The Storm

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Two hundred years after the Rending, most surviving Irina were reluctant to leave the havens where they’d hidden. The Elder Council in Vienna was the governing body of the Irin people, financing the scribe houses and protecting the secrecy of the Irin race in the human world. Since the Rending, the council was made of old men reluctant to part with their power.

  Damien and Sari, former watchers in Istanbul, had taken over the warrior training center in the Czech Republic. They were desperate to rediscover the martial spells Irina had once sung in battle. Songs that had once destroyed angels had been lost to time, since Irina libraries existed only in Irina singers themselves. Irina librarians were knowledge in human form. Walking encyclopedias of magic, able to recall complex spells from memories trained since birth. They did not write magic down, believing that the delivery and emotion behind oral preservation were as essential as the spells themselves.

  It was a stubborn ideology that drove Rhys mad.

  He was a scribe of Gabriel’s blood, trained to preserve knowledge and copy any manuscript with precision, gifted in tattooing intricate magic on his body. Rhys’s tattoos, his talesm, started on his left wrist, wrapped around his arm and up his shoulder, down his chest, torso, and right arm, covering his body from the tops of his thighs to his neck. Only the space over his heart was bare, waiting for the mating mark he was half-convinced would never come.

  His talesm were not only a magical armor, but a personal history. Every scribe was trained to preserve knowledge for future Irin generations in the most efficient and sensible way: writing.

  “This Wolf,” Rhys asked, “is she a librarian?”

  “Better,” Max said.

  Rhys rolled his eyes. At this point in their history, there was nothing more valuable than an Irina librarian. “So what is she?”

  “She’s the sister of the Serpent.”

  Rhys blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “They were both killed.”

  “No. Ulakabiche died in battle, but his sister didn’t. Atawakabiche lives. At least according to Sari’s contact.”

  “And not once in nearly three hundred years has she revealed herself to her sisters?”

  Max sighed. “Don’t ask me, Rhys. You’re the archivist. That’s why Damien sent you on this job. Sort out truth from legend, talk to this woman in New Orleans, and find out if the Wolf is still living. She and her brother were the most feared Irin warriors in North America. Atawakabiche’s magic destroyed an archangel without the use of a heavenly blade. If she exists, she could change everything.”

  Rhys considered what he knew:

  Atawakabiche, the Tattooed Wolf, had been a legendary and powerful leader.

  There was no trusted record of her death, only rumors.

  Native Irina in the Southern United States had withdrawn long before the Rending.

  There was a surprising lack of Grigori attacks in New Orleans, despite a ready and available stream of tourists.

  Sari was the opposite of a fool.

  Damien trusted her implicitly.

  “Who is Sari’s contact?” Rhys asked.

  “An Irina named Meera. She’ll meet you in New Orleans in three days. Go to Jackson Square on Saturday morning and she’ll find you.”

  Rhys groaned. “She wants to meet me among the biggest tourist traffic in New Orleans on Saturday morning? Is she serious?”

  “I don’t make the decisions here, brother. I’m passing along information. Be there by nine.”

  “In the morning?” Rhys curled his lip. He was a night owl.

  “Nine in the morning, my friend. Be there.”

  Rhys’s eyes locked on the dark-haired man walking out of the diner with a woman on his arm. It was the Grigori and the young waitress. He opened his car door and spit the toothpick on the ground. “Max, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get on the road.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Rhys slid his hand into his pocket, his fingers curling around the hilt of a silver dagger. “Just a little hunting. No need to be alarmed.”

  “Be careful. The Houston house thinks you’re a mild-mannered scholar on vacation.”

  “Bollocks,” Rhys muttered. “Goodbye, Max.”

  He hung up before his brother could say another word. He tossed the phone in the passenger seat and closed the car door. The Grigori and the woman had disappeared to the back of the parking lot. Rhys hadn’t noticed him arriving in a car, but perhaps he’d convinced the woman to give him a ride to a more secluded location where he could feed from her.

  Grigori were soul hungry. Human mythology called them incubi or vampires. Even cannibals. They fed from the soul energy that all human beings possessed, though most preferred women. Women they could lure with their looks and their scent. They were born predators, dark sons of heaven made to seduce and feed.

  In a shadowed corner of the back parking lot, Rhys saw the Grigori pressing the woman against her car, kissing her neck as the her head was thrown back. She was panting, her breasts heaving in a macabre imitation of pleasure. In reality, there could be no pleasure for her because the Grigori’s bare hands were pressed to her stomach and back, his touch robbing the waitress of her free will. She was putty in the creature’s hands, willing to do anything he asked, his touch more effective than a drug.

  Rhys approached quietly, but the Grigori must have sensed him. The creature spun, keeping one hand on the woman.

  “You,” he hissed.

  “If you were smart,” Rhys said, “you’d already be running.”

  The Grigori’s eyes were cold and blank. No hint of conscience warmed them. “She wanted me. She said yes.”

