Fire and Ice

  She lifted her head. “Keep talking like that, buster, and when I learn how to not-so-randomly blow shit up, your ’nads will be first on the list.”

  “One thorough fucking, coming right up,” Jan said.

  She moaned as he worked one, then two fingers into her, effectively silencing her. Well, silencing her speech, although the incoherent sounds of pleasure rolling from her were anything but quiet.

  “That’s it,” Rick said as he took a long, slow stroke inside her. “You just lie there and enjoy it. We’ll do all the work.”

  That was fine with Lina. Her tender nipples rasped against the fine, dark hair dusted across Rick’s chest. All she wanted to do was lie there and enjoy the feeling of two cocks inside her.

  As soon as Jan hurried up and got his inside her.

  She felt him spread her cheeks. Then the head of his cock pressed against her rim. “Is this what you want, lovely?” he asked her.

  “Uh-huh!”

  Rick’s fingers dug into her ass, holding her still and spreading her wide. “Tell us,” he ordered in the sexy Alpha tone that always melted her.

  “I want your cock in my ass, Jan!” she gasped. “I want you both fucking me!” She already felt more pleasant tingles in her clit as she tried to rub it against Rick’s body. Hot and cool, she knew the contrasting sensations would send her skyrocketing into another powerful orgasm without any assistance from a tongue, finger, or battery-operated boyfriend.

  “Hold on, I’m working on it,” Jan said. He slowly pressed forward, hesitating as his cock passed through her tight ring of muscle.

  She moaned against Rick’s chest. “Do it! Please, fuck me!”

  “Better do it,” Rick teased. “She sounds serious.”

  She tried to hump their cocks, but Jan pressed a hand down in the middle of her back, holding her still. “Just wait, baby. Give me a minute.” He slowly worked his cock in deeper. She loved the sensation of one of them in her ass. Being impaled between them was a delicious sensation she wished she’d indulged in sooner.

  When he bottomed out inside her tight ass, he sat up and grabbed her hips. “You feel so good!” He gasped as he took a long, slow stroke.

  She moaned, squirming between them, wanting more, wanting to be fucked hard and fast.

  Beneath her, Rick started thrusting, picking up a rhythm that hit her clit perfectly every time as he drove his cock hard and deep inside her pussy. Lina felt time slow and stretch. It felt like every nerve ending in her body had lit up.

  As her climax approached, she threw her head back and moaned. “Yes!” When the first tingles started, her vision went blue.

  Suddenly, she was no longer in bed with Rick and Jan. She was standing in the doorway of a small shop on a narrow, cobbled village street. She couldn’t read the signs around her, but they looked like they were in French.

  A heavyset, older man wearing a dour expression emerged from one of the shops on the other side of the street. She couldn’t clearly see his face due to the hat smashed down on his head. He headed off down the sidewalk. Lina knew she had to follow him, but didn’t know why. As she stepped down from the sidewalk to cross the street, her climax slammed into her, ripping her from the vision and pulling her back into her body.

  “That’s our girl,” Rick said with a grunt as he picked up the pace. Above her, Jan pounded into her, drawing out her orgasm until she finally collapsed on top of Rick, feeling like a puddle of melted flesh.

  Rick came first. Lina shivered at the delicious sensation of his hot seed filling her. When Jan came, she shivered again at feeling him empty his coolly soothing load in her ass.

  As they all lay there catching their breath, Jan leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck. “You still alive, lovely?”

  “Mm hmm. I had another vision.”

  “We make her see stars,” Rick joked.

  “No, I’m serious.” She lifted her head. “I had another vision. I saw an older guy in some foreign city.”

  Rick frowned. “I’m not sure I like triggering that in you. I’m afraid it might hurt you.”

  She shook her head. “No, don’t feel like that. I like it. It’s like it’s allowing me to open a different energy channel.” She reached behind her and patted Jan’s side. “Not to mention it feels sooo good.”

