“Nothing is wrong,” she said with a shrug and eyes that hunted for stray bits of lint on his shoulders.
He caught her chin in his hand and made her lift her gaze to his.
She sighed in resignation.
“I’ve grown tired of this breeding carousel. My heat comes and I become a desperate little fiend demanding sex and frantically fretting over my fertility. I want a child so badly ...”
“As do I,” he said.
“Do you?” she asked. “I can’t help wondering if I haven’t just been dragging you into this maelstrom of mine and that you put up with it only because you wish to see me happy.”
“Syreena,” he said sternly, “one does not become Prince of the Vampires because he is easily swept away by the desires of others.”
“This is different,” she said with a small stamp of her foot. “Our connection makes it different.”
“True. And yes, you do become a tad desperate during your cycle.” At her stern look he edited himself. “Very well, quite desperate. But it all levels out afterward, leading me to believe that drive and desperation are probably a part of your breeding cycle and the hormones you are being subjected to at the time.”
“Then why doesn’t my sister behave likewise?” she wanted to know.
“Your sister is not you. And as you mentioned earlier, you are not like any other Lycanthrope. You are very much apart from others. Perhaps your dual animal aspects magnify your heat by two.”
Syreena thought about it and gave a reluctant nod.
“Perhaps.”
“Damien.”
Damien turned sharply at the intrusive address. His Vampires knew better than to intrude on his private time with his mate, but this was no Vampire.
Suddenly he could sense her, feel the wrongness of her. He thrust his wife protectively behind himself and hissed at the female. He mentally shouted for his guards, wondering how they had ever let such a creature get so close to him.
“Be at ease, I mean you no harm.”
He did not believe her. She was a stranger and she reeked of foul magic, the stench of it emanating off her like a twisted perfume. She was a Demon, he realized, when he saw her with his infrared vision and deduced she was several degrees cooler than a human or Lycanthrope. The black-and-gray swirl of her hair was caught in a loose braid that snaked over her shoulder. A white scarf hung around her neck and shoulders, but the rest of her was clothed in sweeps of black fabric.
“You will forgive me if I do not take your word for it,” he said as Vampires began to move swiftly into the room.
“I will be gone before any of you can touch me,” she promised him softly. “Force me to leave, and I cannot give you the help you and all the Nightwalkers need.”
“Wait.” Syreena touched her husband on his biceps, moving to his side in a way that made him bristle. He did not like her being in the line of sight of this unknown threat. “Who are you?” she asked the delicate-looking Demon.
The Demon looked at them with the strangest eyes, the indiscernible color seeming to constantly shift across the grayscale spectrum.
“That is not important. I am not what matters. What matters is what I have done.” And in an instant she was gone, disappearing in a strange pixilation of black, gray, and white, just out of the reach of a suddenly grasping guard. “I will not say this again,” she said, suddenly behind them and forcing them into an about-face. “Waste your time on me and Ruth will slip free, gaining power you cannot imagine. This could be your last opportunity to stop her. Your last chance to live safe and happy.” The female Demon fixed her gaze on Syreena. “Ignore me, chase me away, and you and your Prince will know nothing but sadness in the future.”
“Speak, Demon. Quickly,” Syreena encouraged. “My husband is impatient to have your head for daring to come so close to his loved ones with nothing but danger dripping off your tongue.”
“Tonight I have kidnapped Windsong, the Mistral Siren, and delivered her to Ruth. She is safe and alive at present, but this will not last for long. You must find her and rescue her before Ruth can carry out her spell against the Demon King’s mate. The spell requires the death of the Siren, and once cast, it will be unbreakable, even if the caster dies. Kestra will suffer and so will Noah. The Demons will lose their leader. The Nightwalkers will begin to lose the war against necromancers and the Vampire rogues. Your peace will dissolve. Your lives will unravel like a poorly crafted tapestry.
“The child of Time has saved you all from one fateful time line by sparing the lives of her parents, but by doing so she opened up an equally traumatic one. But this can be avoided if you save Windsong’s life and defeat Ruth once and for all.”
“If you knew taking Windsong to Ruth was going to lead to such terrible things, why did you do it?” Syreena demanded. She owed her very existence to Windsong. This news touched her close to home on so many levels. Yet instinct told her to listen carefully to this girl. This creature, spoiled with black arts as she might be, held crucial truths to Syreena’s future. She could sense it.
“It is a trap. One of Ruth’s tricks,” Damien said dismissively when he heard the bent of his wife’s thoughts.
“I captured her safely,” the Demon injected, “because otherwise she would have been taken by a nest of powerful Vampires. In their victory they would have feasted on the blood of the most powerful Mistral alive today. That would have given them unspeakable power.” She shook her head, seeming to be momentarily speechless. But after that moment passed, she continued. “By capturing her and tainting her blood with paralytics and sedatives, I managed to put them off their feast. Again, this will not last long. No doubt Ruth will let them at her as soon as Windsong regains consciousness and the drugs have left her system ... provided it doesn’t interfere with her spell. I cannot say. This I cannot see. I have already altered one thing, so what once was written has already been changed.”
