The Ardennes Curse
Saranna DeWylde
Contents
Untitled
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Ardennes Curse
A Woolven Secret Novella
by
Saranna DeWylde
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Published in the United States of America by
Saranna DeWylde © 2015
Cover Art by Saranna DeWylde
Stock Photo: Dreamstime
All excerpt materials printed with permission.
Created with Vellum
Chapter 1
Armand Rommulus-Ardennes arrived in the small town of Malfleur on a Friday evening. It was nestled deep in the Ardennes forest, hidden from humans and other supes alike. Walking into Malfleur was walking into the past, or a fairy tale. The town looked like some gothic German village with half-timbered buildings, blackened oak beams and second story overhangs. The structures were positioned in a circle around the very thing that had given the town its name—Malfleur or “evil flower.”
It was a carnivorous strain of monkshood—wolfsbane. It made their prey docile and pliable, and some said that it was used to lull human brides into a state of such bliss, they could do nothing but submit.
The flower was night blooming, its black petals unfurling in glossy doom. Armand watched with fascination as it sought its prey. A bat circled down ever lower to its unhappy end, drawn in by the sweet scent of the deadly plant. When the bat was close enough, the petals snapped shut around the squirming creature and devoured it. It was a beautiful dance of death, of predator and prey, of all it meant to be a wolf.
He stopped, cocked his head to the side, listening. The forest had gone silent. There were no night birds, crickets, or any rustling of underbrush around the town—and the town itself was silent as the grave. Almost as if it had been abandoned, but the smell of other wolves still lingered in his nose.
The sudden press of something cold and sharp against his throat kicked his survival instincts into high gear. Why hadn’t he heard the attacker? It must be some foul magic indeed. His wolf surged, ready to shred the meat of this interloper, but his human logic helped him to keep his skin intact.
“What are you and what are you doing in Malfleur?” A feminine voice asked him.
Her voice was sultry, like a hot summer night in his home country of Roluscany. It reverberated through him with echoes of lust and a faint hope he’d long since surrendered. He’d walked the earth for hundreds of years and never had he felt the pull to a female like he did to this one.
Goddess, he didn’t even know what she looked like. Not that it mattered. She could be a cross-eyed, meth mouthed troll and she’d still be the one.
But he wouldn’t let his father down, or his new pack. He had to establish dominance over any possible threat—including this female. He wasn’t ready to reveal all of his secrets—how the bite that had saved his life changed him—transformed him on a genetic level. Or that he had the blood of an Ardennes witch in his veins.
He spun with a practiced ease, cellular memory pushing his body through the motions. But she was good, a warrior in her own right. She dodged and feinted, but he was faster. Stronger.
His arms locked around her just as she slid the blade between his ribs.
It stung like a bitch.
Armand’s vision blurred, but he steeled himself against the pain and focused on the soft female in his arms. She wasn’t cross-eyed, nor did she have meth mouth. Actually, her mouth was the softest, most feminine thing about her. It was the most intriguing shade of pink. It reminded him of fairy wings.
Her skin was pale and smooth, her blond hair cascading down her back and over his hands like a shower of silk. He was hyper aware not just of her, but of everything around them. The sensation of her skin against his, the almost tentative breeze that slipped over them—the magic of the land recognizing its own.
“You’re not a wolf and you’re not human. What are you?” she whispered, blue eyes tremulous.
She smelled like lilies and lavender, the scent of the flowers faint with an underpinning of something sweet and wholesome. He tightened his grip and the female stopped struggling. “I am the Ardennes Alpha.”
She laughed. “If you’re going to tell a lie, you should make sure that there’s no one to dispute you.”
“And do you dispute my claim?” His wolf was strangely quiet on that point.
“I do.” She lifted her chin in defiance.
“I see. Single combat?” He cocked his head to the side, curious to see if she’d take him up on it.
“What?” She shifted so she nudged the knife. “Let me go.”
“You’ve challenged my claim. Do you wish to continue with a trial by single combat or other means?” As if he’d let her go just for pushing the blade deeper. What kind of weakling did she think he was?
“I’ll throw you in the dungeon and wait until my father returns from the Great Council. Then you’ll have your trial by combat.”
“The princess has a dungeon?” He arched a brow. “Will you chain me then? I might like it.” Her father? Shit. He just realized who she was. This soft, delectable, albeit badass female was Victoria Ardennes, Luc’s daughter.
Luc, who he’d just separated from his head at the Great Council in Rome when he challenged him for the right of Alpha. But it had to be done. Her father was making deals with a hunter that could’ve led to their extinction. As it was, it had plunged the six recognized werewolf nations into war.
