Seal of Destiny (Seven Seals Series Book 1)

by Douglass, Traci

  Harps began to play. Zoe started the procession. She was lovely in her pastel purple gown, her dark hair pinned up and her eyes sparkling. He slid a glance at Xander and chuckled at his commander’s star-struck expression. “Uh, Xan. You might want to wipe the drool off your chin before she gets here.”

  • • •

  The assembled heavenly host rose to face her as she walked down the aisle. Mira’s long veil covered everything in a halo of white. She neared the altar and smiled when the jolt of Kagan’s nearness tingled through her tummy. From the way he fidgeted, she suspected he was dying to burn off his nervous energy. She climbed the few stairs to reach her groom, and Zoe helped her lift the veil.

  Mira turned to face Kagan with a smile. A year ago — hell, a month ago — she’d never have dreamed she would have been standing here today, marrying the man she loved. He took her hand in his, and his eyes glowed with warmth. She perused his tuxedo-clad form, admiring how the expensive material clung to his muscled frame and the dark hue contrasted with his midnight-blue gaze. The smoldering stare he shot her made her toes curl in her white satin pumps.

  The ceremony blurred by. Between remembering what she was supposed to say and do and fighting the urge to jump her husband, Mira had her hands more than full. When Michael spoke the famous final words, “You may now kiss the bride,” Mira couldn’t believe the proceedings were over so fast.

  Caution tossed to the wind, Mira grinned at Kagan and was delighted to see the tension surrounding him dissolve. He linked his fingers with hers and they faced Michael together. Tears of joy welled in Mira’s eyes. The scent of flowers filled the air, and Kagan’s warmth permeated her being. At last, she was safe. Together, they would find sanctuary.

  Epilogue

  Chicago — One month later

  Music blared through the large speakers surrounding the open dance floor. Mira smiled at her husband from behind the bar, deep in conversation with Luther about the proper mixing of a Brain Hemorrhage. Luther had been coerced into bartending for their belated reception. After buying and refurbishing The G Spot, she and Kagan had been busy getting the place ready to reopen as a karaoke bar. Turns out the Scion loved karaoke. According to Kagan, all the Otherworlders did. He’d been right. Business was booming.

  She demonstrated, holding up bottles of peach schnapps and Irish cream and pouring them into the glass together to achieve the exact brain tissue effect. Luther wrinkled his nose. She added a final splash of grenadine for bloody gruesomeness and held up her creation. “See? It’s spectacular. Our best seller.”

  “Disgusting is more like it. People actually order these?” Luther’s dazzling, tiger-gold eyes filled with horror as Mira tossed the drink back in one swallow.

  “Yummy!” She grinned, plunking the empty glass down on the bar. “Now where’s that damn husband of mine? I want to boogie!”

  • • •

  Zoe giggled as Mira stumbled past her table and gave her a thumbs up. She watched the couples twirl in time to the music. Chago got conned into dancing with one of the light bearers. The woman kept insisting he looked exactly like the guy in those hot underwear ads. To shut her up, he agreed to a dance.

  Wyck and Xander were picking their way through the buffet table opposite her. If she concentrated, she could catch Wyck’s stray thoughts about the latest round of hacker attacks sweeping the Internet. Xander glanced up and caught her eye; his gaze held a certain twinkle, like he knew what she was doing. Zoe looked away and frowned, tuning out the internal dialogue around her by downing the rest of her wine. She lowered her glass in time to see Divinity join the warriors at the food table.

  • • •

  “At least the First Seal is safe,” Xander’s attention remained focused on Zoe as he spoke.

  “For now. There are six more to guard,” Wyck said, digging into his third shrimp cocktail, a dollop of sauce running down his chin.

  Divinity smiled. “Having a good time, boys?”

  Wyck mumbled something incoherent around a mouthful of food and Xander smacked him across the back of the head. Divinity turned with her small plate of goodies and spotted Chago’s awkward slow-dance moves. She grimaced. “Too bad I don’t have a plant to cure that.”

