I shrugged nervously. “Um, yeah? I mean, they’re just practice pieces really. Wait’ll you see the real one when it’s finished…” They were pretty, sure, but they weren’t my best work by a long shot, which was why I had no issue putting them on display with price tags stuck to the pedestals beneath them. “Does that mean something to you?”
His eyebrows shot up, and he swept a hand through the air to indicate all four. Spring, with its green-tinted glass and vaguely tree-like contours, was an open vessel filled with an abundance of tiny star-shaped flowers in every color; Summer, shaped like a raindrop, was equally overflowing with lush green miniature vines dotted with yellow blooms; Autumn’s bulbous fertility goddess form gave birth to flowers in a range of fiery reds and golds; and Winter’s slender icicle shape was bursting with blooms of white and pale blue. To me, they were just flowers behind glass, but to Gray, they were apparently something more.
“It means you don’t just carry an unheard-of amount of dragon magic; you’re filled with ursa magic too.”
4
Gray
April’s aura flared green at the suggestion that she was filled with ursa magic, as if merely mentioning it summoned the power to the surface. But the look on her face still made it clear she didn’t quite grasp how amazing she was. I shifted my attention back to her creations, four of the most perfect artistic renderings of the Seasons I’d ever seen. Each one glowed with an abundance of earth magic, though the vessels themselves still crackled with the fire magic she’d infused the glass with.
I hadn’t blown glass since I was a child, but it had always been the most ideal medium for young white dragons to explore our innate creativity, while still exercising our skill with fire. That was why I’d come here. After the bittersweet farewell from the others, I had an urge to start back at the beginning, seek out what I’d loved most in life prior to my hibernation, and try to reclaim some of that passion and see where it led.
Evidently, it had led me straight to this woman, and for the second time, I wished I could see fate hounds the way Deva and her mates could. I was almost positive despite her insistence that her hounds were occupied with another task, they’d somehow managed to steer me into this gallery and straight to April’s side.
But the discovery of her skill meant everything. Not only was she Bloodline, she had power unlike any member of the Bloodline I’d met, except for Aella. As Aella’s bodyguards, my partners and I had always known she possessed it, even before her awakening a year ago on Spring Equinox. When we learned that three of the Winds were her fated mates, we hadn’t been particularly surprised. Her ability to manipulate the air with her voice was unmatched, so naturally, she’d required not one, but three powerful mates tied to that element.
I could barely contain my excitement to learn that April was so similar. Could it mean what I hoped? If she carried enough dragon blood in her veins to be able to carry on telepathic conversations as well as see auras, that ranked her up there with Aella in terms of her concentration of power. Whether it was enough to warrant three dragon mates, I didn’t know.
But she didn’t just carry dragon blood.
Deva had explained how the Bloodline worked that day last year after we watched Aella fly away with her new mates, leaving my five partners and me at loose ends. Each member of the Bloodline carried a mix of higher races blood. For most of them, it was diluted, and all it took was the magic of one of Deva’s songs to activate, allowing them to find their perfect match within a crowd of other Bloodline. Sometimes more than two people matched with each other, but their mix of blood always balanced each other. Deva’s fate hounds had some involvement, but I was never exactly clear on what they did behind the scenes. I think it amounted to subliminal nudges whenever the person had a choice to make that could lead them either farther from or closer to their soul mate.
Deva had emphasized that there were rare members who had much higher concentrations, whose only hope of finding a true soul mate was to be matched with a member of the higher races. And in even rarer cases, more than one member of the higher races. Deva’s dedication to finding them mates wasn’t entirely frivolous though.
The Bloodline existed outside of Fate’s web of control, which meant Fate considered them a flaw, an anomaly that threw the whole pattern of the world out of balance since Fate didn’t have the ability to easily find them soul mates. If it hadn’t been for Deva’s intervention, Fate would have had its own packs of fate hounds hunt down and kill every last member of the Bloodline just to save it the headache. Thankfully, Deva was willing to do the work to restore balance by using her own powers and the six fate hounds loyal to her to match the Bloodline up with soul mates, so Fate had backed down.
But it hadn’t occurred to me to hope I might meet a member of the Bloodline so alluring as April, and I knew better than to believe my urge to come into this gallery was entirely random. I was probably crazy to hope that this beautiful glassblower was powerful enough for six, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to find out more. Even though I itched to pull out my phone, to call Stuart and Tate and the others and tell them to get their asses to Seattle to meet her, I held back. It wouldn’t do to get their hopes up and find out only one of us could have her. Or that maybe I wasn’t meant to have her at all, but to lead her to the member of the Bloodline who was her perfect match—Deva’s hounds worked in mysterious ways like that.
“You really need to teach me how to do that,” April said, her voice tinged with wry humor.
“What?” I shifted my attention from the sculptures back to her, struck again by the sexy disarray of her hair and clothes. She was kind of an adorable mess, her blonde curls sticking out from a red bandana tied around her forehead. She wore a snug tank top that had once been white, I thought, though it was hard to tell, and over that was a threadbare plaid flannel shirt tied at the front. Her cut-off denim shorts left her tan legs bare, and on her feet were a pair of scuffed brown shit-kickers, which were no doubt standard issue for glassblowers, at least if they were human.
“Teach me how not to broadcast, because I can tell you’re doing some heavy thinking right now, but I’m not getting even a whisper. What’s going on in there?”
She stepped close and tapped her finger to my forehead, her proximity giving me another whiff of her intoxicating scent. She smelled like she lived and breathed fire and glass. And not just that, but metal too. Metal and earth and—I inhaled deeply, unable to resist the urge to lean in. Life.
“Sweet Mother, you smell like life.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “You mean I smell like a biology experiment, right? Because there is no way in hell I smell good.”
I barked out a laugh. “No, I don’t mean that at all. You really do smell wonderful. Why do you think you don’t?”
She lifted an arm and plucked beneath the sleeve, dipping her head to inhale, then grimaced. “Because I really don’t. I haven’t bathed in a few days. I’ve been preoccupied with staying on schedule. These little masterpieces are only the beginning of my Earth and Fire series. Just a sample.”
My spine tingled. She had more like this?