“Time,” Syreena breathed. “She’s come to change history as she knows it to be. You’re from the future.”
“One future. One possibility. One that still exists, I believe. If it didn’t, then I would cease to exist.”
“You are a Demon of Time?” Damien asked.
“No. I am ... something else. And I cannot say more than that. All you need to know is that I have infiltrated Ruth’s nest of rebel Nightwalkers. I have used magic, soiling myself as they are soiled in order to gain their trust. Just so I could be here for this moment. So I could protect Windsong for just a few hours. So I could come to you.”
“And why should we believe any of this?” Damien wanted to know.
The Demon cocked a brow and inclined her head.
“In an act of vengeance, two years ago, Ruth cast a spell on Syreena so she could never conceive. That spell can only be broken with the death of the caster. You will never have a child so long as Ruth draws breath. Believe me or not, do as you will. But are you willing to take that chance?” The Demon turned up one side of her mouth in a smile that was not really a smile. “Also, your companion Jasmine and her would-be mate are about to stumble into Ruth’s nest, not realizing that she has fortified her ranks with rogue Vampires and rebel Nightwalkers. Demons. Lycanthropes. Even Mistrals. Those who have been lured by Ruth’s promises of power through black magic. She spins a very convincing argument, makes for a compelling leader when she wishes to. With a little more time, she will not be just a nuisance. She will foment civil war in your ranks. It will be the beginning of the end of peaceable life as you know it.”
Damien scoffed. “Jasmine will never have a mate.”
“You are correct. Because he will die when they fall upon this nest. And she will never be the same, I promise you. Think you she was melancholy before? Just try to keep her aboveground once he is lost.” Again she gave them that smile. “These might just be words to you. But are you willing to take such a chance?”
And with that offering, the strange Demon female disappeared in a pixilated rush of grays and blacks.
/>
Chapter 9
Adam followed Jasmine through the air as mist, sensing, as she no doubt did, that they were on the last leg of their hunt. They were very close to their quarry now.
And yet his mind was distracted from the imminent battle. All he could focus on, time and again, was the beautiful curve of a feminine cheek, the seductive length of denim-clad legs, and the way the wind whipped and twisted through her hair. He had come to know many things about her in just a few short hours, and somehow the new knowledge made his attraction to her all the more powerful. She was stubborn and dogged, beyond determined to see this Ruth come to an end. He was still fuzzy about whether it was personal or due to a deep-seated sense of right and wrong. She claimed it was because Ruth had detained her once, but he knew it had to be more than that. No one hunted with such passion because of what amounted to an inconvenience. And she was head of this Nightwalker law enforcement group. That didn’t sound like something one did just for amusement.
He could believe it was to satisfy her bloodthirsty nature. It was very obvious she had one. But there were any number of violent pastimes out there for a Vampire. She could just as easily have turned rogue to get her kicks. Yet she had not. She had come down on the right side of the law. A lawfulness that, to be honest, surprised him when he saw it in a Vampire.
He had to remind himself that Vampires had changed and, clearly, grown in maturity and responsibility. Most of them, anyway. She was a strong example of the way Damien now led his people. It was impressive, to say the least.
Titillating.
Especially to one such as he, who lived and breathed the law. Strange as it was to entertain the idea, she was ... very much like him. Close friend to a monarch. A powerful hunter. Employed to rein in those who needed reining in.
And all of this served to make their attraction toward one another all that much more powerful.
Damn it, he’s staring at my ass again. I can just feel it...
Adam drew up short as her voice lilted through his brain. Startled, he dropped to the closest surface he could find and snapped into solid form.
Oh brother. Now what?
There it was again. Quite clear, quite obviously Jasmine’s thoughts as she dropped down onto the stony outcropping where he had landed.
“Now what?” she demanded. “You know, Ruth isn’t going to sit around and wait for us to catch her. She’s very smart. She is very likely hauling up stakes as we speak and moving on. She’s going to assume we are hunting her!”
“Yes, about that,” he said a little numbly as he stared directly into her eyes. “It occurs to me we might be racing headlong into some manner of ambush.”
Well, shit. If you want to be all logical about it ...
“Perhaps. But I think she’ll be too busy packing up her shit and running away,” Jasmine said aloud.
Adam stared at her, slightly gape-mouthed. He had no doubt in his mind that somehow, for some inexplicable reason, he was hearing the gorgeous Vampire’s thoughts. But that knowledge didn’t startle him half so much as the understanding that she was actually being very honest with him whenever she answered him. She was, quite literally, speaking her mind.
“Are you as attracted to me as I am to you?” he blurted out before he could second-guess himself. Before he lost his nerve.
To say the question surprised her was understating things just a tad.
What in the hell is this all about? Talk about coming out of left field! But then after her surprise wore off, she leaned back ever so slightly, letting her eyes drift over him from head to toe.
“Wait. Before you say or ... or think anything,” Adam said with haste as his heart beat rapidly in his chest and chills of conscience walked his spine. “I think you ought to know that I am quite certain I can read your mind.”
