The Walls of Jericho

Drawing Conclusions

Channing’s weight is just the right amount of heavy, even when he’s not supporting it, and with werewolf metabolism, his presence over me is like a warm, heavy quilt. Even when I’m not so exhausted, the lull his warm sand and salty ocean smell and the heat of his body is enough to make me contentedly drowsy. It’s like a magic spell.

Caging me with his arms, he rests his forehead on the ground near my shoulder as emotionally wrung out and physically exhausted as I feel. Only he’s absolved himself of any more responsibility for the running mess between dragon and wolf. In the same way the dragons have depended upon the oracles to help them claim their mates, now, he’s depending on me to create the solution I demanded.

God. This is so daunting. No wonder the wolves have just kept pressing the advantage of their numbers. In this moment, it certainly seems like it would be a lot easier to let them find Drake.

Sometimes, being the right person in the place where things have gone all wrong is a real b***h.

I was the girl who planned to take the easy way out—get a degree, get a job, get out of Crossroads.

Then I was the technomage who still wanted to do those things but added kill a dragon to the early part of the list.

Now, I’m the mage whose memories of the distant past as Jillian are clearer than the lifetime I spent as Mia and I don’t know why. Whose every encounter with both wolf and dragon muddies the water and makes deciding what to do an agony.

I’m the mage whose abilities are vastly beyond manipulation of technology, but don’t include divining the dragon’s damn mate, which is the one skill I really need right now.

I’m the mage who’s confused as all hell by that because I was the oracle bloodline, but now I’m not. Sort of.

I’m the mage who took a wolf as mate, and I’ve added exponentially to his burden by complicating the significant issues facing him inside Avernus.

And I’m the mage who also mated the dragon, complicating my own issues, because apparently, I didn’t have enough challenges facing me.

Which means I’m the mage who has to sort all this s**t and quickly.

I distinctly hear Karma laughing at me.

At my ear, Channing’s breathing is regular and even as he drifts, hopefully blissfully, in a deep drowse. I’d dearly like to join him in dreamland, but I shake off yet another corporeal demand for sleep. My well and truly laid body aches in all the best places and all the best ways and the memory of that delicious pounding is joltingly clear in the exhausted space inside me that my mate still occupies. Savoring it, I let my eyes lose focus and drift over the texturing on the ceiling above me.

There’s nothing I can do about what happened between me and Drake besides regret it. That and maybe pray to God that Channing never finds out. God willing, if he does, he doesn’t forsake me for it.

I can attempt to make that serious snafu right marginally by finding the woman who’s supposed to be Drake’s mate. Someone besides me. To do that, I need the oracle.

To find the oracle, I need to trace Jillian Jinks’ descendants and hope that since she was an oracle, there will be someone else in that lineage who is too.

Which brings me back to needing access to Heritage.

Stalemate.

Or almost. I would probably help my search if I was in the Heritage database. Or at least the DNA database, which means I should submit a sample for testing. Especially since I have a suspicion that the historical records won’t give me much.

I also need to get a better bead on Ferdi definitely, but in all probability, Damien too. The burgeoning relationship between Damien and Fia will give me some time in the latter circumstance. It’s a small comfort considering he was the lesser of my worries, and likely to be as distracted as a toddler in a toy store.

Not Ferdi though.

He’s fixed his sights clearly. He won’t stop at killing me either, since that’s the quickest and easiest way to get himself into power as the Alpha. No. Once he’s there, he’ll hunt down the rest of my bloodline, he’ll kill Drake too. And he’ll kill off potential challengers among the wolf population.

Just because he can.

I glance at my sleeping mate’s face. Even though he’s drifting in dreamland, I can see the tension there. In the scowling set of his square jaw and strong brow. In the slightly pressed line of his fine lips. I shift myself beneath him just slightly, giving myself a better view.

“Jericho.” My name is barely a murmur, and instinctively, his arms wrap closer around me. “Sleep, babydoll.”

It’s marginally amusing, since there’s no way my one-hundred-twenty pound bony body is throwing off his two-hundred-ten pounds of werewolf and I’m not stupid enough to think I could. It also fills me with a ferocious tenderness. A warm shiver cascades in little hops and burbles over my body, settling into the space between my legs where we’re still joined and feeding the afterglow of his fervent lovemaking. I brush a kiss over his lips, savoring the taste of him and us—of virile potency, determination, and reliability, of his mouth and my mouth and my s*x.

Of heat and contentment.

Hot on those emotions’ heels comes the utter exhaustion, the completely drained bonelessness of having been romped, long and hard and thoroughly, right into the floor. The beachy male scent of him suffuses the space between us, as warm and potent as the solid strength of him on top of me. His arms tighten closer around me and he nuzzles his face into my neck. Exhaling a relaxed sigh, I let sleep take me.

**

Sometime later I feel Channing stir. Far too soon for my still incoherent mind drifting on a blissful cloud of slumber far away to form a response.

“Babydoll.” His low, smooth tenor at my ear prods at my consciousness. “Jericho.”

Still inside me, his generous tool stirs interestedly, and he tests the waters with a couple languid strokes.

The most I can muster in response is a humming “mmm”.

“I’m going to move, Jericho,” he warns. “Or not,” he says wryly feeling my legs flex against the backs of his thighs. My arms slither further around his neck, clinging to him like a choking vine.

I give a soft grunt of protest feeling the weight of his upper body press hard into mine. Then his hands are moving along my ribcage, up inside the wrap of my arms and pressing down against my shoulders. He makes three quick jerks to free himself, as if counting—one, two, three. Then once his neck is free, he unwinds each of my legs from his thighs.

My moan of protest earns a low chuckle, then Channing scoops me into his arms.