  Jan carefully withdrew from her and went to the bathroom to clean up. He returned with a warm, wet washcloth and a towel, cleaning her up before she rolled off Rick.

  “Feeling a little better?” Jan asked her.

  She nodded as she wiggled into a comfortable position next to Rick. “Definitely. I needed that.”

  Jan returned to bed. “Rick has a point. We need to be careful. I would hate to trigger something in you that you can’t control that harms you.”

  She grabbed his arm and laced her fingers through his. “Don’t worry about it. What Goddess says goes, right?”

  Rick snorted with amusement. “Right. That’s probably safest for everyone involved.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Physically sated and totally exhausted, Lina crashed into sleep snuggled safely between her two men. It felt good to be home, in her own bed. A little normalcy in a wacked-out week. She just wished she had definite proof of who killed Kael’s parents, and Bertholde.

  Alas, she opened her eyes in a forest clearing.

  Fuck.

  She immediately knew this had to be another…well, she didn’t know what the fuck to call them. The visions made her sight go blue. This was different, like replaying the things she saw from the past while with Baba Yaga.

  A well-trodden path led from the clearing. She suspected this was the way she had to go, although every cell in her body told her she wouldn’t like what she found on the other end. She reached out to touch a tree alongside the path and her hand brushed right through it, although to her, she looked solid.

  Alllrighty, then.

  The path wound through the woods, ending at another clearing that opened onto a pasture behind a small stone house with a wood-shingled roof. Next to it was parked an old pickup truck. Well, it looked new, but vintage. A gravel drive led down to a dirt road about a quarter mile away. She watched as an old-fashioned milk truck drove past.

  Okay, so I’m in the past. The front door of the house was closed, but that didn’t stop Lina. She walked right through it.

  She wished she hadn’t. Inside, three robed, hooded figures had the occupants tied up. A man, a woman…

  And a young girl.

  Panic set in. Lina raced over to the captives and tried to untie the ropes, her efforts futile. Two of the robed figures turned from where they’d been kneeling in front of the hearth. They dragged the man, who started screaming, over to the hearth. Lina tried to free him from their grip, but her hands passed through the attackers with no effect. Two of the figures held his arms down while the third plunged a knife into the struggling man’s neck.

  The woman and little girl screamed, crying for him. His eyes went wide then glazed over as the killer pulled the knife from the victim’s neck. One of the other figures held a pewter goblet under the man’s neck to catch the flow of blood as the killer shed his robe, revealing him to be naked underneath.

  Edgar.

  Lina watched as he drank from the goblet. Then, reciting a spell she couldn’t understand, he smeared his body with the dead man’s blood.

  Repulsed, Lina looked away.

  That’s when she got a good look at the knife lying on the floor next to the victim. The ornate handle was the same as the two knives from Yellowstone. Trying to avoid looking at the victim, who was now in the process of being eviscerated with Edgar’s bare hands, she realized the other two killers also had knives tucked into the rope belting their robes shut. As best she could tell, they bore the same pattern of engraving on this one.

  Okay, at least it’s proof.

  She still couldn’t make out the other two killers’ faces. When they finished with the man, they pulled him away from the heart
h and discarded his body in the corner. Edgar stood, smiling in evil glee and stretching as he pulled his robe on.

  Anger surged within her. She rushed him, screaming, and tried to hit him. Except for a flicker across his expression, her efforts proved useless.

  Meanwhile, the other two men dragged the screaming, struggling woman over to the hearth as the little girl plaintively cried for her. The second attacker, who turned out to be Lenny, repeated with her what Edgar had done to her husband as Lina screamed and cried, helpless to stop it, helpless to look away.

  When it came time for them to kill the little girl, Lina felt like her sanity would come unglued. She recognized the older man who raised the knife, even though in real life she had never seen him before.

  He was the man from her earlier vision, the man she saw in the street. Only he looked a little younger and a lot thinner.

