After taking a deep breath, Starla turned back to the Vampire Hunter. Straightening her shoulders, she glided back over to the desk he now stood behind. She retook her seat, and motioned for him to do the same. Slowly, Tyrian sank back into the chair and waited for Starla to break the news.
“I understand you have found your Medium,” Starla finally said. She settled back in the chair, and delicately crossed her ankles to the side. Her posture, relaxed now, drew him into a likely false sense of security. In the seven hundred years that he’d known her, Tyrian had never seen the Druid so shaken. It didn’t inspire a feeling of confidence in the youngest Hunter.
“Yes. Her name is Kaelyn Hamblin,” he answered. The way Starla nodded when he said her name, as though she’d already possessed the information, led him down the track that she had brought up his Medium as a diversionary tactic. The feeling of dread doubled in the pit of his stomach with a vengeance.
“Have you explained the situation to her?” Starla smoothed the soft silken fabric of her gown across her lap in an action that spoke of nervousness to Tyrian.
“Not exactly.” He leaned back in his chair, and regarded the Druid leader carefully. For whatever reason, she felt reticent to reveal the true reason behind her visit. So he would play her game, at least until he learned what had upset the woman so profoundly.
“Why not?” Starla punctuated the question in a non-accusatory tone, almost as if she were just filling the space of the moment. Perhaps she was. Surely the clairvoyant Druid already knew the answers to all the questions she offered him.
She was stonewalling him.
“The moment has not yet been right.” Tyrian rested his elbows on the arms of the leather desk chair, crossed his fingers in front of his face, and rested his chin tenuously atop his knuckles. Starla’s eyes had yet to meet his, further confirming his belief that she was stalling.
* * * *
“In some ways, the moment is never right.” She sighed, slumping her shoulders slightly, and dropping her milky-white gaze into her lap.
Growing impatient with her diversionary game, Tyrian decided to switch gears. “Something tells me that you did not come here today to inquire about Kaelyn,” he stated carefully, watching every nuance of the Druid’s body.
Her throat clenched as she swallowed; she lifted her pearlescent eyes to his briefly, before shifting them off across the room. She drew in a breath and raised her shoulders, entwined her fingers in her lap, and tilted her head slightly to the left. “How is Caleb?” she asked with a tight smile.
Caught slightly off guard, Tyrian blinked and opened his mouth briefly before responding. “As well as an eighteen-year-old teenage boy can be, I suppose. He’s in class today.” He inclined his head, and dropped his hands to the ends of the chair arms.
Starla nodded, swiftly rose from her chair, and meandered about the room, inspecting one or two items before moving on restlessly. “Yes,” she said with a small candid smile, “I could see from the beginning that he was a very special boy.”
Tyrian huffed lightly, and rolled his eyes as he thought of the boy. “Perhaps a bit too smart for his own good sometimes.” He rose from his own seat at the desk, then cautiously approached the woman from her left, hands clenched in the pockets of his dark gray dress slacks.
Starla stood staring with unfocused eyes into a clear, bulbous paperweight, her mind seemingly millions of miles away.
“I remember the night you found him, wandering in the park, suddenly all alone in the world,” she finally said. Slowly, she lowered the paperweight back to its resting place, on the surface of the wood-and-marble table, next to the ornate wood-mantled fireplace.
Tyrian nodded, then picked up the paperweight himself. He watched through his peripheral vision as the Druid wandered over in front of the large fireplace. Its massive size seemed to dwarf the tiny woman in the warm glow of the fire burning within. Starla appeared to feel none of the warmth the crackling flames offered; she wrapped her arms tightly around her middle, clasped her thin arms, and stared unseeing into the orange and yellow light.
After setting the paperweight back down, Tyrian crossed his own arms, leaned back against the mantle, and regarded his companion solemnly. “I don’t believe I ever properly thanked you for saving his life.”
Starla raised her gaze to Tyrian’s own, and he noticed a soft light that he had missed from their depths since she’d arrived across from him at the oak desk. She offered him a small smile.
