Temporal gifts, p.1
Temporal Gifts, page 1
Temporal Gifts
Whitney Hill
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, people, or places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.
TEMPORAL GIFTS
Copyright © 2023 by Whitney Hill
All rights reserved. This book is for your personal use only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Thank you for supporting the author by purchasing this book.
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ISBN (ebook): 979-8-9873785-3-3
ISBN (pbook): 979-8-9873785-4-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906534
Cover Designer: Pintado (99Designs)
Editor: Jeni Chappelle (Jeni Chappelle Editorial)
Content Warnings
This book contains strong physical violence and gore, on-page death, swearing, slurs (not toward any real racial or ethnic group/identity), alcohol use, knife violence, threat of sexual violence, mention of past abuse by a guardian, deadnaming, state-sanctioned violence, blood-drinking, consensual on-page sex scenes, and brief mention of off-page/past sexual assault.
For those who have had to reclaim their power from people who refuse to see it.
Contents
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
Also By Whitney Hill
About the Author
Chapter 1
A storm raged in a desert, winds whistling through tall stone spires and clouds blocking out the moon.
Or I thought it did. I was asleep. Dreaming. I knew I was dreaming. I knew the storm wasn’t real, that it was just a figment of my subconscious. The stirred-up agitation brought on by being presented with the weight of what I had to do in waking life, bringing the elves and the djinn together once more and restoring balance in Otherside.
So I indulged myself in a way I couldn’t in the waking world. I became the storm.
Fell into the gale and pummeling rain that sent a deluge of sandy mud streaming around me. Wrenched every drop of moisture out of the sky, then drew more in.
I would see this desert bloom.
A cramp tightened my muscles. Odd. I shook my head and ignored it. I needed this release.
Another cramp. This time, a stronger one. Then another when I tried to push it away, strong enough to drop me to my knees.
I lost control of the storm.
My eyes snapped open, and I gasped awake.
I was drenched, and so was the bed—and a deathly serious-looking Troy and everything in the damn bedroom. Sand was heaped in the corners, and the lamps had toppled from the nightstands. The space reeked of burnt marshmallow. Those cramps must have been him trying a spell to get me conscious. Underlying that was the dry scent of the desert though, like I’d somehow pulled even that part of my dream into the real world.
My heart stopped as I took in the trashed room. When I brought my attention back to Troy, he lifted his brows, expression still hard.
I shook my head. “I have no idea what— This has never happened before. Nothing in my dreams is real.”
“Nothing in your dreams was real.” His quiet, even tones said he was controlling a strong reaction. The bond was locked down, so I couldn’t tell what.
“Did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“Physically, I’m fine.” I shuddered and disentangled myself from sodden sheets. A puddle splashed as I got out of bed. “But this? What the hell.”
“What happened?”
“I was dreaming. A storm in the desert. I knew it was a dream, so I just…let go. It’s not real, Troy.” Maybe if I kept saying it, it’d be true. Even if I knew life didn’t work like that.
Sighing, he got out of bed and dragged his wet T-shirt off before throwing the window all the way open and peering outside. “Looks like the effects were limited to this room.”
I went to check the kitchen, finding it dry and sand-free except for the trickle of water making its way under the crack of the bedroom door. It smelled like dinner, not the desert.
“Yeah. Okay.” I reined in the rising panic.
I’d cast in my sleep before but only ever Air. I’d never just created sand—or pulled it from the dream?—or drenched a room. There wasn’t even sand like that in this area. It felt wrong. Or at least different, like the sand at Wrightsville Beach had felt different from the sand at Jordan Lake. But more. A completely different composition. Nothing that was around here.
Think. I needed to think.
Troy was still looking at me like he was trying real hard not to demand answers I might not be able to give. I couldn’t call Duke; I still got the twisty feeling in my stomach at the idea of asking him what this was about.
Duke. I couldn’t call him, but I had spoken to him. He’d said something that I had no idea what it meant. But I couldn’t figure out what else this could be.
“Chaos spheres,” I said. “I told Duke about dreams of the forest and the beach and that you were there sometimes. He swore and told me I should have said something. Said it was a talent and implied it required a certain amount of strength. That’s the only thing I can think of, but I have no idea what it is or what it means. And he refused to tell me.”
Troy stiffened. “Wait. You dream of a forest and a beach? Tall redwoods? Cliffs? Like something on the West Coast. Seattle.”
I nodded. “I mean, I don’t know what the Seattle area looks like but yeah. Big trees. Cliffs or mountains or something. And you’re always there. But I only have the dream when we’re separated.”
