Unchained Beauty (The Deadly Beauties Live On 5)

“Already I’m winning at parenting by comparison,” Karma says with a shrug of her shoulders.

“You got beat by a girl,” Dice says, singing the last word as he points at Cole and laughs.

Dice’s pants spontaneously burst open, tripping him when he stumbles back from the spark at his waist. He yelps and crashes to the ground, sending Cole and Kicera into laughing hysterics.

“Cole, that better not have been you,” Mom warns.

“It wasn’t!”

“Kicera,” Karma warns.

“Not me!”

Slade smirks, and I roll my eyes. “You’re supposed to be the oldest one here,” I remind him.

“Tell me that incubus doesn’t deserve worse,” he says unapologetically.

Thad burst into feathers suddenly, scaring the shit out of me with the abrupt shift, and flies over Dice, pecking him in the head a few times, before soaring into the air.

Roslyn bursts into her wolf form, leaping over our heads as she takes off into the woods under his flight path. I guess they decided they were done with the meeting.

“It’s like a circus. Now that I’ve seen one, that saying makes so much more sense, and it’s disturbingly accurate. If someone started juggling, it wouldn’t even seem surprising,” Slade says against my head, mock groaning.

I laugh against him, kissing the side of his cheek.

Leah bumps my fist on her way by me as she goes toward where the kids are playing, and Slade wraps his arm around my waist as he dematerializes us.

We land in the small cabin in the woods on the land his crew took over ten years ago. The same crew who have been learning how to live in between raids.

There are still a lot of names on that list to take care of, and it’s helped give them goals while they ease into a new way of life. A life where it’s not all about survival.

Surviving is the easy part. We have instinct to guide us.

It’s learning to have a life that is far more difficult when all you’ve known is survival.

Slade’s arms come around me, and he rests his head atop mine as we watch a bonfire raise in the center of the training fields, everyone celebrating the full moon that will be

rising when the sun sets. They celebrate a lot of little things, since they were deprived of so many things I grew up taking advantage of.

“What are you thinking?” I ask Slade, knowing he’s not letting his mind wander down the same paths as mine.

We work so well because we think so differently. Eternity is a long time to spend with someone if you think just alike.

“That the interdimensional rip is going to cause more problems than we realize if we don’t figure out a way to patch it soon.”

“Fortunately the human eye can’t see it, and it’s high enough that planes don’t near it. But we have immortals in the human government placed perfectly to keep planes out of that area as much as possible, so as not to accidentally give a show of dragons shifting and flying around out there.”

“I’m not worried about humans. Their narrow minds are far more easily manipulated these days than they once were,” he tells me absently.

“You’re worried about a huge threat coming through, but the Lokies can’t breach. They’re still sealed off from us.”

“Yes, but we have no idea how many other dimensions do exist. Lokies haven’t had restricted access from all other life. They could have created things just as deadly as us.”

I shrug a shoulder.

“You’re seriously that unconcerned?” he asks incredulously.

My eyes come up to meet his, and I reach for him, letting my fingers trace down the scar that travels to his lip, interrupting what was once a flawless face.