“If I remember correctly, you were quite cross with me for having saddled you with the boy.” She held his stare for the first time that evening.
“Thank you, Starla.” Tyrian gazed at her in open appreciation. She seemed to relax a bit beneath the weight of his stare.
Chuckling softly, Starla raised one perfectly sculpted ivory eyebrow in his direction. “Does this newfound amity have anything to do with your Medium, Tyrian?”
“Probably everything to do with her, actually.” He thought of her words to him in the kitchen that morning, and felt a small smile tugging at his own lips.
“She is quite spectacular, is she not? If you are worried about her accepting you, fear not. I am sure you will find that woman is full of surprises.” Starla turned to stare back into the glowing fireplace.
“I already have,” Tyrian huffed. Kaelyn had done nothing but surprise him since he’d met her. He had silently admired that trait of hers, and many others, from the start.
“Hmm…tell her. Soon, Tyrian.”
His breath caught in his chest at the look Starla gave him. His mind suddenly transported him back nearly twelve years, to when he’d called her to the park to heal a small boy sure to die from a Vampire bite. He took every phrase she punctuated with that look as an absolute order, and suddenly the dread in his gut returned tenfold.
“Does this have anything to do with the happening you mentioned?”
Starla seemed to draw in on herself quite suddenly, closing her eyes slowly as she expelled a breath through her lips. A pained look spread across her immaculate features, and her jaw clenched against some bitter memory.
“I am very old, Tyrian, though I do not look it. I have walked these lands alone for many millennia, and I have seen the world change around me. I watched as it was built up, and grieved when it fell. But my sight is not limited to this realm, as you know.” She drew in a deep breath, let her head fall back on her shoulders, and stared upward, seemingly straight through the ceiling to some distant edge of the cosmos that only she could see. Then she suddenly snapped her head down, and paced away from the fire.
“My people began to wither and fade from this realm as we watched the humans slaughter each other over greed and spite. Unable to see a future in which this realm would ever prosper, my people decided to pass on to a higher realm, one devoid of human suffering and madness. Just as the last of them left this world, the unthinkable happened.” Starla turned, and pinned Tyrian with a hard stare. “The first portal opened on the battlefields of man. I stood by and watched as the first realm-species hordes ravaged the lands. It was then that I first caught a glimpse of the strength of man.”
After moving over and placing her hands on the shelf of one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, Starla continued her tale. “The first twelve Hunters stood united against the otherworldly creatures until they eventually fell to the Hunters’ might, and retreated back to the realms from whence they’d come. I appeared to the Hunters then, and offered them a choice: serve as protectors of the human realm, or eventually fall at the hands of the beasts they had unleashed with their own malicious intent. They chose to live. And so I procured the strongest souls of each species and crafted a way to house them within a human body, giving the human access to their strengths while shielding them from that which sought to harm them or others of this realm. As I placed the last soul within its human host, I was overcome with a powerful vision.”
Tyrian drew in a breath. “The Medium prophecy.”
“Yes.
” Starla smiled ruefully, turned back around, and gazed into his eyes with a look he could only describe as remorseful. “Though at that time, it was not yet a prophecy. What I saw in my vision, Tyrian, was you.”
He felt his heart jump into his throat. “What?”
“This time, here, now.” Starla gripped her upper arms and swallowed. “I felt the awakening of a great darkness, and the need for the ability to traverse realms to defeat it. As I had constructed it, the blood seal would not allow a Hunter to step foot in the native realm of the soul sleeping within them. It would rip the two apart, resulting in the death of both the Sleeper and the Hunter. I needed to find a way to allow a Hunter to cross the boundary without suffering that horrible end.”
Starla shook her head softly, tightening her lips into a thin line, then drew in a sharp breath. “That was when I envisioned the Mediums. Strong, beautiful creatures born of the union between an other-realm species and a human. Their unique blood, when combined with the blood seal of a Hunter, would allow such a crossing to succeed.”
