Chasing Faete (Beyond the Veil Book 1)

Evernight Publishing ®

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2016

Elena Kincaid, Maia Dylan, and Sarah Marsh

ISBN: 978-1-77233-874-4

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Karyn White

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

We would like to dedicate this book to all of our fantastic and amazingly supportive street team members in our Sinfully More Erotic group! This entire series was born right there in a contest. Our winners Avril, Julie, and Tami chose the building blocks for the story and we couldn’t be happier with how our first trio came out. Thank you all for the inspiration!

CHASING FAETE

Beyond the Veil, 1

Elena Kincaid, Maia Dylan, and Sarah Marsh

Copyright © 2016

Chapter One

“Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck,” Erica half growled, half moaned as she entered an alleyway she had stumbled down, only to find that she reached a dead end. And wasn’t that just painfully ironic, she mused, considering she might potentially be about to meet her own
dead end.

Ha!

Even with the threat of certain death hanging over her, she still thought herself quite funny.

It was late at night, and she could hear the steady thump of rock music coming from inside the bar she had just passed. The air was thick with the smell of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and urine. She glanced around the dark alley in a panic trying to find a means of escape, but could find none. On one side of her, she saw a side entrance to the bar, but unfortunately, there was no handle on this side of the door, only a lock that required a key.

She pressed herself against the brick wall on the darkest side of the alley, biting back a moan as the move put pressure on her wounds. Erica took three deep breaths, releasing them slowly. She only had about two or three minutes before Alefric’s guards found her. She was a healer with no equal, and needed to heal herself enough to fight back or this was going to be one hell of a short escape story … and one that no one would hear.

Closing her eyes, Erica called upon her inner healing light, sending it deep into her own body. She felt the warmth of it flooding through her, seeking out her injuries. She ignored most of them, and directed it to the two stab wounds on her right side, hoping to stem the blood loss enough to give her a fighting chance.

A noise coming from the front of the alley had her coming fully back to herself and her eyes snapping open. She had managed to close off one wound, but the other still bled sluggishly. She wasn’t losing as much blood as she had been before, but too much for her to hope to last too long.

“Come on out now, Erica,” a man’s voice called out, and Erica shivered in dread. She recognized that voice. “Why don’t you just come on out, and we’ll take you back, all nice and peaceful like.”

Kheelan
. He was the captain of Alefric’s guards, and her chances of getting out of this alive had dropped from around sixty-five percent to closer to ten. He stood a foot taller than her five foot four, was lean but muscular. His long black hair was tied back with a leather tie, and Erica believed he did that so the scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his jawline was clearly visible. He was as ruthless as he was evil, and he took a sadistic kind of pleasure in seeing her in pain. Erica had promised herself that if she ever made it out of the Elven realm she would rather die before she would allow herself to be returned. Kheelan was a large part of the reason for her making that decision.

Erica fought back the tears and drew her anger and her rage around her like a cloak, a trick she had learned from her mother. She pushed her fear and her pain behind the cloak. Lifting her head and squaring her shoulders, she pushed off from the wall and stepped out into the alley, not stopping until she stood in the pale glow of the murky “Exit Only” sign above the door to the bar.

She stood proud and tall, no one would suspect she was as hurt as she was. “Hey Khee, aren’t you sick of doing all of Alefric’s dirty work? Or do you just like being his bitch?”

She knew she’d scored a direct hit to his ego when Kheelan’s dark eyes flickered red. “I believe you still hold that position
, Ittee
.” Kheelan spat the Elven word for a whore at her, and Erica had to force herself not to laugh. She had been with only two men in her entire life. Kheelan on the other hand had fucked his way through half the ranks of the Elven guard, male and female, and
she
was the whore?

Erica tensed when three more of his guard stepped into the alley behind Kheelan. “You know, Alefric was gravely concerned when he was told you had left the Elven realm. I have never seen him so distressed,” Kheelan said with a smile, but, because the man had never smiled once in his life before, it came across as more of a snarl.

