Stealing Her Heart

by Evangeline Anderson

  “Yes, I’ll accept,” Melli said at once. She gave Liosh another shy smile and the big Blood Kindred returned it and squeezed her hand.

  Jodi shot an angry look at Vorn, who returned it with a blank stare of his own. Clearly there was no love lost between these two—they had been at odds from the moment they met each other for some reason. But it was also clear that Jodi had no choice in this matter.

  “All right,” she said at last, grudgingly. “As long as he really does stay in the background.”

  “Don’t worry,” Vorn growled, his golden eyes flashing. “I have no wish to insinuate myself into any part of your life, Josephine.”

  “Ugh—don’t call me that!”

  Jodi hated her first name. She had been named after her paternal grandmother who was a strict, unyielding old lady who always gave the girls lectures about everything they were doing wrong. Jodi had disliked Grandma Josephine as a child. On her tenth birthday, she had declared that she never wanted to be anything like her and wished she didn’t have her name. From that point on, she had been “Jodi” to the whole family by her own request.

  “Just call me Jodi, like everyone else,” she told Vorn now, frowning up at him.

  “If you don’t wish to be called by your first name, I will call you ‘my Lady’ as Liosh calls Melinda,” Vorn said stolidly. “It is disrespectful to shorten a female’s name in my culture.”

  “My Lady? Like we’re at the freaking Renaissance Fair?”

  “What is the—?” Vorn began but she was already shaking her head.

  “Never mind. Whatever. Just don’t call me Josephine.”

  Jodi looked away, her cheeks burning and Vicky knew her oldest daughter was wondering how in the world she would explain having a seven-foot-tall Beast Kindred bodyguard dogging her every step and addressing her like they were both players in a Shakespearean theater troupe. Hopefully Vorn really could stay in the background.

  As for Liosh and Melli, well, the way her younger daughter was looking at the Blood Kindred gave Vicky hope that perhaps Melli’s self-imposed dry spell was coming to an end. Maybe Liosh would be good for her—maybe he could help her get over whatever it was that had been keeping her in her shell for the past three and a half years.

  Vicky could only hope and pray that both her daughters would be all right but it made her feel better to know that both of them were going to be guarded by Kindred warriors.

  Because, as she knew from her own personal experience, no human man could love and care for and protect a girl halfway as well as a Kindred.

  The End?

  I really thought it would be! Of this particular book, anyway. But it occurred to me that I LOVE the whole bodyguard trope and I really want to see what happens to sweet, shy Melli and her devoted Blood Kindred, Liosh. I also want to know what happens when fiery, independent Jodi butts heads with the dark, stubborn Vorn. Also, I know most of my books are set on alien worlds, but I’d like to see how Kindred warriors function in regular Earth society—what the reactions of other humans are to them and how they deal with any human problems that get thrown their way.

  Are you interested to know more about Melli and Jodi? I don’t know if they would each get a book—I think I’d like to write both sisters at once and watch how their different stories with their two very different Kindred flow and intertwine. If you’re interested too, please let me know on my Facebook page. I love to hear from readers so drop me a line and let me know how you feel about a continuation of this storyline.

  For now, if you have enjoyed Stealing Her Heart, please take a moment to leave a review or like a positive review HERE. Good reviews are like gold for an author in the crazy, overcrowded e-book market. They let other readers know it's okay to take a chance on a new series or a new author. Plus they give me the warm fuzzies. : )

  Thanks for being such an awesome reader!

  Hugs,

  Evangeline

  Turn the page for a preview of

  FANG AND CLAW,

  Nocturne Academy, Book Two.

  Coming February 2020

  My name is Kaitlyn Fellows and I'll never be the same.

  The Fire stole everything from me.

  My home...my family...even my beauty.

  The right side of my face is normal—even pretty. But the left side, I hide in shame. That's where The Fire marked me...scarred me forever.

  At Nocturne Academy I'm nothing—just a little Norm girl with no supernatural powers and a disfigured face.

  Which is why it's so strange that a big, handsome Drake like Ari Reyes should take an interest in me.

  But it isn't only Ari who wants me.

  For under his high cheekbones and clear amber eyes, Ari hides another, much more frightening visage—A Drake, the fire-breathing monster that lives within him.

  A monster who has decided I should be his alone.

  Can I survive Ari's love for me? And more importantly, can I survive the love of his Drake?

  Because once a girl has been claimed by a Drake, the only way out is through The Fire.

  What am I going to do?

  One

  Kaitlyn

  The flames come for me—vivid orange and yellow. I can feel the heat baking off them and their bright fingers reach for me hungrily—wrapping around me, enfolding me in the terrible searing pain I can never escape…never forget.

  Outside the door, I hear my mother and father screaming.

  The door bursts open at last and they are there, but the flames already have me—I can feel them licking up the back of my nightgown like hungry tongues, setting my hair afire with light. They are ravenous—insatiable. They intended to eat me alive—I know that just as I know there is no escape from them.

  “Katy!” my mother screams as she runs to me, heedless of the wall of fire between us. “Katy—my baby!”

