Demons & Dragons

by Gina Kincade

  As Kyna learns of the magic hidden inside her, purposefully stunted for her protection as she grew up, she must now battle mystical hauntings—the result of curses—while getting a crash course in utilizing her powers.

  Kidnappings and satanic weddings become her daily events as she struggles not to lose her heart to one of two men—a former Navy SEAL hired to protect her, or a wizard hired to train her.

  Soon she will realize just how true it is that “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

  Chapter One

  Ominous fanfare greeted her arrival in County Monaghan. Lightning shred the fall of dusk as a grisly storm surrounded the car. Her every nerve vibrated with electricity; the well read letter in her hand trembling in the heat of her clenched fist. Her last minute research of this part of Northern Ireland had not done the place justice. Beauty, that of a rolling and majestic nature even in the dark downpour, stole her already shallow breath.

  The thousand slices of light tearing through the sky reflected in the grey water beside the road. Kyna perceived the ominous black shadows cast by the trees as decrepit, arthritic fingers reaching out for her from the heavy flowing stream. A resounding flood of sound, deep undulating thunder, made her curl her body in on itself as she angled away from the window streaming with tears from the sky. The squall so violent, she imagined the glass would shatter. Never one to cower, she swore in a whisper to herself. Ever since she’d landed in Ireland, someone or a something, specifically an indescribable dark presence, followed her. Sure, it made no sense, but she couldn’t convince her over-stimulated brain and racing heart.

  Trying to swallow despite the dryness in her mouth, looking straight ahead, her gaze following the peaks and valleys of the deserted stretch of road, she sought a moment’s peace from the raging internal war. Deep breathing exercises had yet to award her tranquility. This unexpected twist in her life over the past few days propelled her toward her wits end. From the moment she’d pulled the cream-colored, gold-trimmed envelope containing the correspondence from her mailbox, every part of her being had been altered in some way. From bursts of indefinable energy making her want to run a marathon, to unbidden ideas reminiscent of familiar dreams, to a feeling of having a sixth sense that warned of impending danger, she warred within to maintain some semblance of composure. She didn’t understand her own body anymore, but had not the time or the mental capacity to analyze the abrupt changes as she traveled.

  Erratic thought patterns plagued her instead, a barrage of unanswered questions. Prior to that fateful letter, she’d just been a girl from the foothills of the Alleghany Mountains, having lived her whole life in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. Her mother’s confession of her true heritage came when confronted with the communication, the damned letter, scrolled in a shaky hand, from an aunt from Ireland she never knew existed.

  Apparently, Kyna was more Irish than she knew, as in born in Ireland and adopted through the Irish Mafia into the United States. The father she barely remembered, a man who’d died in a mining accident when she’d been barely five years old, had ties to the organization. She’d been a black market baby, for the love of all that is holy! The adoption had born conditions. Telling the poor child of her adoption a deal breaker, punishable by death. None of these random facts brought about feelings of safety and security as she traveled abroad to meet her aunt on her biological mother’s side.

  The letter, the freaking destroy-a-simple-life letter, ranted on for two pages of a heartbreaking tale. Her birth mother, Alana O’Riagain, had passed away a few years ago. Her aunt, Saoirse O’Riagain, now desperately wanted to meet her only living relative. Kyna’s birth father and his family were all long ago buried, so whatever perceived danger her mother had given her away to protect her from had passed away with them. Maybe her tired eyes played her for a fool, but even now Kyna swore the words on the paper in her hand depicting imminent danger appeared written in an even shakier scrawl.

  Rain assaulted the car window with the unrelenting onslaught of gunfire. Her pulse beat a rapid-tattoo, as if she were under attack. Another round of multiple lightning strikes flashed the dark sky to bright, ones that crossed the distance of the sky to the ground, bringing Kyna out of her murky thoughts of a re-written past to a clearly foreboding present. Just ahead, the first visuals of her aunt’s home in Armaugh appeared and disappeared in brief glimpses granted by the windshield wipers and the lightning.

