by Kresley Cole
“Wroth, you bartered with Kristoff as you lay dying?”
When put like that, his negotiation sounded more reckless than it’d been. As Nikolai had lain in his own cooling blood, nearly freed of the constant struggle, of the never-ending war, of starvation and disease, he’d told Kristoff, “You need me more than I need to live.”
Kristoff had seen him in many battles and agreed.
“I did,” Nikolai said. “I was used to giving orders and would take them from no one but a powerful king. I wanted my brother turned if he was dying, and trusted compatriots as well. Kristoff complied.” That wasn’t all. Nikolai had asked for sixty years so he and Murdoch could watch over the rest of their living family—their father, four sisters, and two other brothers.
Already too late to save them. . . .
“You know, I’d heard of you when you were a human,” she said. “Weren’t you called the Overlord?”
This surprised him. “By kinder tongues. How could you have heard of me? Your accent isn’t from the northlands.”
She sighed. “Not anymore. I’d heard of you because I’m interested in all things martial. You were quite the vicious leader.”
His voice grew cold. “We were defending. I was anything I needed to be to see it done.”
Her lips parted. As if she couldn’t help herself, she sidled closer to him on the bed.
She’d clearly liked his answer.
More gently, she said, “But in the end, you lost.”
He stared past her. “Everything.” The enemy had already scorched and salted their lands. Famine and plague had followed. Nikolai’s country had been like a dying man, that last battle the final blow.
“Wroth,” she said softly. He turned his gaze to her. “Let’s make a pact, you and I.” Her eyes were so captivating in her ethereal face. “Let’s vow we won’t harm each other in this room.”
When he nodded, she flashed him a warm smile that made him feel praised. She guided him to lie back, and he complied. What would she do next?
She eased open his legs and knelt between them. With the back of her hand, she smoothed her damp hair to one side, baring her tantalizing neck.
A rush of her intoxicating scent swept him up, like a drug. If she smelled like this, what would she taste like? Heaven?
He wished she’d bared her supple flesh in offer to him. He imagined her cry as he pierced her for the first time. . . .
“Wroth, this is embarrassing,” she murmured in a sensual voice, “but I think I’ve caught you staring at my neck. Hungrily.”
“You did,” he admitted. She’d caught him contemplating his order’s most reviled crime, and yet he felt no shame. Odd.
She brushed her fingertips over her skin. “Are you tempted to take a drink from me?”
In the worst way.
He wondered how many times Ivo had sampled her and felt some unfamiliar feeling claw in his gut. “We don’t drink from living beings. It’s how we got our name.” Forbearing was his order’s pledge, their pact. Nikolai had never tasted flesh as he drank.
But then, he’d had no inclination to before her.
“Why?”
“So we are never lured to kill,” he said, giving her the official line, which was true, but the whole truth was more complicated. And they kept the details they’d managed to learn secret.
When a vampire drank living blood, blood not separated from its source, he would harvest his victim’s memories. Kristoff believed these memories drove natural-born vampires insane and turned their eyes permanently red.
As far as the Forbearers could determine, the only way to avoid this was to drink blood that had died, avoiding the evils—and the benefits.
“What if you drank from an immortal who couldn’t be killed from that?” she asked, her words lulling. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from hers.
An immortal would have far too many plaguing memories, vastly more than a mortal. He answered her question with one of his own. “Do you want me to take your flesh, creature?” The mere idea made his words rough, his fangs ache.
At her titillated look, he feared she’d say yes, calling his bluff. What would he do then?
“Rain check,” she answered brightly. Then, to his shock, she curled up between his legs. Nuzzling her face against his uncovered torso, she wrapped her pale arms around his thigh.
“I never asked my questions,” he said, staring at the ceiling, trying to sound casual. He’d seen a great many things in his life, but this female was throwing him.
“We have all the time in the world for that, do we not?” She kissed the scar on his lower stomach—and gave it a slow little lick.
He lay tensed, rasping, “At least tell me your name.”
“Myst,” she whispered, then fell asleep.
Myst. How fitting that she was named after something intangible and capricious.
In sleep, his little pagan clutched his leg with her pink claws. And they were claws, sharp and curling, though somehow elegant. Imagining that she clutched him for comfort, he ignored the pain, for it was little compared to his sense of satisfaction.
For hundreds of years, their army had been constantly on the move, hiding in the shadows of the northlands in grueling conditions, keeping their growing numbers secret. Everything had been about the war, all adding up to this attack.
Now he savored merely resting with her, doing nothing but watching as her hair dried into glossy red curls.
He brought a lock to his face and brushed it over his lips. So soft, like her flawless skin. Tomorrow night, if she hadn’t given him information, could he lash her skin to get at her secrets? After Myst had clung to him so trustingly?
Could he break her bones and bear seeing pain in those green eyes?
If she were his Bride, he would have been forbidden from ever harming her—his life given over to protecting hers.
He ran the backs of his fingers down her silken cheek as her light, quick breaths warmed his stomach. He had never truly felt the sting of jealousy in his life, had never envied other men—except those who enjoyed peace in their land.