He went very still. “I wonder if that’s why I stopped dreaming of you there when I moved in.”
Flushing, I nodded and looked around the bedroom again, trying to distract myself from the idea that he might actually have been in my dreams for real—or I was in his. Some of those dreams had been…interesting.
“Lemme clean up. We’ll figure it out,” I said.
He kissed my cheek as he passed to the bathroom, telling me he’d only been scared for me, not mad.
Or maybe a little mad. Frustrated. I could see it in the line of his shoulders. As my bondmate, fiancé, and sometime bodyguard, he didn’t like when things got out of his control, and while he didn’t try to control me these days, he did like to have some control over the environment.
Nothing for it.
Centering myself, I surrendered to Water and pulled all the excess moisture in the room into a ball. That went out the unscreened window with a splash before I embraced Earth and did the same with the sand. The water-damaged papers on my nightstand and the fried jamming device Troy had in the one on his side got a sigh. I could only manipulate the elements, not magically restore paper and electronics. Fortunately, the laptops were in the kitchen, and our phones were at least a little waterproof. I gathered them up and headed to the kitchen to bury them in a bowl of rice, just in case, before changing my clothes.
The first light of dawn was peeking above the trees when I peered out the window. Far too early to be up, but my heart was troubled enough that I didn’t think I’d make it back to sleep. Certainly not tonight. Sleeping had been hard enough when the gods of the hunt kept pulling me into the Crossroads, but that was almost better than this. At least then I had someone to blame then.
Now there was nobody to blame except myself.
I didn’t know what was going on or how to fix it. All I knew was that if I went to sleep, I might do some magic that could hurt Troy. And while he had some auratic talent, I doubted he could stand against this new power. He’d been born a Monteague, and they leaned heavily toward mental manipulation.
He came back out of the bathroom while I was changing the sheets. He dressed in the cut-off grey sweatpants and T-shirt that said he’d be going for a run after this and helped me finish with the bed before asking, “What’s on your mind?”
Of course he picked up that I was noodling on something. “Two things. We can’t tell the djinn about this. Duke gets squirrely every time dreaming comes up, and you heard what he said about Dreamwalki
“Why my dad?”
“Because I think he knows something.”
Troy’s expression shuttered. “About djinn dream talents? Or yours in particular?”
I shrugged. “Sight doesn’t work like that for me. I just know it’s something to do with him.”
“I don’t think I like that. He’s up to something.”
This time, I bit my tongue. Troy’s feelings about being reunited with his father were complicated, and it’d only been a few days. None of us could get a read on the man, and neither Troy nor Allegra could recall him acting as erratically as he did now. None of us knew if it was a consequence of being in solitary imprisonment for twenty years, a residual effect of having been tortured, something to do with his trickster patron, or all of the above. Or something else entirely. Either way, Troy would need time and space to work through it.
When the bed was done, he grabbed a pair of socks. “Moon’s making me itchy, and now I’m up again. Will you be okay if I go for a run?”
“Yeah. I need to have a think about how to get the elves and the djinn to agree to this new House structure. I don’t want to leave it until the last minute.”
He gave me a long look that said he knew I was avoiding sleep again but just said, “Okay. Back in a bit.”
I threw myself on the bed as he headed out.
Step by step, I went through my memory of the dream, trying to figure out at what point it had gone from just a dream to something that could be pulled into the real. That and how I’d done it. I hadn’t even known it was possible for dreams to be real.
When that line of thought failed to produce answers, I turned to what it might mean. That my magical strength was growing, obviously. But Harqil had been concerned yesterday when I told them about the prophecy, or whatever it was, and they’d suggested someone else might have been naughty.
Was this power even mine?
That soured my mood another lemon. The last thing I needed when I was already battling imposter syndrome was to doubt whether the things I was doing were even mine to control or if I was as much a puppet to some unknown god now as I’d been when Neith’s gift had taken over my mind. If that was the case, I needed to know how they were influencing me. Harqil’s gem was the only new gift I’d accepted from the gods, but that was in a lead-lined neutrality box. I’d had to be holding the knife Neith had given me for it to influence me. So if it was outside influence, it was by some other means.
Shit.
Whatever it was, I had no answers and no way to begin to get them unless I wanted to call Duke, could get Cyrus to talk to me, or Harqil dropped in for another visit.
