Pure Ecstasy

by Aja James

  Jade glanced quickly out the dark tinted windows. It was well into the morning by now. They could still do the things Seth mentioned if they dressed quickly and snuck out of the Cove before her personal guards got wind of her unplanned departure.

  “Come then, husband,” she threw carelessly over her shoulder as she scrambled to find clothes that would be suitable for mingling with the human crowds outside, in broad daylight no less.

  “We’d best get going before the day is done!”

  She didn’t see the flash of acute pain that streaked over his face at her casual words.

  When she paused in her flurry of movement to regard him once more, dressed in a long, wool dress with thigh-high splits and knee-length, high-heeled boots, he was also dressed, impeccably handsome in his formal fitted attire, the same one he’d worn when he’d first arrived at the Cove.

  “Well, husband?” she asked flirtatiously, relishing in their pretense. “How do I look?”

  She turned slowly to display her generous curves and long, graceful lines, and gave him a look of pure sin through the cascade of her lashes.

  “Beautiful,” he answered simply, his face unsmiling.

  Her own teasing smile wobbled uncertainly on her lips.

  Why did he look so serious when this was all a game?

  She refused to dwell on it.

  Determinedly, she grabbed his hand and led him quickly out of her chambers, down the winding corridors, into the hidden elevator and down seventy levels to exit out a secret door at the base of the Chrysler Building.

  Having avoided detection and detainment by her constantly present protective escorts, Jade let out an elated laugh, breathing deeply the refreshing winter air.

  She quickly sent Ana and Maximus a message through her wrist device to keep them from hunting her down in worry once they found her missing. She could take care of herself for a few hours.

  She slanted a furtive glance at Seth, who had raised his face to the warmth of the sun, soaking it into his skin, for he’d not been physically outside for the duration of his stay with her.

  As if sensing her eyes upon him, he tilted his head down to regard her, his eyes warm and bright.

  He would take care of her as his wife, he’d said, if she trusted him to do so,

  She wanted to trust him.

  Very much.

  “Thank you for today,” he said quietly, startling her out of her own reverie.

  “But it isn’t over yet,” she pointed out. “It hasn’t even begun.”

  He held out his hand to her, palm up.

  “Then, let’s begin it together.”

  In a low voice she barely heard, he added as if to himself—

  “Wife.”

  *** *** *** ***

  Present day.

  “It could be a trap.”

  Seth didn’t look up from his letter at the speaker, Adam Morgan, as he hand-wrote his response with a nineteenth century fountain pen.

  Engraved invitations from millennia-old vampires required a personal touch.

  “You should take a couple of the Elite with you,” Ayelet suggested, hovering somewhere near his right side.

  “Cloud and Aella, for example. They are not hunting tonight.”

  “Our defenses are thin enough as it is,” Seth said as his hand moved gracefully across the page in bold strokes.

  “They are more needed here, especially while Valerius and Rain are gone.”

  The Protector and his Mate, the ex-Royal healer of the Pure Ones, were on a mission to both recruit more warriors to their fold, as well as to search for the still missing Paladin, Dalair, leaving only three Elite guards to protect the queen.

  Tristan, Ayelet’s Mate, had his hands busy with their almost two-year-old daughter Isolde most nights. If there was ever a female who embodied the title “daddy’s little girl” more, Seth had yet to meet her. Even he had never doted on Masika the way Tristan hovered over Isolde, like a giant pet she commanded with ease and rewarded for good behavior with wet smacking kisses on his cheek.

  Morgan stirred against the far wall of Seth’s office, refolding his muscular arms over his chest.

  “It’s an unpredictable time in the vampire world,” he cautioned. “Those behind their queen’s attempted assassination are still at large.”

  “Goran Ivanov had not been implicated?” Seth looked up briefly and arched a brow in question.

  “No,” Morgan confirmed, “but that doesn’t prove his innocence.”

  “Understood,” Seth said, focusing back on his reply to the Dark noble, slashing his signature across the bottom of the note.

  “Why must you risk attending the gathering?” Ayelet pressed, coming closer to stand beside his desk.

  “What would you have me do?” Seth returned calmly, folding the letter and sealing it. “Send our newly Awakened queen in my stead?”

  “Of course not—”

  “Ignore his invitation to formalize a truce between our Kinds after millennia of cold war and subversive hostilities?”

  “That is not what I—”

  “Ivanov invited twenty other Pure Ones, all heads of important households within the New England territories,” Seth continued as if Ayelet had not spoken.

  “They will bring escorts, I’m sure. And I am not completely helpless, you know.”

  He took up the heavy steel staff leaning against his desk and stood.

  “I’m more than just a pretty face,” he said teasingly, trying to relax Ayelet with a confident smile.

  “Seth,” she huffed with some exasperation at his blithe interruptions.

  “I know you can handle yourself. Honestly, you’re more fit to be a warrior than a diplomat, but fortunately for us, your skills in the latter far surpass the former.”

  “Though the former is still formidable,” Seth reminded her.

  “You will be outnumbered,” Morgan sided with Ayelet.