Nikolai had been born affluent, his family aristocratic, and fortune had followed him until the latter years of his mortality. To envy was to lack.
So why did he want to destroy any vampire who might be blooded by her?
3
Where the hell is my warlord?
Myst jerked upright, waking from her first real sleep since she’d been taken by the Horde. She was alone in Wroth’s bed, her laundered clothes folded at the foot. He’d even drawn a blanket over her. Awww.
She needed to keep up with him until her sisters broke her out of this pokey. According to plan, they would extract her from Oblak at dawn tomorrow.
Once more Myst swore that she would never again be bait—and this time she meant it.
Rumor was rife in the Lore, but tales of Ivo the Cruel making dark alliances had proved worrisome enough for the Valkyries to investigate.
Operation: Myst Gets Nabbed.
She’d learned little about Ivo for her troubles—the acting, the letting herself get caught, etc.—only that he was definitely planning something major.
She chuckled. Well, at least until General Wroth had punked his ass out of a castle.
No, she hadn’t learned much about Ivo, but Kristoff and the general would make good dish. What if this king wanted to kill Demestriu—only to rule over his own kind? Was it possible not all leeches had a predisposition toward sociopathic evil?
What if the Valkyries didn’t have to war with these Forbearers?
Doubtful. Her sisters wouldn’t discriminate between the two vampire factions. They’d behead first and then say, “Fuckity, were you good? Oops!” Vampires were too powerful a species to go unchecked.
Demestriu and his Horde had been brutal to all the Lore, but especially the Valkyries. Fifty years ago, Furie, their queen, the strongest and fiercest of them all, had tried to assassinate him. She’d never returned.
/> Tales abounded that Demestriu had chained Furie to the bottom of the sea—a never-ending torture for an immortal. If true, Furie had been drowning again and again only to have her immortality revive her.
Once the Valkyrie covens found and freed her at last, their queen would be as none other on earth, awash in rage. Furie wouldn’t check for vampire affiliation before she slaughtered, and she would expect her sisters to follow her example.
So until the Valkyries decided on their plan of action with the Forbearers, Myst would go about business as usual. Which meant she needed to find Wroth.
Before he’d come, she’d been powerless here. She could handle weapons as well as most of her kind, but a sword and bow were not her strengths.
Her preferred weapon was men.
She manipulated them, played them, made them believe she lived for them alone—in order to have them do her bidding. That was her m.o.
Furie had once asked her, “Why would you ever send a man to do a woman’s job?”
Confused, she’d answered, “Because. I. Can.”
And now Myst had one in her clutches—a big, scarred one with skin she wanted to lick until her tongue got tired.
Or she’d had him. Where is he?
The problem with Ivo’s vampires: they’d had no appreciation for her whatsoever. At least Wroth liked to look at her.
For the Horde, blood was all-important, and she could neither withhold it nor capitalize on it.
Their eyes were red from sucking the life from their victims to the very marrow—not from merely drinking from the flesh, as these Forbearers feared. One kill while feeding put a vampire in a downward spiral, because bloodlust compelled him to do it over and over.
The buildup of their victims’ memories over the years drove many of them mad.
Yet for the last four nights, Ivo and his men had never tried to drink from her, vacillating, examining her as she yawned with boredom.
Finally, she’d snapped, “Get dental with me or don’t, but make a damned decision.” Ivo’s eyes had slitted with menace, his red gaze a contrast to his pale face and shaven head. In the end, he’d decided not to drink from her, thinking her too old, her blood brimming with too many memories.
Worked for her. In fact, she’d never been bitten.
She wondered what it would have been like for Wroth to take her neck when his irises had flickered black with want.
She was an awful person, weak and perverted even to entertain these thoughts. Probably the only Valkyrie on earth who’d ever fantasized about a vampire. She frowned. No. There’d been one other. . . .
Myst tapped her chin, wondering if she should tell the Forbearers they forwent for really no reason.
Neh.
Maybe if the scrumptious general continued to be nice to her, she’d hint a little. She actually had heard of him back in the day. Most Valkyries had.
Naturally, they’d sent a correspondent into the field to cover that northlands war, and she’d reported that Wroth had been cunning, brave, and deliciously ruthless to his enemies. Though the Overlord had lost in the end against a much larger force, he’d bought his people at least a decade of protection.
Myst and her sisters had sat by the hearth, sighing over tales of his deeds. She remembered feeling loss at the news of his defeat, because a great man like him would’ve fought to the death.
But he’d made a comeback, and in person, he hadn’t disappointed. Except for the fact that he was now a mortal enemy—or rather, an immortal mortal enemy. Oh, and a leech.
She tried the door to his room, in case he’d decided to trust her. Locked. But not mystically reinforced the way her cell was.
She could have broken out with ease, but she didn’t have to be back in the dungeon until dawn. So she dressed and piled her hair up in a way she thought he’d like, and still had time to root through his things again. She averted her eyes from the jeweled cross, lest she get sticky-fingered with it.
She investigated his clothes—his style was modern but still aristocratic somehow—and inhaled his scent. She rolled in the bed with one of his big cable-knit sweaters, her face buried in it, uncaring if he returned and found her like that.
