“I didn’t tell you to fight a cyclops!” Remy growls.

Flint finishes with Billie Eilish and moves on to BTS’s “Dynamite.” And oh my God. Listening to him belt out one of the boy band’s biggest hits has me all but suffocating as I try not to laugh.

“What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Do. To. Him?” Remy grinds out through his teeth as he stares between Flint and Calder.

“You told us to get a number from Bellamy. We got the number. But we had to drink with him until he was drunk enough to spill.” She gives Flint an affectionate smile. “Apparently, he looks a lot tougher than he is.”

Flint responds by waving goofily at her and changing to Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball.”

“Apparently,” Remy says as he turns to me. “Can you do something to help them?”

I stare between Flint and Hudson, who is currently sniffing my hair and telling me how good I smell, and ask, “What exactly do you suggest I do? Keeping in mind that this mess was all your idea.”

Remy blows out a long breath, then sinks down on the bench across from Hudson. “What was the number Bellamy gave you?”

Calder’s amusement disappears as quickly as it came. “He said it needed to be at least a hundred thou.”

“Per person?”

“Yeah.”

Remy does a little shrug, as if to say, The hits just keep on coming. Then he sighs and asks Hudson, “So how much did you win?”

Hudson stops sniffing my hair long enough to reach under the table and pull out a sack of money, which he drops on the table next to Flint’s head. It’s filled with gold coins—so many that I’m a little dizzy—but Remy looks disappointed.

“If that’s all, then we are fucked,” he tells Hudson.

But Hudson just laughs—and then groans and holds his ribs. “It hurts,” he wheezes to me.

“Oh, baby.” I press a superlight kiss on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

“Don’t let him make me laugh,” he answers. Then bends down and pulls out another sack of money. And another. And another.

And another.

“Holy shit,” Calder says, her eyes huge. “How many people did you fight?”

“All of them.”

“All of them?” Remy asks. “Everyone in the arena?”

“Everyone in all the arenas,” Hudson clarifies. “They just kept lining up, so I just kept knocking them back down. You told me we needed a lot.”

“Yeah, I did. No wonder you’re so fucking loopy.” Remy shakes his head, then shoots me a grin. “I’ve been reserving judgment up until now, cher, but your mate’s a stand-up guy.”

Hudson is back to sniffing my hair, so I laugh and say, “Yeah. Yeah, he is.”

“I do have one question, though,” Remy adds.

“What’s that?”

“If things go to shit in the next couple of hours, what the hell are we supposed to do with them?”

136

Talk About a Giant

Temper Tantrum

I don’t have an answer for that question except to say, “Vampires heal fast.”

“That fast?” Calder asks.

“I have no idea.”

Remy stands up again. “Let’s see if we can’t get the dragon and Golden Gloves over here on their feet enough to head back to the blacksmith.”

“Can you walk, baby?” I ask Hudson.

“For you?” He sighs. “Anything.” And then nearly falls backward as he stands up.

I quickly reach an arm around his waist and let him lean against me. He pushes his face into my hair and sniffs. “I love the way you smell.” Which, okay. He smells pretty good himself. But then he adds, “You taste better, though,” and my cheeks heat.

I glance around to see if anyone heard him, but Calder is trying to coax a glass of water down Flint. “Come on, big guy. Drink up. I’ll sing ‘YMCA’ with you if you can walk on your own.”

Flint sits up like someone gave him an IV of coffee, then grins goofily at Calder. “Really?”

She rolls her eyes. “If I must…”

Flint staggers to his feet. “A deal’s a deal. But you gotta do the arm movements, too.” And then he starts belting out the first line of the iconic song.

“I’ve got the funds,” Remy says as he starts hoisting the sacks of gold coins into his arms.

“How much time do we have?” I ask, glancing at Hudson again, who is still none too steady on his feet.

“Not a lot. Why?”

“I thought maybe we could catch up to you in a few.” I try to sound casual, but even I know it fails—even before his eyes narrow.

“What’s going on, Grace?” Remy asks suspiciously.

