How many friends had she taken from him?
Loved ones?
She stumbled backwards, tears filling her eyes. She had done it to protect her friends.
She looked down at her hands and saw the blood of all the souls she had taken on them.
So much blood.
So many lives.
Heat swept through her, a sense that she wasn’t alone filling the void in her chest and comforting her, and she turned her face towards the source of that feeling.
Vail stood before her, his chest heaving and his black armour slick with blood. Crimson splattered across his face too, an arch of red spots and slashes that darted from the right side of his jaw across his nose. The spikes of his helmet shrank and disappeared, the scales drifting down and back into the rest of his armour, allowing the warm breeze to tousle his hair.
His near-black eyes were wild, filled with dark hungers she could sense within him.
He needed more enemies to kill.
These six demons, and however many he had slaughtered at the village, hadn’t been enough to satisfy the hunger for violence that rode him.
“Keep your distance,” Fenix whispered close by her elbow and flexed his fingers around the grip of his sword.
Vail snarled and bared his fangs, his pointed ears flaring back and flattening against the sides of his head as his eyes narrowed on Fenix.
“Vail won’t hurt me,” she said with all the confidence she could muster, not taking her eyes off him, giving him all of her focus because she knew deep in her heart it was what he needed and desired. He needed her to see only him, to face him as he was and not flinch away and seek the protection of another male. He needed to know that she didn’t fear him, even when the need for violence gripped him. “You did this to protect me. Didn’t you?”
She believed that. The canyon would have brought them to this plain, and into the presence of these demon warriors who lay dead at her feet because of Vail. She would have had to fight them with her wrists and powers bound, so Vail had fought them for her, just as he had taken on her foes in the castle courtyard.
She braved a step towards him, bringing all of his attention to her.
“You fought to protect me.”
He looked off to the left of his feet, his claws curled into fists and he closed his eyes, his nostrils flaring as he drew in a deep breath.
“More will come,” he muttered beneath his breath and she glanced beyond him to the gathering of buildings near the fissure. “Too many.”
That sent a cold shiver tripping through her. If Vail thought there were too many for him to handle, then she wanted to get away before they showed up. Having seen him fight, she could easily imagine that too many for him meant numbers in serious double figures.
She scanned what she could see of their surroundings, searching for an alternate route, one that would keep them away from the demons for long enough that they could escape and lose them.
“We need to split up,” Fenix said and her focus shot to him.
“What?” She had to have heard him wrong. “Split up?”
He nodded. “It will make it harder for the demons to track us.”
She looked at Vail and he nodded too. He might be on board with the insane suggestion of splitting up but she certainly wasn’t.
“There’s safety in numbers.” She tried to squash the note of panic in her voice, not wanting to sound as if she was about to blow a gasket at the thought of being left alone in a demon realm without her powers.
Fenix nodded. “That’s why you’re going with him.”
He pointed to Vail. Vail stared at her, the intensity of his gaze sending a hot achy shiver through her bones.
“We should stick together.” She refused to give up and wasn’t going to allow either male to bully her into changing her mind. “That’s final. We’re not splitting up. I won’t allow it.”
Fenix smiled. “That’s what I like about you, Rosalind. You’re opinionated, bossy and stubborn as Hell, but… you have a flaw.”
“I do?” Her eyebrows shot up and his smile widened, blue and gold swirling in his eyes.
He stepped towards her, brushed his fingers across her cheek, earning a low growl from Vail, and shook his head.
“You tend to see the good and overlook the bad… and that’s why you would never have seen this coming.” He kept his gaze fixed on hers, the blue and gold in his irises brightening and swirling together, compelling her to keep looking at him, pulling her under his spell. She cursed him for using his charms on her, making her hazy and compliant, unable to hate him or fight him, and she wanted to do both as she dimly realised what he was going to do. He leaned in, his heat surrounding her, spreading through her veins, and whispered, “Be careful, Little Girl, because I knew one just like you once and that flaw you share got her killed, eight times over. It’s time I tried not to make it nine. See you around.”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead and disappeared.
The warm haze that had suffused every inch of her dissipated, leaving her cold. Anger curled through her veins. Awareness crept in, of her surroundings, of Vail watching her closely, and of the fact that the incubus had lured her into a stupor so she couldn’t fight him and had teleported.
“Bloody son of a bitch.” She stamped her foot and growled in frustration. Vail arched an eyebrow. “We need to teleport after him or something.”
His eyebrow didn’t fall. If anything, it crept higher.
“No,” he said, his deep voice low and husky, stirring heat in her veins as easily as the incubus had with his charms. “We do not know where he went, and Fenix is right. We will travel faster separately, and the demons will find it harder to track us.”
She cursed him in the fae tongue. She never had liked the fact that men had a tendency to stick together and form allied fronts against women, and it really grated on her nerves right now, when they had just lost one of their fighters because the men had refused to listen to reason.
Teleporting around the land would have given them ample chance of losing the demons. Splitting up seemed like a terrible idea, and not only because they had lost a good warrior and she might be forced to fight.