Still unable to fully comprehend what he’d just heard, Tyrian dragged a hand through his dark brown locks and shook his head. “Why now?”
A hint of moisture tinged the edges of Starla’s pale eyes; she turned her lips down into a frown. “The happening I spoke of. It is not so much a what as a who.”
Tyrian’s brows drew downward. “Do you know who it is?”
Starla shook her head. “I cannot see them. Everywhere they touch, they create holes in my vision, and right now the entire Vampire realm is shrouded in darkness.”
“They’re hiding in the Vampire realm?” Tyrian asked, confused.
“That’s not all,” Starla said, her tone shaky and her stance rigid. Tyrian watched as she fought back the tears that threatened to spill down her pretty, pale cheeks. “I wasn’t quite certain until I asked, but there is another whom I can no longer see.”
The dread in Tyrian’s gut exploded into full-blown horror at the implications behind her words. Not again.
“No,” he stammered, stumbling back from her in denial.
Crystalline tears now streaming down her flawless cheeks, Starla confirmed his worst fear. “I’m afraid our enemy has taken your Page, Tyrian. I’m so sorry.”
Chapter 7
A loud thump sounded outside Kaelyn’s apartment door, and she glanced up sharply. Blinking rapidly, she planted a bookmark in the book she was reading and folded it closed, then slid the book onto the coffee table in front of her. After rising from the couch with a grumble, she shuffled over to the door, expecting to see one of her former foster siblings. When she gazed through the peephole, she saw Tyrian.
Swiftly flipping the locks, Kaelyn threw open the door and took in the sight of the man standing before her. His haggard face downturned, the muscular man bulged with barely constrained wrath. She stepped back as Tyrian let himself in. She never removed her gaze from his weathered form while he stalked across the room to stand in front of her fireplace. His damp hair hung in tangled strands into his vibrantly shining emerald eyes, lit with a fury that left her shivering. Kaelyn, noticing the waterlogged state of his black sweater and dark gray pants, wondered if he’d walked the entire way from his home in Beacon Hill to her tiny apartment in Southie.
She padded softly over to the couch to tug loose the blue-gray chenille throw covering the back of her creamy white lounge. After carefully walking up behind him, she gently draped the blanket over his tense shoulders. He jumped slightly, blinking swiftly, as he seemed to suddenly focus on his surroundings. He turned his head and stared at her, heavy eyebrows lifting, then swallowed heavily. She lifted a soft-fingered hand and gently placed it against his cheek. She couldn’t help but wince as the ice-cold surface slid against her heated palm.
Clearly, something terrible had happened.
Tyrian seemed almost lost as he stared deeply into her eyes, seeming to plead with her to wash away the pain and anger swirling within the depths of his haunting green eyes. Cupping his face in her hands, Kaelyn then rose up on her toes and brought his chilled lips to hers. He drew in a shuddering breath against her mouth as shivers wracked his body. His face suddenly contorted in pain. He squeezed his eyes closed, raised his large hands, and covered hers on the sides of his face. He drew her hands away, opened his pleading eyes once more, and locked them with hers. Again, he clasped her soft, warm hands in his large, cold ones, and rested his forehead against hers.
“I need to talk to you,” he whispered, his usually beautiful voice laced with pain.
Kaelyn shook her head, stepping into his personal space and pressing her warm pajama-clad body against him.
“Not right now. Right now, you need warmth.” Kaelyn pressed her lips against the pulse point in Tyrian’s neck. He sucked in air, then abruptly released her hands, swiftly reached around, and grabbed a firm hold on the cheeks of her terry-cloth-covered behind. He lifted her effortlessly against him, and she responded by wrapping her toned thighs around his hips and rubbing her molten center against his newly straining erection.
He met her lips with his in a scathing fury, nipping and sucking until they were red and swollen. The previous night’s passion seemed a walk in the park compared to the raw power he drowned her in now. It felt as though his every inhibition had been tossed out the window, leaving only pure, unbridled male who knew exactly what he wanted and how to take it.