“I was hoping maybe I could…” I don’t know why I’m so embarrassed to admit this out loud. It’s a normal biological function.

“Maybe you could …?” Now he’s beginning to look pissed.

“I thought I could give Hudson a few minutes to drink from me,” I finally blurt out. “The blood will help him recover faster.”

“Oh!” Remy goes from suspicious to amused in two seconds flat. “I’ve got to admit, cher, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Had what in me?” Now I’m a little insulted. Do I not seem like the kind of girl who would take care of her mate?

“It’s okay,” Hudson says, and though his words are still a little slurred, his eyes are sincere. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Yeah, but you’re hurt—”

He wraps an arm around my neck and pulls me close. “Grace, there’s no way I’m going to take blood from you in the middle of a bunch of criminals. Who knows what kind of lowlifes that will attract?” He kisses my nose—which would be weird except for the fact that I think he was aiming for my mouth. “Besides,” he whispers kind of close to my ear, “once I get to bite you again, I don’t think I’m going to want to stop anytime soon.”

His words make me flush a little, but before I can respond with something a little bit sexy, Calder calls back to us that she’s going to come do the “YMCA” dance on our asses if we don’t shake a leg.

“We really don’t have time anyway,” Remy says and turns away to catch up with Flint and Calder.

Hudson smiles at me, then leans in for another kiss. This time he gets the bottom of my chin. “I’m going to take you up on that offer when we get out of here,” he tells me groggily.

“If we get out of here,” I answer grimly even as we catch up to the others and start making our way back to the blacksmith and his furnace.

It only takes us a few minutes to make it to the forge again, even though half the group is staggering. Partly because Flint’s dragon metabolism is sobering him up in record time, and partly because when no one was watching, I let Hudson take a few pulls of blood from my wrist. I couldn’t stand the idea of him suffering, even if he was starting to heal. He’s certainly nowhere near 100 percent with such a small amount of blood, but I can already see his eyes and lips are clearing up and mending and he’s walking on his own power again.

As we near the blacksmith, Vander says, “I have the key.” Then he checks us over, taking in that we look a little worse for wear since he saw us last, and pats the large pocket on his shirt. “I’ll keep it safe until we all get out.”

“I have a flower to give you that will simulate your death,” I say, pointing to one of my flower tattoos. “Once they think you’re dead, they’ll remove your body from the prison and you will be free. We don’t have enough flowers for everyone, though, so we need the key so we can exit in a different way.”

“Give me one of the flowers now,” the giant says.

I glance at Hudson, who just nods; then I think about how badly I need the flowers. After that, I reach toward my tattoo… And then nearly screech in surprise when one of the flowers floats off my palm like it was waiting for me to call for it.

The Crone assured me it would work no matter what. At the time, I wasn’t sure why she was so insistent, but now I know what she meant. Or at least I hope I do. She was insisting that her flowers’ magic would work here, even though nobody else’s does.

I hope she’s right.

“Right good job!” Hudson whispers to me, and I grin at him, because the British always makes me smile. And also because his eyes appear a bit clearer than they did, and that makes me happy.

“Give me that!” the giant growls and grabs at the flower, then tosses it into his mouth. It’s so small, he can swallow it without chewing, and we all step way back in an effort to keep a twenty-foot giant from falling on us.

Except…nothing happens.

He doesn’t fall over. He doesn’t die. He doesn’t even look sleepy, actually. Just pissed off. “You tricked me.”

“We didn’t!” I tell him. “The flowers are supposed to work.”

“You’re going to pay for this,” Vander says. “Nobody lies to me.”

“Don’t threaten my mate,” Hudson says coldly, and for the first time since the fight debacle, he sounds like the old Hudson. “We didn’t lie to you. Maybe you’re, I don’t know, immune,” he tells him.

“Why would I be immune?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you’re twenty feet tall and a thousand pounds and it’s one little flower?” Hudson shoots back. “Or maybe giants don’t respond to this. How are we supposed to know?”