“I know what will wake you up.”

Well, he’s not wrong.

The mere threat of him dropping me in a cold shower snaps my eyes open instantly. He clutches me close against his chest, belying the threat I thought he was making.

In the bathroom, he rubs one elbow against the switch to turn on the light, then deposits me on the counter beside the sink. Drawing the curtain across the tub, he starts the water warming, then closes the bathroom door and returns to me at the counter.

Brushing his lips over the exposed hollow where his mark rests, he slides his hands around to cup my bottom and pull me to him. I wrap my arms about his neck as he lifts, freeing his other hand to test the temperature of the spray. Satisfied, he steps into the shower with us both, setting me on my feet.

He keeps one arm around me as he draws the curtain closed, then reaches for the soap. Much to my amusement, he manages to wash the both of us thoroughly with only one hand. But the slippery bar and the suds it leaves behind have the effect I think he intends. Within minutes, he’s rigid between us, and the tender petals between my legs that he’d just washed clean are slippery again, but not from the soap.

As soon as we’re both rinsed, he gets us out of the shower. Out of the warm spray, my skin erupts in goose flesh even though the damp humidity still swirls around us. I shiver, and the sight of the shimmering drops still clinging to my goosebump-covered skin and the tightened tips of my breasts draws a low moan of purely hedonistic desire from him.

I half expect to find myself on the floor beneath him, but Channing only takes a thick fluffy towel from the rack and dries me thoroughly. He uses the same towel to dry himself, then hangs it up to air dry for the next use.

“Will you be okay to do some hiking in the shoes you were wearing?”

I arch a brow. “Is that a rhetorical question? I spent six days per week working twelve hour shifts in those shoes and walking to and from work in them. If you can dish it, my Converse can take it.”  

A lazy smile curls the corners of his mouth and inside I turn melty. 

“That’s true of their owner too,” he comments. “I’ll get your clothes. Once we’re dressed, we’ll take a walk to the Giant's Causeway.

**

The Giant’s Causeway is on the Antrim coast near the northeast tip of the island. It’s a World Heritage site, which means it’s an area with legal protection under an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Each site globally has some type of significance—culturally, historically, or scientifically—and in the case of the Giant’s Causeway, it has more than one.

It’s about a three-mile easy hike from the cottage to the causeway, a rocky stretch of beach and bluffs composed of interlocking basalt columns created ages ago by the eruption of a volcanic fissure. To visit the causeway itself is free, but there’s a charge for the Visitor’s Center and for the bus that shuttles visitors the last mile down to that actual stones, if you opt to use it.

Naturally, because I’m mated to a werewolf, we don’t bother with the bus. Which is fine, because he can carry me if I don't feel like walking. The Visitor’s Center offers audio devices with each paid admission, so Channing selects the scientific one and I get the non-scientific one, and we start down the last sloping mile to the causeway.

Halfway down, my mate abruptly turns off his audio device with an annoyed huff. “I really regret this decision,” he comments as we stop at our fourth or fifth guidepost. “I can’t listen to,” he drops his voice to a documentary announcer’s smooth drone, “‘66 million years ago, yadda yadda yadda’ even one more time.”

I can’t help my laugh. “Try mine, beefcake. I like you enough that I’ll share.”

The non-scientific audio tells the story of Finn McCool. The Irish legend says that Finn was a giant who lived along the Antrim coast centuries ago. By chance, he heard of another giant who lived across the water in Scotland and decided to stir up some trouble. He tore up chunks of his shoreline, throwing them into the water, thus creating a causeway that connected Ireland with Scotland. Prepared now, he used the causeway to get to Scotland, looking for a fight with this other giant, named Benandonner.

Only when he got to Scotland, he learned Benandonner was twice his size, and, regretting his decision, dashed back across the causeway to his home. Word came not long after that the Scottish giant had pursued Finn. To save himself the beatdown, Finn had his wife disguise him as a baby.

Taking one look at the enormous ‘baby’ son of Finn McCool, Benandonner decided Finn must be an even larger giant than himself and fled to Scotland, destroying much of the causeway to prevent Finn from following. What Benandonner left is roughly forty-thousand interlocking basalt columns that are mostly hexagonal but may have as few as four sides or as many as eight.

“I like the story better,” Channing tells me. “Except for it seems like this whole trip has become a lesson in humility for me.”

I can tell at once that he’s come to the same conclusion I have, which is that the story of Finn McCool, the wily Irish giant, and his argument with the Scottish giant, Benandonner, sounds an awful lot like the shenanigans the werewolves have going on with the dragons.

Suppressing my laugh at the irony, I ask, “What’s the scientific explanation for the hexagon-shaped stone?” I nudge the audio device hanging uselessly from his neck.

“Oh. This says the particular shapes of the columns are the result of instant cooling when the basalt rock hit the water upon eruption of the fissure,” he advises.

We spend a little more time tootling around the main causeway, and taking Channing’s required vacation selfies in front of the Giant’s Gate rock formation which rises some eighty feet above sea level, the Organ Pipes formation and the Giant’s Boot. Then we hike the Blue Trail back to the Visitor’s Center. There’s a café there, so we rest for a while and people-watch, grabbing a snack to share and something to drink, then start the hike back to the cottage hand in hand.

"You think I'm being foolish, don't you?" Channing asks as we walk through the tranquil countryside. 

I shrug. "I think you're a man caught in the middle. You're doing the best you can with the information available to you. I know I can't, but I wish I could change your mind."

He lifts our clasped hands to his lips, kissing each of my knuckles. "What makes you think you can't?"

"Because I don't think you're in a position where anyone will let you draw your own conclusions."