  Her breath caught at the vast size of what resembled a castle on a hill. A steep incline of land seemed formed to hold up the formidable, three-level, stone façade. The structure consisted of several three-sided bays stuck together and one four-storey imposing tower to the right side. On the tower hung corner bartizans. These came into view as they made the sheer climb closer to her ancestral home. These rounded, grey stone turrets, cut with windows, multiplied her sense of being watched, that some sinister being stood sentinel over her, overseeing her every move.

  Crazy. All of it. She’d lost her mind to the sense of foreboding, and she had to get it back in the immediate future. Tough, a fighter in an impoverished world, surely she could handle whatever this display of wealth held for her. But, little made sense. Her past lay in a shamble of lies around her feet. Her future looked...well, scary. She had a lot to sort out, and planned to get right to it once she met her aunt.

  Her mouth had remained parched and her shoulders tense since she’d landed in this country. Her body betrayed her in various other ways as well. Strange sensations of heat in her core coupled with flashes of what she could only refer to as static electricity along her limbs, made her feel a foreigner in her own skin.

  As her driver pulled up to the grand entrance to the residence, put the car in park, grunted, and pulled himself out of the vehicle, Kyna took advantage of another long streak of lightning strikes to gaze upon this veritable castle of a house. The bays had mullioned windows, curvilinear gables, and tall, dark brick chimneys. While she presumed the stone to be a light grey in the light of day, it accosted her with looming shades of smoke, as if old and charred, from her storm-shielded, misty view.

  The metallic shriek of her door opening sent a wave of panic crashing over her. From her teeth set on a painful edge, to that cold slither of fear down her spine, she forced herself to ignore each physical sensation, each body betrayal. She looked toward her driver as a streak of lightning silhouetted him, made him a dark outline like that of a large, monster-figure looming over her. He had several inches on her, as well as a bulky, full-muscled build one could only achieve with hours in a gym or steroids, she assumed. As he reached for her hand, the strength of his grip intensified to painful when an explosion of thunder cracked over them seconds later. She reminded herself, as a means of comfort, what little she knew of the man. Aedan Dunne, employed by her aunt, served as head of security; a man the woman trusted with her life.

  In a brief conversation at the airport, Kyna had learned through grumbles of words in response to her barrage of questions, that the man had been injured then forced into an early retirement from the Navy SEALs. Irish-born, he’d come home in hope of finding similar work, something where a mere leg injury would not be the big deal the military had made it out to be. While he may not be able to hide underwater at night in frigid water for hours like he used to without pain and cramping of the damaged muscles, he could surely protect on land, a home and a woman. From what her aunt had written of Aedan, while he may be short on words, failure wasn’t in his vocabulary.

  The cool sweat covering her skin intensified with the firm grip Aedan took of her waist once she stood. While casting shy glances at his face, what she could see of it for the shadows created by his hood: sharp cheekbones chiseled into a grimace, out of the corner of her eye she caught the image of a man and a woman in black uniforms run to the trunk of the car and grab her belongings in a swift and sure manner. To her, the rain-soaked stones that made up the pathway to the inset of the main
door resembled yet another insurmountable obstacle. Really, she’d reached that point in her day. Every little thing currently escalated to dramatic portions. Never the type to make a mountain out of a molehill, she straightened her spine, lifted her head, and pushed her shoulders backward, determined not to start now.

  Yes, life had dumped a whole crap load of change and new discoveries on her. By the looks of things, another dump truck sped her way, but her mother hadn’t raised a quitter. Besides, Aedan’s strong arms and solid frame offered a possible means to diversion, if desired. From what her glimpses in the airport had gathered her, outside of being exactly what she’d imagine a SEAL to be, retired, he could now pursue a career in modeling with his intense dark eyes and full lips. Simply put, he had rugged, good looks that rivaled anything she’d seen in the movies. He stood strong and tall beside her, an image of masculinity beyond any she’d witnessed before, at least in her mind.

  While she dared another look, Aedan focused on getting her inside. With her first glimpse despite the rain that fell in large drops from the hood framing his face, her stomach tightened even more. Locks of dark chestnut brown hair fell in long, messy sections on each side of his forehead. Long, dark eyelashes framed wide moon-shaped eyes interspersed with flecks of green and gold shimmering in the reflection of the house lights. Intense and mesmerizing, she lost her train of thought, even as curiosity and anxiety mixed to further unsettle her.