  Lina tried placing herself between him and the little girl, and his hands plunged through her without effect. But when he raised the goblet to his lips to drink, Lina screamed at him, swatting at the goblet.

  To her shock and his, the goblet flew from his hands, blood spraying from it in a ruby arc, splattering the wall while the goblet bounced off an old-fashioned floor radio and hit the hardwood floor with a clang.

  Lina froze, as did the three men.

  Edgar and Lenny proved to be as spineless and self-centered in the past as they were when she knew them. “We need to leave. Now,” Edgar said.

  “But the ritual!” the third man complained. She detected a slight accent in his voice, but wasn’t sure what.

  “Forget it!” Lenny said. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway! She was just a child. We needed the son. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to fool the dragons or the wolves like we do. Let’s get out of here!”

  They gathered up their stuff, including the spell book from Yellowstone. They cleared out, leaving a sobbing Lina kneeling over the girl’s body. The child looked so much like Kael.

  “I’ll figure it out,” she promised the little girl. “I will, I swear.” She reached out, even knowing she couldn’t touch the child, to close her eyes.

  To Lina’s shock, she could feel her. When she lifted her hand, she realized it was now covered with the girl’s blood. Lina started to scream when Jan shifted in his sleep next to her, accidentally bumping her with his elbow and startling her awake.

  As she tried to calm her racing pulse, she looked at her hand.

  Clean.

  With tears drying on her face and her heartbeat slowing, she settled between her men tried to go back to sleep.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Lina stumbled downstairs while her men still slept. Zack was already in the kitchen, the delicious aroma of coffee brewing making her sigh with relief. She plopped down at the table without a word while Zack poured her a mug, fixed it the way she loved, and slid it in front of her.

  “Thank you,” she said with a content sigh. She wrapped her fingers around the warm mug and lifted it to her lips for a sip.

  “Of course, sugar.” He joined her at the table with a mug of his own. “Anything wrong?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “What’s got you frowning, girl?”

  “This seems so unreal.” She looked at him. “How does your mom handle all of this?”

  “All of what?”

  “All the prophecy crap?”

  He laughed. “Honey, she doesn’t know.”

  “But before Edgar attacked us at my house last year, you said you came from a long line!”

  He nodded. “I did. Just because we’re a long line, doesn’t mean she knows anything about it. I’m the one with the memories, not her.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “Now, you have your memories, too. The boys up there still don’t remember shit, but you know as well as I do they are the spitting image of what they used to look like.”

  “How is your mom, anyway?” Soon after Lina had met her men, Zack’s mom had gotten a promotion and taken a transfer to Los Angeles, a dream job for her.

  “She’s fine, Little Miss Avoiding-the-Subject.” He arched an eyebrow at her.

  Lina felt heat flood her face. She suddenly found her coffee mug very interesting.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  “You so cannot lie to me, Lina. Spill it.”

  She didn’t want to think about the nightmare. Her stomach flipped at the memory. “I saw…something bad last night.”

  “Bad how? Missed a Best Buy sale bad, or ran over a blind kid with a Seeing Eye dog bad?”

  “Bad.” She sipped her coffee, not wanting to revisit the scene, even in her mind. She looked at her hand. Clean, not a trace of blood. “I saw Kael’s family get killed.”

  His mouth gaped. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  She started to cry. Somehow, he made it around the table before she could blink. He cradled her in his arms as she let out her grief on his shoulder. “I couldn’t stop it,” she moaned. “I saw it all, heard it…I couldn’t change it!”

  That’s where the three dragon shifters found her moments later when the sound of her anguished wails reached them all. Jan and Rick nearly collided with Kael as they all tried to race into the kitchen at the same time.

  When Zack finally got her calmed down, he said, “Okay, sweetie. I know you don’t want to talk about this, but you need to go back and tell us everything.”

  “It was just a bad dream though, right?” she asked them all more for her own comfort than anything.

