by Eileen Wilks
PRAISE FOR EILEEN WILKS’S NOVELS OF THE LUPI
“Grabs you on the first page and never lets go. Strong characters, believable world building, and terrific storytelling . . . I really, really loved this book.”
—Patricia Briggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fire Touched
“As intense as it is sophisticated, a wonderful novel of strange magic, fantastic realms, and murderous vengeance that blend together to test the limits of fate-bound lovers.”
—Lynn Viehl, New York Times bestselling author of the Darkyn series
“Eileen Wilks writes what I like to read.”
—Linda Howard, New York Times bestselling author of Troublemaker
“I remember Eileen Wilks’s characters long after the last page is turned.”
—Kay Hooper, New York Times bestselling author of the Bishop / Special Crimes Unit Novels
“An intense and suspenseful tale . . . A must-read . . . Eileen Wilks is a truly gifted writer.”
—Romance Junkies
“It is always a joy to step into Wilks’s wonderfully complex world where her richly detailed characters bravely face treachery and danger at every turn.”
—RT Book Reviews (4½ Stars, Top Pick)
“An engaging paranormal tale full of action and adventure that should not be missed!”
—Romance Reviews Today
“Quite enjoyable . . . with plenty of danger and intrigue.”
—The Green Man Review
Books by Eileen Wilks
TEMPTING DANGER
MORTAL DANGER
BLOOD LINES
NIGHT SEASON
MORTAL SINS
BLOOD MAGIC
BLOOD CHALLENGE
DEATH MAGIC
MORTAL TIES
RITUAL MAGIC
UNBINDING
MIND MAGIC
DRAGON SPAWN
Anthologies
CHARMED
(with Jayne Ann Krentz writing as Jayne Castle, Julie Beard, and Lori Foster)
LOVER BEWARE
(with Christine Feehan, Katherine Sutcliffe, and Fiona Brand)
CRAVINGS
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, MaryJanice Davidson, and Rebecca York)
ON THE PROWL
(with Patricia Briggs, Karen Chance, and Sunny)
INKED
(with Karen Chance, Marjorie M. Liu, and Yasmine Galenorn)
TIED WITH A BOW
(with Lora Leigh, Virginia Kantra, and Kimberly Frost)
Specials
ORIGINALLY HUMAN
INHUMAN
HUMAN NATURE
HUMAN ERROR
BERKLEY SENSATION
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Eileen Wilks
Excerpt from Dragon Blood by Eileen Wilks copyright © 2016 by Eileen Wilks
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY and BERKLEY SENSATION are registered trademarks and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9780451488046
First Edition: December 2016
Cover art by Tony Mauro
Cover design by Katie Anderson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Praise for Eileen Wilks’s Novels of the Lupi
Books by Eileen Wilks
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Excerpt from Dragon Blood
About the Author
PROLOGUE
THE sunlight glittered on ocean waves, the air sparkled with sorcéri, and the baby he held was asleep. Sure, the beach was crowded and it would take a while to get to the front of the line. The snow cone stand was doing a brisk business. But all in all, Cullen Seabourne was having a good day . . . until the two gigglers got in line behind him.
Both were blond. Both wore bikinis. Cullen had nothing against blonds or bikinis; he enjoyed looking at female bodies and had developed a particular fondness for blond hair. Cynna’s hair was blond. So was Ryder’s. But both his wife and his baby had hair much shorter than the polished curls on the short girl or the ironed hair on the tall one.
But then, they hadn’t come to the beach to get their hair wet, had they?
“She’s absolutely adorable!” the taller one cried. “How old is she?”
Cullen wasn’t about to argue with clear and irrefutable fact, but he was sadly aware of what would come next. Both his nose and experience warned him of that. He shifted the hand on Ryder’s back, making sure his wedding ring showed. It probably wouldn’t help. “Nine months.”
“I just love babies!” The short one beamed up at him without paying any attention to the baby Cullen was holding. “And there’s nothing sexier than a man holding a baby.”
Her taller friend chimed in. “That is so true. I’m Meghan. What’s her name? And yours?”
“Ryder. And Cullen.”
“What a pretty name! Hers, I mean. Is she yours?”
“Yes.” The pleasure that filled him at being able to give that simple answer had only grown deeper with time. It mellowed him enough to give them another chance to back out gracefully. “Not mine alone, of course. My wife’s hair is the same lovely color. Do either of you have children?”
The short one giggled. Her friend struck a pose, running a hand along her torso suggestively. “Oh, come on. Do I look like I’ve had children?”