  Xander tossed his trash and grabbed a drink off a passing tray. “What’s next on the agenda?”

  Divinity shrugged and nibbled her meal. “Wyck’s right. Six more Seals have been activated.” She gestured to the party around them. “If this case is any indication, a few of those Seals might become permanent members of the family.”

  Xander followed the path of her gaze to Chago and sighed. Chago shot him a look filled with pure panic. He shook his head and finished his champagne then glanced over at Zoe again and caught her stare before she turned away. Now or not at all. “Excuse me.”

  He placed his empty glass on the buffet table and strode across the room, halting in front of Zoe. “C’mon, let’s dance.”

  • • •

  The next song signaled the wedding couple’s first dance, and everyone gathered around to watch as the couple symbolically began their life together as man and wife. Kagan led a tipsy Mira to the floor and cuddled her into his arms. Merda! Eternity would never be long enough with her. He trailed kisses over her flushed face and snuggled closer.

  They swayed to the music while the smooth crooner sang about how lovely his lady looked tonight. Kagan nuzzled the side of her neck. His lovely wife purred and he grinned. “Happy, piccola?”

  Mira smiled. “Beyond happy, love.”

  About The Author

  A Midwestern native, Traci Douglass is the author of paranormal and contemporary romances with a sly, urban edge — including her Seven Seals Series. Her stories feature gorgeous alpha-male heroes rife with dark humor, quick wits and major attitudes; smart, independent heroines who always give as good as they get; and scrumptiously evil villains bent — more often than not — on world destruction. She enjoys weaving ancient curses and mythology, modern science and old religion, and great dialogue together to build red-hot, sizzling chemistry between her main characters.

  A storyteller since childhood, she began putting her tales on paper in 2011 and made the decision to pursue a full-time writing career in January 2012. Her life has now become a rollercoaster crash course in achieving your dreams. She is an unrepentant lover of chocolate, quotes, and animals, and is known to her friends as a more than occasional smartass.

  For more information and her latest projects, please check out her website:

  www.tracidouglass.net

  And join her on social media:

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/TraciDouglassAuthor

  Twitter: @Traci_Douglass

  Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/user/show/8112113-traci-douglass

  A Sneak Peek from Midnight Engagement by Eliott McKay

  It was half-past two according to the fourth hand of the scuffed gold watch that otherwise read ten minutes to the hour of six. It lay in the grass just inches from Michaela’s now bare face. Aunt Hazel would have iced murder for this unsanctioned breach of rule number two, as if it were Michaela’s fault an extended nail from an old school bench had targeted her bag for a savage attack.

  The gold gleam had captured her eye, while something else captured her foot. Michaela’s landing was implemented with practiced expertise. The contents of her arms spewed everywhere. She had long ago learned that life and limb were much dearer than physical possessions and her instinctual habit was to relinquish whatever she was holding — this time a weighty stack of school books, notebooks, pencils, papers, chewing gum, and a torn book bag — and brace herself for the inevitable. Punctured hands healed faster than broken limbs.

  She landed on a concrete path that wound through four acres of trees surrounded by high fencing toward her aunt Hazel’s vine-smothered house.

 
Michaela unburied herself, smeared a crimson dotted hand in the grass, and reached for the timepiece, the face of which had popped open.

  The offending trip site appeared to be the unlucky combination of over-stacked arms, a renegade tree root, and vision-obstructing spectacles … either that or she had just tripped over her own feet, which wouldn’t be the first time.

  The bulky frames, which more resembled bat wings, were bent under a heavy textbook with torn brown paper — Advanced French disguised as Advanced German — but luckily the lenses were spared — an odd reaction for someone with perfect vision. To say the least, these were no ordinary lenses — they were heavy-rimmed, yellow-tinted, rhinestone-bearing spectacles that were an acute source of misery and humiliation dating as far back as Michaela could remember.

