Elijah (42 page)

Now they sought to capture and harm her only living child—even after what they themselves had done in their arrogance to cause Mary to suffer in the first place! If not for their self-righteous laws, Mary would have been mated to a Druid male who would have loved her with incomprehensible power, doubling the girl’s potential, or perhaps more. But no. They had not seen fit to save that poor Druid male from a terrible death by starvation. They had only changed the laws to suit themselves when one of their elite clique had been in need of it. The Enforcer and his bride.

And now those two same dared to hold her daughter captive, their self-righteousness radiating off them like a reeking plague. Ruth knew they were using Mary to bait her, but she would not be so easily fooled, nor her purposes so easily circumvented.

Isabella stood nearly toe to toe with the young Earth Demon, her violet eyes full of barely repressed anger toward her. Mary and her mother had ambushed her when she had been pregnant, beating her down in a specific attempt to end her child’s as well as her own life. The female Enforcer would not soon forget or forgive that slight. Neither would her mate who, at present, was casting out a sensory net meant to prevent Ruth from sneaking up on them the way they had crept up on her encampment and unprotected offspring. In the field, necromancers and hunters were being engaged and easily defeated. The hunters had no weaponry outside of the odd excavating tool, and the necromancers were heavily dependent on their concentration and no doubt a great deal of preparation before being effective in battle. Only those to whom the power came more naturally would present a true challenge. That and the fact that the infiltrators were quite outnumbered.

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Isabella was unconcerned, however. Redemption was a powerful motivator. There wasn’t a Demon or Lycanthrope on the field who didn’t have good cause to visit redemption on this particular group.

Suddenly, Isabella felt an eddy of displaced air striking her strongly in the back, making her stumble forward. Jacob whirled to face his bride as his sensory alarms blared loud and wide.

Elijah also felt the eddy even at his distance in the field and was distracted from his current adversary long enough to look in the Enforcers’ direction.

The warrior knew the feeling of displaced air from a teleport when he felt it. So did the Enforcers. The problem was, there was no one or no thing at the center of the displacement.

“Where is she?” Isabella asked frantically, instinctively backing closer to her mate.

Elijah saw their confusion, and a sick, cold trepidation crawled up his spine as he watched them flail for a target. The sensation got the attention of his bride, and he saw her turn to look at the Enforcers out of the corner of his eye. Her golden eyes slid closed and her whiskered nose lifted into that trace of a breeze. Immediately, the hackles on the back of her neck rose to full attention. The cat shifted to the Werecat with heart-stopping speed. Elijah knew her thoughts instantly. Ruth was there. Despite what their eyes were telling them, the senses of the cat could not be so easily tricked.

Jacob caught Siena’s metamorphosis and the clarity of its motivation a moment too late. Isabella was suddenly yanked off her feet and sent flying in his direction. He couldn’t avoid catching his wife even if he had wanted to, but even with her petite stature, the speed of her impact into his chest sent him reeling and tumbling over backward.

Elijah reacted instantly, focusing on the younger traitor Demon and demolecularizing her into nothing but a breath of air. His wife was covering land in awesome, powerful leaps, literally following her nose in order to find the other, who had somehow masked her visual presence.

Ruth materialized with a scream of frustration just when Siena was not more than two leaps away from pouncing her into the ground. The Elder traitor flung out a violent hand toward the Lycanthrope female. Siena struck a wall, mid-bound, and recoiled off it and into the dirt with a startled cough. Ruth had teleported a solid rock into her path at too short of a distance for her to change her direction. Stunned, Siena touched a padded paw to the rend in the fur across her forehead, coming away with bloodied fur for her effort.

Ruth then teleported herself away. Elijah braced himself, feeling quite surely that she would follow her daughter’s trail at any cost. Since forcing Mary into the noncorporeal state took a great amount of effort, more so because she was fighting it tooth and nail, Elijah whipped her back into her natural form by his side before he lost the opportunity to do so. No sooner had he done this than he felt Ruth appear violently at his back.