It had left her alone with Vail.
She muttered a protection spell beneath her breath, wishing she had her powers so she could use her strongest wards to keep the growing attraction, the intense pull, she felt towards Vail at bay.
Maybe Fenix was right and she had lost her mind. The dark elf prince standing before her, his black armour slick with the blood of his enemies and a touch of madness in his sharp gaze, was the last person in this universe a sane woman would find alluring and attractive.
But if she had lost her mind, then she couldn’t bring herself to care that it was gone.
Because the damaged man standing before her wore armour splattered with blood because he had risked his life in order to protect hers, and the madness that touched his eyes was because another man had dared to lay his hands on her and place a kiss on her forehead.
And she found that beautiful.
She forced herself to turn on the spot, needing her eyes off Vail so she could build up some resistance to the urges flowing through her, the intense desire to cross the short span of earth between them and thank him with a kiss that would probably be the death of her.
But what a way to go.
She shoved that thought away and looked in every direction, but it all appeared the same to her. Flat plains. Lava rivers. The occasional silhouette of mountains.
Where in this desolate, dangerous land was safe?
“So where do we go now?” She glanced back at Vail, catching him staring at her with hungry eyes that echoed the growing need inside her.
Vail pointed far off to his right, beyond the edge of the valley they had walked through, in the opposite direction to the one they had been heading towards.
“And what’s over there?” She squinted but couldn’t make out anything in the pitch black.
<
br /> Vail stood in silence, a battle raging within him that obliterated the subtler sensation of the desire she had detected through their link and vibrated within her. Whatever laid in that direction, he was reluctant to take her there. Why?
His clear purple gaze drifted back to her.
“The Third Realm.”
Rosalind’s heart leaped in her chest. He was going to take her back to the Third Realm? The thought of seeing everyone again lifted her spirits and she took a step towards Vail. His eyes narrowed on her, focused and searching, and she realised he had been waiting to see her reaction to his decision and he wasn’t pleased. Why?
The answer to that question came to her as he turned his back and stared off into the distance, the belching flames casting a golden outline down his noble profile as they leaped from the gorge beyond him.
She hadn’t hidden her excitement over returning to that kingdom, a place where he no doubt felt he didn’t belong because of whatever dark things haunted him and his relationship with his brother.
A place she had no doubt he would leave after depositing her there, assured that she was safe and with people she knew and trusted.
She didn’t want him to leave, but right now, she could see no way of making him stay. He had been pleased when Fenix had suggested they head towards the Seventh Realm, in the opposite direction to the Third Realm. Her eyes widened as something dawned on her.
In that direction lay the elf kingdom too. Vail had been moving away from it, distancing himself from his homeland, and now he was going to head back towards it for her sake.
She wanted to tell him that they could go another way, but the words slipped away as he turned back to face her and held out his hand.
Rosalind swallowed her heart and the pain growing in it, stirred by the thought he meant to leave her for real this time. In a matter of seconds, she would be in the Third Realm and Vail would teleport out of her life forever.
She searched his dark eyes, part of her desperate to see something akin to hurt in them, a flicker of pain that would let her know that the thought of parting from her hurt him as much as it hurt her. They revealed nothing to her, his schooled features hiding whatever he was feeling and the link their bond created stone cold and empty.
She turned her face away from him, closed her eyes and placed her hand into his, bracing herself for the teleport and the inevitable separation that would occur after it.
Vail’s clawed fingers closed over hers, his armour cold against her skin.
She waited, her breath lodged in her lungs, refusing to leave them.
Nothing happened.
Rosalind opened her eyes and frowned. Vail growled, the sound born of the frustration she sensed rippling through their link.
“What’s wrong?” she said and he snatched his hand back and paced a short distance away. Her stupid heart leaped as her mind supplied he didn’t want to take her to the Third Realm after all. He couldn’t bring himself to part from her.
“I cannot teleport out of this realm. They have sealed the borders with a powerful binding spell. All of the portal pathways between this realm and the others are closed to me.”
Those words were a bucket of icy water on the fire burning in her heart.
She bit back her desire to snipe at him and tamped down her ridiculous hurt over the fact that he still wanted to ditch her. Who was she kidding? They were a match made in Hell. No matter how fiercely she desired him, how much she fell for him, he despised witches and she couldn’t see him overcoming that hatred, not even for her.
Rosalind rubbed her arms and tried to keep the bite out of her voice. “So we cross the realm to the border and if we can’t walk across it, I’ll unlock it with a spell.”
She felt Vail’s gaze on her, boring into the side of her face, spreading wildfire heat through her veins.
“During the war between the Third and Fifth Realm, the Fifth sealed the Third, stopping Thorne from teleporting back into it with Bleu and Sable.” She ignored Vail’s growl.
Was it because she spoke familiarly of the demon king of the Third Realm or another elf? Bleu had been handsome. A little moody and distant, but far less mercurial than Vail, and far nicer to her. She couldn’t resist embellishing the truth to find out whether Vail was suffering another jealous episode. Sure he knew that Thorne was mated, she amended events to focus on the unmated elf instead.