“No, but I hesitated to mention the size of your breasts. Don’t worry. They’ll get larger when you’re nursing.” He turned his back on them while their mouths still hung open. A second later, they both decided they didn’t want a snow cone after all, and went in search of better prey.
The woman in front of him—a roly-poly, dark-skinned matron of an age that made him think the three children she was shepherding through the line were grandkids—let
out a loud laugh. “If you’re tired of women climbing all over you, why you wearing that little Speedo? Man as pretty as you don’t need to show off what he’s got.”
“What, you think I’m asking for it? Isn’t that what some people say if a woman wears anything more revealing than a burka?”
“I like you,” she announced. “What’s your name?”
“Cullen. What’s yours?”
“Sarah Winstead.”
He and Sarah talked about babies and raising children while they waited their turns for snow cones. They were almost at the head of the line when the trouble started.
There were three of them—two with brown hair, one blond. All young, male, and very fit. Early twenties, he thought, which was surely old enough to know better, but it seemed no one had taught them how to behave in public. They wore swim trunks—red, green, orange. One of them had a brand-new tattoo of the Confederate flag on his left bicep. The skin was red and puffy still.
There were three people on the other side of the trouble, too: a man in jeans and a San Diego Padres T-shirt; a woman in a pretty green hijab, long sleeves, and a maxi skirt; and a beautiful dark-eyed boy about four years old.
The line had stayed pretty constant behind him. There were a lot of kids, mostly with moms, a small knot of teens, an older couple holding hands. Cullen hadn’t been paying attention to them, not consciously. But he never completely shut off awareness of his surroundings when he was out in public. Not unless he had someone he trusted to watch his back, and he could count on one hand the people he trusted that much. So when the three fit young men decided to cut in front of the small family, he noticed. He didn’t do anything. Best to avoid trouble when you could, and it wasn’t his job to make the humans around him behave. But he noticed.
The father objected. The young man with the new tattoo told him to go back to his country if he didn’t like it here. Cullen stopped listening to Sarah and stepped out of the line so he could see what was going on—using both kinds of vision.
Pretty the sorcéri might be, but they were also distracting. He usually kept his Sight tamped down this close to those magic-churning waves—though “tamped down” wasn’t a good descriptor for the process, which was more a matter of his level of attention. When he listened to music, he didn’t stop seeing what was around him. He just stopped noticing it. Same with his two types of vision.
Neither trio gave off the glow of magic. Good. That kept things simple. He flipped the mental switch that kept him from noticing magic as much.
The father informed the young man that he was already in his own country. He was an American, born and raised here.
That set off all three of the young men. “Dirty terrorist” was one of the terms they used. “Raghead” was another. The one in orange swim trunks told the woman he bet she’d be real pretty in a bikini and outlined an hourglass shape with his hands.
The father flushed with anger. “Leave my wife alone! Leave her be!”
“Make us!”
“Shut up, raghead!”
“Yeah, make us!”
“Hey,” Sarah said. “You, there! You cut that out.” Another person—also female, one of the teenagers—objected, too. But these young men weren’t likely to listen to those who weren’t able to enforce their objections.
They didn’t. “Shut the fuck up!” one yelled, and from another: “Mind your own business, Granny.”
“Sarah,” Cullen said, “would you mind holding Ryder for a few minutes?”
“Now, you just calm down. The cops—”
“Aren’t here right now. I am, and I don’t like bullies. Would you take Ryder?”
Sarah sighed, but accepted the baby.
“Thanks.”
Cullen walked toward trouble. “Hey!” he called out. “I need to explain something to you boys.”
Confederate Flag scowled. “Who you calling a boy?”
“Well, you don’t look like girls. If you’re transitioning, I have to say the drugs don’t seem to be working.”
That just confused them. Cullen stopped far enough away to give himself room to move, but close enough to make his challenge clear. The fumes from all the alcohol the three had consumed made him wrinkle his nose. He hated the smell of alcoholic sweat. “Everyone else might want to step back a bit. Yes, like that, very good. Now, boys—or whatever you are—here’s what you need to know. You’re rude, crude, and not very smart, so I’ll make this simple. Go away. It would be better if you apologized first, but I’ll settle for you leaving.”
“Oh, the queer wants us to leave!” That came from the one in green trunks. This struck his fellows as hilarious, so he made a kissy face at Cullen.
Cullen rolled his eyes. “Two more things you need to know. First, someone has probably called the police by now. That make you ready to clear out? No? Then I’d better warn you that I’m not a good enough fighter to be sure I won’t break anything. Benedict could take you three down without inflicting any real damage, but I’m not Benedict.” He shook his head sadly. “I might break a bone or two. I’ll try not to, but it could happen. Best if you just leave.”
