Marc And Kianna’s Love

His voice came out rough, scraped raw by centuries of blood and burial earth. He kept his gaze on Kianna, though Jean’s scent burned his throat. Kianna was wounded at the shoulder. A thin red line ran down her arm and vanished into the water swirling around her boots.

“Marc,” she said.

His name sounded different in her mouth. Not fear. Not quite trust.

Jean’s smile widened. “You know him?”

“I know enough,” Kianna replied.

The slime cage tightened. It pulled her arms behind her, forcing a sharp breath from her. Marc saw the movement and felt his hunger sharpen. Her blood was close. He could hear it beneath the thunder, a living rhythm, clean and bright. His fangs pressed against his gums.

He hated that his first instinct was to taste her.

He hated more that his second was to tear the world apart for hurting her.

Jean lifted one webbed hand. “Come closer, dragon. I want to see whether your dead heart still breaks.”

Marc lowered his head, smoke leaking between his teeth. “Release her.”

“Or what?” Jean asked. “You’ll burn my venom? You’ll bite me? You’ll discover that even monsters can poison a grave?”

A glob of black fluid snapped through the air.

Marc twisted aside. It struck his wing instead.

Pain flashed white. The membrane smoked, and the smell of rotting flowers filled his senses. He roared and beat his wings, driving a blast of wind across the courtyard. Jean staggered, but the slime cage held.

Kianna clenched her fists. Water surged up around her knees.

“Don’t breathe near it,” she warned. “The venom follows warmth.”

“I’m not exactly warm.”

Her gaze flicked over him - over the black scales, the torn edges of his wings, the pale seams where his body had been stitched back together by whatever dark miracle had kept him alive.

“No,” she said softly. “You’re not.”

The words should have cut deeper than Jean’s venom. Instead, they steadied him.

Marc lunged.

Jean spat a curtain of poison. He plunged through it before he could reconsider, folding one wing over his face. Venom struck his scales and slid in burning trails along his neck. He reached the cage and clamped his jaws around one strand of slime.

The taste was foul enough to make his undead stomach convulse.

He pulled.

The cage stretched. Kianna cried out as the black substance tightened around her ribs.

“Stop!” she shouted.

Marc released it at once.

Jean laughed. “How touching. She commands, and the dead thing obeys.”

Kianna looked at him through the rain. “I didn’t mean - ”

“You meant to keep me from hurting you.”

“Yes.”

“Then say it plainly.”

Her mouth parted. The storm filled the pause between them.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said.

Marc’s claws flexed against the stone. “I won’t.”

The promise came too quickly. Too easily. He had made no such promise to himself.

Jean struck again.

A venomous tendril whipped toward Kianna’s throat. Marc moved before thought could interfere. He drove his body between them, taking the blow across his chest. Poison burst over his scales and seeped through the cracks in his dead flesh.

His knees buckled.

Kianna screamed his name.

Water exploded from the ground.

The tide answered her like a living beast, punching through the ruins in a blue-white wall. It shattered the slime around her and hurled Jean across the courtyard. Kianna stumbled free, but the force threw her toward a collapsed stairwell.

Marc caught her in one clawed hand.

She landed against his palm, soaked and trembling. Her skin was warm. Too warm. Her blood rushed beneath it, and the scent filled his mouth.

For one terrible second, he imagined sinking his teeth into the delicate curve of her neck.

Kianna looked up at him.

Her fear was there. He saw it in the widening of her eyes, in the way her fingers hovered above his scales without touching. But beneath it lay something else - a question, perhaps, or a decision not yet made.

Marc set her down.

“Run,” he said.

“I can fight.”

“You can barely stand.”

“I’m a goddess.”

“And Jean Blanchard is trying to drag you into a hole.”

Kianna glanced toward the broken courtyard. Jean was rising from the floodwater, her body steaming where Kianna’s power had struck. “That is not an argument against fighting.”

“It is when I’m telling you to live.”

The words silenced them both.

Jean’s laughter rolled over the ruins. “You hear him, Kianna? He wants to keep you alive. How sweet. How useful.”

She sank her fingers into the softened stone. The entire courtyard shuddered. Cracks raced along the ground, filling with black venom. The old sea temple began to collapse around them.

Marc seized Kianna by the waist and pulled her beneath a fallen arch as a pillar crashed where they had stood. Dust and salt filled the air. Kianna’s back struck his chest. His wings curled around them, shielding her from raining stone.

She was pressed against him now, close enough that he could feel her breath through his ruined scales.

“You’re bleeding,” she whispered.

“Not mine.”

A red smear marked her palm where the slime had cut her. Marc stared at it.

Kianna noticed. Her hand closed.

“Marc.”

He forced his gaze to her face. “You should cover that.”

“Because you’re hungry?”

The question held no accusation. That made it worse.

He looked away. Outside, Jean prowled through the falling ruins, her wet footsteps squelching over stone.

“I am always hungry,” he said. “The dead part of me wants what the living part of you carries.”

Kianna’s breath caught.

Marc expected her to pull away. He expected disgust, or the bright defensive anger she had used when he told her to run.

Instead, she touched one finger to the side of his jaw.

The contact was light. Careful. Her skin cooled his fevered scales.

“Then why didn’t you bite me?” she asked.

“Because you asked me not to hurt you.”

“That is the only reason?”

Marc met her eyes. The truth had teeth of its own.

“No.”

Rainwater dripped from her lashes. “Tell me the other reason.”