Ruth had always been an accomplished backstabber. Literally. It was one of her favored attack strategies. Elijah had taught her how, so he was well prepared for the blade that came slicing toward his exposed flank. He didn’t waste precious energy changing form, but instead ducked and rolled with remarkable agility and speed. Even so, the blade breezed past his ear, nicking the lobe.

The warrior didn’t have time to note the injury. Ruth teleported again and was once more at his vulnerable back. Instinctively, Elijah blocked her stroke with his arm, sending sparks flying as the metal of her blade contacted the links of his golden armband. Without concern for the wickedly sharp blade, Elijah wrapped his bare arm around it and jerked downward, disarming Ruth neatly, although at the expense of a good bite into the flesh of his biceps and forearm. Again, the armband saved him from the worst of it.

Ruth turned to look at her child, clearly trying to focus on her to teleport them both away. But as it had been every time she had tried so far, something was preventing her from taking her daughter with her. Frustrated and enraged, Ruth teleported away, alone, before the Demon warrior gained his feet and could regroup to attack.

Elijah did get up, but he had a different target in mind. He grabbed the disoriented Mary by the
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throat, using the hold to jerk her back against his chest. Mary gasped, then gurgled out a restricted sound of panic as that enormous hand cut off her air supply. She was too young and inexperienced to use any of her innate abilities after being jostled around from captor to captor like she had been. All she could do was flail and grasp at the steadfast hand locked so firmly around her neck.

“Ruth! I will rip her head off right here and now, I swear it!” Elijah barked meanly into the night air. “End this! Meet your fate like the warrior you once were!”

Ruth materialized once more, this time with such violence that several of her compatriots were blown back off their feet. Elijah was instantly on edge when he realized the traitor had appeared right behind Siena. He needn’t have worried. Siena had apparently been prepared for just such a tactic. She was a blur of golden fur as she whirled around with amazing speed. Ruth reacted, throwing out her arms as she tried to leap back. But Siena was faster, her reflexes honed as true as her targeting abilities. The Werecat’s claws ripped through the front of Ruth’s dress, scoring through chiffon and flesh.

The Elder Mind Demon screamed in pain, staggering back, her eyes wide with sudden fear as the Werecat snarled and crouched, black and gold pupils narrowing on her as if she were going to be the cat’s next meal. Her senses became aware of the Enforcers approaching, that the ranks of her camp were dwindling down to nothing, and that if she stayed and fought for her daughter a moment longer, she was very likely going to be captured as well. The last thing in the world she wanted was to come under the retribution of the Enforcers and the King. If she were captured, she would no doubt die for her crimes.

In a last desperate attempt to save her child, Ruth tried to think of a way to help Mary escape a similar fate. She had only a heartbeat to come to a solution before she would find herself under the pounce of the cat and her rending claws. With desperation, Ruth stole a digging pole with a metal-tipped spike that a hunter was using some distance away as a speared projectile against Gideon. It reappeared mid-flight, heading straight for Elijah and her daughter, who protected his chest. But Mary was just small enough against the giant so that her shoulder was sitting just below the span of ribs that covered the Warrior Captain’s heart.

The projectile was too unexpected and moving too fast even for Elijah to react. But Siena had already begun to fly at this Demon bitch who had caused her so much pain. Without realizing Ruth had launched a last, lethal attack at her mate, she leapt onto the Demon woman with a bone-chilling scream. Startled, Ruth fell back with fear, her full attention forced to pay focus to that horrible, animalistic war cry. It was only her centuries of reflexive training as a warrior that made her scramble in the right direction to avoid the claws aiming to disembowel her with a single stroke.

Too late, Ruth realized she had lost control of the spear she had aimed at Elijah’s heart.

Scrambling again to avoid Siena’s deadly accurate pounce, she whirled to check if she had freed her daughter from the giant’s throttling hold.

For a moment, empowering delight surged through Ruth as she saw the warrior kneeling, hunched over in the long grass. In the next second, however, he turned to face her and his mate, shock and pain written over his expression. Ruth’s eyes moved down, and her entire world exploded into agony and rage. Cradled in the blond giant’s arms was her daughter, speared through her heart by the weapon Ruth had intended for the Warrior Captain.

