Noah. Jacquelyn Frank
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down the side of his left temple. Sarah’s father had told her that he had been stabbed there once, with an iron blade. When she thought of how that must have felt, the metal that was so deadly to Demons burning like acid through skin and bone, she wondered how his sight in his left eye had been preserved. He was lucky that all he had suffered was a scar.
“Good evening, Sarah,” he greeted her, his deep voice surprisingly soft.
“Enforcer,” she said in return, nodding in her very best royal manner.
“Ariel,” he corrected, an amused grin playing over his lips and sparkling in his eyes.
Sarah shrugged, telling him it did not matter to her one way or another.
“So be it,” Ariel said softly. “I thought you should know that I intend to win this competition, and I will demand you for my prize.”
Sarah gasped in shock and flushed with outrage.
“How dare you speak to me this way!”
“Adjust, Kikilia,” he said with determined ease, “for soon you will be in my house, tending my hearth, and you will no longer be a Princess.”
“I would rather be dipped in boiling oil than become mate to the Enforcer,” she retorted, the acid in her voice meant to burn viciously. She thought he had incredible nerve to even think such a thing. No self-respecting Princess would give up her father’s house and her title to live with the stigma of being the wife of the man who humiliated and punished his own kind. Granted, somebody had to do it, and her father respected him very much, but she was not about to become the wife of one such as he, no matter what he said to the contrary.
Ariel chuckled at her reply, but she did not understand what was so funny.
“Do you wish to give me a favor, my lady? Then all will know of your regard for me as I wear it onto the battlefield,” he said.
She gasped, horrified at his sheer gall.
“Never!”
“Very well. It will not matter one way or another. Before dawn, you will belong to me.”
Ariel reached out to her quickly, taking the liberty of stroking her fair hair and purposely running a finger down the length of neck hidden beneath it. She huffed, but not entirely in outrage. His touch burst like fire over her skin, soon moving to burn through her entire body. As he turned and walked away, Sarah was left numb and speechless with the riot of sensation and reaction that rushed through her body. Skin and breath, heart and blood, all of it. All of it. It was as if a brilliant candle had been lit inside her and, given another moment, would send yellow bursts of light out of every pore of her skin.
Sarah suddenly understood what raw panic and terror truly were. As a Princess, she had never needed to be afraid of anything. She had lived a very protected life and had always been safe from even the most rudimentary of fears.
Now, however, she was learning a rapid lesson in all those frightening emotions. The Enforcer had touched her, and now her entire body was raging with trapped light and sizzling energy. There was one and only one condition capable of moving such a violent emotional reaction through a body with no apparent cause or reason.
The Imprinting.
It meant that she was destined to be exactly what he wanted her to be. His mate. His partner throughout all the centuries of her life.
And there was nothing she could ever do to change it.
Except one thing. She could not deny him her body, nor the need she would have ever after to live close to him, but she did have the power within her to reject him in her heart. She could choose to refuse him even the smallest amount of love. If she denied him that, he would not truly conquer her.
Sarah’s heart began to pound at the possibilities of defying one so powerful and deadly. That was when she decided that she should at least try to run away. Hiding could not hurt. So what if he was the best tracker amongst them, the ability the divine right of all Enforcers? She was a Demon of the Body. She had quite a few tricks at her disposal as well.
She would trick him first, and then she would run and hide. Nothing was going to make her do this terrible thing. No one was going to make her love so unlovable a male.
Syreena stood in the empty window casement, her slim hands braced on the cold, flat stone. The Romanian early winter breeze swept over the jagged mountain and chilled lakes before churning harshly up the walls of the towering edifice that had come to be her home, reaching her exposed position at last. The biting chill and powerful press of it blasted through the casement and into her body, snapping the heavy satin of her loose gown back until it was plastered against her like a white, shining skin, the excess fabric whipping behind her body as if it were a standard of truce.
When a man’s hand slid into the curve of her waist, the contrary warmth of it gave her goose bumps that flushed up her belly and breasts. She turned to look down at him with a smile that was full of delight and mischief. She reached down with a stone-cold hand to stroke her fingers across his face.
Then she leapt out of the window.
Damien, Prince of the Vampires and husband to the high-diving woman, stepped up into the window she had abandoned and quickly leaned over to watch what would become of his wife.
She laid her arms back along her body as she rushed headlong toward the jagged rocks at the base of his family holdings. Her loose gown whipped and billowed, the fabric sheeting back until it slipped entirely free of her lithe body, buffeting into a swatch of swirling white as it continued on to the stones below.
Syreena, however, would not be joining it. In a flash, she went from the form of a beautiful human woman to the swift dip and reel of a small peregrine falcon. She did this just in time to avoid the sharp rocks below. And though she was famous for her “on the fly” Lycanthropy, she still had the power to take her husband’s breath away with the trick, after making him hold it in a fearful moment of doubt. It wasn’t that Damien doubted the skills of his clearly talented wife. She was the most skillful Lycanthrope alive. It was because he still had moments where he imagined he couldn’t be so lucky as to be the first and only Vampire in his society for eons to know what true and lasting love really was. He was the only Vampire alive who was married, and to an outsider no less. He had broken a great deal of ground, and more than one long-standing law, in order to take her as his bride.
That had been a little over nine months ago, and a great deal had happened since they had gone public with their relationship. The results had been mixed. Some good, some bad. It was the bad things that drove his wife to jump out of windows in the highest towers of the castle.
He didn’t have to tax himself to figure out what had happened that had her turning to her ability to fly as the falcon for release and escape. He was Prince of the coldest, most troublemaking race of Nightwalkers alive. And while their respect, civility, and Vampire law kept them in line for the most part, Damien’s marriage to Syreena had given a few of the more unruly members of his society an excuse to start trouble. This trouble had taken all kinds of forms, but it was the most recent that had gotten under Syreena’s skin.
Damien watched as she reeled toward the lake, flying like a quick brown and black kite, lofting from one shelf of air to another with a skill that always impressed him. The Vampire wasn’t as assured of his shape-changing abilities as his wife was. He changed and became a large, glossy black raven while still safely seated on the windowsill. He’d only had the ability to become the raven for the last year. While he had flown all of his life in the shape of a man, a skill every Vampire had after a certain age, it wasn’t until he had fed off his bride that he was able to become the raven. Now, as he flew after her, it was clear what the months since then had done for his skill. Still, he preferred to be cautious as he practiced. It would be silly to end a millennium-long lifetime with an awkward splat on the rocks below. It would be a rather ignominious end to the longest-reigning and most powerful Prince in Vampire history.
Damien chased down his wife with determination. She had given herself away, and he was fixated on hearing her troubled thoughts. Before she