Orange Trunks called him an Arab lover. Green Trunks, having discovered what he considered an insult, was sticking with it. He wanted Cullen to “kiss my ass, fag.” Confederate Flag used a word Cullen hadn’t heard used in public in years—a word that he applied to Sarah, along with a couple more choice terms implying that Cullen knew Sarah in the biblical sense. That word just really pissed Cullen off.
“One more thing,” he said. “Your dicks are really, really small. So small I bet you have trouble finding them when you need to pee, and when you—”
Confederate Flag threw the first punch. Cullen swayed to one side, letting the man’s roundhouse swing pull him off balance. He leaned over and snapped out one foot. It connected with Green Trunks’s stomach just as the man rushed him. As that one crumpled, Cullen spun, avoiding a blow from Orange Trunks, and bitch-slapped Confederate Flag once with his left hand and Orange Trunks twice with his right.
Orange Trunks toppled like a small tree. Confederate Flag staggered but didn’t lose his footing, so Cullen kicked him in the stomach, too. Then he looked at the three men on the ground. Green Trunks was throwing up. No blood, so that was good. Confederate Flag was curled tightly around his gut, moaning. Orange Trunks might be unconscious.
The whole thing might have taken ten seconds.
Cullen had spoken truly. He wasn’t a top fighter, not among his own people. He was dancer, though . . . among other things. And he was unusually fast, even for his people. “Damn. I hope I didn’t break his neck,” he muttered, and went to check.
Not a broken neck, Cullen determined with relief when he squatted next to the unconscious young man in orange swim trunks. The boy would wake up with one hell of a case of whiplash, but he would wake up. “Someone’s called the cops, right? We need an ambulance, too.”
No one answered, but then, it was noisy. One of the kids who’d been in line was crying. The father was saying something to his wife, the teens were exclaiming, and almost everyone else was making some kind of racket.
The breeze brought Cullen a familiar scent. He looked up with a smile. “Hey, there.”
A few feet away, an amazon in a hot pink bikini accepted Ryder from Sarah. Her short, choppy hair was a shade warmer than platinum. Her sunglasses and tote were apple green; the tote was the size of a small suitcase and carried a diaper bag, among other things. Many other things. It was slung over one shoulder. A lovely shoulder, in Cullen’s opinion—strong and shapely, like her thighs and calves. What people noticed first about her, though, was her skin. The arabesques and runes covering most of it were so finely drawn and intricate they might have been spider-spun rather than tattooed—and indeed, Cynna’s ink hadn’t been applied with a needle.
That’s what he saw with his regular vision
. To the Sight, she was ablaze with magic. Some of it followed the paths laid down by her tattoos, but not all. Nowhere near all.
Cynna was flanked by three men, two of them tall and buff. They paid Cullen not the slightest attention, which was as it should be. They were her guards, not his. She didn’t much like having guards every time she left Clanhome, but she wasn’t stupid about it. You never knew when a dworg might pop out of a gate.
The third man was short. Very short. Also ugly, with a face as compelling in its way as a peacock’s spread tail or a head-on collision. He wore baggy swim trunks in a Hawaiian print and a disapproving scowl. “If you were gonna fight, you might have waited for me.”
“There were only three of them,” Cullen said apologetically.
Cynna shook her head. “I can’t take you anywhere, can I?”
“Now, that’s exactly wrong. You can take me anytime, anywhere. Not that beach sex is a personal favorite of mine. The sand gets—”
“Shut up, Cullen.”
He grinned and rose. Confederate Flag was stirring. Cullen told the boy to stay down.
“Want me to make sure of that?” the ugly man asked.
“Thanks, Max. Don’t hit him unless you have to. The cops will surely . . . ah, here comes one now.”
The first cop to arrive had to be a rookie, as he looked about thirteen. But he was sensible enough; he immediately summoned an ambulance and told everyone to hold on—they were all talking at him at once—and that he’d hear them out, but one at a time. Unfortunately, he started with what he thought were the victims.
Confederate Flag—who turned out to be named Marvin—wasn’t a very good liar, but he tried. By then Green Trunks had stopped throwing up and was eager to agree with everything Marvin said about how it was all Cullen’s doing, which caused everyone else to start talking at the cop again. Before the rookie could get them straightened out, one of the beach EMTs arrived. Orange Trunks had woken up, but he did not look well. The EMT thought his jaw was broken. Then the rookie’s partner arrived. She was twenty years older, twenty pounds heavier, and not in the mood for nonsense.
Cullen took note of all this somewhat absently, being more interested in keeping Ryder happy while Cynna obtained the much-delayed snow cone. She’d just returned with it when the older cop came up to Cullen. “Name?”