  She dives through the flames, not caring that they catch her too, wrapping around her like the wings of a great and terrible bird enfolding her. She pulls me close and begins to beat at the fire that is trying to eat me, all while my father is shouting for us to hurry, yelling that we have to run…have to get out…

  Get out, I think. We have to get out!

  We will never get out.

  And then I smell the awful scent of burning flesh and know it is my own…

  I woke up with tears in my eyes and my throat closed tight with panic, as I always did when I dreamed of The Fire.

  I thought if it that way—capitalized in my head. Why not? It was certainly important enough—it had taken everything from me. It was probably what my English teacher would call “the seminal event” of my entire life and though it had happened over two years ago, when I was barely fourteen, the dream made it seem as fresh as ever. I could still hear my parents screams, echoing above the roaring flames…

  A sob caught in my throat and then another as a vast sense of loss filled me. They were gone—they had left me all alone and they were never coming back. My wonderful, wise mother and my handsome, smartass father, who was always cracking dad jokes to make us groan. I would never see them again—not on this side of eternity, anyway.

  I know lots of teenagers don’t get along with their parents—and my relationship with mine hadn’t been perfect. But we had laughed together and loved each other and really, almost never disagreed.

  I wondered if it would hurt less if we had fought more.

  The vast ocean of grief—its waters as deep and black and cold as space—threatened to overwhelm me. I felt like I would drown in it sometimes.

  Sometimes I even wanted to.

  The loss of my parents filled me for a moment and my heart ached almost as much as my scars, which covered my arms and the entire left side of my body. Sometimes I tried to remember what I had looked like without them—back when all of my face—not just the right side—was pretty and pleasing to look at. Now the left side looked melted and what used to be smooth, light brown skin had been replaced by pinkish-white tissue, knotted and lumpe
d and ugly, so ugly.

  I avoided mirrors these days and except for when I was alone with my coven-mates at Nocturne Academy, I kept to myself as much as possible.

  I wished I was there now—wished I could reach out to Emma or Megan, the newest member of our little clan—for some comfort or at least some distraction from my bleak thoughts and the awful memories.

  But it was the weekend and I was home. Well, at Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove’s home, anyway. I had been babysitting their little girl, Allegra, almost from the time she was born. After the fire and the weeks I spent in the hospital, I had no home of my own to go back to so Alastair and Anastasia Breedlove had taken me into their house and given me a room of my own—right next to Allegra’s. They had even sponsored me for Nocturne Academy—paying the extremely expensive tuition out of their own pocket.

  I was grateful for their kindness though, being Nocturnes, neither one of them was exactly very warm. But Allegra made up for her parents’ coolness and distance by being sweet and bubbly and incredibly loveable. I knew what my friend Avery said—that I was basically the Breedloves’ nanny, at least on the weekends—but I didn’t care. Allegra was a ray of sunshine in my dark life and I loved her as though she was my own.

  As though my thoughts of her had called the little girl, I heard the light patter of footsteps in the hall outside my door and then the door creaked open. In the darkness of the hallway, I saw the soft glow of her pale blue eyes.

  “Katy?” she whispered, approaching my bed. “Katy, I had a nightmare. Can I sleep with you?”

  “Sure, sweetie.” I opened the covers for her and she slid into bed beside me and snuggled close. Like all Nocturnes, her body temperature was about ten degrees below human normal so she felt like a cold little lump beside me until my body heat warmed her.

  “Was it a bad one?” I asked as I wrapped my arm around her. “Your nightmare? Do you remember what it was about, Allegra?”

  “Don’t know. Just…it was scary.” She snuffled and pressed closer, her back to my front. She had on the expensive white lace nightgown her mother insisted she wear and her long, pale blonde hair mixed with my own black hair on the pillow. In the moonlight spilling through the window, I thought it looked like silver.

  I barely noticed when she pulled my wrist to her mouth and sank her little fangs in. The skin there was deadened and knotted with scar tissue—it was a wonder she could find a vein at all. But she always seemed to manage and though she never took more than a few mouthfuls of blood, it relaxed her enough to go back to sleep.

  This time, however, I felt a strange little tingle run up my arm as she sucked my wrist. I frowned in the darkness—what was going on? I usually didn’t feel a thing after she had first sunk her fangs in. Maybe some of the nerves in my deadened skin were regenerating at last? It seemed like too much to hope for so I shrugged the idea off and ignored the burning tingle.

  If this sounds weird—the babysitter letting the kid she’s watching bite her—well, it was pretty routine for us. As I said, I’d been watching Allegra since she was a baby and she was four now—almost five and a “big girl” as she liked to point out. But big girl or not, she was a Nocturne and they live on blood—though they mostly drink bagged and chilled animal blood. Allegra, however, tended to get hungry between meals and I didn’t mind letting her “snack” on me from time to time.

  I knew my friend Megan got wonderful intense sensations when her Nocturne, Griffin, bit her, but when Allegra bit me, all I felt was a mothering-kind of love for the little girl. In fact, I had been surprised when Megan talked about how pleasurable she found it when Griffin sank his fangs into her flesh—“better than sex” she’d called it. Though, as Avery pointed out, she wouldn’t know since she was still a virgin and Griffin refused to do anything about said virginity until she turned eighteen and was completely legal.

