by Aja James
Before the closed door, she waited.
Listening.
But there were no sounds coming from within. Despite the fortress threatening to collapse around them at any moment, this corner of it seemed eerily peaceful.
The eye of the storm.
Donning the mask she always wore when in his presence, Ashlu inhaled deeply and pushed the door open.
A tall, dark-haired boy with man-child features and long, lean limbs stared arrestingly at her as she stepped across the threshold. As if he’d been waiting for her all this time. Most likely he had been.
They regarded each other for several silent beats.
There was a powerful stillness in the boy, his obsidian eyes glittering intelligently, his gaze keen and penetrating.
Such an unnatural creature, Ashlu thought.
Good thing she was an accomplished actress, or her profound mistrust and fear of him, someone so much more powerful than she, might bleed through her thick, invisible mask and contaminate the adoring expression on her face.
When you kept a weapon that could raze your enemies to the ground with a thought, you might be recognized as the strongest ruler of all. But that same weapon could be used against you, as well, especially if it had a mind of its own.
Ashlu was always very careful in how she handled the young Elemental. Thus far, he had not questioned her actions and motives. But the older he grew, the less easily manipulated he became.
The Consul was right. She could only play on his emotions, not appeal to his logic. No matter how powerful one was, “love” was a blind spot the afflicted individual could never overcome.
“Were you stretching the extent of your powers again, my little prince?” Ashlu inquired with a fond smile, letting her eyes warm as if the sight of him gave her cheer.
He didn’t repulse her, no matter her mistrust and fear, that was a fact. The Earth Elemental was growing up to be quite alarmingly beautiful. Even amongst the perfection of Immortals, he stood out. And even at only eleven summers, he possessed more raw, masculine gravitas than those hundreds of years older than he.
He didn’t answer her immediately, watching her intently with those fathomless dark eyes.
“I am not little, any more,” he said in a voice that was strangely erotic, on the verge of deepening into a man’s rough husk, but still retaining the purity of an innocent child.
“No, I can see that,” she tipped her lips up and beamed at him. “You are as tall as I am already. I know you will grow much taller in another few summers.”
“Will you wait to Claim me then?” he got directly to the point. “Is that why you take other males to your bed? Because I am still not enough to please you?”
She walked into the room and circled him slowly, glancing her fingers lightly across his shoulders and chest.
When he was smaller, she used to sift her fingers through his ebony curls while she hugged him to her bosom as a loving mother would. She doted on him and carved time out of every day to spend with him. Playing, dreaming, making him laugh, feeding him food and drink from her own hands.
Was it any wonder that he loved her unconditionally? His beautiful, magical Dark Queen.
He never suspected that it was all pretense.
“So you come all the way to the north tower to pout and vent? Setting the whole fortress in an uproar?” she rebuked quietly, keeping her smile, showing that she wasn’t truly angry.
He was her darling little prince, after all. She could never stay angry with him for long. At least, this was what she led him to believe.
“I am not doing it on purpose. I cannot help if my emotions create the quakes.”
“Then you must learn to control your emotions,” she said, coming around to face him, standing toe to toe, eye to eye.
He gazed deeply into her, searching.
She hoped he wouldn’t see through her façade. She’d always been careful around him, always showing him affection and care, never a hint of what she really felt. Which was disdain at best, derision at worst. He was a necessary evil. A means to an end.
Though she had to admit—he was incredibly beautiful for all that.
“It hurts me when you are with them,” he said finally.
Simply.
Dark Goddess above, but he was naïve. So terribly, deplorably innocent.
“What would you have me do?” she murmured, smoothing her palm gently along his face.
He leaned into her touch like a sunflower seeking the sun.
“I am a grown female. I have needs. Wait another few years, and I shall be glad for you to service them, my darling prince.”
“I am ready now, Ashlu.”
She fought back a wince.
He never called her by her honorifics, only her name. He treated her like an equal, when he was merely her slave. And an untried babe at that.
He just didn’t know it.
Because he loved her, he voluntarily gave her his vein. He didn’t understand that the first time she took from him, she’d carried out the ritual of the Blood Binding, branding his veins as her possession, mastering his blood.
“Are you indeed?”
She looked at his boyishly lean, tall form, so unappealing at this stage. It would be some years before he grew into a body that tempted her.
At least there was that. At least her enslavement of him would have its perks. Eventually.
He boldly took her hand in his and brought it to his groin.
Ah. He might still be a boy elsewhere, but he was already fully-grown where it counted most.
“Hmm,” she smiled with genuine interest this time. “It appears that you are.”
She kneaded his erection with a practiced hand, making his young body quiver with anticipation and arousal.
She thought she would bring him to climax just like this. Perhaps a hand job would satisfy his hunger for sex. He’d had his first erection at nine summers, the Consul had reported. Surely he knew how to put his fists to good use by now.
But had he done more?
“Such a magnificent rod you have, my precious prince,” she sighed with sincere desire, continuing to massage him through his breeches. “Have you practiced wielding it yet?”