  The first pair had started out well enough in comparison, but each had grown with overzealous compensation as she aged into her teen years. The latest design, which had only been forced upon her with considerable objections, and was the almighty thorn of contention between herself and Aunt Hazel, sported wing-like protrusions that not only blocked views but often clipped walls, doorways, and occasionally other students as she maneuvered her way through the school halls. It was a barking miracle she could see through the inch-thick, rippling glass at all.

  Those horrible bat-like contusions were conspicuous to the highest degree and had attracted far more than her fair share of unwanted attention, exposing her to much ridicule, and turning her into ten times the spectacle she normally was, which wasn’t much, as misbehaving around Aunt Hazel brought severe psychological punishment to the wrongdoer.

  Hazel Fidelia, Michaela’s aunt on the maternal side, had the rigid posture of an iceberg — personality included — and had become an extreme recluse after her entire family was killed in a horrible accident nearly twenty years ago. Of her long list of unbendable rules, the number one, rock-solid, mother enchilada, which must never be broken under any circumstances (under threat of excruciating and ambiguous punishments) was this: the bubbly, yellow spectacles were never to come off — except at night when sleeping, of course. Michaela added that last part of the rule without Aunt Hazel’s knowledge.

  Punctuality was also a biggie in the vast rulebook of Hazeldom.

  Aunt Hazel’s hostility ran along the high-nosed snobbery scales and was generally indicated by the rigid stance of her skeletal frame. She had ashen hair, piled atop a short frame, and exuded the impression of towering impunity; she was not to be questioned. Michaela imaged she must have been a prison warden in a former life. One tap of her pointy shoe was a sure sign of impending volatility, which is what Michaela would earn for her tardiness this day.

  After years of acceding to Hazel’s because-I-said-so explanation regarding her eyewear, Michaela assumed there had to be a practical reason for such extreme measures, and as a young girl, finally summoned up the courage to question her aunt about it.

  Hazel lowered her article titled Changing Your Identity and turned slowly to face Michaela — a rare occurrence in and of itself. She looked down her long, straight nose with intense scrutiny, and as the temperature gauge on her tolerance barometer plummeted to subzero, her lips curved with contempt, causing ice crystals to crust over a young Michaela’s heart.

  “It’s because you have a rare disease,” Hazel said, emphasizing the last word with a double measure of disdain, “which … ” her teeth cut across each other in cruel, white stacks, “causes your eyes to need extra protection from the light.” Hazel made as if to turn back to her article, then paused with a second thought.

  “And if you stop wearing them, you might go blind.”

  Even at the ripe old age of seven and one-half, Michaela could see that this uncontested wisdom had a few holes in it, and one day when her spectacles were broken at school during a lethal game of field hockey, Michaela took her chance to question the school nurse about it.

  The nurse chided her directly for believing, “such tall tales,” and Michaela’s eyewear was declared to be “no more protective than a drop of honey.”

  It was at this stage that the bat-like extensions became the new norm on Michaela’s face. Hidden behind those double-lensed apertures were brilliant green eyes pricked with gold reflections to match her long, unmanageable hair, forever in tangles. A light sprinkling of freckles trailed over her small, dutiful nose and highly etched cheekbones. She had a small frame and looked ordinary enough when de-spectaclized, or so Michaela thought most nights when reviewing her reflection in the bedroom window. This was a time of liberation and reflection, a chance to feel like herself again, if only for a few seconds. It was a ritual of renewal that pressed the reset button of Michaela’s daily life.

  That night, after finding the watch, as every other night when Michaela switched off the lights, two green blurs rippled across the window as she slipped into bed and curled up to a rag of dark-blue silk with faded, gold threading, that once passed for a blanket: the only gift her parents had left her. A chunk was missing from one corner.

  Every so often, unbeknownst to Michaela, two tiny green blurs would blink back at her from off in the darkness.

