Authors: Jacquelyn Frank
Noah
The next instant was about nothing but chemistry, wanting, and gripping, starving needs that had yearned for this connection for far too long. The moment where Destiny demanded obedience.
Kestra’s fingers slid into the crisp, curling hair at Noah’s collar. She couldn’t help herself. She had dreamed of him as often as he had dreamed of her. Whether she would admit to her needs or not, she craved the reality of him. The feel of his thick hair curling between and around her fingers was rich realism. Her opposite hand skimmed fast and hot over his clothing in search of far more carnal sensations. Kestra shaped him with her fingers and palm, down his chest, over his ribs, and around to his back, a thorough exploration of the musculature of his flank.
The Demon King responded.
OAH
THE NIGHTWALKERS
ACQUELYN
F
RANK
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
“Whosoever wishes to know the fate of Demonkind must consult these prophecies…
“…as magic once more threatens the time, as the peace of the Demon yaws toward insanity…
“We must enforce ourselves more strictly as the time approaches. In the age of the rebellion of the Earth and Sky, when Fire and Water break like havoc upon all the lands, the Eldest of the old will return, will take his mate, and the first child of the element of Space will be born, playmate to the first child of Time, born to the Enforcers…”
—Excerpts from
The Lost Demon Prophecy
“Kes…what are you doing?”
“I thought I’d wash my hair,” came the whispered, tart reply over the slightly static connection. “What do you
think
I’m doing?”
Jim chuckled softly under his breath before reaching to tap the mike of his wireless earpiece, just to annoy her with the noise. Then he clarified, “I meant I wanted to know which room you’re in.”
“The Billiard Room,” she said dryly, “with an unusually heavy candlestick in one hand.” She paused and Jim heard her grunt softly over the open line. He leaned forward a little in his chair to peer at his computer monitor. “I’m in the machine room. Where else would I be?”
“Okay. I was just wondering.”
There was another brief pause, full of soft static.
“Incidentally, why do you ask?” she queried at last.
“Oh, no reason. It’s just that I have this huge red blob on my infrared screen that looks suspiciously like a security guard heading in your direction,” he informed her, snapping his gum in her ear over the mike.
Kestra cursed through her teeth, glanced around with sharp, seeking eyes, and turned her face upward almost out of innate instinct. After a quick calculation in her head, she scuttled rapidly across the vastness of the equipment room and headed straight for one of the air-conditioning turbines. With a running start, she stepped up onto the rim of the large machinery and launched her lithe, dark figure straight up into the air.
There was a clang as her hands just barely made the catch onto a pair of sturdy pipes that ran across the high ceiling. She immediately began to swing herself until she was able to get enough momentum to hook her feet over the piping. Without a single further sound, she wriggled herself up into the darkness of the tight plumbing. She sprawled over it, lying across it as if it were a casual cotton hammock instead of a series of conduits that ran both hot and cold against the press of her flesh. Once secured in the shadows of the one direction nine out of ten rent-a-cops invariably failed to look in, all she could do was wait. She covered the earpiece on her ear with her hand, not wanting to risk any chance of Jim or random static giving away her location.
She didn’t have long to wait before the guard made his appearance. Kes rolled her eyes shut for a moment, thinking that Jim had cut his half-assed warning pretty damn close.
The guard had no reason to hide his progress, so she could hear his footsteps from the moment he entered the stairwell just outside the door leading into the room. The door clanged open, recoiling off its backstop as the guard released the metal handle that he’d opened it with. In spite of all this noise, Kestra made very certain her breathing never went above a barely audible whisper of sound.
The guard clomped across the concrete floor, walking the straight path between the rows of turbines on one side, and water heaters on the other. He flicked on a Maglite and swept it back and forth over the dark shadows surrounding him. Kestra closed her eyes briefly, praying to whatever part of the universe it was that protected people like her. Then she watched the approaching man carefully for any signs that he took note of the tiny green lights on the undersides of half the gas heaters, which were guaranteed to be out of place.
