A Feast of Souls: Araneae Nation, Book 2 (38 page)

She eyed his hand, wary of his touch. “Daq Aryk, what are you doing out here?”

Was he following her?

“Just Aryk. I needed quiet.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I felt on display.”

She could relate to both parts of
that
statement, and unexpected sympathy welled for the stranger. As if of its own volition, her body moved closer to him. His eyes drew her gaze. Their intensity made her falter. “Why have you come here to Poshnari-Unai, my city?”

“To set my destiny in motion.” His lips quirked at her puzzlement. “
Stovak nos briel.
”

She cocked her head. “What does that mean?”

“‘Destiny awaits.’ Sounds grand and mysterious,
hai
?” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “’Tisn’t. I’ve a political problem back home. Cianan thought Loren could help.”

Humans believed in the Destiny Hand? “Well, he’s very good at solving most problems. Everyone’s but mine.”

“Your eyes are red. You’ve been crying. Why?” He frowned, but she read genuine concern in his eyes. “Today you triumphed over everyone. I’ve never seen anything like it. You were amazing.”

“Really?” She cursed the tremor in her voice, the eager need for approval only too obvious even to herself.

His smile softened the harsh planes of his face and deepened the crinkles around his eyes, making him seem younger and less imposing. “
Hai
. Really. I’ve seen many a warrior in my lifetime. Believe me when I say you’re truly gifted, kyra. Smart, strong and beautiful. Poetry in motion.”

Something melted within her at the compliment. There was that word again, kyra, his husky tone almost making it an endearment.

“The one thing I wanted most in this world slipped through my fingers this afternoon,” she confessed. “A chance to be selected as a ranger trainee, to further my studies. It didn’t happen.” A tear slid down her cheek. She froze as he reached out to brush it away.

“There are many paths to greatness,” he told her. “A warrior’s greatest strength is the scope of his vision. You showed vision and judgment today, but take care lest your focus cause you to miss your true path. A warrior must above all be adaptable to change. The one thing that never changes is the fact that everything changes.”

Aryk held out his hand again, palm up, and Verdeen found herself reaching to take it. Big mistake. His thick, scarred fingers slid over hers in a caress which made her tingle in places not even remotely attached to her hand. She entwined her fingers with his to still them and bit her lip at the zing of awareness as his thumb brushed across the sensitive skin of her inner wrist. “Cease,” she whispered.

“Cease what?” His voice dropped to a smooth, dark seduction of lethal proportions. “This?” His fingers teased hers with long, light strokes. “Or this?” He rubbed gentle circles over her pulse, which hammered at his touch.

She should pull away but didn’t move. Couldn’t move. “This isn’t proper.”

Some rebellious part of her didn’t care.

“Do you always do what’s proper, kyra?”

She had to know. “What’s kyra mean?”

“’Tis a term for a woman warrior.”

Verdeen nodded. “We also have such a term, ancient and seldom used.
Vertenya
. Few exist in our world to carry such a title.”

According to Cianan, there were now but two—Queen Dara and herself.

Aryk slid closer, the heat from his body curling around her. “I answered your question. Now you answer mine.”

What was his question? If only she’d focused on his words instead of on the rich smoky warmth of his voice. Like crème rija pudding with honeyed brandy. Sheer decadence to make her melt.

“Do you always do what’s proper?”

Female in the military? It didn’t get any less proper; just ask her absent parents. Acourse, holding hands with a royal guest in a moonlit garden wasn’t exactly proper, either. Yet here she stood with her hand in his, close enough for his subtle, musky scent to push the fragrance of the flowers from her awareness. All she could think of was how she wanted to move closer yet. Dazed, she shook her head.

Heat flared in his changeable eyes. “They said this is a wishing fountain. If you make a wish and toss in a pebble, your wish comes true.”

“’Tis true. A legend as old as this city itself. There are faeries with the power to grant it, if the wish is personal and comes from the heart.”

Aryk uncurled his free hand, revealed a stone. With a flick, he tossed it over her shoulder.

