Storm's Heart

by Thea Harrison

  “Faerie,” murmured Tiago as he rode beside her.

  “Just wait,” she whispered. “Watch.”

  They reached the hill’s crest and looked over a valley.

  The land scrolled down, carpeted in green and gold. Clusters of pale buildings with spare, gracious lines showed through copses of trees dressed in brilliant fall foliage. The deep blue river bordered the valley. It came from an immense waterfall in the distance that was shrouded in a perpetual mist that sparkled in the bright chill afternoon.

  The jewel in the scene was the palace by the river that gleamed pearl and pale gold. A double colonnade of immense sycamore trees lined the road that led up to the palace. The ancient trees towered several stories high, the curve of their white branches flowing upward in gracious outspreading fans. They were tipped with gold leaves that had not yet fallen, their trunks wreathed in lush skirts of scarlet-leaved vines.

  Aryal nudged her horse up beside Niniane’s. The harpy’s eyes were wide with wonder. “So that’s Adriyel. No wonder it’s famous in poems and shit. We’re finally reaching journey’s end.”

  Niniane and Tiago looked at each other.

  “No,” he said. “Now we begin.”

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  EPILOGUE

  Early in the morning, one week later, Niniane sat at a table on her terrace and looked over her private walled garden. The day had dawned crystal cold and clear. She wore a fur robe, and braziers dotted the area around her. The garden was a jewel of a place, perhaps a third of an acre in size, with a luxurious carpet of thick well-tended grass, fruit trees, flowers and shrubs. She watched as the man worked in her garden. He had removed his shirt and rivulets of sweat glistened on his long, muscled torso.

  Her coronation had occurred the day before. For his coronation, Urien had worn an outfit encrusted with jewels and gold. For hers, Niniane chose a simple, tailored gown made of deep midnight blue silk. She must have said the right things and given the right responses at the appropriate times. She couldn’t remember. She had gone through the ceremony, her mind blurred with terror, trembling as the weight of her father’s crown was placed on her head.

  Afterward, she had held her first court. The throne was a ridiculously uncomfortable piece of furniture. She made a mental note to get a cushion. Tiago, dressed in severe, unrelieved black with two crossed swords at his back, had taken for the first time his position standing just behind her. Representatives from the American and Canadian governments and other Elder demesnes had presented her with gifts and statements of congratulations and promises of friendship. Well. Time would tell about that.

  Then came the time for the Dark Fae nobles to pay homage to her. She noted both confirmed and potential allies, and she gave a cold smile to old enemies with friendly faces who bowed low before her. Tiago had put in a fruitful week of work already. He had five nobles targeted for arrest and prosecution for their involvement in the coup that killed her family. She affirmed Kellen as Chief Justice, and Aubrey as Chancellor, and appointed their strongest recommendation for Commander, whom Tiago also liked, a clever, accomplished and genial male named Fafnir Orin.

  Afterward they held the coronation feast, and she danced first with Aubrey, next with Kellen, third with Fafnir, and down through the list of preapproved safe partners. She danced last with the one she loved the most. After the feast, they carried a mound of blankets out to her private garden and made love under a brilliant spray of stars, and it was good. It was very good.

  Aubrey said from behind her, “Good morning, your majesty. Thank you for inviting me to breakfast.”

  She turned to give him a bright smile. “Good morning, Aubrey. I hope you don’t mind a working breakfast.”

  “Not at all,” he told her. “I enjoy an early start to my day, and we have a lot to accomplish.”

  The Chancellor joined her at the table. She poured him a cup of coffee. They looked at the man together as he worked his powerful body through a complex martial arts routine that stretched and toned muscles recently healed from serious injury.

  “He will always be at war here,” said Aubrey, his brow creased in concern.

  In the midst of his work, the man glanced at her. He was aware of what had been said. He was aware of everything that happened around her. His Power mantled over her in a warm, invisible caress.

  The Dark Fae Queen replied, “That makes him happy.”

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  SERPENT’S KISS

  Coming October 2011 from

  Berkley Sensation!

  “I am a bad woman, of course,” said Carling Severan, the Vampyre sorceress, in an absent tone of voice. “It is a fact I made peace with many centuries ago. I calibrate everything I do, even the most generous-seeming gesture, in terms of how it may serve me.”

  Carling sat in her favorite armchair by a spacious window. The chair’s butter-soft leather had long ago molded to the contours of her body. It cradled her like an old lover. Outside the window lay a lush, well-tended garden that was ornamented with the subtle hues of the night. Her gaze was trained on the scene, but like her face, the expression in her almond-shaped eyes was blank.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Rhoswen asked. There were tears in the younger Vampyre’s voice as she knelt beside the armchair, her blonde head turned upward to Carling like a flower’s to the sun. “You’re the most wonderful person in the world.”

  “My sweet girl.” Carling kissed Rhoswen’s forehead since the younger woman seemed to need it. Although the distance in Carling’s gaze lessened, it did not entirely disappear. “You know, those are painful and rather disturbing words. To believe that of someone such as I—you must acquire more discernment.”

