by Winter, Eden
THE
TWO WORLDS
The Three Moons Series Book 2
A Paranormal Romance Story
By
Eden Winter
Copyright © 2017 Isse Publishing
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Contents
Prologue The Queen and The Pawn
Chapter One
The King
Chapter Two
The Knight and The Rook
Chapter Three
The Pawn
Chapter Four
The Queen
Chapter Five
The Knight, The Rook, and the Queen’s Sister
Chapter Six
Let’s Play Chess
Chapter Seven
The Queen and The Pawn
Chapter Eight
The King and The Queen’s Sister
Chapter Nine
The Queen and The Pawn
A Note From The Author
Prologue
The Queen and The Pawn
The blackness of the night sky seemed to swallow up any living creature that was around. Not even with the light of the three moons overhead was the vampire queen able to truly see what was standing in front of her very eyes. She had been standing completely still for too long. The darkness was swimming around her, dancing between a pitch black and another shade of black that was deeper, darker, and more sinister than any black she had ever seen before. There was something keeping her from coming to terms with what she now knew, to the point that she had been rendered motionless.
‘But how can this be?’ she thought to herself. ‘There hasn’t been an incubus in this world for millennia.’
Adam’s mouth curled into a half smile, but happiness did not fuel it. It was fueled by a kind of comfort that came from Queen Veri’s realization.
“So, you’ve finally figured it out,” he said. His voice was low and so calm to the point that it had become unsettling. His smile made it even more sinister. He walked around Queen Veri, slowly holding a small black box. He had called it a camera, though Veri had never heard of such a thing before. The black box flashed a light when Adam held it up to his face, and she wondered if that was how he was able to send her those blinding headaches. She had been suffering from the migraines for what felt like a lifetime to her, and each time she had felt the sharp pain around her temples, she had seen Adam’s face.
She had never met him before this very evening, but she knew who he was because of the painful visions that were brought to her. If she had not tasted the blood of the king she loved, she would have had no way of knowing who this “human” was or what he was doing in this secret clearing in the forest. Queen Veri reminisced about her time in this clearing. She considered the moments she shared with the elf king and the future that was now stolen because of the man who was standing before her.
After so long a passionate and secret romance, the elf king had come to the realization that he was falling in love with someone else. It was difficult for him to admit this to Veri, but he had always been noble to those around him, and he wasn’t going to lie to her. Loving someone else wasn’t something the elf king had planned, or even wanted, he had said to her, but he still allowed himself to fall for another. He had crossed the realm in which they lived just so that he could be honest with her. After everything they had shared, the elf king was no longer hers. And now she was looking into the eyes of the man who had stolen her love from her. Seeing Adam now face to face sent a chill up her spine that she would never admit to him.
“You’re a smart vampire, Veri. I didn’t think that I could overpower you so easily.”
Veri stayed silent. She didn’t know what powers an incubus possessed. All she knew was that she was able to catch glimpse of him during her painful migraines. But was sending her visions all that he could do?
As a vampire, Veri had the ability to briefly see into the lives and memories of anyone whose blood she was able to drink. She could bring up past moments in their lives and communicate with them if need be. It appeared that Adam was able to tap into those.
She was also unable to smell him. She could briefly sense his fear, but aside from that, it was as if she was speaking to a ghost in the night.
Queen Veri had never had a taste of Adam’s blood, and she was still very confused about how it was possible that the two of them were able to be connected in the way they currently were. The migraines had begun when she’d had a final drink of the elf king’s blood the night he told her that he wanted them to remain civil to each other. There was no need to bring their people to war for something that concerned only the two of them, he’d said. Veri, in her stubbornness, refused and sent the elf king away. She had sent him to what could have possibly been his death, and now so much despair and regret overwhelmed her.
It was the memory of King Kainen that now gave Veri the courage to speak.
“What have you done with Kainen?” Veri asked. She was beginning to regain her senses and her power. She let her voice travel—not just to Adam, but throughout the secret field where she had found him lurking that evening. This was a place that she and Kainen had shared for so long, and to have seen Adam in this very clearing when she could see into Kainen’s memories was an additional crack in her already broken heart.