He didn’t. He made it to the far wall, turned, and retraced his steps. He passed within a foot of her both times, but of course did not look up. He barreled out of the basement door with a noisy bang, his clomping footsteps echoing away up the stairwell.
Kestra exhaled a half breath of relief. After she was reasonably sure the guard was far enough away and had no intention of immediately returning, she leveraged herself out of her makeshift hidey-hole. She laid her forearms along two narrow pipes and, using them like a pair of parallel bars, swung her legs down. She released, allowing the momentum to somersault her over just once, then lofted into a perfect landing on the dusty warehouse floor.
Resisting the habit of taking a gymnast’s bow, she swiped at the sweat dotting her forehead, smearing the dust and silt from the exteriors of the pipes across it, and turned her attention to her communications system and her smart-ass partner.
“Thanks for the warning, James,” she said with low heat.
“You’re welcome.” He tried to sound bratty, but she could tell he was relieved to hear from her.
“James, I thought you said there was no one on the premises,” she hissed.
Jim winced, knowing that he was definitely going to be in a huge amount of trouble for being wrong about that. “There’s not supposed to be. The guy’s off schedule. I’ll let you know when he moves on to the next building.”
“Not good enough. I want him out of my perimeter completely.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? Kidnap him?”
“There’s an idea,” she retorted, kneeling down in front of the turbine that had just helped her escape the guard’s notice. She shrugged out of her backpack and withdrew her last two square packets.
Kestra left the backpack behind and scurried low across the floor to the next gas heater. She rolled gently onto her back and reached beneath the unit. There was the distinct clang of metal on metal as the strong magnet on the back of the packet stuck to the underbelly of the furnace. She flicked the switch on the front and waited while the lights went from yellow to green.
“The point is,” she continued as she rolled out from beneath the unit and moved cautiously to the next one, “that I specifically said no civilians in the kill zone. It was your job to see to it that’s what I got. That is why I spent a month timing this operation just right.”
“It’s not my fault the guy changed his routine, Kestra.”
“Make it your fault, James,” she bit back as she hesitated next to the last furnace. “Make it your responsibility. You have twenty minutes to get him out of the kill zone. I don’t care
how
you do it, just do it! And there better not be anyone else.”
“There isn’t. You and the guard are the only two heat sources in the entire warehouse row, save a rat or two.” There was a distinct pause. “Do you have any suggestions on how I can protect your civilian without getting arrested?”
Kestra thought about that for a moment, using the time it took to attach the last device to the last heater in order to mull over the situation.
“How long does it normally take for him to round off the row and start on the docks?”
“There are three buildings in the row. You’re the first on the round. If he follows form, it’ll take well over an hour. And if he rounds onto the docks, he’s going to spot you. I don’t care how sneaky you are, Kes, you don’t want him wandering your escape route.”
“Damn.” Kestra slid out from beneath the furnace and stood up. She dusted off her backside with more violence than necessary and marched toward her backpack.
Then she stopped and cocked her head to the side, her incredibly light eyes brightening just a little more as she thought of a possible solution.
“Oh, James?”
“Yeah, Kes?”
“Do any of the buildings
opposite
those in this row have an alarm system?”
“All of them. Take your pick.”
“And are they part of our rent-a-cop’s minimum-wage jurisdiction?”
“Why,
yes
, they
are
!” Jim gasped comically, knowing she was already done formulating her plan.
“Now, call me crazy, but if you were a security guard and one of the alarms in one of your buildings went off, you’d run like hell to check it out, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, you’re definitely crazy,” Jim agreed with a chuckle. “And you’re also right. But how do you plan to set off an alarm and not get caught? Don’t we usually do that the opposite way, where you
don’t
set off the alarm? Do you even know how to set one off?”
“How hard can it be?”
“And not get caught,” he reminded her.
“Mmm.”
“And blow up the row…?” Jim added.
“Yup.”
“And not get caught,” he reiterated most importantly.
“Uh-huh.”
