look. She slipped an arm over my shoulder and squeezed me closer. "I know, my inquisitive little Tamer, but it's safer if you don't remember. It's for the best... Now come on, you need to eat it all up."

I grimaced, then steeled my stomach for what was to come. Closing my eyes I tossed the otherworldly grub into my mouth and bit into its writhing body. I almost gagged when I squelched through its flesh. Putrid oozing gunk exploded into my mouth, but it was tempered slightly by a saffron flavor, and a crackle of magic zinged along my teeth.

"It's gross," I complained, chewing as fast as I could.

Mom only returned a mock look of sympathy, patting my upper arm. "It'll be over soon and we'll go get an ice cream." Letting go of me, she rounded where I stood to stand flush in front of me. Leaning down, she looked me dead in the eye. Her features tightened into a serious expression. "Now I need you to think about this place and Florin. Can you do that for me Graysen?"

I nodded, glancing up and around. This place was a grotto of enchantment. Cave-like but filled with creepily weird and seriously cool items. The prices stated on their tags were so high, more than what I earned as pocket money, I'd never be able to afford them. Even after just being caught out my fingers itched to continue pocketing a few more rarities. There were some things here that hailed from Zrenyth's time.

However, I did as my mother asked and brought into my mind's eye this place and Florin. And my memories slipped backward in time...

...Wandering around unattended, stealthily slipping fascinating things into my pockets, and hiding them in my suit, while my mother eased her friend's pain. The reason why our outing in Ascendria had taken a strange and harried turn. Mom's voice floating from the office glowing bright with wavering threads of power, as she scolded him for not calling on her sooner...

...To the lair's gigantic door and the bell ringing—tink, tink, tink—as we entered the place...

...Gripping my mother's hand tight as we walked down an ancient staircase with power flailing against my skin and whipping through my hair...

The magic coursed through my body, razoring straight to my head, the sensation much like thousands of tiny insect feet crawling across my brain. it threaded its way through all the memories connected to this place and Florin and pulled them in like a fishing net with a haul of flapping salmon.

My mother walked away to put back all the things I'd stolen. As she strolled through the vibrant den, rounding enormous sculptures, to find all the jars and bowls I'd thieved from, she spoke with Florin. No one knew she was friends with a Horned God. I didn't think I'd ever heard her speak of Florin at home, and I had a feeling that even Dad didn't know.

I listened in to their conversation as the world around me started to take on a filmy quality.

Florin approached with ponderous footsteps while she put back the Bog Booghie's sword with the rest of the miniature weapons. She cleaned a nearby row of jars with a quick swish of her duster, readjusting them with the tip of her finger so they sat perfectly aligned with each other. She tipped her head back and sideways to look up at him. "Will it work?"

Florin leaned heavily on his walking cane, standing beside a cracked and worn stone carving of Brangwene. "It won't erase the memory completely, but it will bury it down deep."

She spun around on her heels, smoothing a hand over the duster, its nylon fronds gathering within her fist before flaring free when she released them. "Will it stay buried down there?"

At that mention, a pinching sensation erupted inside my skull, as if the grub was burying itself deep inside my brain.

"There's no guarantee it won't unearth itself. If it does, it won't come back in its entirety all at once, just in small confusing pockets," he replied.

My mother glanced at me with curiosity before her gaze returned to the Horned God. A notch formed between her brows. "Have you used it before?"

"Just once or twice," he replied.

My mother's mouth pursed and tension lined her furrowed forehead. "Have you used it on me before?"

"What would you have to forget, little thief?"

She flashed a grin, the freckles dusting her nose and cheeks sparkling, and her body relaxed. "Nothing I'm sure." And then her tone became thoughtful, slow and careful. "I suppose I wouldn't remember if you had used it on me or not."

A beat of silence. "Indeed."

His pause gave me pause too. I tasted something wrong on my tongue, like a dusting of snow, cold and sharp and numbing.

Startlement had my spine stiffening.

Florin had used it before on my mother, but she didn't know. Didn't remember, obviously.

And then my mother's face began to blur at the edges as the world rippled and warped in a way that reminded me of the time my aunt had tossed a solvent at one of her canvases. All the oil paint had melted away into dribbles of color, taking the picture along with it. And that was what seemed to be happening around me, inside my mind too. This strange place that I'd entered not so long ago and wandered amongst all its wonders, melted away. I turned around in a dizzying circle and caught sight of the wooden sign hanging above the door, briefly, so that I only saw a single word written in silver—PURVEYOR—just as my vision became dotted as if I were looking through a veil of lace, before my mind went blank and my vision black.

All of a sudden I was blinking into a bright light, surrounded by walls painted in vivid colors, the sound of chattering customers around me just as loud. In my hand, I held an ice cream with pastel swirls of pinks and chocolates and greens. My mother leaned an elbow on the white table across from me. Ice cream coated her tongue in apricot as she licked her cone. She smiled, a beaming smile that showed all her teeth, and winked.

And the memory-dream shifted into something else...

A strange sensation, from the here and now in the bedroom of the tower, of my body being pushed. Shunted. Rolled. Before I was tugged back down like a scuttled ship dragged beneath the surface of an ocean, and I fell into a deep sleep where I dreamed of nothing. Time passed slowly and quickly as slumber always seemed to do.

And then something else tossed me from the depth of sleep.

Something soft as feathers tickled my thigh.

I rose to consciousness with a deep growl working up my chest to rumble from my throat, and an animalistic need burning my skin.

A melodic hum replied, soft and sweet and enticing, before the warmth of lips, teeth, and tongue danced across the side of my ribs.

