Noah. Jacquelyn Frank
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claim to. It’s why he, above all others, is King.”
“That’s why he, above all others, deserved a complementary Queen,” Corrine replied.
Noah knew on some level that the child he was now watching play contentedly before his hearth was responsible for what had happened.
The Prophecy had been clear and unmistakable. The Enforcers would give life to the child who would be the very first of his or her kind to have the power to manipulate the element of Time. Though she was only a little over two years old, Leah clearly had shown the first evidence of her ability, an astounding event even had it been a well-known element like Water or Wind. Even his remarkable power had not come to him at such a young age.
Of course, she had no idea what she had done or the significance of the part she had played. Suddenly certain things began to make sense to him. He spent enormous amounts of time with this special child. Though she’d had no conscious control of what she was doing, somehow Leah had formed that conduit through time for him. Perhaps it was simply a child’s desire to please that had triggered the subconscious ability. Leah loved her uncle Noah with incredible devotion. She strived to do things that would please him. Combine this with the power of his and Corrine’s wills, their need to be successful in their hunt, and it had made the perfect catalyst for a child with an untried power who wanted nothing more but to give him what he wanted. What he needed.
And for a terrible moment, Noah wanted to use her for exactly that reason. The King was a scholar, so he knew full well the implications of altering time, and a person’s presence in time. However, he couldn’t bring himself to care for that long second of self-indulgent thought.
Noah stood up abruptly, pacing over the playing toddler in order to lean close against the mantel. Normally the proximity to such intense heat would comfort him, but this time it did not.
He wanted to burn. Oh yes, he was impervious to any and every form of flame or molten fire that the natural world could offer up, but this wasn’t what he meant. In his dreams, she had made him burn. Kestra Irons. He laughed with the dry irony of her last name. The metal iron was toxic to Demonkind. It burned on contact. Just like Kestra.
The fire of passion was no stranger to him; he manipulated it well and with arrogant skill, and he had more than one lover in his history who would attest to that with a longing sigh of remembrance. This thing with the woman who had pervaded his sleeping world was out of reach of all of that. It was transient and lacking cohesion, and yet somehow all the more real. Now made unreal and inescapably out of reach for all the rest of time as he knew it.
Unless…
Noah shivered. He was unused to selfish thought. He was a man who lived every moment of his existence with the well-being of so many others as his first priority. Family. When not family, Council. When not family or Council, the multitude of his subjects. If none of them, then the races of others with which they associated. That was the essence of a good monarch. Everyone else must come first, especially those you loved best.
In that moment, all he wanted was to put himself first.
Whatever the cost.
No matter who had to pay.
Isabella entered the King’s castle without even bothering to knock. It wasn’t so much that she had developed altered manners from living in Demon society as it was that, to Noah, privacy was an alien, if not impossible, concept. Dozens of people moved in and out of his home throughout the night, and he expected it to be so.
Since Noah still had Bella’s daughter in his care, she had even more cause to march in unannounced. She rounded the wall of the foyer, entering the Great Hall and heading automatically for the enormous fireplace that Leah was constantly in front of, whatever the season, whenever she stayed with him. Her steps hitched when the Turkish rug, so well worn from years of children playing upon it, lay as abandoned as the toys scattered over it.
She wasn’t worried, just surprised. She crossed her arms over her middle, her fingers drumming thoughtfully in the curve of her waist for a moment. She was a hunter, like her husband, and all she need do was quiet her thoughts and concentrate on her target. She would find them wherever they were in the enormous house without having to shout or search rooms. Filtering through scent and residual patterns of warmth, she was able to sort out which belonged to her daughter and her liege.
To her continuing surprise, it led out of Noah’s home entirely. This perplexed her because it was nearing dawn. The dawn and the sunlight were things best avoided for those of the Nightwalker races, aside from the incredibly powerful Elders. And while that description fit Noah, her daughter was a very different matter. Though a Demon and Druid mixed child was a unique creature, there was no guarantee that her mother’s blasé human immunity to the sun would be an inherited trait. For Demon children, the sun could make them very weak and ill. It even had the potential to kill vulnerable children not yet in their power. They would fall asleep and simply never wake up. Isabella and Jacob had never had a desire to test their child’s tolerance to sunlight. They would wait until she was older before trying such tricks.
It was unusually irresponsible for Noah to take the little girl elsewhere when daylight was so near, especially because Isabella or Jacob always came and collected her exactly one hour before the dawn. Still, the young mother didn’t worry or panic. Leah was with Noah, after all. The King would rather die than expose her to harm. He was probably already on his way home and just running a little late.
So Isabella turned to flop down into the seat nearest the fire, sighing contentedly as she stretched out a body quite weary from a long night’s work. The closer it got to Samhain and the full moon, the more she and Jacob were forced to hunt down Demons who lost control of their logic and normal temperaments. After a night like the one they had just had, she was always very tired and more than happy to go to bed.
She wouldn’t have to worry about another out-of-control Demon until dusk the next day.
Corrine lay down in bed gratefully, feeling exhausted mentally and emotionally, both of which manifested in her body as weary muscles and achy bones. Kane was already in bed, anticipating the coming dawn that left him so lethargic. She had showered off the soot and soil of the night’s exertions, so she brushed her still-damp hair out into a fan of dark coils, back over her pillow, with a single sweep of her arm. With choreography of thought that came so easily to telepathically connected partners, Kane turned toward her and drew her warm curves tightly against the cradle of his body.
“Sleep,” he murmured gently. “The coming night will provide ample time for you to obsessively worry.”
“I know. I just can’t escape the feeling that we shouldn’t let Noah deal with this alone,” she whispered back to him.
“I agree. But day is come and he will sleep like the rest of us. We’ll attend him first thing in the evening.”
“Thank you,” she said, hugging the arms wrapped around her.
“I haven’t done anything,” he chuckled, rubbing his cheek against hers.
“Go to sleep. I’ll tell you why you’re so wonderful in the evening.”
Corrine punctuated this with a yawn, closed her eyes, and quickly fell asleep, still smiling at her husband.
Chapter 5
Something disturbed Corrine in her sleep just enough to make her brow furrow. She turned her head restlessly, but was suddenly halted as an abrupt hand on her mouth stilled her movement and pushed her head back into the pillow with a heavy weight.
Despite the depth of her sleep, Corrine’s eyes flew open wide. She panicked for all of a moment, but then realized she recognized the man who was leaning over her in the slightly brightened room. She exhaled with relief as she looked up into Noah’s gray-green eyes.
Her relief was short-lived. As she looked up at the King, Corrine was overwhelmed with the very powerful intuition that something wasn’t right. First of all, Noah would never approach her in such a rude manner.