Almost exactly twenty minutes later, Kestra dropped from the dock into the rear of the speedboat docked there. She whipped off the tie line and punched the ignition button. The motor roared to life; the only sound possibly louder was the blare of the alarm in the distance.
Kestra aimed the boat directly out of the harbor and toward the open ocean. She glanced down at the cabin when James stuck his head out of the hatch.
“You forgot to blow up the warehouses,” he said dryly.
“Yeah, I know.”
The row of warehouses blew up.
The Miserable Princess
A Demon Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, fairly long ago, there lived a Princess. This Princess was in need of a husband, or so her father thought. She had a responsibility to wed an upstanding male who might one day become King of all their people. She had a responsibility to have children who would become strong and powerful members of their society. That was what Princesses were supposed to do during that time very long ago.
However, this particular Princess, though she was kind and good-hearted, did not like to be responsible, she did not like being told what to do, and, most of all, she did not want a husband.
One day, the Princess, who was named Sarah, was forced to attend a competition between the males of her father’s people. She did not wish to go, but her father had told her that if she did not, he would choose a husband for her and she would have to be satisfied with his taste. He would hear no arguments, for he had lost his patience with his headstrong daughter.
So the Princess went to the royal booth and sat in her chair and frowned at everyone. She had to be there, but she did not have to pretend to be happy. Her father had said nothing about being happy or nice to anyone.
Princess Sarah looked around at the field of competitors with bored, cornflower blue eyes. She feebly brushed back her long, golden curls as she sighed. This was the third such competition her father had arranged. The Princess knew he hoped that somewhere on that field there would be a Demon who would finally catch her eye. There was no real reason why her eye should not be pleased, because Demon males were as wondrously handsome as Demon females were breathtakingly beautiful. Certainly they were all well mannered, elegant, and highly educated after so many decades of immortal life.
The Princess, however, was only 110 years old. She thought she was far too young to think about tying herself down to a husband who would probably want babies and obedience. Male Demons were notorious for their arrogance and their need of total control of all things they felt they had a right to control. The Princess did not need another person telling her what to do all the time. She wanted to choose in her own time, when she felt right and ready, and when she found a male who looked upon her as an equal, rather than a worker who required orchestration.
Sarah shuddered at her own thoughts.
In spite of their high-handedness, males of her race were far better than the human mortals when it came to the matter of marriage. The idea of being treated like property, a man’s chattel he could use and dispose of in the fashion of his own choosing, was a nightmare.
As for Ephraim, the aforementioned King of the Demons, she knew that he held high hopes that she would be one of the rare and lucky Demons who became part of the Imprinting.
The Imprinting was the meshing of the hearts, minds, and souls of a male and a female who were compatible with each other to a point beyond perfection. It was reputed to be a connection that transcended the complexities and intensities of mere love. It was an engagement of power that her father hoped would one day coalesce in her womb and produce the powerful potential of a future King of all Demons.
“Noah, what on earth are you reading to her?” Isabella asked in a curious whisper.
She had just entered her daughter’s bedroom, taking in the sight of her two-year-old, who was draped lazily across the current Demon King’s lap. Leah was lying on her back in the cradle of Noah’s biceps and forearm, with her arms splayed wide, wrists hanging limply as she snored softly and drooled against his silk-covered chest.
The King looked up at his Enforcer, the female counterpart of a pair, and smiled in a way that was both bashful and charming. He winked one gray-green eye at her, his darkly patrician features softened by his mischief.
“It is just a fairy tale,” he explained in a hushed voice, folding closed the small book in his hands before setting it onto the floor by his knee.
He reached for the sleeping child in his lap, touching gentle fingertips to her limp form. At that careful caress, Isabella’s daughter slowly began to turn from her flesh-and-blood form into the soft, localized cohesion of a cloud of smoke. The young mother held her breath as Noah manipulated the little cloud into her railed bed and, with practiced ease, returned her to her natural weight and form.