Verdeen heard the splash.

“Guess what I wished for.”

“Your destiny would be fulfilled?”

“
Stovak nos briel.
Nay, what I wished for is more personal and out of my hands.”

“What’s that?”

Their gazes clashed, then locked. His eyes narrowed, darkened. “A kiss, freely given, from you.”

What? Her heart skipped a beat. She froze. That was it? Why waste the power of a wish on such a frivolous thing?

He must have read the disbelief on her face. “’Tis a rarer gift than you’d ken. But tonight, in this magical place, all things seem possible.”

They did. They truly did. She should’ve been angry or offended at his outrageous request. She should return to the party. Today had been emotional chaos. She felt raw, vulnerable, in its wake. Tonight, heart ruled mind. She nibbled her lower lip, undecided. Why? Mayhaps ’twas the moonlight, the seclusion of the garden setting. Who would know? Mayhaps ’twas his words, the understanding on his face. The heat in his eyes, the warmth of his hand.

Or mayhaps Cianan was right. Mayhaps the woman tired of the warrior having the say.

Verdeen stepped closer, as if he drew her in, and quivered as Aryk’s free hand came to rest on her hip. She reached up to run her thumb across the rough stubble on his cheek, along his jaw to the cleft in his chin, slid her free hand around his neck. Her fingers tangled in his tawny hair, unexpected softness on such a hard man. His hand tightened over hers, held it to his chest. Her heart pounded in her throat, part trepidation and part anticipation.

He held himself still as a statue, as if he feared she’d bolt like some wild creature.

She closed her eyes and leaned in. The warmth of his body curled around her. She almost missed his mouth, brushed the corner with her lips. But she adjusted, moved across his lips in the lightest of caresses. A tingle of awareness sizzled through her at even so small a contact. She jerked back, appalled at her daring. What was she doing? ’Twas madness.

“So strong. So beautiful.” Aryk raised her hand to his lips, nuzzling the satiny skin of her inner wrist. She gasped at the prickle of his beard. The sensation rippled through her. “Don’t be afeared. I won’t hurt you.”

“I-I’m not afeared,” she lied. She feared her inexperience showed, that she’d disappointed him. She’d never been motivated to pay attention to the other maids’ gossip on the subject of kissing afore. Now she wished she’d paid more heed to those silly lasses. She felt so awkward.

“Shh, relax.” His eyes had darkened. “Again?”

Verdeen kissed him again, rubbed his lips with hers. The shock of awareness returned, and she whimpered at the unfamiliar heat, tingling. The need to move closer yet.

Haunted by personal betrayal, stalked by a murderer and taunted by destiny.

Finding justice—not to mention a little faith—has never been so hard.

Wrath

© 2011 Denise Tompkins

The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 2

A murderer is terrorizing the streets of London, targeting women who look suspiciously like Maddy. Under the mantle of darkness, the killer attacks his victims from behind, severing their heads with startling efficiency and single-minded brutality. A single gold coin is left at the scene of every crime, buried in the neck of each victim. Nothing adds up, and the deeper Maddy gets into the investigation, the more she learns that there are hostile eyes in every faction—some malicious, others murderous.

Amid her struggles to stop a seemingly unstoppable killer, Maddy learns that dreams are far too fragile to juggle. Her newfound love is crumbling around her under the burdens of guilt and blame, and where one man abandons her, another is slated by the gods to take his place. Defiant, Maddy finds her struggles with free will versus destiny have only just begun.

Figuring out whom she should trust, and when, will force Maddy to reassess her alliances…and reaffirm her fragile mortality.

Warning:
Contains Scottish and Irish brogues, heads that—literally—roll, seriously random acts of violence, heartbreak and hope, explicit m/f sex in a variety of locations, a voyeuristic vampire and one dinner table that will never be the same.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Wrath:

Whoa, baby.

The man was built beautifully when he was in his shirt, but out of it? He was a visual orgasm. More muscular than Bahlin, he wasn’t muscle-bound but rather seriously ripped. There wasn’t a stray hair anywhere on his chest and only the thinnest stripe from his bellybutton running into his trousers.