  “Oh, shut up, Avery,” Megan had snapped, half-laughing as she shot him a glare. “Like you’ve had so much experience yourself.”

  “Like any of us has,” Emma sighed, staring into the fire—a fire I stayed well back from, despite the fact that it was small and friendly—nothing like the blaze that had taken my parents and house and changed my life forever.

  We had been staying up late one night, not long after Megan and Griffin had Blood-Bonded—which was supposed to be a big no-no, since the main law of Otherkind—the Edict—stated that Others of different races must never mix. However, Megan had broken the magic of the Edict when she became the Witch Queen and Griffin became her Blood Knight. They tried not to flaunt their new relationship but it was easy to see, by the way they looked at each other, that they had found a love that would last forever.

  I sighed and shifted in my bed as I thought of my coven-mate and her Nocturne. I was never going to find a love like that. Not with the ugly scars I wore.

  You might think that as a human going to a magical school, I could have the scars removed easily but it wasn’t so. Both medical and magical treatments had been tried and even Megan’s immense magic hadn’t been able to make them fade, though she had tried several times to help me.

  “I’m sorry, Kaitlyn,” she’d said after the last attempt when my scars stubbornly remained in place, though she had cut herself three times for me. (Megan does Blood magic—something else that’s supposed to be outlawed in the Other World but she has a habit of making her own rules, as Avery puts it.)

  “It’s okay.” I sighed and shook my head. “It’s not your fault—thank you for trying.”

  “It almost feels like they’re resisting me magically—your scars, I mean.” Megan had frowned, a furrow forming between her green-gray eyes. “But how can that be? How can I have enough power to abolish the Edict but I can’t get rid of your scars?”

  I could see the frustration on her pretty face and knew that my coven-mate wanted to help me so badly she could almost taste it. But I had no answers.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged helplessly. “But, well…thank you for trying.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Megan had declared. “I’m going to have a look in Corinne’s grimoire. There are tons of healing spells in there. Maybe one of them will work for you.”

  The book she was talking about had belonged to her ancestor, Corinne Latimer—one of the most powerful witches to ever have lived. Megan seemed to have all of her power and then some…and yet she couldn’t heal my scars.

  As Allegra slipped her fangs out of my scarred wrist with a contented sigh and the tingling faded, I wondered if Megan was right—if my scars were somehow magically resistant to healing. But that didn’t make any sense, did it? The house fire that had taken my parents and marked me so horribly had been caused by faulty wiring—or so the fire marshal’s report had said. There was nothing magical about it—it was just terrible luck.

  That was what I told myself, anyway, as I cuddled Allegra closer and slipped back into sleep. I might be scarred for life, I told myself, but at least I had people who loved me. People who cared enough to stick by me—no matter what I looked like. My coven mates, Megan and Emma and Avery to name a few, and sweet little Allegra who was already fast asleep in my arms to name another.

  People who loved me. People who wanted to protect me…

  A new thought entered my mind—the image of a vast black shadow with wings like sails hovering in the sky, looking down on me…

  Watching over you. Protecting you, whispered a strange little voice in my head.

  I shivered and pushed the disturbing thought away. I didn’t want to think of that shape—of what it meant—of who it might be. Better, far better, to snuggle under the covers with Allegra and let myself drift back to sleep knowing the nightmares were in the past and that nothing worse than The Fire could ever happen to me.

  Or so I thought.

  Two

  Ari

  I woke up in the night, knowing she was upset, though I didn’t know how I knew it.

  I felt her terror—it woke me in a cold sweat, my heart pumpi
ng, my muscles bunching as everything inside me drove me to go to her.

  My Drake woke with a roar. I felt him inside me—spreading his wings—trying to emerge.

  “Wait—wait a minute!” I shouted at him mentally. “Para, estupido!”

  Only a few months before he had broken free of me and gone flying to where she was—a stunt that had nearly earned me an expulsion. The humans don’t believe in dragons—or witches, or fairies, or vampires for that matter. And they don’t like to have their beliefs challenged by a ten-ton Drake flying over their heads in the middle of the morning.

  In the end, Headmistress Nightworthy who runs Nocturne Academy, had let me off with a warning—that I must keep better control of the beast which lived inside me. I had agreed but what could I do when he was so attuned to her—to Kaitlyn, the little human girl I had somehow become linked to?

  I don’t know how it happened—maybe it was because I spilled blood for her. Not mine—Pedro Sanchez’s. I had punched the pendejo in the face when he had mocked her and made fun of her scars. And unfortunately, many of the Drakes that ran with his crew had joined in.

  I swear I had no feelings for her before then. But seeing Sanchez pick on a helpless female like that enraged me. I had been raised in the Sky Lands, the home world of the Drakes, to protect and champion those weaker and more vulnerable than me. My father was constantly lecturing me about the importance of caring for those that were unable to care for themselves.

  “History will judge you by the way in which you treat the least of your people, Ari,” he would tell me, his voice echoing through the vast and cavernous audience chamber where he sat to hear grievances every month. “You must be certain you can look back later and be proud of your actions.”