Isabella had seen Noah make similar transformations dozens of times, including to herself. He was a master of the element of Fire, and she did trust him implicitly. She knew from experience that it was very much a harmless trick, taking only the minimum of his awesome skills and power to perform.
As a mother, though, a mother who had until three years ago been all too human and as ignorant of the existence of these elemental beings as most humans were, she couldn’t help the concern that fluttered in her stomach as she understood that her child was being manipulated on molecular levels. She laughed at herself mentally for her silly anxieties a moment later. Noah was powerful and well practiced, the basest of requirements the Demon race expected from their elected King. Everything about him broadcast the natural fate he had been born to. He had been crafted out of a mighty lineage of Demon genetics, forged and tempered, having the awesome patience, wisdom, and education required of a great leader.
Even sitting as he was, there was no mistaking the grandeur of his height, nor the sculpture of a physique just as artistically molded as his mind was. He was not a warrior by nature, but neither did he remain on the sidelines in a soft, padded throne while others went into the fray for him. Isabella had fought by his side and she knew how strong he was, how cunning, and, above all, how merciless he could be when he faced an enemy that threatened the things he held dearest to his heart.
However, she felt she knew him better this way, cuddled up with her daughter in his role as a foster uncle who had probably spent as much time with the darling little girl as her own biological parents. Bella had barely given birth when it became very clear that Noah and Leah were going to be inseparable in their adoration for each other. He showered the child with love, attention, and blatant favoritism. All of this in spite of the fact that he had more nieces and nephews of his own blood than Isabella could count.
Bella didn’t look too closely at the great fortune of this adulation the King had for her child. As with anything, there were hidden layers to it all, most of it redirected emotions from a man who sat in a position of power, and that kind of enormous sovereignty could be all too lonely. All Bella could see at the moment was that Leah looked diminutive in Noah’s embrace, somehow no longer seeming to be growing too fast and too darn independent, as she had been complaining to her child’s father just the night before.
Leah was truly in no more danger from the King’s power than she was when her Earth Demon father separated the child from gravity and sent her squealing and giggling into the air with barely a backhanded thought as they played. Isabella realized that she was still prone to the occasional human foible of fear, a knee-jerk reaction that was habit more than anything. However, she was always able to overcome her trepidations quickly. All she had to do was think of her Demon husband’s highly moral nature, his powerful sense of justice, and the fact that this intense compass also guided many of the Demons in high positions in their society, a category Noah defined even as he fell into it. He made a point of setting the example he intended all others to follow.
“Well, your fairy tale is apparently a great success,” Isabella whispered, reaching down for the book with clear curiosity.
Noah turned suddenly, grabbing her wrist and deftly removing the journal from her hold.
“Thanks,” he said, tucking the book protectively into a pocket on the inside of his jacket.
Isabella frowned slightly, rubbing her wrist where he’d grabbed her a little too enthusiastically, clearly having forgotten his own strength. It was nothing to her, really. After all, she wasn’t human any longer. Well, mostly not. She was a hybrid of ancient Druid and modern human genetics, and since she’d developed significant strength with her other freshman abilities, she’d barely even bruise from the King’s rough handling. Still, if she’d been wholly human, that grip would have broken her wrist clean through, and it wasn’t like Noah to be so unthinking.
“Time for me to get going,” Noah said, gaining his feet quickly and reaching to plant a fast kiss on her still cheek.
With a twist, the Fire Demon morphed into a column of smoke. The column collapsed and scattered across the floor, scudding in all directions for cracks and crevices leading to the outside of the manor.
He was gone barely a second before a storm of dust swept violently into the room, surrounding Isabella’s tiny figure. It snapped suddenly into the shape of her husband, his arms already wrapped tight around her and her wrist coming under immediate inspection.
“What the hell is the matter with him?” Jacob barked, his displeasure over the King’s rough, thoughtless handling of his bride all too clear in his tone and expression.
Since Isabella had become his Imprinted mate those three short years ago, Jacob had found himself with little tolerance for other men touching her, never mind causing her even the smallest of harm. His possessive temperament was part of the nature of their particular Imprinting.