He caught me looking and I blushed. He didn’t laugh but came over to my side of the bed and knelt on the floor beside me. Taking my hand, he kissed each knuckle. “May this body please you in any way you see fit to use it, Madeleine Niteclif, be it for sword arm, shield arm, lance, magic, or love.” He looked stunned at his own words. He scrubbed his hands over his face and muttered an unintelligible oath before getting back to business.

I pushed myself to sitting, grimacing with the movement and ignoring the unexpected oath of devotion. “What are you going to do, Hellion? Bahlin’s tried, and the fae healer did a little, but nothing’s finished the process.”

“Oh, I’ll do a bit of this and a bit of that.” He cracked his knuckles and eased me back onto the bed so I was lying flat. He lifted my shirt up so my stomach was bared. He pulled a small dirk from his boot top and, without pausing, sliced his palm open. I gasped. “Shh, you’ll distract me.” He took the knife and laid it across my stomach so it pointed north to south, then he began to drip blood around the knife. He scrubbed the wound to keep it open and, when he had enough blood gathered, he began to trace runes onto my skin, using the blood as paint. The patterns were impossible to discern. The one thing I could say with certainty was that they were interconnected. He got to the last rune at due north, and he said, “This is it, Madeleine. Do you want me to take your voice? This is going to hurt, and I can’t have you scream.”

I nodded, and he did the same thing as earlier, leaving me with a scratchy throat. He finished the last line in the rune, and my stomach lit up, the runes blazing gold and red. Black smoke seeped from around the knife and seemed to come from my skin. I screamed but it was nothing more than a hiss of air. The sheer pain was ripped straight from my gut. I cried and I thrashed, but Hellion held me immobile, pressing down on the hilt of the knife with one hand and laying his other forearm across my shoulders. He ended up nicking me, and when my blood joined his, the runes burned even more intensely for an interminable second, and then it was over.

I lay there panting, fighting nausea. It hadn’t taken more than a literal minute though it felt as if it had passed on a time-lapse camera, each frame sliding by at a third its normal rate.

Hellion laid his hand over my forehead, and again the nausea faded. He said, “Stay here.” I nodded, and he murmured the releasing spell for my voice. He went to the sink and grabbed a washcloth, wet it and came back to clean my stomach off.

“What
was
that?” I panted.

“It’s a rather complex, arcane piece of magic that has been all but forgotten. It’s used for healing when one is dying and for, ah, well, death itself. Different order for the runes and a few different words, and you’d be pushing daisies before you knew what had happened.”

“What do you mean dying? I wasn’t that bad.”

“Days more and you would have been.”

I sat up and realized I wasn’t sore. I looked inside my T-shirt, and all the bruising was gone. I scrambled off the bed and Hellion let me go. I raced to the bathroom and shut the door. Lifting my T-shirt, I twisted in front of the mirror: the bruising over my kidneys was gone. I looked closely at the area over my heart where Tarrek’s curse had taken me, and the black blistering was gone. I felt really good. I walked quickly back into the bedroom. I stopped across from Hellion and smiled a true smile, and he gave one in return.

“Better?”

I nodded. Then my smile faltered. “I have to go back to Bahlin, Hellion. It’s not a choice for me right now. You understand that, right?”

“I do and I don’t.” He moved farther onto the bed, propping himself up on the pillows and watching me. “But I do believe it’s for the best, at least until we sort out how you and I are going to proceed.” He let his head list to one side, and his eyes closed gently before he asked, “My god has deemed us a mated pair and all but ordained it. I must ask, do you think you could love me, Madeleine? Or spend your life with me?”

Why do the supes always go straight for the kill shot?
I wondered. “I don’t know, Hellion. There’s something between us, and it’s only the second time in my life I’ve felt this type of connection, and the first didn’t end so well. I want to be careful, okay?” I took the chair he’d vacated earlier and watched him a bit warily. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me at this point, but I also knew he had the potential for a wicked temper and the means to back it up.