  “Maybe,” Jan said, “but maybe not.”

  Kael patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Lina. We need to hear it.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and related what happened. As she got to the point where she knocked the goblet from the third man’s hand, Zack stopped her. “They said he didn’t need to fool the dragons or the wolves?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that’s what Lenny said.” She didn’t want to think about the gory scene.

  She didn’t want to rehear the screams and cries.

  The sound of the knife plunging into their bodies.

  The sound of their guts being ripped out.

  At least the third killer hadn’t gotten that far, his ritual interrupted. He certainly hadn’t aged well, if she could believe her other vision of him.

  “Would you recognize the third man if you saw him again?” Kael asked.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “He looked like he was in his fifties or sixties. He had mostly grey hair and brown eyes. But…” She did the math in her head. “Wouldn’t he be dead by now? That happened eighty years ago.”

  “Not if he’s a shifter,” Kael said. “And I’d bet money on that. And the fact that you saw him in another vision lends credence to that theory.”

  “Could you tell if the third man was the same person who killed Bertholde?” Rick asked.

  “No. In that vision, I never saw his face.” She went quiet, a thought hitting her. “Hey, wait a minute. My vision at Yellowstone was blue. Like I was looking through a filter. And so was the vision last night about the tablet. And about the third guy.”

  “So?” Jan asked.

  “When I was with Baba Yaga looking at the past, and again with my nightmare, they looked normal.” She stood up, disengaging herself from Zack’s protective embrace. “If something’s already happened, I’m just seeing it. But if it hasn’t happened yet…” She went quiet, thinking.

  Her men learned fast. They remained silent while she circled the kitchen, pacing, her concentration intently focused inward. They stayed out of her way until she stopped and looked at them. “We haven’t found the tablet yet. I wasn’t seeing the past, I was seeing the future. We will find it.” She walked to the table, where the book still lay in the center and flipped it open to the page with the drawing of the tablet. She turned the book to face Zack and pointed to a few passages next to the picture. “What does that say? Read it to me, please.”
br />   He pulled it closer. When he stumbled over a word or phrase, one of the three dragons helped him. “The artifact of Trammel was spirited from the battlefield of Hilmelgamos after the defeat of our forefathers. It is said the three crones helped the adversaries capture our life force with it, dispersing it across the Ether, beyond our reach, robbing a number of us of the mighty abilities we once had. Recapture it at all costs.” He looked up at her. “What is it?”

  Lina slammed her fist on the table. “That fucking bitch!” She looked up at the ceiling. “All right, lady! I want a fucking word with you!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lina literally blinked and found herself in Baba Yaga’s garden. The woman, in her matron form, knelt weeding a small patch of lettuce. Lina stormed over to her. “Okay, spill it, lady!”

  “Spill what, Goddess?”

  “The rest of the story. The parts you left out from yesterday’s little blast from the past about what happened when the cockatrice were defeated the first time. I knew there were some holes in that narrative. Not to mention, what’s the deal with the tablet?”

  “I keep telling you to follow your instincts. When will you listen to me?”

  “Why the hell didn’t you just tell me!”

  She brushed her hands off, pulled off her gloves, and sat back on her haunches. “You needed to figure that out for yourself. My sisters and I sorely strained the patience of the Goddess as it was by interfering as much as we did.”

  “Well, this is one goddess right here and now that’s pretty pissed off and impatient, too, ya know.”

  Baba Yaga smirked. “Nice pajamas.”

  Lina looked down. She was still wearing the lavender Eeyore pj’s she’d slipped on before heading downstairs to the kitchen that morning. Lina let out an irritated scream and jabbed a finger at her. “Now, you look here, quit changing the damn subject! Why didn’t you tell me about the tablet?”‘

  Lina didn’t know if the smirk or Baba Yaga’s calm voice infuriated her more. “What have you learned since we last spoke, Goddess?”

  “What?”