Until Bella had arrived and threaded herself deeply into the tapestry of Jacob’s soul and of his existence, the Imprinting had been so rare that it had only ever been talked about in Demon fairy tales, like the one Noah had been reading to Leah. For the male Enforcer, the intensity of knowing what a rare treasure it was they shared made him irrationally overprotective at times. Still, he was better now than he had been at the start of their relationship. Of course, facing his wife’s exasperation and frustration after each excessive incident had played its part.
“I don’t know,” Isabella murmured in reply to what had been intended as a rhetorical question. “Jacob,” she said suddenly, turning in his arms and wrapping anxious fingers around the loose fabric of his burgundy shirt where it was tucked tightly against his lean waist. “I’m afraid.” She laid her dark head on his chest, burying her pretty face against his shirt until she could feel his warmth pulsing against her cheek. “I’m afraid that someday soon our friendship with Noah is going to be tested in the worst possible way.”
Jacob frowned even more darkly, his entire countenance a dark storm of intense, overcast emotion. Troubled clouds scudded over his heart as well.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. He was the Enforcer. He had been so for over four centuries, elected by the King himself to keep Demon law in strict alignment. Every time the Hallowed moons of Samhain or Beltane neared and passed, any Demon who was without an Imprinted mate could be tempted into straying toward the frail humans or other vulnerable races. These innocent, unsuspecting creatures were not likely to survive the passion of a Demon trying to satisfy dark, clawing hungers that were as primal as the need for food, water, and breath.
The intensity of the effect only grew worse with each passing year. Each Hallowed moon that progressed saw those who, no matter how strong and how self-disciplined they were, slipped back into the more ruthless, animalistic nature that Demon ancestors had long ago been born to. When this type of chaos blossomed, it was the duty of an Enforcer to see that it did not turn toward innocents, and if it did, to severely punish the offender.
Bella and Jacob were the only Enforcers. That meant insane behaviors would always end in a confrontation with one or both of them, a confrontation that the temporarily insane Demons always lost as the lucid, organized Enforcers tracked and trapped them.
Then there was the terrible punishment to follow. This duty rested solely in Jacob’s hands. Isabella had not developed the stalwart, armored heart that was required to mete that punishment out, and he hoped she never would. It was a responsibility he took on gladly because he would rather her heart stay sweet and unburdened. Punishment for a Demon was an unspeakable thing, and the humiliation of it tended to stigmatize the one who suffered it for a long period of time afterward.
In the end it meant that neither of them could pretend not to see the indications of a Demon who was pressing at the edges of sanity, their sense of civilization and moral sagacity rubbed raw with the growing phase of the moon. It was little details, ones that made an aura vibrate with high-strung tension, or the occurrence of aberrant behaviors that were ever so slight but that warned them that the Demon in question was struggling with his own volatile nature. These were the sparks that indicated a fuse was lit and growing ever closer to a deadly moment of explosion.
Apparently Isabella was seeing those signs in the Demon King. If he were going to be honest, Jacob would have to agree, although the very idea of it made his stomach churn. If they were forced to battle so respected and powerful a man, so beloved a friend…
Isabella looked up at him with sad, understanding eyes. She was his spiritual mate, and as such had telepathic access to all of his thoughts, but even if she hadn’t been able to hear his wishes, she would know what Jacob was praying for.
That Noah would find his destined mate as soon as possible.
It was the only thing that would prevent the inevitable juncture of confrontation the King and his Enforcers were heading toward. Destiny, whom all Demons revered for both Her diligent forward motion as well as Her capricious sense of humor and irony, intended the Imprinting to be the Demon race’s salvation. Jacob would never fear the potential of his own madness during the Hallowed moons again. That potential had been whisked away when Bella and the Demon prophecy about Druids like her had fallen into his lap. That was when they had all learned that it was possible to find soul mates in the Druids lying dormant and hidden in human society. It promised to rescue an ancient species trembling on the brink of madness.