  “She doesn’t know what you are.” Rhys glanced at the woman. Her eyes were still closed. She was still panting. Her moans of pleasure scraped against his ears like nails on slate. “Get away from her.”

  The Grigori hesitated, his eyes narrowed in growing panic. Rhys noticed the second the man decided to run. He broke away from the woman and lunged to the left, dashing between cars as Rhys caught the human woman and laid her on the ground. Then he shot to his feet and ran after the man who was running toward Kirby Drive.

  The older waitress walked out of the restaurant just as Rhys ran past.

  “Your friend is in the back,” he yelled. “She’s hurt!”

  Rhys left the humans and ran, waiting for the traffic to pass so he could follow the Grigori. Cars honked and drivers rolled down their windows to yell as he ran.

  There.

  Rhys caught a glimpse of the monster as he darted between two parked cars in a multi-story car park. The Grigori might have been running to his own vehicle or simply trying to lose Rhys. Either way, the creature was going to die.

  He paused when he entered the garage, brushing a thumb over the talesm prim on his left wrist and waiting for his senses to sharpen. In seconds, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his heart rate steadied, and his ears picked up the footsteps running up the ramp and toward the roof. Rhys followed the sound, drawing the silver stiletto from its hidden sheath and gripping it tightly.

  He reached the top of the garage and was barely breathing harder. The moon had disappeared behind a blue fog that drifted over the city, but yellow lights buzzed on the roof, casting strange overlapping shadows between the parked cars.

  There were several rows of parked cars and trucks. Rhys walked among them deliberately, waiting for a sound, a scent, anything. He sorted through the acrid smell of burning sulfur, exhaust, and mold.

  There.

  A row of pickup trucks caught his eye, every one of them a potential hiding place for the Grigori.

  “Who do you belong to?” Rhys asked. “Who commands you, Grigori?”

  A creak near the blue truck.

  Not the blue, the red.

  “There are ways to live without killing,” Rhys said.

  A shuffle and a break in the silence. The Grigori took a running leap from the top of the parking garage
to the office building on the other side of the alley.

  “Are you joking?” Rhys grumbled. He hated to jump and he didn’t particularly like heights. “You fecking knob!” Rhys grit his teeth and ran toward the edge, concentrating on the burst of magical energy as he leapt into the darkness.

  A fall from four stories wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt like hell.

  He landed and rolled on the gravel roof of the office building just in time to see the Grigori slip over the side. Rhys needed to get to the ground fast. He spotted a drain pipe and ran toward it, shimmying down the dirty pipe until he was close enough to fall. He ran around the corner of the building just in time to see the Grigori dangle from the fire escape and drop.

  Rhys grabbed him by the neck while he was still catching his balance and shoved him face first against the brick wall of the office building.

  The man was smaller than he’d appeared on the run. Rhys was tall, over six foot, with a runner’s build and a long reach. Far from bulky, Rhys dwarfed him.

  He gripped him by the neck. “Who do you belong to?”

  The man’s shoulders slumped. “Bozidar.”

  “The archangel?” Not likely. Bozidar’s sons would have more natural magic than this. “How many women have you fed from like the waitress?”

  The man froze. “Not enough.” Then he turned and snapped his teeth at Rhys’s left wrist in a last ditch effort to damage the scribe’s magic.

  Without a second thought, Rhys plunged the silver stiletto into the base of the Grigori’s neck and waited. Within seconds, the body began to shimmer and disintegrate. Rhys stepped back and wiped the dust from his blade before he returned it to the sheath, watching silently as dust rose through the heavy night sky, disappearing into the darkness and mist.

  Under his breath, Rhys said a prayer. He’d slain a son of the angels. Fallen angels, yes. But the same blood ran in his veins. The same magic fueled him. Grigori were the dark shadow of the Irin. Without knowledge and training, scribes would turn feral too.

  The lone Grigori had been no challenge, and Rhys felt no satisfaction in the kill, no sense of righteous anger or vengeance.

  Bozidar.

  The archangel from St. Louis. It hadn’t been the whole truth, but there had been a ring to it. Perhaps the young man had belonged to one of Bozidar’s lesser Fallen allies. He’d report the incident to his watcher and let Malachi decide if he wanted to pass the information along.

  After all, Rhys was nothing more than a visiting scholar from Istanbul.

  Hardly a threat at all.

  Rhys slept until noon the next day, waking only when the housekeeper tapped on his door. He’d checked with his Spanish passport, so Rhys called out in Spanish, asking for a few minutes more. He threw off the sheet that covered him and took a moment to enjoy the cool breeze on his bare chest. He rubbed the unmarked skin over his heart, wondering for the thousandth time what it would feel like to put a needle into it. His first marks had been made at the age of thirteen by his father, a stern man who impressed on Rhys the importance of history and legacy and tradition. Those talesm ran down his back, covering the magic his mother had spoken over him from the time of his birth.

  “When you find your mate, then you will know true wisdom.”