“Me?” Adam now had his full attention on Veri. She couldn’t read his expression, but it looked like he was in pain. “I wasn’t the one who told the other creatures in this place to do whatever they wanted with him. I never wanted him to go and see you in the first place. Kainen said that if he could see you one last time, if he was as honest with you as he could be, you wouldn’t want to start a war. He wanted to do what was right for everyone. But you were too busy thinking with your ego instead of your heart, and now…”
Adam’s voice trailed off when he saw the look on Veri’s face. She didn’t know what he was talking about, though now she was beginning to have an idea. When Veri last saw the elf king, she remembered the horrible things she had said to him in her anger. She remembered that she had told the creatures by the sea that they no longer needed to protect him on his journey home. She was so stubborn that she pretended not to care about what happened to him once he left her kingdom. Of course, she did care. She needed to know if he was alive and if there was a way he could forgive her for leaving him to the wraiths, sirens, and merfolk.
“You don’t know…” Adam said. The queen’s blood turned cold. What did he mean by that? What was it that she didn’t know? What had become of Kainen?
He couldn’t be dead. She would have felt it. There was no greater bond than a vampire and whomever they grew to love. There would have been something in her heart that told her that Kainen had died.
Adam shook his head and turned away from her.
“You got him into this, but I’m going to be the one to save him.”
“I didn’t…” Veri had to take a moment to catch
her breath. She was beginning to feel the familiar symptoms of a coming migraine. Adam was sending her a memory. A sharp wave of pain crashed into her, and she closed her eyes. She could see Kainen. He was still and cold, almost as if he were dead, but she knew that he wasn’t. He was lying asleep on his bed with his sword by his side. Queen Veri staggered and collapsed onto her knees. Her eyes welled up with tears the color of blood.
Adam was right. If it weren’t for her, the elf king wouldn’t be in any mortal danger. But what did he mean when he said that he was going to save him?
All this time, it had been a known fact that there were no longer any incubus or succubus in this realm. They had become extinct before Veri was ever born. The tales about them had been deemed myths or fantasies. But here she was, face to face with an incubus who—up until this moment—everyone suspected was a human.
“Does Kainen know what you are?” Veri asked. She was weak from the pain in her mind, but she was regaining enough strength so that she could open her eyes and look up at Adam. She wiped the blood from her face with the piece of cloth Adam had given her when she had started crying after seeing his face in person for the first time.
Incubi were stronger than Veri could have ever imagined. She didn’t need to drink any of his blood or have any direct connection with him in order for him to project his memories onto her. Could he also see her thoughts or learn about her own past? Was he able to read her mind? She wasn’t going to ask that. She didn’t want him to know that she was more afraid than she was letting on. There was no way she was going to let Adam know how much power he did or didn’t have over her.
“No, he doesn’t know,” Adam said simply.
And that was when Veri rose to her feet. If Kainen didn’t know what Adam was, that meant she still had a chance. There was a chance that Kainen still loved her—truly loved her. There was a way that she might win back his love for her. Adam could have enchanted Kainen without his knowing. There was no way for her to be able to tell if Kainen’s love for Adam was real.
“But he loves me,” Adam spoke again. He said the words as clearly as possible, as if trying to convince himself as well as Veri. “And I’m going to save him.”
There was a low rumbling beneath their feet. Veri bared her fangs and looked around her. She made sure to keep most of her attention on Adam, especially now that his back was turned to her.
There was a light that was so green and so bright that it didn’t look like anything of this world. Veri put her hand over her eyes to shield herself from the glare. The rumbling grew louder, and the earth around her began to quake.
In front of Adam was now a bright green light that almost looked like a doorway. Veri was having a hard time keeping her eyes on him. The longer she stared into the light, the more the ache in her head grew.
Then, the ground stopped shaking. Everything was silent and still. It was so quiet now that it felt like the bright green doorway was emitting a strange sound of its own. The door appeared to be opening. But opening to where? Veri could still only see how bright it was.
She took a step toward it. If Adam was planning to walk through it, she was going to follow him and see what he was up to.
Adam turned to face her just before he stepped into the opening. He shot her a look of desperation, not caring that she was there to witness what it was that he was planning. He disappeared the second he stepped inside.
But where was he going? Veri was not going to let him get away with anything that easily. If he had the power to open secret portals, that meant that he was even more powerful and full of surprises than she had already come to realize. She hissed, and with all her strength and speed, she lurched from where she stood and dived into the open doorway right as it shut.
All around her was black, but there was no ground beneath her when she dived. In the blackness, she felt no life or anything around her.
She fell through the blackness… down and down and down. And when Veri opened her mouth to scream, no sound came out.
Chapter One
The King
His eyes fluttered open as if he had awakened from a nightmare. The elf king had been asleep for so long that being a part of the world once again felt new to him. Kainen had almost forgotten who he was during that time. He had spent so many nights trapped within his own mind without any escape.
