Warrior, Opposed: Book One Of The Comhairle Chronicles

Chapter Seven - More Than He Bargained For

Tor pressed his wrist to Deòthas’s lips, relieved when her fangs automatically plunged into his opened vein. She swallowed his blood on instinct, even though it didn’t pull her from her faint. As she fed he tugged her jacket open, pushing the soft leather aside and lifting her black t-shirt just enough to reveal the wound which had brought on her collapse.

            “Hell,” he breathed as he pressed the fabric of her shirt back over the puncture wound, urgently trying to stem the persisted flow of blood, blood which was already staining his father’s stonework.

“Her stitches have torn open,” he announced as he looked back up at Aodh. “We need to get her back to the compound immediately. I think she’s done extra damage to herself while fighting, and at this rate she’s going to be in serious trouble sooner rather than later.”

“You can’t feed her!” his father reprimanded from where he remained, pressed against the wall of the house. “Don’t you know what she is? Are you so foolish you’d give your noble blood to a fey-born?”

If Tor’s wrist hadn’t been clamped between Deòthas’s jaws, he may have gone for his father again, as it was all he cared about was giving what strength he had to the woman in his arms. She was his partner, damn it, and he wasn’t going to sit back and let her become seriously ill. Sure, she wouldn’t bleed out, not as an immortal, but if she lost too much blood then recovery would be a bitch.

As it was, he didn’t have to worry about any intervention on his father’s part, not as the captains joined him on the porch, forming a wall between him and the man who’d just renounced any right he had to control Tor’s life. Hopefully Corvinus would soon have his family loaded up in vehicles and on their way to a safe house, after that Tor would never have to see them again. He’d be free to do as he wanted, so long as the Comhairle were willing to ignore his ancestry.

“Gods,” Seren murmured, her tone coloured by outright shock. “Look at her markings.”

Her markings? Tor’s gaze flicked to the black warrior brands on the left side of Deòthas’s face but he couldn’t see anything unusual there. The others hissed in surprise however, and something that sounded like a denial uttered from his father. It took Tor a few moments to register what the others had already noticed; that Seren hadn’t been talking about the warrior tattoos which marked the skin of every ghaisgeach.  On no, she’d drawn attention to something far worse. Something far, far worse.

At least he suspected that was how Deòthas would view it.

The tattoos weren’t permanent, the subtle shimmering lines below Deòthas’s right eye would vanish the moment she stopped feeding. Their glow appeared as a simple warning, the first indicator of a bond that could tie him more firmly to the baobhan sith than any warrior’s pledge. If he were to take her blood and her body, then those marks would become as permanent as the black patterns they both sported already.  They would declare to the world that they were bound to one another, mated.

He’d never imagined the gods would grant him a sacred mate; that bond was too rare. He didn’t even know any mated bhampairean. Sure, the markings below Seren’s eye revealed that she had been bound once, but her mate had died. Most people were never granted such a sacred a union. And to be mated to a baobhan sith? That was utterly impossible.. Or it should have been. The fey never mated that way. The gods didn’t allow it... Just like they didn’t allow non-bhampairean to take the trials...

Shit. Double shit.

Why had the Great Father decided Deòthas should be special, especially to him? Or with him. Or whatever. What made her different in the eyes of the gods? Was it compensation for what had been done to her, to make up for her separation from her people? Not that her people had been any more understanding towards her than the Comhairle over the years, not considering what she’d just told him.