  Her servant’s tears spilled over and streaked down a youngseeming, cameo-perfect face. Rhoswen threw her arms around Carling with a sob.

  Carling’s sleek eyebrows rose. “What is this?” she asked, her tone weary. “What have I said to upset you so?”

  Rhoswen shook her head and clung tighter.

  Carling patted the younger woman’s back as she thought. She said, “We were talking about the events that led up to the Dark Fae Queen’s coronation. You persist in believing that I did a good thing when I healed Niniane and her lover, Tiago, when they were injured. While the results might have been beneficial, I was merely pointing out what a selfish creature at heart I really am.”

  “Two days ago,” Rhoswen said into her lap. “We had that conversation two days ago, and then you faded again.”

  “Did I?” She stroked Rhoswen’s pale hair. “Well, we knew the deterioration was accelerating.”

  No one fully understood why very old Vampyres went through a period of increasing mental deterioration before they disintegrated into outright madness and then death. Since it was rare for Vampyres to achieve such an extreme old age, the phenomenon was little known outside the upper echelon of the Nightkind community. Vampyres lived violent lives, and they tended to die from other causes first.

  Perhaps it was the inevitable progression of the disease itself. Perhaps, Carling thought, in the end, our beginnings contain the seeds of our eventual downfall. The souls that began as human were never meant to live the near-immortal life that vampyrism gave them.

  Rhoswen’s tear-streaked face lifted. “But I don’t believe you have to deteriorate! In Chicago, and later at the Dark Fae coronation, you were fully alert and functioning. You were present for every moment.”

  Carling regarded the younger woman with a wry expression. Extraordinary experiences did seem to help, as they jolted one into alertness for a time. The problem was it only helped temporarily. To someone who has witnessed the passage of millennia, after a while even the extraordinary experiences became ordinary.

  Carling sighed and admitted, “I had a couple of episodes I did not share with you.”

  The grief that filled R
hoswen’s expression was so epic it was positively Shakespearian. Carling’s sense of wryness deepened as she looked upon the face of fanatic devotion and knew she had done nothing whatsoever to merit it.

  She had squandered an almost unimaginably long life in the acquisition of Power. She had played chess with demons for human lives, counseled monarchs and warred with monsters. Throughout the unwinding scroll of centuries, she had ruled more than one country with unwavering ruthlessness in her slender iron fist. She knew spells that were so secret the knowledge of their existence had all but passed from this Earth, and she had seen things so wondrous that the sight of them had brought strong, proud men to their knees. She had conquered the darkness to walk in the full light of day, and she had lost and lost and lost so very many people and things that even grief failed to move her much anymore.

  All of these fabulous experiences were now fading into the ornamented night.

  There was simply nowhere else to take her life, no adventure so compelling she must fight above all else to survive and see it through, no mountaintop she had to scale. After everything she had done to survive, after fighting to live for so long and to rule, she had now become . . . disinterested.

  And here was the final of all treasures, the last jewel in her casket of secrets that rested on top of all the others, winking its onyx light.

  The Power she had worked so hard to accumulate was pulsing in rhythm with the accelerating deterioration of her mind. She saw it flare all around her in an exquisite transparent shimmer. It covered her in a shroud that sparkled like diamonds.

  She had lost track of when it had begun. Time had become a riddle. Perhaps it had been a hundred years ago. Or perhaps it had been the entirety of her life, which held certain symmetry. That which she had fought so hard for, shed blood over and cried tears of rage over would be what consumed her in the end.

  Who knew that dying could be so beautiful?

  Another Power flare was building. She could sense its inevitability, like the oncoming crescendo in an immortal symphony or the next intimate pulse of her long-abandoned, almost-forgotten heartbeat. The expression in her eyes turned vague as she fixed on that ravishing internal flame.

  Just before it engulfed her again, she noticed an oddity. There was no sound in the house around them, no movement of other Vampyres, no spark of human emotion. There was nothing but Rhoswen’s hitched breathing as the younger Vampyre knelt at Carling’s feet, and the small contented sounds of a dog nearby as he scratched at his ear and then dug out a nesting place in his floor cushion. Carling had lived for a long time surrounded by the jackals eager to feed from scraps that fell from the tables of those in Power, but sometime over the last week, all her usual attendants and sycophants had fled.

  Some creatures had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, unlike others.

  She said to Rhoswen, “I suggest you work harder on acquiring that sense of discernment.”

  Every little thing is going to be all right.

  Recently Rune had quoted Bob Marley to Niniane Lorelle when she had been at a very low point in her life. Niniane was young for a faerie, a sweet woman and his very good friend. She just also happened to be the Dark Fae Queen now and the newest entry on America’s list of the top ten most powerful people in the country. Rune had brought Bob up in conversation to comfort her after an assassination attempt had been made on her life, during which a friend of hers had been killed and Tiago, her mate, had nearly died as well.

  And damn if that Marley song hadn’t kept running through his head ever since. It was one of those brain viruses, like a TV commercial or a musical theme from a movie that got stuck on perpetual replay, and he couldn’t find an off switch for the sound system that was wired into his brain.

  Not that, in the normal course of things, he didn’t like Bob’s music. Rune just wanted him to shut up for a little freaking while so he could get some shut-eye.