  “You don’t know how many bloodsuckers await you at the congregation. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Seth sighed, extending the letter to the human Chevalier to deliver to its intended address.

  “If I don’t attend, my absence will give the naysayers more fodder to toss into the vampires’ broiling resentment toward us. They’ll say that Pure Ones are all cowards, never their equals. They’ll demand retribution for the rejection of their extended olive branch. They’ll ostracize Invanov and other Pure sympathizers for ever making the attempt to bring our two Kinds together in peace. And so on and so forth. I cannot let that happen.”

  “So you’ll get yourself captured, tortured or killed instead, if indeed this is a trap?” Ayelet argued.

  “They won’t risk open warfare,” Seth returned.

  “Maybe it’s exactly what they want,” Morgan said, a rare scowl darkening his usually impassive, stoic face.

  “There are plenty among the Dark nobles who clamor for a return to the time when vampires ruled the world. The same feral bloodsuckers who bankroll the fight clubs I fought in.”

  “It is a risk I have to take,” Seth stated with finality, then speared his comrades with a nonnegotiable look.

  “No matter what happens, you are not to come after me. I will deal with it myself.”

  “How will you deal with it if you’re dead?” Morgan raised a brow of his own.

  Seth quirked a corner of his lips.

  “I’ve faced more challenging odds before, and died a rather gruesome death as a human to secure a particularly difficult negotiation. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep the peace between the races. No risk, no reward, right?”

  “Seth…” Ayelet began, laying a worried hand on his arm, as if trying to keep him within the safety of the Shield.

  But past events had demonstrated that nowhere was safe when their nemesis was still at large. Seth would rather face the danger head on than play it too conservative.

  “Keep up the search for more recruits to the Dozen,” Seth told Ayelet as he gave her hand
a reassuring squeeze before moving away.

  She heard perfectly well what he hadn’t said—in case I don’t come back.

  *** *** *** ***

  The Creature looked down at its Sleeping Beauty Prince.

  Breathing, but just barely.

  Alive, but not quite.

  It should probably find a better place to stash the gorgeous husk of the male for which the Pure queen had Awakened, but it wanted to keep her “trigger” close at hand.

  Besides, it was curious.

  Why this particular male, across all the incarnations that the Pure queen had lived?

  Her soul had been infused into new bodies with each and every generation. For the most part, she lived out ordinary, mundane, human lives. Even married and produced offspring in some of them.

  Her incarnations never seemed particularly happy or extraordinarily sad. Her relationships had never been anything to “write home about,” as humans would say. Her accomplishments during her lifetimes would never outlive her.

  She’d been so very average, in other words.

  Except for three distinct incarnations: her first incarnation as a Pure One, the second as a Princess in ancient Persia, and her current form as a human college student named Sophia Victoria St. James.

  Well, no longer human, now that she’d had her Awakening.

  It wondered whether she’d been able to make sense of all of her memories by now. Several millennia’s worth of memories was a lot to sort through.

  The warrior called Dalair, the Pure One’s Paladin, had succumbed to his too numerous wounds on that fateful day of Sophia’s Awakening.

  Succumbed, in that he’d lost consciousness and had not regained it in the ensuing months.

  It was as if his soul refused to awake, though it also remained trapped in its corporeal shell.

  His wounds had superficially healed, the skin knitted, the bones mended, and the bleeding stopped. But the Creature could see the pale veins beneath the warrior’s skin, the blood flowing through them sluggish at best, the muscles and sinew not quite regenerated. His punctured internal organs were probably still a mess too. It wouldn’t take much to permanently release his soul from his too damaged body.

  The Creature drew one perfectly manicured finger down the warrior’s straight blade of a nose.

  The Paladin was certainly an exquisite specimen of male beauty, it noted objectively, but the Creature had seen countless others just as handsome. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscular. He didn’t have any one feature that captured and held one’s attention. And in repose as he was now, he radiated no innate magnetism, gave off no seductively masculine scent.

  The Creature dipped down to lick its forked tongue across the warrior’s mouth.

  Hmm. The taste was rather bland, his lips cold and lifeless.

  Truly, the Creature couldn’t figure out why this was the detonator to Sophia’s burgeoning powers.

  The Mistress wanted it to release the Paladin’s soul from his body in front of Sophia to provoke the manifestation of the Pure queen that would become the most powerful weapon on earth. And they would wield her for their own uses together.

  The Creature was not so certain.

  One, it doubted that the Mistress intended to wield anything “together.”

  Though she’d suffered some setbacks, she was as conniving, as selfish, and as evil as ever. She didn’t share anything with anyone.

  Two, once released, the Creature had doubts whether anyone could really control Sophia’s powers, not even herself.

  And though it didn’t worry about the threat of the Apocalypse, it wasn’t ready to relinquish its miserable existence just yet.

  Three, it was rather fond of sweet little Sophia.

  It had even tried to sway her to its side, though she didn’t know it behind its disguise, one of many. It had been inching toward success through its teasing flirtations and subtle manipulations, but the Paladin always appeared at the most inopportune moments to remind Sophia who she really wanted.

  Bothersome male.