  In perfect symmetry, the slim, angular, fu Manchu moustache thing he had going on accented the sharp ridges of his cheekbones. Scruff filled in his jaw line. Whether intended or not, he worked the look, appeared more wild and beast-like. She quivered at the thought of such a man attacking her, his eyes lust-filled. Her fingers twitched to touch the small patch of hair just under his full bottom lip. The word fierce popped into her mind, sent a shiver rushing through her spine that escalated as it moved from her head to her toes.

  The sudden absence of rain and the sound of a large door opening jarred her attention back to the present, wiping the decadent and wondrously distracting thoughts from her mind. For a moment, she stood in a dark alcove. The primitive chandelier above her head gave the appearance of rough flickers of candlelight over the mahogany-colored wood walls. A chair, massive and medieval in style, sat beside her, the only objects in this tight entranceway save for doors on each side of her. Another man in a black uniform entered from the door to her right and snatched her coat without word of greeting as she watched the first uniformed man with her bags disappear into the same door.

  “Go ahead in, Ms. Hughes.” Aedan’s deep, rough whisper behind her ear, accompanied by the unexpected warmth of his large, calloused hand pressing on the small of her back made her jump.

  His gentle push through an ornate shaped opening reassigned her unsteady gait to a landing, teetering just inches from a set of stone stairs with an actual red carpet down the middle. Lush on the sides but worn in the middle, it’d obviously not been laid out for her. The thought almost brought a delirious laugh, but her frozen lungs stifled the sound.

  “Ms. O’Riagain should be here momentarily.” Again, Aedan spoke, his gruff voice a blanket of soothing comfort for the moment. Although, she wished with every fiber of her being that he hadn’t removed his hand from her body.

  Actual armor, minus a man she hoped, stood on a stand next to her. On her other side, a small cannon sat. Neither provided her a feeling of welcome, nor security at all, but rather a sense of being ready for battle. Juxtaposed to these intimidations were the candles perched on wrought-iron stands aligning each side of the carpet on the stairs. Perched between each tall candlestick sprayed an exquisite array of long, sharp green leaves topped with out-of-season pink-spotted orchids and white roses. The color scheme surrounded by scarlet walls screamed abundant wealth and refined taste from centuries ago.

  Although Kyna had grown up in a mobile home with a single mom, she knew wealth. Opulent displays no longer intimidated her. Her mother had worked tireless hours at The Greenbrier, one of the leading luxury resorts in the States. Allowed to work alongside her mother some days growing up, she’d found employment there herself during her college years.

  A woman with pale skin and strawberry-blonde waves of hair, garbed in a simple, white, flowing dress, walked into the picturesque scene. Kyna grew unnaturally conscious of her damp clothes and rain-matted hair as the vision in white flew to her with wide eyes and open arms.

  “Oh, Kyna, at last—” Her aunt’s final word stopped on a sob.

  As the woman apologized again and again, for what Kyna didn’t know, their bodies shook as her aunt wept in great heaving moans. Moments crawled by while feeling trapped in this woman’s lung-crushing embrace. Kyna's gaze searched for Aedan. Employed to protect her, he’d claimed during the car ride here. Apparently, this type of event didn’t count. She found him standing to her right, next to the armor in a similar stance. In fact, save for his all-American boy slash hoodlum attire, he looked like he’d just stepped out of the metal suit.

  When he caught Kyna’s pleading look, he shrugged his shoulders, paused for a brief moment as if in thought, and then asked of her aunt, “Are you okay, Ms. O’Riagain.”

  “Yes, oh yes. Just splendid. Better than I’ve ever been,” she exclaimed, releasing Kyna from the hug, but holding her at arm’s length for a moment as she stared.

