Hunter's Season: Elder Races, Book 4 (16 page)

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.

He shifted again, settling the covers around his hips. Without his shirt, he looked like a model for the cover of a bodice-ripping romance. I was staring at his torso again when he asked, “Is what you feel for me the same as what you felt for Bahlin?”

I thought about it. “No. And I don’t like that. I’m not like most women, Hellion. Emotions scare the ever-loving hell out of me.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never had luck in relationships.” I struggled to find the words to adequately explain and finally just gave up, shrugging. I would have to use what I had, adequate or not. “I’m just not that woman, the one who dreams of the fairytale ending, or the one who runs off with a man because he professes to love her, or even the one who generally accepts happily ever after.” I thought back to the wish at the stones, and my bitter thoughts about love being an add-on to life. “I’m not your storybook heroine, Hellion, so how can I just accept a storybook life?” I stood and rolled my head around on my neck. Man, I was tense.

He threw the covers back and stood, a small smile playing across his face. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets, the muscles on his stomach bunching. “I’m truly glad you’re not that woman, Madeleine.”

I took a small step toward him and he reciprocated, moving only when I moved and only so far as I went, until we met halfway and faced each other. “You say that now, but you’ll undoubtedly learn that I won’t have my hand forced, not by threat or magic or fear or, sadly, even love. I make my decisions in my own time, so don’t get too excited about finding the perfect minister to officiate just yet.” Though it still surprised the hell out of me, I admitted, “I like you, but that doesn’t a marriage make. Let’s see how this goes and also see how things with Bahlin work out before we go jumping from any bridges.” I laid my hand flat on his bare chest, and the feel of his heart was soothing to me. I jerked my hand back.

He reached out and traced my cheek with his thumb. “I understand the fear of what might be, but why not celebrate what is? You respond to me, I respond to you. For now, it’s enough.” He shook his head, and a crooked grin graced his lips. “It’s amazing to me, this shift, but I’ll accept it at face value. I wish you’d consider the same so we could at the very least see what lies between us.”

“Seems like you weren’t listening.” I smiled to lessen the sting of my words. “I don’t trust anything like this, Hellion, particularly anything this easy. I just don’t. And you sound like you’re trying to get into my pants, nothing more.” He opened his mouth, undoubtedly protest, but I held up my hand to stop him. “You’ve done an emotional one-eighty— first wanting me dead before declaring me your true love because someone told you to. I’m skeptical, no matter what I inexplicably feel. I’m disappointed I let things get as far as they did this morning.” I stepped back and he followed me. “Back off, Hellion.” I sighed. It felt like I’d spent the morning telling men to give me some space.

He took a step back and reciprocated my sigh but his was followed by a sudden grin. “This will be great fun.”

“What?”

“Convincing you to follow your heart.”

“And are you so sure of the answer?”

“Odin’s spoken. Besides, the true answer will be what’s best for all, even if it hurts initially.”

“How can you be so stoic?” I demanded.

He shrugged and beamed. “I’m Irish.”

Hunter’s Season

Thea Harrison

Duty. Devotion. Desire. When fate brings two isolated people together, love is in the cards.

An
Elder Races
Novella

As a palace guard and assassin for the Dark Fae, Xanthe always wore a mask, hiding her emotions to do her duty. But when her identity is compromised, she trades undercover work for guarding Queen Niniane—a position that often brings her in contact with Chancellor Aubrey Riordan.

Aubrey’s trust is shattered. A year ago his wife tried to assassinate their new queen in his name, a betrayal of everything he believes in. And now an attack on his life is proof the dark conspiracy is not yet over. Although injured and weak, Aubrey can’t help but be drawn to this shy assassin and loyal protector. Xanthe is everything Naida wasn’t, and the passion she stirs in him is something he thought had long passed him by.

Warning: Take a man recovering from an assassination attempt, the assassin sworn to protect him, add in a magical Tarot card deck and an isolated cabin, and watch the sparks fly!

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

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Hunter’s Season

Copyright © 2012 by Thea Harrison

ISBN: 978-1-61921-311-1

Edited by Heather Osborn

Cover by Angela Waters

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: September 2012

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