  In her early teens, Michaela begrudgingly continued to wear the kamikaze lenses out of fear of getting caught, and on the one occasion she did daringly slide the unruly specs from her face, paranoia lurked and multiplied, and every person she met became a potential spy for Aunt Hazel. It was the longest ten minutes of Michaela’s life and remained a hushed secret in her miniature stockpile of seditious moments.

  In retrospect, however, Michaela began to wonder if the true reason behind the social-killing monstrosities might have something to do with her other secret.

  On the first day of the eighth grade, Michaela made an alarming discovery. The bell between classes had just rung. She pulled out her schedule and squinted through the bubbly lenses to see what was next on the agenda: German.

  Podge, who was the bullying bane of her grade school existence, approached in the hallway, flanked by his trademark gang of troublemakers. He was tall, freckly and heavy-set with bleached bangs against black hair. He gave off the impression of an overstuffed skunk with permanent sweat stains on his chest and pits. Michaela sighed and prepared for the worst, lamenting that he had survived the summer without falling off the planet or dying of a serious case of smelliness.

  “Ahoy, Wings,” he taunted with his usual unimaginative greeting, “Those things are so big, you could light them on fire and jump hoops through them!”

  His gang broke into laughter.

  Michaela rolled her eyes. It’s not as if they could see her anyway.

  “You should join the circus!” Another boy from the gang chimed in, as another began a rousing chorus of When I See an Elephant Fly. They all started flapping their hands next to their faces as the singing escalated.

  Other students stopped to observe, many of them laughing, many of them frozen. Most of them, apart from the regular hecklers, only joined in to keep from getting on Podge’s bad side. Michaela got a few apologetic looks before people dashed into other hallways and classrooms.

  At long last Michaela finally managed to make it to class, disheveled, but feeling lucky to have avoided ramming into any lockers or students along the way. She took a seat at the back of the class. There she could hide in the blissful void of unacknowledged existence while mapping out a Podge-free path for future use. Sometimes, the breaks between classes seemed longer than the rest of the day combined.

  When the teacher got up and introduced herself, Michaela assumed she would be speaking English for at least the first few minutes, but her assumption was wrong:

  “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Madame Bouvier. Comment allez vous?”

  Michaela jerked up in her seat, fully alert. This wasn’t German at all — everyone knew “bonjour” was French. There must have been an error on her schedule. As she fumbled
to recheck her room assignment, the teacher continued speaking, drawing Michaela’s attention: she understood every word, and even more astonishingly, began responding in her head. There were times during the lesson when it felt so natural, Michaela lost track of which language they were speaking.

  A small thrill warmed her from the inside out. It was the first time she had ever encountered anything that might be linked to her past, and French class became Michaela’s guarded little secret. She even went so far as to learn a few German verbs for Aunt Hazel’s benefit. The language she was learning in school was much less elaborate than the Esperanto version in her head, and Michaela greatly enjoyed adding to it, rearranging it, filling it with the formal parts she innately knew were missing.

  Aunt Hazel had a strong aversion to discussing Michaela’s origins, particularly her family, so this new discovery awakened a fresh vigor in Michaela’s efforts toward her studies, in the hopes of finding more clues from her past. According to what little she could glean from Aunt Hazel, her parents had died in a hiking accident. Michaela was nearly three years old before coming to stay with her aunt, and very few memories existed before that time, just a few vague scenes that flashed in the wee hours of the morning before succumbing to consciousness: a mossy pond in a courtyard of stone and an ethereal voice that whispered a form of her name.

  Kayla.

  Every so often a high-pitched tune played solo in her head, one she could never quite catch. At first it was comforting, but it always left her feeling empty and vulnerable. Michaela sometimes found herself humming that tune, but the moment she became aware of it, the tune would vanish from her head.

  These days, the lonely ticking of the gold pocket-watch that she now carried everywhere had become a talisman of sorts. The miniature painting in the cover was finely detailed. The woman had light-blue eyes and dark ringlets around her oval face. Her expression was soft and warming, as if observed by the one she loved. Michaela was drawn to it, staring at it for long periods of time, feeling somehow filled by it.