  His parents still lived, still tended the library in Glast as every scribe in his family had done since the beginning of time. Rhys was a direct descendant of Gabriel’s line in Glastonbury. His father had been the chief archivist as his grandfather had been. Rhys’s children—if he ever had any—would be expected to follow in that line. In the early days, the scribes in his family only took trained Irina librarians as mates, so the Great Library at Glast had been one of the rare joined archives of their race. Rhys’s grandfather had met his reshon and broken that tradition, but no one had blamed him for it. A reshon was a rare and beautiful gift, the single perfect soul created by heaven to be your equal.

  Rhys still hoped for a mate someday. A reshon was likely too much to ask. Of course, it wasn’t easy finding any mate when eighty percent of the women in your race had been killed.

  He hadn’t given up hope. Not exactly. After all, all of his brothers in Istanbul had found mates. Malachi, his new watcher, had mated with Ava, an American with unique Grigori blood. Leo had also mated a kareshta singer, and Rhys was fairly sure Max and Renata were finally together, though the cagey Irina had led his brother on a fifteen year chase.

  There was hope. Probably. If those bastards could find women to put up with them, there had to be someone who could keep his interest for more than a single conversation.

  Rhys groaned and rolled out of bed. He could feel the onerous heat pressing against the windows and creeping under the door. He showered and threw on his spare change of clothes, unconcerned about covering his talesm that morning. Americans were easy about such things. Tattoos were so common now, he’d noticed professionals and grandmothers inked with them. The neat rows of intricate writing covering his arms were unlikely to raise more than a casual interest.

  He stood at the door of his motel room, enjoying the brief moment of being perspiration-free before he slid on his sunglasses and walked outside.

  Ah yes. Covered in sweat again.

  Walking quickly down the stairs, he found the compact blue rental car and threw his backpack in the passenger seat. Then he drove two blocks away and returned the car at the rental agency before he called for a taxi. He took that car to another hotel and walked from there to a national car rental.

  If he was going to take a road trip, he wanted the right car and it needed far better air-conditioning than the blue compact. He took off his sunglasses and scanned the lot.

  A salesman walked up to him. “Can I help you, sir?”

  Rhys spotted it, a silver Dodge Challenger with tan leather interior. “That one.” He walked over to look inside.

  Leg room. Glorious, glorious leg room.

  “The Challenger?” the man appeared to be excited. “An excellent choice. It has—”

  “Would it be possible to return it in New Orleans?”

  “Yes, sir. There would be an additional charge.”

  “Not a problem.”

  He slid his sunglasses back on. Yes, this one would do nicely.

  Within minutes, he was driving on Interstate 10, “Way Down We Go” blaring from the speakers, crossing the channel and heading east to New Orleans to find a legend lost for three hundred years.

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  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank everyone who encouraged me to write this story, especially Grace Draven, Thea Harrison, and Jeffe Kennedy. The Storm originally appeared in the Amid the Winter Snow anthology with stories from these three other talented authors. I’d been debating how or if I even wanted to tell Max and Renata’s story, and these three ladies gave me the push I needed.

  I want to give a special thanks to my wonderful editor, Anne Victory. Her participation on this project came at a painful personal time, and I cannot express how much it meant to me that she was willing to work on this book. Anne, so much love to you and your family. I am honored to not only call you an editor, but a friend.

  I also want to thank all the Hunters in my reader group who were so enthusiastic to read about this prickly pair. Many Irina stories are hard to tell, and losing her soul mate made Renata an especially hard
subject.

  And as always, love and gratitude to my family. Though we aren’t always close geographically, we hold each other in our hearts. You are all home to me, no matter which continent you currently reside on.

  For Renata, like so many who have suffered real loss, the only way to move forward from a painful past is to find meaning and purpose in the present.

  To everyone who has suffered loss—big and small—I pray that you have the audacity to hope, the bravery to love, and the faith to continue on your journey.

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH HUNTER is a USA Today and international best-selling author of romance, contemporary fantasy, and paranormal mystery. Based in Central California, she travels extensively to write fantasy fiction exploring world mythologies, history, and the universal bonds of love, friendship, and family. She has published over thirty works of fiction and sold over a million books worldwide. She is the author of Love Stories on 7th and Main, the Elemental Legacy series, the Irin Chronicles, the Cambio Springs Mysteries, and other works of fiction.

  ElizabethHunterWrites.com

  Also by Elizabeth Hunter

  The Irin Chronicles

  The Scribe

  The Singer

  The Secret

  The Staff and the Blade

  The Silent

  The Storm

  The Seeker (Summer 2018)

  * * *

  The Elemental Mysteries

  A Hidden Fire

  This Same Earth

  The Force of Wind

  A Fall of Water

  The Elemental World

  Building From Ashes

  Waterlocked (novella)

  Blood and Sand

  The Bronze Blade (novella)

  The Scarlet Deep

  Beneath a Waning Moon (novella)