  Instead Rune kept waking up in the middle of the night, staring at his ceiling as his silk sheets sandpapered his oversensitive skin and mental snapshots of recent events shuttered against his mind’s retina while Bob kept on playing.

  Every little thing.

  Snap—Rune’s other good friend Tiago was sprawled on his back in a forested clearing, gutted and drenched in his own blood, while Niniane knelt at his head and held on to him in perfect terror.

  Snap—Rune stared into the gorgeous, blank expression of Carling, one of the most Powerful Nightkind rulers in history, as he grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her hard and roared point-blank in her face.

  Snap—he struck a bargain with Carling that saved Tiago’s life but could very well end his.

  Snap—Carling was walking naked out of the Adriyel River at twilight, drenched in silvery water that glistened in the dying day as if she wore a transparent gown of stars. The curves and hollows of her muscled body, the dark seal-wet hair that lay slick against her shapely skull, her high-cheeked Egyptian face—they were all so fucking perfect. And one of the most perfect things about her was also one of the most tragic, for the lithe, sensual beauty of her body had been marred with dozens of long white lash scars. When she had been a mortal human, she had been whipped with such force it must have been a ferocious cruelty, and yet she moved with the strong, sleek, confident sensuality of a tiger-striped cat. The sight of her had stopped his breath, stopped his thinking, stopped his soul, his everything, so that he needed some kind of cosmic reboot that hadn’t happened yet because part of him was still caught frozen in that epiphanic moment.

  Snap—he bore witness as an antique gun that both fired and exploded in the forest clearing, killing both a traitor and a good woman. A woman he had liked very much. A strong, funny, fragile human who shouldn’t have lost her short, precious life because he and his fellow sentinel Aryal had screwed up and left her to protect Niniane on her own.

  Snap—he saw Cameron’s face when she had been alive. The human had had the long, strong body of an athlete, her spare features sprinkled with good humor and cinnamon-colored freckles.

  Snap—he saw her that final time as the Dark Fae soldiers prepared and wrapped her body for transportation back to her family in Chicago. All the pretty cinnamon color had leached out of her freckles. The exploding gun she had shot to save Niniane’s life had taken out a large chunk of her head. It was always so harsh when you saw a friend in that last, saddest state. They were okay. They didn’t hurt anymore. At that point you were the one who was wounded.

  Every little thing is going to be all right.

  Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up all you could do was send them home in a body bag.

  Rune’s temper grew short. Normally he was an easygoing kind of Wyr, but he had started snapping off people’s heads for no reason. Metaphorically, anyway. At least he hadn’t started snapping off people’s heads for real. Still, people had started to avoid him.

  “What’s up your ass, anyway?” Aryal had asked after Niniane’s coronation, when they crossed over from Adriyel to Chicago and were en route back to New York.

  They took their preferred method of travel, which was flying in their Wyr forms. Aryal was his fellow sentinel and a harpy, which meant she was a right royal bitch ninety percent of the time. Usually her snarky attitude cracked him up. At the moment it almost had him drop-kicking her into the side of a skyscraper.

  “I’m being haunted by Marley’s ghost,” he told her.

  Aryal slanted a dark eyebrow at him. When she was in her harpy form, the angles of her face were pronounced, upswept. Her gray-fade-to-black wings beat strongly in the hot summer wind that blew wildly around them. “Which ghost?” the harpy asked. “The past, present or future?”

  Huh? It took him a second to click to it. Then the Dickens connection happened in his head. He thought of Jacob Marley’s ghost, not Bob. Aryal had gotten the Jacob Marley character all muddled up with the three spirits of Christmas past, present and future.

  Time and time and ti
me. What happened, what is and what is to come. He barked out a laugh. The sound was filled with ground glass. “All of them,” he said. “I’m being haunted by all of them.”

  “Dude, give it up,” said Aryal in a mild tone that he recognized as a conciliatory one, coming as it was from her. “Believe in Christmas already.”

  His Wyr form was that of a gryphon. He made the harpy look almost delicate as he flew by her side. He had the body of a lion and the bronze-colored head and wings of a golden eagle. His paws were the size of hubcaps and tipped with long, wicked eagle talons, while his eagle’s head had lion-colored eyes. His feline body had breadth and power across the chest, had sleek, strong haunches and was the dun color of hot desert places. In his Wyr form he was immense, easily the size of an SUV, with a correspondingly huge wingspan.

  In his human form, Rune stood six-foot-four, and he had the broad shoulders and lean, hard muscles of a swordsman. He had sun-bronzed, fine-grained skin with laugh lines at the corners of lion’s eyes that were the color of the sun shining through amber. He knew how to use his even features and rakish white smile to his best advantage, especially with those of the female persuasion, and his tawny mane of sun-streaked hair that fell to his broad shoulders held glints of pale gold, chestnut and burnished copper.

  He was one of the four gryphons of the earth, an ancient Wyr who came into being at the birth of the world. Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races—the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Demonkind, the Goblins and the Djinn and all other manner of monstrous creatures—tended to cluster in or around the Other lands.