“Firstly, let’s call it what it was—an
escape,”
Erica said. “I didn’t just leave. You make it sound like I was simply over for tea and biscuits and left without saying thanks. I had been held captive in that realm … in my own home, Kheelan. I can assure you, I certainly wasn’t going to fucking thank you for the beatings and the torture.”

Kheelan’s face slid into its usual leer. “But, princess, you took them so well! When you would make me work for your cries and screams,
mmmm
.” Erica had to swallow the bile that rose in her throat at the perverse sound of pleasure the sadistic bastard made. “I lived for those days.”

They had kept her shackled in a small bedroom located near the dungeons.  Alefric claimed that he was being hospitable by not throwing her in a dirty cell, though sometimes he liked to remind her of his
hospitality
by isolating her in those cells for days if she was being particularly unruly. The shackles prevented her from not only using some of her unique powers to fight back or even to heal herself.

Determined not to show any weakness, Erica shrugged. “Well, that seems only fair. I lived for the days, and let’s be honest there were a lot of them, when you disappointed your King, and he had you beaten on the stairs of the palace.”

Kheelan’s eyes now blazed red, and Erica grinned knowing that she had won this round. But, because she was a woman who never understood the concept of quitting while she was ahead, she decided to add one final little verbal jab.

“I have been meaning to tell you this for a while now, Kheelan. I know you were jealous of all the times Alefric turned his unwanted attentions on me, but take it from a woman who knows, there’s not a lot there to covet if you know what I mean.” Erica waggled her pinky finger in the air to drive her point home and just in case he was too daft to understand her meaning. She had never actually seen Alefric naked, but Kheelan didn’t need to know that. Kheelan definitely had, and by the angry look he presently gave her, she knew she had hit the nail on the head.

“Shut your mouth, bitch! How dare you talk of our King like that! He—”

“He is no King of mine!” Erica yelled, losing hold of her anger for the first time. “He is nothing more to me than someone I want to
kill.
He murdered my family, destroyed our kingdom, and he deserves to die slowly and very painfully. Now, you came here to do a job, asshole, so why don’t you stop with the endless posturing, and inane fucking pissing contests, and just come at me.”

Erica drew the curved blade of her kind from the sheath she wore behind her back, charged it with energy, making it glow an eerie blue, and slid with practiced ease into her battle stance. Her right foot slid back, leaving her to balance on the balls of her feet. She held her sword in a two handed grip and dropped her weight back on her right leg.

Live or die this night, she took comfort in the fact that she would be free. Ignoring the battle cry of the three men who now charged her, she prepared to either meet death face to face or be the harbinger of it.

Chapter Two

Leo could barely stop himself from growling at the drunk humans who bumped and pushed their way through the crowded bar. He looked back at his brother Ben and was not surprised to see him flirting with some woman while they were supposed to be hunting. They were Enforcers for their wolf pack, and it was their job to protect their territory. They’d been hitting bars all over town, trying to catch a scent. Gabe, the Alpha of their pack, had tasked them with finding out why a sudden influx of Fae were coming into their town during the last six months, and pack members had been reporting seeing and feeling them in even more unusual numbers for the past week. The Fae were known opportunists when it came to picking up strays in bars, so that was where Leo and Ben decided to start their search.

“Ben, stop fucking around,” Leo growled low enough so the humans wouldn’t be able to hear him over the rhythmic booming of the music. “We’re working, not looking to get laid.”

“Don’t be so grumpy, brother. Maybe if you actually got laid once in a while you wouldn’t be such a dick all of the time,” Ben replied, still smiling at the exceedingly drunk blonde with fake tits in front of him.

Ben may have liked to joke a lot with his big brother, but Leo knew that it was to cover up his concern for Leo’s ever changing moods. He also knew that the comic relief and playboy act were just to conceal his own pain. As the years went by, it seemed as if Leo grew less and less interested in the pleasures life had to offer, and just threw himself into his job of protecting the pack. Leo had stepped up to fill in the missing role of their parents after they had been killed, forcing him to grow up faster than his little brother. He hadn’t even been on a real date in over three years. He may have fucked a few women here and there, but even that hadn’t happened in a while. Everything just seemed unworthy of his time lately, even though wolves by nature were social creatures, and wolf shifters were no different. The way he kept to himself was a concern for the entire pack, but a feeling in his gut had told him something big was coming. Ben had expressed his guilt about having the chance to enjoy most of his childhood while his big brother took on a more paternal role, and he had also expressed on many occasions that it was time to let that role go and just be brothers again … equals.