  And now that she’d Awakened and recalled her past, the Creature had a snowball’s chance in hell to change her heart. It wasn’t even worth trying.

  And four…

  It frowned as it considered, swallowing uncomfortably.

  There was one other for which it held a peculiar attachment, though it didn’t even know of the child’s existence until almost a year ago.

  It sat back and checked the various tubes and needles that inserted into the Paladin’s veins. It adjusted the knobs on the machines that provided nourishment to the comatose male and watched the liquid life feed into the stone-still husk.

  It had better keep the male away from the Mistress and keep him alive until it figured out a Plan B.

  Triggering the Destroyer’s wrath with the male’s death and bringing on the End of the World was well and good, but for one tiny little problem:

  It didn’t want Benji’s short, innocent life to be snuffed out with all the other candles in the human world.

  It wanted its son to live.

  Chapter Six

  “I believe it is time to form a true alliance,” the organizer of this congregation, Goran Ivanov, continued in his statesman-like speech, meeting the eyes of the gathered Dark and Pure Ones one after the other.

  “We are not so different, after all. I have spent centuries studying the histories of our Kinds, and I find more similarities that bind us together, than contrasts that separate us,” he continued steadily.

  For a vampire, Ivanov was uncharacteristically intellectual, Seth noted from his end of the extra-long dining table where about thirty immortals were seated.

  Though he eschewed stereotypes, Seth surmised that Dark Ones were intrinsically more physical, primal, and animalistic. It was bred into their DNA.

  Perhaps he should bring it up to Ava Monroe, the superhuman scientist and friend of the Dozen, when she next visited Rain, to perform some CAT scans on Pure and Dark Ones’ brains.

  Seth lacked a medical degree, but he’d hypothesize that Dark Ones would show markers for excessive aggression, and Pure Ones would have neuro images where the conscious mind was much more dominant over the subconscious; the ego controlling the id.

  Ivanov, with his lean build, high, pale forehead, and prominent widow’s peak, two startling streaks of silver hair at his temples pulled back by a simple string from his handsome face to cascade down his back along with the rest of his heavy black mane, looked more like a lofty foreign dignitary than the Master of one of the oldest Hordes in New England.

  His Mate sat serenely beside him, hanging fixatedly on his every word.

  She was dainty and fragile looking for a vampire female, and Seth had on good authority that she used to be a Pure One in her previous life.

  In fact, if he didn’t know better, he would have thought that she was not a vampire at all, the way innate shyness infused her cheeks with a blush at the slightest provocation, the way she always leaned into her Mate as if for support.

  No, on average, vampire females were just as dominant as their male counterparts.

  In many ways, more so.

  Some human folktales even theorized that vampires were descended from the deadliest predators from ancient times—lions, tigers, panthers and leopards.

  For the most part, these were solitary creatures that hunted alone, but when they did gather together, it was the female who provided for her family. Males just lay about looking pretty, once in a while aggressing on other males who trespassed onto their land or expressed undue interest in their females.

  And when the dominant female was in heat, the male was expected to service her needs until she found satisfaction, or he’d surely suffer the consequences of her displeasure.

  But neither Ivanov, nor his Mate, appeared to be Alphas. Their Horde was old, but small. Only a dozen or so members. And all of them seemed more subdued than Seth was used to seeing in centuries and millennia old vampires.

/>   “But you are in the minority, Goran,” one of the Pure guests commented when their host paused in his well-rehearsed speech.

  “I hear of a growing faction of Dark Ones who wish to return to the time before the Great War, when Dark Ones subjugated Pure Ones and humans. There has been a string of abductions lately in the upper New England states. Unguarded Pure Ones taken from their homes and sold to Dark nobles as Blood Slaves.”

  Seth had heard of this trafficking as well, though he had yet to obtain proof to substantiate the stories. If they were true, those who sought to subvert Jade’s rule were more resourceful and more audacious than he thought.

  It was bad enough that rogue vampires ran amuck, unlawfully draining humans of blood and souls, but to enslave Pure Ones again, to have access to unlimited, immortal blood that would only fuel a vampire’s bloodlust and powers…

  It was too dangerous to contemplate.

  “This is why we must band together,” Ivanov urged.

  “We must form alliances where we can. Help each other however we can. My family and I have always been friends of the Pure Ones and even humans. We only take the blood of criminals and souls that must be sent back to the Universal Balance. Our queen herself has allowed the harmonious mingling of the races within her jurisdiction. She is on our side.”

  “But why bring the alliance into the open now?” another Pure guest asked.

  “Why not continue to work together in secret? You risk inciting Dark Ones who are against us even further with a formal truce. And as much as I like you and yours, Goran, I am not sure I will ever fully trust vampires.”

  “We have to start somewhere,” Ivanov said. “Perhaps if more Hives and Hordes around the world saw our Kinds joining together, they will do the same. Why must we hide as if we are ashamed? Why must vampires be demonized for the very nature the Dark Goddess gave us? We are not animals reduced to our basest urges. We—”

  “Speak for yourself, Goran.”

  A silky new voice entered the discussion from a darkened corner of Ivanov’s Great Hall.