I shoved the worries in a mental box to deal with later. If I had no answers, I had to focus on something I had a chance of controlling or at least influencing. Top of mind just now was the safety of my home. The boundaries might have been secure, but I was still pissed that the Sons of Seth had dared to attack and more so that the Bureau for Supernatural Investigation had apparently authorized it. Acting Director Sinclaire had also made threats against my people, which I needed to do something about. The kidnapping attempt had failed, and now her little shadow op hadn’t managed to take me out, so the smart option would be to try weakening me by going after one of the local faction heads next since I was proving too much to handle. It almost made me miss the days of being a private investigator, when my biggest concern was finding my next client and keeping Callista happy.
My head spun a little at that thought—the near-nostalgia for Callista as a simpler problem. Life really had taken a strange turn.
Restlessness drove me to get up and make a cup of tea, mulling over what angle to take with the mundane issue. I might be pissed about my home, but I kept having to remind myself it wasn’t all about me anymore. I needed to restore balance within Otherside and between Otherside and the mundanes, and I needed to protect everyone while doing so. Harqil had said balance was the price of magic, and we were currently in debt. Deep in debt. I had to work fast if we were gonna have any chance of keeping magic.
The wereleopards were going to be the most vulnerable. But Maria was still struggling to regain control of the vampires in Raleigh, I had elves acting out on my borders, and I hadn’t heard anything from the werewolves in the mountains in far too long. If I didn’t get Otherside in line, fast, our best chance at achieving balance and keeping magic was fucked.
I couldn’t let that happen. Which meant I needed to set aside the damn mundanes for a minute and get this House restructure done. The Otherside population was too small for any one faction to establish a balance alone. We needed all of us, united.
Calmed somewhat by having something to do and somewhere to start, I took my tea to the deck out back to keep plotting and watch for Troy’s return. I called a gust of wind to clear the remaining sand I’d chucked out from the bedroom, pushing away the unsettled feeling that tried to rise again.
Nothing I could do about it right now, no matter how much my stomach clenched.
A nudge in the bond pulled my attention to the tree line.
Troy vaulted the fence rather than using the gate. From the steady look he gave me, he wasn’t at all surprised to find me still up and, at the same time, was swallowing a scolding.
Once upon a time, I would have been annoyed at that. Felt like he was treating me like a spoiled child. Now I just understood that it was born out of the depths of his care for me and the effort to let me be me, even if he thought I was hurting myself, because he knew me well enough to know pushing me would draw out my contrary streak.
Instead of pissing me off, a different heat lit in me.
He paused then inhaled deeply as he slowly mounted the stairs. His dilating pupils said he was fully aware of the shift in my mood as much from my scent as the bond, probably.
“Where did that come from?” he asked.
“I want you.” The words jumped from me with no thought, let alone grace. Just pure sentiment.
He smirked. “You had me all last night.”
“Well now I want more.”
“I know that. What—”
“You’re the one constant I have. I cannot catch a single fucking break. Shit just keeps changing. And the only time I feel like I can breathe is when I’m with you. I—I need you. Please.” I shut my mouth so hard my teeth clacked, trying to stop the gale of words as my face flushed.
I was usually more reserved than this, but lately, I was so afraid of being too much. Afraid that all the growing I was being forced into would push him away, no matter what he said about growing alongside me. I was feeling insecure as hell because I couldn’t even fucking sleep without possibly ending the world, and I just needed to know he was still my anchor.
I dropped every wall on my side of the bond, a dirty emotional play, but one I thought he’d understand.
On silent feet, he approached until he towered over me. With a single finger, he tipped my chin up. A darkly playful grin curled his lips. “If you want me, you’ll have to catch me.”
I was up before he finished, but he was still too fast for me.
Despite his earlier run, he led me on a wild chase through the woods and back to the house before finally tiring enough for me to bring him down when he stumbled after jumping the fence again.
I straddled his hips and trapped his wrists against the ground, hesitant and still worried about being too much at first, then harder when he moved to throw me off.
“I love you,” I whispered against his lips.
He kissed me as he dropped the walls on his side of the bond, signaling his surrender. “And I will always love you, no matter how scary your powers get. Never doubt it, cariñamí.”
With those comforting words, I got off him and dragged him inside to claim my prize, determined to carve out a little something good before throwing myself into the new set of problems that’d landed on me.
Chapter 2
Those problems apparently would not be abating anytime soon, as I discovered when I dragged myself into my office at the bar. Of all the shit I thought I was gonna have to deal with this month, turning a mundane into a wereleopard was definitely not it.