“No, I might like it. Like seeing you taught to respect your betters.” She shoved all of her body weight forward and pushed the knife in deeper.
“Having a conversation with you is painful. I’m going to assume you’re not mated.”
She scowled. “Oh, it’s that stupid flower, isn’t it? You don’t know what you’re doing.” She let her body go slack and slipped out of his grip, putting several feet between them.
Even with the blade in his ribs, he could still pounce on her, take her down. His wolf relished the thought. He wondered what it would be like to chase her through these dark, foreign woods, lay claim to her on this land that was now his.
He licked his lips.
“Look, I don’t know how you got here, but you need to leave. It’s not safe.” Her eyes flickered to the full moon that hung plump and pale in the dark sky. The heavenly body that had always seemed like a gentle mother, the very goddess he worshipped—but it seemed to
Victoria to be some kind of dark portent.
Armand knew there was something unnatural here, something dark. The Ardennes pack had been cursed, but surely, nothing that could harm him. Although, he wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating any threat.
He pulled the blade out and flung it to the ground.
Armand could tell the moment the scent of his blood reached her. Her eyes flickered to an ice blue so bright they pierced the veil of darkness.
“Oh God.” Terror shone on her face. “I shouldn’t tell you to run, we like the chase too much.” Her voice had dropped several octaves, each word lower and harsher than the last. “But you need to run.”
Her pretty eyes filled with red, glowing like hot coals and he watched the Change take her. But it was nothing like he’d ever seen before. It was a sickness, an aberration.
A curse.
What stood before him wasn’t a noble wolf in her warrior form—thought it was bipedal. It wasn’t even a berserker, a wolf lost to the rage. It was something broken, something dark, something evil.
There was nothing of the woman he’d just met present in the creature that snarled, jaws snapping and wet with spittle. Nothing that spoke of any humanity—although there was a cunning in those red orbs, a hunger.
He transformed to warrior form, bipedal and upright. He was bigger, stronger, but he didn’t want to hurt her. Even like this. She couldn’t be held responsible.
“Submit,” he growled.
A roar echoed from the beast’s throat, shattering the night and a hundred howls echoed in return, shaking the very earth beneath his feet.
Armand suddenly understood why the town had seemed abandoned.
They were monsters. They’d chained themselves up to keep from ravaging the countryside, hurting innocents, and exposing their secret. The whole town was beneath his feet, hiding in the dark, slaves to this disease that infected them.
This curse was why the Council had let Luc Ardennes’ madness continue for so long.
Luc, with his laws and his deals and his paranoia, he’d kept them leashed.
Armand wouldn’t let his pack down. He’d be the Alpha they needed him to be.
“Submit,” he commanded again, this time drawing on the Alpha power that resonated in his bones, and the Ardennes magic in his blood.
The beast in front of him shied away, head turned to the side in avoidance rather than submission. Her muzzle pulled back from her long, deadly razor teeth and she continued to snarl.
Power thrummed through him, the magic recognizing its own after so many years left to lie fallow in the earth and it surged, crackling along his fingertips, up his arms.
“Submit!” His very voice caused the earth to shudder and grass under the other wolf’s feet blackened and she yelped, but instead of submitting, she launched herself at him.
He was ready for her attack, and rolled easily.
But her teeth tore into the flesh of his neck and suddenly, that wasn’t magic or power in his blood. It was pure, unadulterated lust.
He hadn’t counted on that. Sure, he wanted her human form. But this wasn’t her, not really. This was a mindless, raving beast. Guilt was quick to follow the burn of want that engulfed him. It was his job to protect her from all things. Himself included.
She bit him again and he floored her, got the beast on the its stomach, arms locked behind its back. Goddess, but he was so hard and thick. The scent of musky female desire hit him hard and he looked down at her, the beast now looking slyly at him over her shoulder.
This darkness wasn’t mindless at all.
It calculated, it hunted, and most of all it hungered.
She squirmed against him, no longer fighting, but grinding her ass against his cock.
He was no pup to be led around by his dick. Even though she writhed against him, this wasn’t consent because Victoria wasn’t in the driver’s seat. He flipped her over so that she was on her back and blocked out the bliss that washed over him when she locked her thighs around his hips.
Armand called his power again, but this time, he didn’t hold back. He let it flow through him ebullient and free. “Victoria!”
The trees shook and bowed their old and creaking branches, the cottages’ foundations rattled, even the dark flower opened its blooms and offered up its meal in submission to the voice of the Ardennes Alpha.
And the beast beneath him took her human shape.