The sound of tearing fabric met her ears as her back hit the wall, his firm hips pressing her into the hard drywall surface as his hands made quick work of divesting her of her cotton nightshirt. A flaming hot mouth attacked her breasts; his palms, once cold, now burning, cupped and caressed the full globes as his teeth and tongue ravaged her peaks with furious abandon.
Kaelyn could do nothing but hold on to the demon she’d unleashed, or so it felt as he devoured her body with his mouth. When it seemed that her breasts would no longer suffice, he tore her away from the wall. In a feat of speed she had no time to marvel at, he carried her into the bedroom. Depositing her on the dark red comforter, he then grabbed the ankles of her gray terry sweatpants and pulled.
Practically a split second later, he was buried to the hilt inside of her.
Kaelyn cried out her pleasure to the creamy walls of the bedroom. His demanding ministrations upon her breasts, and the hard, steady pressing of his hips against hers, had soaked her, leaving her primed and ready to accept him. Even still, being filled so quickly and completely wrenched a scream from her. She hadn’t even noticed him remove his own clothes, and he was quite naked.
She clawed for purchase on his sweat-soaked back, digging her fingernails into his shoulder blades as he set an absolutely brutal pace. He slammed in and out of her so rapidly and so hard that he brought her over the edge within seconds of entering her.
But he had far from finished.
Gripping her hips in his large hands, Tyrian swiftly pulled himself from Kaelyn’s velvet sheath and flipped her onto her stomach. Dragging her up to her hands and knees, he then plunged into her from behind, wringing another strangled cry from the pleasure-crazed woman beneath him. Gasps and cries spilled from her lips as he took her at a furious pace, pushing her knees apart with his own until rendering her practically spread-eagle on the bed beneath him. He loomed over her, hips thrusting tightly against hers. With one hand, he cupped a breast in a bruising hold; he used the other to drag her face to one side, where he crushed their lips together in a fiery kiss.
Kaelyn’s second orgasm crashed over her. She howled, and her nerve endings screamed as shivers quaked through her limbs. Still, Tyrian did not let her rest. Lifting her left leg, he then rolled them both to one side. Continuing to plunge into her from behind, he attacked her neck with his lips. He nipped at her pulse point before laving the abused patch of skin with his hot, wet tongue.
He shifted the hand he had used to massage her breast. He slid that hand down her body, and tangled long fingers in the thatch of dark curls between her thighs
. With a single digit, he found the small bundle of nerves hidden within, and she cried out. He moved his finger against her in time with his debilitating thrusts. She couldn’t have stopped the cries from spilling from her lips if she’d wanted to. He rained a full body assault down on her, making her limbs convulse as every nerve ending in her body fired off, one after another.
And she loved every minute of it.
As the throes of Kaelyn’s third orgasm crested, the persistent drag of her inner muscles finally pulled him over the edge with her. A deep, rumbling snarl deafened her right ear as he came in great, jutting spurts that coated her insides in molten streams, soothing her sore inner muscles. His hot, heavy breath flowed over the crook of her neck and shoulder as he slowly released her leg, letting it flop down onto the bed beneath her.
She struggled to draw breath into her tortured lungs, and her limbs still quaked in the aftermath of such a powerful bout of mind-numbing sex. She’d never before felt so thoroughly spent, and at the same time wholly satisfied, in her life. Endorphins rushed through her system in waves, creating an almost delirious sense of weightless numbness.
She lifted her arm, and traced with soft fingers the length of a large, sculpted thigh, pressed so tightly against her own. He caught her wandering digits and brought them up to full lips, as she turned to lock her hazy orbs with his.
* * * *
Tyrian studied the woman gazing up at him with such love and acceptance, and his heart clenched painfully in his chest.
He felt like a monster.
He hadn’t known where he would head when he stumbled out his front door and down the steps of the old brownstone. All he could think about was getting far away from the bombshell that the leader of the Hunter Association had just dropped squarely on his shoulders. He couldn’t rightly remember even walking into the apartment.
Immortal Sleepers Page 9