I pried apart my sleepy eyes, and my muddled mind tried to make sense of where I was. I usually slept for long periods of time. Right now it should be morning, maybe even early afternoon, it certainly felt that way with the fucking heat baking my skin and the humidity prickling a sheen of sweat over my sticky body and dampening my hair. But it wasn't light in here, it was dark, and I lay surrounded by softness with the heady scent of sex lacing the air.

I blinked, and my gaze sharpened with confusion on the slats above me, right in my view as if I lay in a coffin, confined to a small box.

I realized where I was—beneath my bed.

I levered up. There was enough space beneath the tall bed to raise my head to see what the fuck was going on. I met a crown of pale blond hair, the long locks sweeping across my body like feathers as Nelle scraped her teeth against my skin. Her tongue lapped over the bumps of my ribs, raising goosebumps, her breath washed in swirls of heat as she rubbed her cheek and chin over the curve of my body, all to that mindless humming that tightened my body and turned my blood to molten gold.

What the hells was she doing?

I sucked in a sharp breath when I understood exactly what.

Scent marking me.

Nelle glanced up and I met eyes gone black that glittered like the night sky. She straddled my body and prowled over top of me. Her sex-mussed hair slithered over a shoulder when she angled her head, staring unblinkingly back at me, gone somewhere else inside that head of hers.

And I realized what all of this meant.

Sometime during my slumber, she'd pushed and rolled me under the bed, and tugged the overlaying rugs and furs right down to the ground so we were hidden away. She'd even dragged a mixture of bedding belonging to each of us and nestled them around my body.

It clicked.

She'd replicated a burrow of sorts.

Like a wyrm would do beneath the earth.

Nelle straddled my hips, the top of her head grazing shy of the bed slats. She splayed her hands on my upper chest and pushed me back down onto the soft bedding of silk and cashmere so I was pinned beneath her.

In silence, we stared at one another. Her eyes had blown fully into mine—black, rimmed with gold. She was bright in the dark, even brighter with a ghost of a smile. I reached up and feathered my thumb along the gentle arch of her eyebrow, and she did the same, tracing the inner curve of my eyebrow with the smooth pad of her thumb.

I had no fucking idea what had inspired her to build a wyrm burrow and drag me inside of it. Selfishly, I wanted to stay in this moment a little longer. It was peaceful, and she was beautiful, and we weren't fighting.

I ran the tip of my finger down her forehead, following the slope of her nose, dipping to the cupid bow in her full lips, and trailed downward to end at her chin. Nelle mirrored me, her touch softly sweeping down the center of my face in a straight line from my hairline along the dips and rises of my features.

She was leaning above me, and the riotous waves of pale blond hair had fallen forward like a cascade of raining water, the long length darkened with perspiration tickling my flesh wherever they brushed. I tucked a thick piece of hair behind her ear. My hand stilled, and then I pushed my fingers through her tangled mane to curve around the back of her head, unable to resist massaging her skull, my thumb sweeping back and forth over the faint cluster of freckles near her ear.

Nelle briefly closed her eyes on a contented sigh, pushing back into my petting, before shifting her own hand to weave her fingers through my sweat-dampened hair and did the same, kneading the tendons and bone in the nape of my neck.

My eyelids lowered at the comforting touch.

Hellsgate.

So fucking good.

Inside her burrow, the heady smell of sex was an erotic fragrance that mingled with our scents, earthy and rich like a pine forest tangled with flora. My lust for her was an effervescent drug fizzing through my bloodstream, and with every breath I took, the humid air laced with our scent made my mind fall more and more under her spell, pushing aside every other thought but us...

A bead of sweat slithered down Nelle's neck. I let go of the back of her neck to follow its moist trail with a fingertip as it rolled like a dewdrop down her chest to disappear into the shadowy valley between her plump tits. My mouth was parched from a long stretch of sleep, and now it watered with longing to flick and suckle on the stiff peaks of her nipples and have her moan and writhe against me.

Nelle hummed a low, husky note.

My entire body tightened, then shivered.

The hypnotic sound crawled along my skin with the radiance of sunshine. Something deep inside, that strange feral part of me, ancient and wicked, arose. I replied to her in a way I didn't understand, a gruff intonation, almost a purr. The guttural sound rumbled in my chest, deep and throaty, rough and possessive.

My cock was hard and she was slick.

And fuck I wanted her.

Needed her.

My hand swept over the soft curve of her breast to wrap around her upper arm. "More," I thought I must have whispered aloud, but I couldn't be sure with lust clouding my senses. All I could smell was us slicked onto my skin, drenching my lungs. I could stay in her burrow for an eternity. Fuck her forever.

But something was off, something was wrong.

That feeling wouldn't go away as Nelle rolled her pelvis, angling herself, her warm, wet heat ready to take my straining cock.

My jaw clenched hard, and my fingers clamped tighter around her arm, as I mentally shoved back at the dark desire urging me to take what she was offering. "Stop," I whisper-hissed through gritted teeth.

She did, instantly.

I released her arm to scrub my face harshly, blinking rapidly and trying to shake this bewitchment from my mind. I dropped my hands away to fist my midnight silk sheets and her fleecy ones nestled around my body to resist the temptation of grasping her hips so I could thrust up and make her mine.

Nelle sat poised and waiting.

Waiting for what?

I couldn't figure what the hells was up with her.

There was a different sensation vibrating beneath my skin to what we'd experienced during the weekend of Evvie's betrothal. The girl had been sex-mad, fueled by craving, and animalistic in her need to fuck. This was...?

Sweet surrender?

Nelle's eyelids fluttered shut as she rolled her neck and hummed a note like singing crystal. The enchanting sound wavered in the dim burrow and rang in my ears. I fell once more into a trancelike state with a thirst to claim her.

I wanted more, more, more.