She smiled sweetly at Vail. “Bleu was a great help. He teleported me to the First Realm and from there we travelled to the border with the Third Realm and I used a spell to unlock it. Well, actually I reversed the spells, which was tricky because it was several layers deep, so we could teleport into the kingdom but no one could teleport out. Bleu was so impressed with me that he—”
Vail disappeared in a flash of pale blue-purple light and reappeared right in front of her, his fangs bared on a snarl and his eyes flashing bright violet as his pointed ears flared back against the sides of his head. He lifted his hand to her face as if to touch it, his palm hovering close to her cheek, and stared down into her eyes, his nostrils flaring with each hard breath.
“Speak not of the male,” he growled in a low voice, one that sent a hot shiver bolting through her, igniting her blood in her veins, and bared his fangs again. He shoved away from her and clawed his blue-black hair back from his face, burying his fingers in it and pressing his palms to the sides of his head. “Despises me. Cannot blame him… will not let him take the witch… from me. My ki’ara… my female… my witch.”
He cast a dark look her way and paused.
His eyes blackened.
“Will kill the male.”
Rosalind shot forwards, holding her hands out in front of her, afraid Vail would attempt to teleport and find success this time, leaving her behind and going hell-bent on a mission to kill a man who was innocent. She would never be able to live with herself if he killed Bleu because of her attempt to make him jealous, and part of her knew he would never be able to live with what he had done either.
“Vail,” she whispered and he froze, a flicker of violet breaking through the black in his irises. “Believe me when I say Bleu only had eyes for Sable. He sort of lucked out there since she’s now Thorne’s mate, but that’s his problem.”
Vail stared at her, intense and focused, setting her nerve endings alight.
“My ki’ara.” Those two words spoken in a deep husky growl cranked her temperature higher, until she was burning inside, part of her wishing he meant the possessive snarl and passion behind them.
The desire that shone in his eyes.
His hand shot out and snagged her wrist, and he yanked her against him. She stumbled, landing with the full length of her body pressed against his, and her heart launched into her throat, fear that he would react negatively making her take a step back so they were no longer in contact.
Vail growled the moment she did, tugged her back against him and stared down into her eyes, a dark possessive edge to his that thrilled her. She had wanted him jealous, but she hadn’t been prepared for the force of the feelings it would stir in her, the startling depth of her desire and her need for him.
“My female,” he murmured, a sexy rumble to his deep voice that melted her insides.
He wrapped his arm around her waist, pinning her to his side and leaving her speechless, and teleported.
Rosalind stared up at him as the darkness swallowed them, filled with a sudden wish that it would take weeks to reach the Third Realm, because she felt on the verge of a breakthrough with her mysterious, beautiful elf prince.
CHAPTER 15
Vail sat with his back against the wall of the small ground-level cave, his right arm resting on his bent knee and his gaze on Rosalind. She lay on her side opposite him where he had placed her, curled up and sleeping fitfully, her ash blonde hair cascading like spun gold across the black rocky ground.
She had passed out shortly after they had escaped a vicious pack of Hell beasts. The seven gigantic canines had pursued him
and Rosalind for miles, tracking their scents across the terrain, no matter how many valleys, fissures or mountains they crossed.
Vail had been aware of them the whole time but had kept their hunters from her, unable to bring himself to frighten her with the knowledge that they had a pack on their heels. She had been flagging since leaving the spot where Fenix had split up with them. Her hunger was a constant echo in his belly, the rumbling of her stomach so loud at times that he felt convinced that the Hell beasts had tracked them by that sound rather than their scents.
She needed to feed.
He dug the bare fingers of his left hand into the dirt, grounding himself with the feel of it and giving him something calming to focus on as he tried to devise a way of giving his mate the sustenance she required. Without it, she would perish.
He snarled under his breath at that, his fangs lengthening at the thought he might lose her. He had hunted his whole life. He could provide for her.
He would provide for her.
She was his now and he had a duty to ensure she was well fed, safe and happy.
She moaned in her sleep, her hands shoving at thin air, fitful movements edged with desperation that he could feel in her.
Nightmares haunted her.
He blinked and leaned towards her, reaching with his bare left hand, and paused with his fingers close to her forehead. What was he doing?
He stared at his dirty fingers, so close to brushing her fair skin, to what? Soothe her? Chase her nightmares away?
He was probably the cause of them.
He had caught the way she looked at him whenever he killed. She thought him a monster.
He forced himself to lean back again, the action taking effort, his body refusing to comply with his mind’s commands.
Or perhaps it was the part of him that longed to gently lay his fingers on her and stroke her cheek, to ease her while she slept and give her good dreams.
That longing was both foreign and familiar, as if the capability for good and kindness had always remained within him and hadn’t been purged as he had thought.
Had he not sought his brother’s ki’ara as an act of kindness to him?
Tempted by a Rogue Prince Page 18