“No. You know I only want you. I love you, Ashlu.”
She laughed seductively, unable to hide the triumphant gleam in her eyes.
“You will gift me with your innocence, then?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“I will give you everything, if only you’d let me.”
And so, that very night, she took everything he offered and made him her Blood Slave in truth. Both blood and body.
That same night, when his man-child’s body came into hers and released his essence for the first time, into the female he loved, who didn’t, not for a single moment, love him back, the Earth Elemental plummeted from the highest pleasure into the deepest pain.
At eleven summers, he lost his innocence.
And began a torturous, ravaging Decline.
“Elementals and Beasts, they are the Purest of all Immortals. They have the spark of the Goddesses themselves, untainted, unspoiled, part of the original Creation, a mixture of Mother Darkness and Father Light. Until they are taught otherwise. And then, they Fall the hardest… ”
—From the lost oral histories of the Zodiac Scrolls
Chapter Eight
Eveline was unutterably depressed.
Firstly, the Challenge to the death issued to the Dark King was drawing ever closer—the next night, in fact.
She wasn’t privy to the detailed logistics; she wasn’t even sure she’d be allowed to be present (strangely enough, she wanted to be, needed to be!). But the more she thought about it, as much confidence as she had in Ramses’ abilities, she worried.
What if the challenger cheated? What if they knew something Ramses didn’t know? Was the challenger Queen Anya or someone else? Eveline assumed it was the queen, but she hadn’t seen the scroll, so she couldn’t be absolutely
sure. And even if it was the queen, there had been instances in the past that a Champion could be selected to represent the challenger. In those cases, the party being challenged could also respond with their own Champion.
But Eveline had the sinking feeling that regardless of who the actual fighter would be, Ramses would answer his own Challenge.
Therein lay the danger.
As far as she could perceive, no one in their right mind would outright challenge a male like Ramses. He must be very ancient and powerful with the immense presence he had. Anyone within a ten-yard radius could feel it.
She didn’t know what additional Gifts he might or might not have, but the fact that he was recruited to be one of the Chosen warriors before he became king meant that he was extremely adept in battle. Knowing all this, why would anyone attempt to Challenge him? And why wait until now? Why not when he was taking the throne in the first place? No one had stepped forth then.
Round and round these thoughts circled in Eveline’s head. She just couldn’t make sense of it. Something duplicitous was afoot.
So, she worried.
Secondly…
And really, if she had ten reasons for being uncharacteristically depressed, this one would be reasons two through ten: Ramses had been ignoring her for five whole days.
Count them.
Five. Whole. Days!
She hadn’t seen him at all.
True, she lost herself amongst books in the Cove’s library most of the time. She started by understanding the organization of the materials, and in so doing, realized that the books and scrolls weren’t arranged in the most logical, easy to navigate manner. And, too, upon conferring with Devlin and Grace, they realized that only a third of the library was archived electronically in the Cove’s database. They worked out a process to upload more, and to ensure the security of the information so that it was safe from prying eyes.
They actually debated this for a while, because Medusa’s tech guru was extremely good. So good at what they did, in fact, that even Grace worked hard to stymie them. And, sometimes, they still slipped through the firewalls before Grace and Devlin could erect new cyber barricades.
As long as the materials in the library were limited to physical copies only, no one could access them through the Cloud. On the other hand, it was so much harder to find information they needed, cross reference and piece together puzzles when one had to pore through thousands of volumes and millions of lines of text and symbols.
In the end, they came to a compromise. Any material they didn’t believe to be “sensitive,” that they might even desire to make more publicly available, at least amongst the Immortal kinds, they would transfer into digital assets. Alternative versions of histories, stories that were passed through word of mouth, myths, legends and fairytales—even if these types of texts were stumbled upon by humans, no one would raise any eyebrows. After all, they were simply “stories.”
So, Eveline began sorting and organizing which materials were to be digitized and which she would leave entirely private and inaccessible. In the process, she often lost herself in the stories themselves.
Verily, she became rather obsessed with one particular time period in ancient history—the reign of the greatest Dark Queen that ever lived—the Queen of All Kinds.
She’d studied Queen Ashlu’s three thousand years of relatively peaceful, if heavy-handed, reign from the Pure Ones’ point of view previously. Now, reading about how events unfolded from the Dark historians’ point of view…it absolutely fascinated Eveline.
How the same history could be told in such different ways. And all the ways of telling it were representations of the truth, but never the full truth.
It was all about perspective, perception, and interpretation.
And then there were her dreams…they were so real they seemed like memories. Except clearer, as if events were playing out as she dreamed them. But even if that were true somehow, it was still one perspective out of many.
Eveline wanted to know the truth.
Aside from immersing herself in the orgasmic feast of ancient texts and literature, Eveline also spent a part of every day visiting with Clara, sometimes with Grace too, and she felt that she was forging a real friendship with the women. As well as the men, though Devlin was a lot easier to talk to than Eli. And Annie was always a wonderful treat. The little girl already started calling her “Aunt Eveline.”