But he never showed.
In time, two guards arrived to escort her back to the dungeon, as per his orders. Wroth wasn’t keeping her? The vampires wouldn’t meet her eyes as they ushered her down to her cell.
Once they’d locked her in, she paced the area. She was in trouble, and she knew why. His words echoed in her memory: “If you do happen to have information, I can torture you for it.”
The dungeon was eerily quiet, all the other cells emptied. The low creatures had been taken away already, no doubt tortured and killed.
None of them would’ve talked. Before Wroth had summoned her, she’d given her fellow prisoners some friendly advice: “Say nothing to these rebel vampires. Or else my sisters and I will peel you and your families. Good talk, buddies.”
No vampire threat could trump Myst’s.
The leeches might come and take one’s village, but Valkyries would creep in, hiding under a bed to take one’s head from one’s pillow. And may you never feel a Valkyrie’s breath at your back was a drinking toast among the Lore. Their word was law.
Which left only her. . . .
She looked up when she heard the warlord’s footsteps echoing over stone.
A guard opened the cell for him, then left them alone in the dungeon.
“Listen carefully, Myst,” Wroth said. “I’m going to ask you questions about your kind and the different factions in the Lore. You must answer them. Or else I’ve been ordered to get the information from you by force.”
“Torture, then? You can’t disobey Kristoff for me?”
“You know I’d be dead if not for him. My brothers and friends as well. My life has not been my own since that night.” He was actually serious about this.
But then, Myst hadn’t been kidding about torture; it really did piss her off.
She’d given Wroth preferential treatment because he was, like, a celebrity in martial circles. But now she needed to accept his descent into vampirism. She’d push and cajole to the end, but after that . . . Bring it, leech. “You could help me escape.”
He narrowed those gray eyes. “I swore my fealty, and I’ll see my vow through. Answer or face the consequences,” he said. “I’ll begin with the most basic. What are you?”
“Pussycat Doll?” she asked, immediately doing a slow headshake. “Judge, jury, and executioner.” He scowled. Her eyes lit up. “Transient! What? Really. No? Babe in Toyland?”
“Damn it, just answer the questions. Then you can come back up to my room.” He lowered his voice and curled his finger under her chin. “We can sleep together again as we did today.”
“Enduring torture would be easier than going back to the Lore as an informant.” She’d no longer be an A-lister, an avoid-at-all-costs enemy. She’d lose her status as a creature with which one did not fuck.
“We’ve tried to get information from the others—”
“But they didn’t talk either, huh?” Had she sounded smug?
He seemed to shake himself, hardening his resolve. “You’re leaving me little choice.”
Well. She was about to experience firsthand the Overlord’s ruthlessness she’d admired. Apparently he’d decided she was an enemy, just when she’d thought they were getting kinda cozy.
Way to hurt my feelings, Wroth. She sniffled. Now I’ll really have to kill you.
With his thoughts constantly on her throughout the night, Nikolai had stalled for hours. He’d interrogated the other creatures till nearly dawn; at least her questioning would be brief.
“You’re truly going to do this?” she asked as she turned from him, moving into the back corner. Her shoulders began shaking. Was she laughing?
He crossed to her, taking her arm and turning her. Genuine tears streamed down her heartbreakingly beautiful face.
“Wroth, I thought we had
an arrangement.” She cast him a brows-drawn look of betrayal.
She wasn’t feigning this. In her wild, mixed-up mind, she had thought they were . . . friends?
The cell wobbled, and he braced himself, but she seemed not to notice. Probably just aftershocks from last night.
He didn’t want her to hurt. But her eyes blazed with it, raw and true and bare. He was actually seeing her—without her false swagger and play. Suddenly he found it unbearable as each tear fell. When one dropped to her cheek, he flinched as if he’d been hit.
The cell shook again.
She lowered her face and wiped her tears away. When she gazed up, her expression was blatantly sexual. Yet another mask.
“Myst, I don’t want to hurt you, but you must answer my questions. This isn’t a game.”
“Oh, but it is,” she murmured. “You want to know about the Lore? Learn this lesson well—we are all pawns.”
The castle quaked once more. Explosions? He glanced around wildly, but she didn’t even blink. “What are you?” he demanded again. No, his surroundings weren’t shaking.
The sound booming in his ears like an earthquake was coming from . . . within him.
Myst pressed her hand against his chest—to feel his heart stutter to life. Because he’d finally recognized her for what she was. . . .
“Apparently, I’m your Bride.”
4
I was wondering if I could get this to beat for me,” Myst purred to Wroth, as he struggled to hide his shock.
She’d heard that a blooded vampire’s new heartbeat was deafening, the rush of sexual desire overwhelming.
With soft touches, she coaxed him to lean against the wall. She rubbed his chest as he took his first unpracticed breath. “How does the air in your lungs feel?”
He inhaled deeply. “Cold. Pressure, but it feels good.” He looked at her with such gratitude for blooding him.
They always did.
Her hand dipped. “How does your blood feel, heating and moving?”
His eyes went heavy-lidded. “Stronger. It’s . . . searing.”