Ruth’s vision went black and then red, the inconceivable picture and understanding of it echoing through her unbalanced mind with maddening persistence. With it came the calm and clarity only insanity could provide in such a moment. She turned reddened eyes of hatred onto the Werecat before her and snarled low in her throat.

“This is not over,” she hissed to Siena. “You will all pay for my child with your own. You have my curse on that! All of you!”

Then Ruth teleported away with one last violent withdrawal, leaving for good now that there was no longer anything to keep her there. With the Demon traitor’s chill words still ringing in her
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ears, Siena turned to look back at Elijah. Only then did she realize how serious a threat it was that Ruth had just made.

Mary was dead.

And Ruth had promised to see to it that they paid for it with the blood of their own children.

The wind that swirled onto the balcony outside the library of the solitary log cabin solidified in the coming dawn into the forms of the Queen and the warrior. They were already wrapped securely around each other, almost as if supporting each other. They were worn out both mentally and physically, so they were probably doing exactly that. Elijah moved first, reaching to touch his warm, firm lips to the recently knitted cut slashing across her golden brow.

“I look forward to the time when Gideon will actually be able to assist your people in healing,”

he said softly against her skin, his heart clearly in the desire. He hated to see her harmed even in the slightest. It would take him a great deal of time to forget the sight of her, blistered and broken in her sickbed.

“Shh…” Siena soothed him on a soft breath, her mouth drifting to his throat. “I am in your mind, warrior.” It was as much a scolding as it was a reminder. She was not accustomed to being worried over any more than he was. “Gideon is quite brilliant. I have no doubts that he will find his way into our chemistry. Meanwhile, this will heal rapidly enough on its own.”

She lifted her head from his and looked around slowly, taking in the lightening darkness that surrounded them. The entire night was gone, though it had only been a few hours since they had risen for battle. Elijah had swept them through numerous time zones, following the curve of darkness until they had come there, where dawn was breaking.

“This is not Lycanthrope territory,” she remarked, looking at the sprawling, treeless prairie and the moat of long grasses blowing in the natural breeze. Autumn was just beginning in this place.

The first snows were due any moment in her home province.

“Exactly,” Elijah murmured, pressing warm lips into her hair as he drew her closer. “No castle.

No guards. No ambassadors, Counselors, or Generals…”

“No night,” she pointed out dryly.

“No problem,” he countered with a chuckle. “Trust me. My point is that there are no enemies, no threats, and most of all no immediate worries that cannot wait for a few hours.”

“That is an impossibility to achieve with that insane creature roaming the planet,” she sighed in sad response.

“Until we know exactly where she has run off to, it is momentarily out of our hands. Only Jacob and Isabella have a hope of finding out where she has gone. She has gotten too good at covering her tracks for it to be left to the skills of a warrior, no matter my power. The Enforcer was born with the innate ability to track his own. He will find her. She is cursed and blackened, mutated and poisoned, but she is still a Demon.” Elijah sighed, closing his eyes as the dawn breeze brought the scent of earth and grass around them. “She will hide, will make it damn near impossible, but I have unfailing faith in Jacob. Meanwhile, kitten, we can’t live our lives only to hunt and battle her. It would give her a victory the extent of which even she could not imagine.”

Siena shuddered softly, reaching to wrap her slender hands around his thickly muscled biceps, her thumb stroking the band that bound him to her.

“When I think of how close you came to being killed…”

“Never. I am faster and stronger than her tricks, kitten. I was nothing but air by the time the weapon struck Mary. I only wish I’d had the time and strength to protect her as well, but with the wound on my arm…” He sighed softly as her gentle fingers traced that healing blade mark beneath her hand. “There is a part of me that will forgive Mary for what she did under the sway of her love for her parent.”

“I never will,” Siena insisted hotly, blinking the burn in her eyes away as she rested her cheek over his heart. “Defying your parent for what you believe is right is a hard choice, but a choice you must make if you face it. I was not much older than Mary when I made that choice. I even
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