Kainen reached his hand over to his right side, expecting to feel the warm body of the human who had been watching over him as he slept. But Adam wasn’t on the bed. Kainen didn’t even know if Adam was in the room at all. After what had felt like an eternity in a state of constant unrest, the only thing he wanted now was to feel Adam beside him.
He needed him now more than ever because of the nightmare that he had just woken from. He was taken back to that day on the beach, the day when he had been so close to death. He was still just on the brink, waiting for the tide to turn one way or the other so that he could escape this constant fatigue and pain.
King Kainen had come extremely close to losing his soul to the wraiths who lived in the caves by the sea. Their lassos bore an extremely dark spell. The lassos held the elf king and nearly dragged him to a watery grave. His soul would have been taken by the wraiths while his body was devoured by the sirens and mermaids in the deep.
Though some of his soul had been restored to him when a few werewolves had come to the aide of Kainen and the remainder of the elves of his army, he was still missing some important parts of himself. His life force had been weakened. There was only one thing that could save his life now, and time was fading fast.
With each day that passed, he was closer and closer to his death. But the moments when he was awake were sweetened by Adam’s touch whenever he was by his side. Adam had been loyal to him since the moment that they met, and even if he was out of Kainen’s sight, he was never out of Kainen’s mind.
He wanted to live. No, he needed to live. He still had more to do in this lifetime. He had more responsibilities as a king, and he had a duty to his people. He was a ruler who was needed in a time that could be brimming with the possibilities of war.
And he needed to have more time so that he could be with Adam.
Kainen needed a miracle if he was going to survive having some of his soul stripped away—a miracle in the form of an enchantment and potion that came from a land that had been so forgotten by the elves of the mountains that it may as well have been uncharted territory. The elves of the mountains had no contact with the witches of the woods. The two groups had not been enemies—though it was known among the elves that witches were not to be trusted—nor were they outright allies to anyone but the cave trolls that resided on the outskirts of their part of the forest. And now that the witches had formed an alliance with cave trolls, there was no telling if anyone could convince the witch queen, Ragana, to part with a potion that would save a king she had never known or cared to know. He had no way of knowing if he was on the verge of death or on the verge of having his soul restored to him.
He relied on Guiden, shaman to the elves of the mountain, for anything that would save him from the never-ending pain that he felt. Guiden had used the bones and the scale of a mermaid to awaken the king from his slumber, but only a potion from the witches of the forest would be able to restore the entirety of his soul to him. It would take several days and several miracles for an elf to be able to obtain such a potion, but that was what Kainen’s best warrior was going to do.
Dende was Guiden’s daughter and the king’s bravest fighter. She had embarked on the quest the moment they returned from the battle by the sea. She was accompanied by Siluman, the leader of a group of werewolves that had saved the elves. Adam had relayed all of this to the king when Guiden’s mermaid potion had awakened him from his coma.
Kainen was never awake for a long period of time. His energy was drained almost instantly, and any effort on his part would once again render him motionless and on the brink of collapse. If he over exerted himself, his soul would leak, and it woul
d drain from him sooner than intended. Rest was giving Kainen strength and a longer life, at least until Dende returned with the witches’ potion… if she was able to even obtain it.
Now that Kainen was awake once again, there was nothing more to do but pine. There was so much that needed to be done, and he didn’t have the strength to do even one of those things. He didn’t know if he was to prepare his army for an attack, to strike first, to wait for word from any allies in this world, to warn his people for what was possibly to come, or to simply forget it all and spend some time with Adam. Where was Adam? He tended to be by Kainen’s side, even more so now that Kainen was ill and deteriorating.
But Adam was nowhere in his sight. His bed was covered in his sweat, and the sword he carried with him into battle was once again by his side. The sword would only ever come off the bed if Adam went to spend some time with Kainen. Kainen was too weak to wield his sword, but he had a sinking feeling that he may soon need to.
With great effort, Kainen rose from his bed—a move that was very ill advised by his nurse and the werewolf guarding the door of his bedchamber—and half walked, half stumbled toward one of his windows.
He expected to see a swirling dark sky to the south of the realm, over the kingdom that was beyond the sea. He could barely see the coastline, but Kainen knew that directly to the south of the very tower he was in lived the vampire queen.
Queen Veri had the ability to alter the color of the sky with her very emotions. It was not done on purpose, but it was a power that was passed down through the royal lineage. When he had last seen Veri, the sky was pitch black. She was angry with him despite his efforts to make things right. He had traveled through the forest and along the coastline with a small army just so that he could speak with her. But Veri refused to listen and sent him away. She had told her allies not to worry about keeping him safe, and that was when the sea almost killed him. This was why he now worried about the possibility of war.