  Finally, with a sigh followed by another single sob, she released Kyna to wipe at the tears streaming down her face. Kyna could see stress and age in the fine lines sprinkled around the woman's eyes

  “Please call me Aunt Saoirse,” the woman croaked as if she’d choked on her name. “And, welcome to your home. I hope you’ll be very comfortable here. I want it to be yours. It will someday. Anyway, listen to me ramble. I want to hear all about you.”

  “O-kay,” Kyna stammered.

  Yet, she squared her shoulders and forced a smile. Although, she’d asked her mother in the States how to say her aunt’s odd first name, she mulled over in her mind the way her aunt had pronounced it, in a mild-Irish accent.

  “Oh, I’ve made you uncomfortable with my tears and rambling. Please forgive me. I’d hoped to make a better first impression, but seeing you, it took my breath away. I trust my Aedan did better upon introducing you to Ireland, though I would assume the stormy weather didn’t help. We actually have snow predicted soon. Crazy weather lately, from a raging storm to a few inches of snow that will quickly melt. I’ve never seen Ireland in such a state of unnatural unrest. Anyway, there I go again. Let’s get you settled by the fire in my private sitting room so we can get acquainted a bit, if you’re not too tired from your travels.”

  “No, that sounds great,” Kyna agreed.

  In all truthfulness, she sensed her numerous cups of coffee had finally kicked in now that she’d stepped into this place. On second thought, maybe nerves had finally wreaked havoc on her fight and flight response, sending it into overdrive. A runner, she longed for a good ten miles right about now to work off some excess energy despite her long travels.

  Her aunt placed a thin arm heavily across Kyna’s shoulders, fingers biting into her shoulders and urging. her forward. There seemed to be a lot of touching around these parts. Soon she found herself guided down a few endless hallways adorned with museum-like art. Rolling landscapes with cloudy skies, along with men and women in various poses, flickered in and out of her view. Rooms opened up around her, but they rushed past them so Kyna could barely take in the ornate nature of each of them. She’d never seen so much rough stone, deeply colored wood, and rich hued fabrics before.

  The Greenbrier stood out to her as an elaborately decorated, predominately white structure. Pastels mostly decorated the crisp and clean finish of that place. Here, oversized fireplaces and dark toned furniture warmed a more primitive almost medieval style of home, which was indeed very castle-like. Candles and flowers appeared everywhere. There had to be employed a servant in black whose only job existed to take care of fresh flowers and
candles. Lavish, elaborate, and affluent, were all words that came to mind.

  A quick look back showed Aedan followed along, stealthy and deliberate in his movements. As they entered a room, a flash of lightning lit up the image of a forlorn forest just outside an almost floor to ceiling window. Two such gothic windows surrounded a fireplace in the cave-like room. Wooden beams loomed overhead, holding up a cement-like ceiling. Long window seats, adorned with various shapes and sizes of pillows, spanned the lengths of the windows. Closest to her, on both sides, at the opening of the room where they stood, sat an overstuffed, velvety couch and wide, leather chairs. Rugs thrown about the floor bore intricate patterns. All of this, seen only through the low light of colored glass lamps and multiple candles cast a cozy, albeit eerie sort of ambiance around the room.

  Aedan strode immediately to the first chair as her aunt guided her to a plush, animal fur rug in front of the fireplace. She found herself surrounded by pillows larger than any she’d ever owned. A servant wheeled in a cart of food. Kyna wondered how many worked in a place like this. Smells of bread, oil, and potatoes met her, forced her stomach to rumble for everyone to hear.

  This gained a smile from her aunt, one filled with warmth and affection like she hadn’t been the recipient of since she’d said goodbye to her mother in the States. A stab of guilt plagued Kyna as she remembered not returning the love, so angry and wired over her news and trip. At this moment, she longed for the only mother she’d ever known to be with her even in this, as she’d been her whole life. Kyna had tried to remind herself of this fact several times, as she’d recounted lie upon lie throughout her life during the never-ending plane ride over the ocean.

  “I ordered a draft cider, sweet and warming. I hope that’s all right. If you’d prefer something else, I can order it now.”

  “No, that sounds great. Everything looks great. This room is amazing. The whole house, actually. Is it an actual castle?” She promised herself to be more articulate tomorrow.