This was rare for Eveline. She wasn’t the sort of female who was warm and fuzzy. She knew she was often off-putting with the way she talked, her interests, her boring-ness. She wasn’t physically demonstrative; she wasn’t naturally affectionate. And her face was usually stuck in a book.
Her comradery with the Pure Ones, for example, was just that: comradery. She did not have “friends.” When Sophia, the Pure Queen, was a child, and all through her formative years, she and Eveline never “bonded,” not like she had with Aella. And Eveline herself grew closer to the Amazon-supermodel Elite warrior only recently. She had a good relationship with Ayelet, the Guardian, but then, the latter woman’s Gift was deep empathy. Ayelet connected well with everyone.
All this was to say, Eveline was very pleased with the friendships she’d been building with the residents of the Cove. In a way, she felt like she was slowly coming out of her shell. And truth be known, she hadn’t even been aware until recently that she’d been holed up in a shell in the first place.
She’d always gone her own way, lost in her own world. The past, the future, other people’s stories, histories—there was so much to learn and absorb and understand. She’d never really focused on the present, and she’d certainly never thought about living her own story. She’d been perfectly content being an observer.
But now…since meeting Ramses…
She wanted to revel in the present. She wanted to live her own story.
While she spent her days and nights in the library, she also dreamt. Daydreams mostly, when she wasn’t pulled into the vision-like flashbacks.
In her fantasies, it went something like this:
Bookish, plain Jane meets beautiful, magnetic warrior-prince. He falls madly in lust with her quirky personality and sarcastic barbs.
What man wouldn’t, honestly?
She challenges him, meets him as an equal, doesn’t take his shit, and he loves it. Because men that magnetic, that beautiful, that powerful, well, they probably don’t get challenged very often. He probably loves it just for the novelty of the experience.
And opportunistic little plain Jane will certainly take that and run with it.
Meanwhile, librarian Jane becomes fascinated by, and addicted to, this sexual beast of a male that she’s never encountered before. Rather like an as-of-yet undiscovered rare, alien specimen that begs further analysis and exploration. He lights up her libido like an open flame with gasoline.
Sooo not what she expected—exponentially more engrossing, endlessly enthralling.
They decide it’s in both their interests to plumb the depths of this mutual obsession. This leads to hours, perhaps even days, of nonstop, energetic, erotic, highly stimulating physical…exploration.
Until they are both too exhausted and sore and wrung out to twitch so much as a hair. So that whatever the mad thirst they have for each other is thoroughly quenched by the end of ninety days.
And Eveline goes home happy. No longer the boring, prudish little librarian and harbinger of the Apocalypse that most people judge her to be. She lives happily ever after, finally unlocking and unleashing her sexual beast.
At least, that’s how the fantasy played out in Eveline’s mind.
Reality, however, was a bitch. Per above.
She hadn’t seen Ramses in Five. Whole. Days!
How was she supposed to explore her wild side without her dancing partner?
Hmm. That was mixing metaphors. But the point was that, after over a thousand years of existence, Ramses was the only male to make her libido sit up and take notice.
And
not just take notice, but roar with hunger.
She couldn’t do this horizontal (or vertical; she was absolutely open to vertical, diagonal, inverted and all other directional permutations) tango without the one male she wanted to tangle with.
While Eveline hadn’t seen Ramses, she had felt him. Unfortunately, she’d been unconscious during the fact. She highly suspected that he’d taken her to his chambers every time she passed out in the library. She had the sense of floating, being carried in a heated cocoon of strong, muscular arms, then wrapped within the unforgiving cage of flesh and bones covered by smooth, satiny skin. When she dreamed, the intoxicating scent of him permeated her senses, making her dream of him.
But she always woke up in her own room these past few days, never again in his.
Alone.
Fully dressed in the clothes she wore the day before. Her neck would be tender from where he’d fed from her, but it was a welcome tenderness, rather like the way Aella described how a woman’s core would feel post a dozen orgasms or so. Sore and well-used, but deeply, deliciously satisfied. That’s how her neck felt every time she woke up alone.
Her core, however, was definitely not used, well or otherwise. And definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, unsatisfied.
Her thoughts too full of one frustrating, elusive male, Eveline decided to take the initiative and search him out this day. She wanted to talk to him about the Challenge. She was truly worried.
Her first stop was the throne room, given that it was still the middle of the night—working hours, in other words. Her game plan was to wait outside with a book until his formal sessions were done.
The gigantic oak doors were closed when she got there, signaling that Ramses had company. Oddly, in addition to the two Sentries guarding the entrance, Devlin was present too. Whoever in there with Ramses must either be very important, suspicious or dangerous.
Or perhaps all three.
“Who is he meeting with, Hunter?” Eveline asked.
The Chosen warrior didn’t immediately reply, instead assessing her with his knowing gaze.