He could have lied. He had survived by lying - to hunters, to priests, to himself. But Kianna stood within the circle of his wings, and her touch had made the ruined body he wore feel briefly like something more than a weapon.

“I wanted you to look at me,” he said. “Not fear me. Not yet.”

Her expression changed.

A stone struck the arch above them. Marc tightened his wings. Kianna’s hand slid from his jaw to his throat, where no living pulse beat beneath the scales.

“I do fear you,” she admitted.

His body went still.

“But I fear what she’ll do if she takes me more.”

Jean’s voice drifted through the dust. “Kianna! Come willingly, and I may leave the dragon enough pieces to bury.”

Kianna flinched.

Marc felt it against him, and something inside his chest - something stubbornly alive - turned toward her pain.

“You know her?” he asked.

“She has hunted me before. She wants my water-heart.”

“What is that?”

“The part of me that makes rivers answer. If she tears it out, she can command every living current along this coast.” Kianna swallowed. “She cannot have it.”

“She won’t.”

“You cannot promise that.”

“I just did.”

“Promises do not stop venom.”

“No,” Marc said. “But I do.”

He pushed out from beneath the arch. Kianna caught his wrist.

“Wait.”

His hunger surged at the contact. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist, small against the breadth of him. He could feel her strength there, the hidden tide moving beneath her skin.

“If you shield me,” she said, “Jean will make you her first target.”

“She already has.”

“You don’t know what I am.”

“I know you’re hurt.”

“That isn’t enough.”

“It is for me.”

The admission seemed to unsettle her more than the collapsing ruins. Her grip loosened, but she did not let go.

“Marc,” she said, quieter now, “if you lose control - ”

“I’ll leave.”

“You might not.”

“Then stop me.”

“With what?”

“Water. Teeth. Whatever you have.”

A startled, breathless sound escaped her. Almost a laugh.

The moment vanished when Jean tore through the arch.

Marc shoved Kianna behind him and opened his jaws. Fire erupted across the courtyard, bright orange against the storm. Jean shrieked as flame caught the venom slicking her shoulders. She lunged through it anyway, her hands stretching toward Kianna.

Marc struck her across the face.

Jean slammed into a pillar. The stone broke behind her.

“You filthy corpse,” she hissed.

“Still alive,” Marc growled.

He seized her by the throat. Her flesh writhed beneath his claws, cold and rubbery. Venom bubbled over his fingers. Jean drove a barb from her wrist into his side.

The barb sank deep.

Marc roared. His grip faltered.

Jean twisted free and hurled him across the courtyard. He crashed through a wall into the old sea chapel. Broken shells and salt-stained bones rained over him.

“Marc!”

Kianna’s voice pulled him upright.

Jean had reached her. Black tendrils wrapped around Kianna’s legs and waist, dragging her toward a jagged opening beneath the chapel floor. Kianna fought, her body breaking into streaming water before snapping solid again. Each change weakened her. Her face had gone pale.

Marc ran.

Jean raised one hand, venom dripping from her claws. “One step closer, and I open her throat.”

Marc stopped.

Kianna’s eyes found his.

He saw the fear she had confessed. He saw the command she wanted to give him and could not. He saw, too, that she was waiting for him to choose her life over his chance to kill Jean.

So he lowered his head.

“Take me instead,” he said.

Jean blinked.

Kianna shook her head. “No.”

“Take me,” Marc repeated. “Let her go.”

Jean’s lips peeled back. “You think I want a dead dragon?”

“You want what protects her.”

For the first time, Jean looked uncertain.

Kianna understood before Jean did. Water gathered at her feet, slipping through the cracks in the ruins. Marc held her gaze and gave the smallest nod.

She drove both hands downward.

A column of seawater erupted beneath Jean. The demon-woman lost her grip as the flood lifted her from the stones. Marc lunged through the spray, wrapped one wing around Kianna, and tore the remaining tendrils apart with his claws.

They ran through the chapel as the ceiling collapsed behind them.

Marc did not stop until they reached a narrow cleft between two cliffs. There, the storm broke against the rocks with a deep, booming rhythm. Fresh water streamed from Kianna’s hands, washing venom from his wounds.

He leaned against the stone, breathing smoke.

Kianna knelt before him. Her fingers hovered over the barb lodged in his side.

“May I?” she asked.

Marc nodded.

She pulled it free.

Pain tore through him. His claws closed around the ground instead of her. Kianna pressed her palm over the wound, and cool water entered his body, soothing the poison without erasing the hurt.

When she finished, she did not move away.

Behind them, Jean’s venom glimmered across the ruins, a black trail leading toward the cleft.

Kianna looked at it, then back at Marc.

“You saved me,” she said.

“You saved me first.”

“That does not make us even.”

“I wasn’t keeping score.”

Her hand remained against his chest. Beneath the dead flesh, something answered her touch with one hard, impossible beat.

Kianna felt it. Her eyes widened.

Marc expected her to retreat.

Instead, she leaned forward and rested her forehead against his.

No kiss. No promise spoken aloud. Only the warmth of her skin, the salt on her lips, and the quiet surrender of two frightened creatures choosing not to pull apart.

Marc closed his eyes.

For the first time in years, he wanted something more than survival.

Behind Kianna, black venom crept over the rocks.

She lifted her head. Marc opened his eyes.

The trail had not cooled. Jean Blanchard was still coming.

Kianna’s fingers tightened against his chest.

“Will you keep shielding me?” she asked.

Marc looked toward the storm, then back at her.

“Yes,” he said.

This time, the promise frightened them both.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters in the full book.