Leo began to head in Ben’s direction, resolved to pry him away from the blonde if he had to, but then he noticed his brother stop dead in his tracks. 

“What is it, Ben?” Leo asked, approaching closer to his brother. “Do you have their scent?”

“It’s not like any Fae scent that I’ve ever smelled before. Usually, they make me sneeze, but this—oh brother, this makes my wolf want to roll around in it.”

That certainly got Leo’s attention, and as he lifted his nose to hone in on the aroma, his wolf perked up and started turning circles in his head. His nostrils flared, and he inhaled deeper, smelling freshly turned soil and a summer wind. His feet automatically began to follow it to the back of the bar. Good gods, her scent was amazing. He knew it was a female that he was scenting because his wolf became rather insistent on that fact.

Claim her. She’s ours!
His wolf repeated in his mind, over and over again. Something else clawed at his senses, however. Another scent combined with the delectable mystery woman’s. A tangy, metallic scent he knew all too well. Blood.

Ben must have picked up on it at the same time because he took off like a shot toward the back door that led to the alley and threw the door open. Leo heard the sound of glass tumbling to the ground and breaking as the door knocked over boxes of empty beer bottles. Then the overwhelming scent of male Fae hit him square in the face as he and Ben burst into the alley. Just then, three Fae charged at a beautiful woman who expertly swung a large and elaborate curved blade.

Leo’s wolf came to the surface so fast that he almost lost control and shifted fully—not something he wanted to do right in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The last thing their pack needed was a bunch of wolf sightings stirring up the local law enforcement. He kept the partial shift, however, to have access to his deadly claws. He saw Ben doing the same through his peripheral vision, and they both rushed forward into the fray to even the odds.

Between the delicious smell of the female and the fact that she was holding her own quite well with that blade against a male twice her size, he felt oddly turned on by the entire situation. It surprised him. He hadn’t even noticed a female in months, let alone been motivated enough to get between her thighs, but this little pixie of a woman with her spiky black hair and her fierce attitude made his cock hard enough to leave a zipper imprint from his jeans. When the Fae he was fighting over-swung and left his right side open, Leo immediately took advantage and sank his claws deep into the male’s neck, quickly pulling back and severing the artery. The Fae turned to ash before his body hit the ground, and Leo turned to see his brother finish the second male. The fact that the Fae just up and disintegrated in their realm when killed made watching them die creepy as hell.

One more threat to the woman remained. He and Ben both advanced to where the female still sparred with the head goon. Leo could see that the woman had taken some damage. She had blood all along her side and lower abdomen along with a few long gashes on her arms. The long-haired male she fought with sported his own declarations of her obvious skill with a blade. She’d left him with a deep bleeding cut across his left cheek and several long marks on his chest.

It became clear to Leo though that from the amount of blood the beauty appeared to have lost, her energy was fading fast. As Leo and Ben advanced on the fighting pair, the Fae goon must have finally noticed them and that his comrades were now nothing more than dust stirring up in the wind. He lunged hard at the pixie one more time before he fled toward the street. Leo’s wolf almost gave chase, and if not for the smell of blood in the air, he surely would have. His pixie … his
mate
was hurt, taking precedence over everything now.

Well, shit!
His wolf had just deemed this pretty little pixie of a female his mate. He involuntarily took in a big gulp of air, inhaling more of her fragrance. Now that he stood closer to her, another scent permeated his nostrils and shocked the hell out of him. His little beauty was Fae herself.

This definitely complicates matters
, Leo thought. Their Alpha was at war with the Fae King, and furthermore, if he wasn’t mistaken by how adoringly his brother stared at the small woman in front of them, both Leo and Ben had just found their mate … and she was Fae.

He really had not
seen
that
coming tonight when they’d set out on a routine mission.