Fear was bright in her eyes, but he held her fast. “You’re safe.”
“So are you,” she gasped, a kind of wonder on her face. “You really are the Ardennes Alpha.”
A chorus of unnatural howls split the night—a choir from Hell to welcome him.
“I’m sorry,” Victoria whispered when her gaze settled on the place where she’d bitten him.
“I’m not.”
“Did we…” she looked up at the full moon. “It doesn’t matter. She’s so beautiful. It’s been too long since I’ve been able to feel her on my human face.”
“It does matter. No, we didn’t.”
“Why not?” She looked back to him. “You know what happens to saints? They die.”
“I’m no saint.” His fingers tightened unconsciously around her hips.
“You’re the Alpha. You can have anything you want.”
Her tone seemed to make her words more of a question, a test. She wasn’t offering him anything.
“What I want is to break this curse.”
“Don’t you think my father tried? It’s what drove him mad. It will drive you mad, too. Chain us up, burn it down. Unless you want an epidemic. The magical barriers get thinner with each full moon that passes. Can you imagine what would happen if one of us were to get free? Or all of us?”
The terrible sound of crunching bones filled his ears as the curse tried to force her back into that aberration of their warrior form. Each vertebrae in her spine snapped as she arched at an unnatural angle, the Change forcing itself on her.
“Chain me, before I hurt you.”
“You can’t hurt me, Victoria.” Pride filled him as he said this. He could take whatever she threw at him.
“That’s only your Alpha pride.”
“Speak your submission.”
“No.”
“If you submit, I can keep you from changing.”
“A true Alpha would take my submission.”
“No, sweetheart. A true Alpha would earn it.”
She growled, her voice dropping an octave. “Why can’t you see I’m trying to help you? If I can’t save my pack, let me save one person.”
“I don’t need your saving, woman. If you want to save someone, save yourself. And submit.”
“No.” Her body twisted again, bones shattering and reforming as the Change tried to take her.
“You do not have my permission to Change.” His power warred with the Curse and her convulsions stopped, but the howls beneath them intensified.
Her gaze settled on the wound at his throat. “I bit you. Oh, god. I bit you!”
Armand watched as knowledge of what that meant, that he was her mate, settled over her. “You did.” He couldn’t help the smirk that curved his mouth.
“You didn’t bite me back. Why not?” she demanded, eyes narrowed and the irises shifted to ice blue.
He was happy to see her wolf. Not a corrupted form of what they were, but the duality of her nature.
“You don’t want me to bite you back.” She may have been his mate, his one and only, but he could never bite her.
“The hell I don’t. Do you know how humiliating it will be to walk around here having given the bite, but not received it?”
He dropped his glamour and showed her the wolf beneath—silver teeth and all. “My bite will kill you.”
The beast broke through his commandment and she shifted beneath him, but instead of the corrupted warrior form, she was all wolf. The transformation surprised him and he released her.
But instead of locking horns with him again, sh
e fled.
“Don’t run, Victoria. I’ll have to chase.”
She didn’t slow down or even give him a backward glance.
He hit the ground running and chased her into the dark woods.
Chapter 2
Victoria awoke in her bed with every muscle in her body on fire.
Her bones ached. How many times had she Changed last night? She reached out for the tonic she kept on the table by her bed and didn’t bother with the dosing cup. She just took a long, deep swallow.
Some of the pain eased and her vision focused on the strange wolf she’d met the night before who was currently stuffed awkwardly into the delicate chair with a rosebud print cushion. It was all that was feminine and dainty. She was surprised it held his massive body. He slept with his head leaned back, his neck exposed.
His neck with the newly purpled bite.
By all accounts, this male was the new Alpha and her mate.
With a mouth full of silver shark teeth that could rip her apart.
Only he hadn’t. He hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t taken anything from her. Not even what she’d been willing to give.
She vaguely remembered things she experienced as the beast. Except this lust she had for him. Victoria remembered that in Technicolor. How good it felt to be beneath him, how his demands for submission only made her burn hotter because he had the power within him to back it up.
He was the Ardennes Alpha.
Which meant her father was dead.
A long time ago, she’d promised Luc she wouldn’t grieve, and for the most part, she’d done her grieving when the last of the man she knew as her father was gone. When he became Luc instead of Daddy. She knew when he started working deals with Peter Breslin, the mad hunter, that someone would end him.
Or he’d end himself and the pack along with him.
She was numb as that knowledge took hold. Her father was dead. This male, her mate, he’d most likely been the one to kill him.
The Ardennes Curse (The Woolven Secret) Page 1