“As if !” She laughed so hard she snorted a little bit. Adam was shocked to realize he thought it was terribly cute. “And I am not cute. Look at me! Seriously, what do you see in this whole package that comes off cute?” She flung an indicative hand down the length of her body and its provocatively tight clothing. “You aren’t a telepath,” she went on to say. “You’re just a Water Demon. And even if you were a telepath, I am probably the second most powerful telepath on the planet. My defenses are quite significant ...”
“Except when Ruth went ripping through your mind to gather information. You may as well have been a child, the way she pushed through you and mined you for information that proved harmful to the rest of the Nightwalkers.”
It was, nearly word for word, the guilty thought that raced through Jasmine’s brain right after her boast to him. He wasn’t saying it to rub salt in her wounds, but to prove a point.
“Oh my God, you’re reading my mind!” Jasmine looked at him in horror and shock. “How is that possible? You have to stop! I demand that you stop!”
“I do not know how. As you said, I am not a telepath.”
“But then ... how? What the hell ... ?”
Adam reached out to take firm hold of her arm, stopping her suddenly agitated body movements. The outcropping wasn’t big enough for her to pace across, and he didn’t want her falling off and flying away.
“Be easy,” he said as gently as he knew how. “First I would like to say that you are being somewhat unfair to yourself, as far as that encounter with Ruth is concerned.”
“What do you know about it?” she demanded irritably. “You were four hundred years away.”
“This is true,” he agreed with a nod of his dark head. “However, even in my short time in your era, it has been made clear to me that this Ruth is a formidable opponent. A Mind Demon without equal. You cannot expect yourself to be more powerful than all things. It would be an unreasonable expectation.”
She frowned, her eyes dropping down.
People died because I was so weak.
“People died because I was weak,” she said.
Adam’s lips lifted at the corners. Had he ever thought her to be duplicitous? Oh, he had no doubt that she was capable of it if her motivations were strong enough, but it would seem, at the moment, she did not see any reason to be so with him. It pleased him, giving him a sudden sense of intimacy with her. Again. It was so peculiar how that feeling crept up over him, seemingly out of nowhere, and so very strongly when it did.
“People died because someone wanted them dead. She would have gotten her information one way or another, Jasmine. You cannot fault yourself for Ruth’s sadistic motivations.”
“Says who?” she demanded petulantly. “I want to blame myself. I want to remind myself to do better. To get stronger. To never allow her to use me in such a way again.”
“I can appreciate that,” he told her. “But have a care. It is one thing to motivate yourself in such ways, and another to blind yourself with them.” He reached to touch two fingers to the bottom of her chin, lifting her gaze to his. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words came to a screaming halt in his brain. She blinked questioningly at him, with eyes as green as jade.
As green as his own.
The truth struck him down like a thundering avalanche, overwhelming him, freezing him in place and leaving him breathless. He felt caught up and compressed from all sides, as though he were asphyxiating from the weight of it all.
Sweet Destiny, the Imprinting, he thought loud and clear.
And she heard it. Perhaps because she was a Vampire and a telepath, but more probably because they were deep in the stages of an Imprinting, and Imprinted mates formed a private telepathic pathway between them. They took up residence in each other’s minds. All of their thoughts were constantly known to one another. The way it had been explained to him was that there was no real way to shut them out.
“As if!” she blurted out, her eyes wide with abrupt panic. “Vampires do not Imprint, and even if we could, I most certainly would not choose to Imprint with you! You are a dated, obstinate, Cro-Magnon, chest-thumping Alpha idiot and nothing about that appeals to me!”
For the most part, she thought. Well, perhaps a little.
Then her bright jade eyes widened as she recalled he could read her thoughts.
“Bloody freaking hell!”
Adam’s only further argument was to cup his hands in the air, right in front of her face, and shift them into water. It swirled into a dark oval pool and then he forced it to become completely still, darkening the rear of it until the surface became a perfectly reflective surface. He showed her her own face, showed her the stunning new green of her eyes.
“No way,” she uttered as she stared at herself. “No way am I going to let this happen. I am a Vampire! A Vampire!”
“So you keep saying,” he said quietly. “And this evening I woke up at war with you. But that has changed. Everything has changed.”
“You mean to tell me you are all right with this?” she asked incredulously. “You’re going to sit there and tell me you wish to have a Vampire for your mate?”
“Jasmine ...” He sighed and took a moment to rub at the painful ache knotting between his brows. “What I want is to be home, on the lands of my family, in the practice fields beneath my family standard with my mother harassing me to do this or that to keep me civil and respectable, instead of lost in this confusion of hunting and battle and one dire situation after another. I want to know the most stressful choice my brother needs to make is whether to chase after a Vampire for bounty or wrestle around with me in the practice ring. This is what I want. Or rather, ’tis what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.
“But I have learned in my lifetime that what we think we want and what is best for us may well be two separate things. I have also been raised to believe there is one absolute in the Demon world. One thing that cannot be questioned, cannot be changed, and cannot be fought. There have been those far better than you and I who tried to fight the inevitability of the Imprinting, and they were no more successful than either of us will be if we do the same.”
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