“What?” Sera gasped.
Falcyn sighed wearily. “Not lost entirely. Temporarily adrift.” He inclined his head to Max. “I shall stay, but only to help you knock sense into Illarion. I won’t let those bastards take him. Not after everything else they’ve stolen from all of us. Now rest. We’ll have more fights to come and you have a beautiful swan to soothe.”
And with that he was gone.
Sera turned back to Max. She still couldn’t believe he was alive again. Laughing, she threw herself against him and kissed his cheeks and lips and neck and forehead.
He laughed, too. “Careful, love. Else I’ll think you missed me.”
“Don’t you ever die on me again!”
“I didn’t mean to this time.”
Her amusement fading, she pressed her marked palm to his as she moved to straddle him. “As soon as you heal, I want us to bond.”
“Sera —”
“No arguments. Our dragonets are grown. They will find their own mates soon. But the one thing I learned today is what the dragonbane really means.”
“And that is?”
“Living without your heart, and my heart is you, Lord Dragon.”
“Then come, Strah Draga. Bond with me. For I know that without you I don’t live. I only survive, and that is the bleakest and longest winter of my life.”
EPILOGUE
Max snorted as he caught Falcyn staring hungrily at Tisiphone’s posterior while she leaned over the pool table where Colt and Rémi were teaching her to play billiards. “I think you used me as an excuse to stay, brother.”
Falcyn slid an unamused glare at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Shaking his head, Max handed him a drink before he started breaking down the soda dispensers. Fang had just closed the bar to the humans. It’d been almost three weeks since that fateful night when Sera had crashed back into his life.
And he cherished every minute of it.
Mostly because he knew war was here and a battle was coming. Blaise and Merlin were working on a Daimon cure, but so far nothing had helped them. Apollo was still after all the Olympians and the Were-Hunters.
With Kessar leading the charge.
They were on the cusp of the full moon and with it a bad feeling that Max couldn’t shake. While his mate and children were safe upstairs with Aimee, he knew Illarion was out there, working with Apollo against them.
The countdown had begun.
And the Fates hated them all.
Max reached for a cloth, and when he did, he accidentally knocked a glass from the counter. Cursing, he moved to pick it up. The moment he did, an arrow shot past his head.
One that would have hit him had he not moved just then.
Furious, he and those around him looked for its source. But it’d come out of nowhere.
Falcyn met Fang’s angry glower. “We need Acheron and Thorn to tighten the shields on this place.”
He pulled the phone from his pocket. “On it already.”
While Fang made the call, Max yanked the arrow out of the wood and saw the note wrapped around the shaft. He unscrolled and read the ancient Sumerian writing before he handed it to Fang, who screwed his face up at it.
“Hieroglyphs?”
“Cuneiform.” Max handed it to Falcyn.
“What’s it say?” Fang asked.
Falcyn answered for Max. “It’s a full-on declaration of war. They are coming for us and they intend to mount our hides to the wall.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Bel m’es quant ilh m’enfolhetis
It pleases me when she maddens me
E?m fai badar e?n vau muzan!
When she makes me stand gaping and staring!
De leis m’es bel si m’escarnis O?m gaba dereir’o denan,
It pleases me when she laughs at me and makes fun of me, behind my back or to my face,
Qu’apres lo mal me venra bes Be leu, s’a lieys ven a plazer.
For after the ill, the good will come very quickly, if such is her pleasure.
~Cercamon
[BЯ]