Authors: Jacquelyn Frank
“I will not allow anyone to take her from me. I no longer care what sacrifices have to be made, I will make them to keep her. Do you understand me?”
Jacob understood perfectly. In that moment, the King would go through every single living being in that room—in their very society—to keep his prize. Jacob knew the feeling well. Even he had once threatened Noah when he’d been forced away from Bella after their first intense encounter. It had torn at his soul and his sanity in a way that he didn’t think he could ever truly bear again. Not without becoming pure animal and instinct, pretty much exactly like the Demon before him.
“I understand. But the only way you can truly keep her is to obey the law and its protocols. You realize that, do you not?”
Noah hesitated again, taking a moment to shift the weight of his burden a little higher against his chest. Jacob watched the King’s eyes close briefly, his face turning closer to the woman’s, the sound of his breath loud in the room full of people holding theirs.
“Very well.”
Jacob and Isabella both cautiously exhaled. Corrine was less able to control her emotions, bursting into tears and falling against her sister in relief. Bella had no choice but to push her away. Her husband’s command was ringing in her head and she rose straightaway to obey. She approached Noah carefully, swiping damp palms down the thighs of her jeans.
“Let me have her, Noah,” she beckoned with a half smile and all the feminine coaxing she could muster. If Jacob had reached for Noah’s possession, there was no telling what volatile reaction it could spark. To this day, Jacob himself had difficulties with other men touching or intending to touch Isabella. Therefore, he was highly sensitive to who should make the necessary move of retrieving the King’s would-be mate.
The unconscious woman was nearly six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than the petite Enforcer, but Bella was far stronger than she looked. Jacob watched her work her soft, soothing magic on the Demon King, her hand reaching to cover his warmly where it gripped his captive’s shoulder.
“She…she is drained,” he warned her, clearly reluctant to release her to anyone.
“I know. I see that. She will come around soon enough,” she assured him.
“Only I can reverse it. I can feed her energy in general, but she is to be my one true mate. It is my energy she will crave as she becomes Druid. She must stay close to me.”
Bella glanced at Corrine when she caught her nod of agreement out of the corner of her eye.
“Then she will stay close to you. Only, let me carry her. You…” Bella hesitated for a long, painful second that reflected a fear only her husband was fully aware of. She spoke before he could stop her. “You have frightened Leah. Go and comfort her. You know she always stops crying for you.”
Isabella knew her husband was flushed with mistrust and barely repressed outrage at the idea of Noah touching their child after he had behaved so badly and with so little regard for her safety, especially because neither of them was at all certain Noah’s episode was past him. However, Isabella knew that Noah would never relinquish the woman without redirection.
He finally acquiesced after a long moment, hoisting his burden into Bella’s arms with a tenderness that belied all of his actions of the past minutes.
“Don’t worry,” Bella whispered to him. Noah nodded, drawing away slowly. He paused for several beats before turning toward Leah. What he ended up facing was the expressions of fright that neither of the females huddled together could have repressed even if they’d had all the time in the world to prepare for it.
It was this evidence of the cruelty of his actions that finally and truly hit home. Noah exhaled sharply with shock and breathless pain as true awareness battered him from all sides. He was surrounded by a roomful of loved ones he had betrayed. He had been running on borrowed strength and power for several hours, burning it off as fast as he could replenish it in his maddened momentum. When the insanity abandoned him, so, too, did his strength, and just as suddenly. Noah stumbled forward onto his knees, only the brace of his hand preventing him from falling facedown onto the debris-scattered floor.
With a child’s fickleness of memory and emotion, Leah scrambled out of her aunt’s arms and hurried to help her uncle. Her little hands cupped his face for a moment, and then she hugged his head and made the soft, soothing sounds her mother and aunt used to comfort her when she was hurt or upset.
It completely undid the Demon King. He blindly gathered the little girl in his arms, sobbing once with incredible pain into her neck before completely giving in to his emotions in front of them all.
The Miserable Princess
A Demon Fairy Tale
Cont’d…
Sarah could hear the collective whisper that shifted like a wave throughout the viewing stands as the Enforcer came to stand before her. She looked up, feeling small and vulnerable in the wake of his tall, imposing figure. He was crafted out of muscle and sinew as a sculpture was shaped from marble. The calluses on his hands were visible, as was the scar that ran 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 had wed him, she had been a Princess in her own right, heir to the Lycanthrope throne and counselor to the current Queen, her sister Siena. So she was no stranger to political machinations and the sometimes undesirable results that churned forth from them. But that didn’t make it any easier for her to bear them. Not when they touched her so personally.
Syreena was diving toward the glassy surface of one of the mountain lakes. That was when Damien knew she was aware of him following her. She would make her next change on purpose, knowing full well how much he hated the bracing cold of winter water. That, more than the breakneck dive of earlier, could be successful at dissuading him from following.
She morphed from bird to dolphin about five feet above the water as she dove toward it. She cut the water cleanly, only a ripple from the break of her tail fins giving away her entrance point. Damien didn’t follow. He lighted on a rock and changed back to his masculine form, crossing his long legs casually and resting a hand on his thigh as he waited for her to surface.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t swim. It was just that a Vampire’s body temperature remained warm only as long as the blood from his last feed remained so. He had no circulation to speak of, so he steadily lost heat over time, becoming colder to the touch the further he got from his last feeding. If he followed his wife into the water, it would suck the heat out of him in an instant, and he wouldn’t be allowed to so much as touch her or kiss her until he fed again and warmed his icy flesh. A delay like that would impede his desire to comfort her when she finally stopped her torrid escape.
The subject of his thoughts surfaced in the middle of the lake, this time in the shape of herself. At least above the water. Below, he had no doubt that she resembled a mermaid instead of a human, with a fin, not legs, keeping her buoyant. In all this changing, there was only one form she hadn’t taken as yet that was available in her repertoire: the winged woman she liked to call the harpy. This gave her a total of five forms, two more than a normal Lycanthrope. She was a mutation, a unique creature amongst her people. Amongst all Nightwalkers. But extra forms or not, Damien would have known that anyway.
At last, Syreena began to swim toward him.
The decision now made to go to him, she did so with all speed, the strong fin below the water propelling her swiftly. She made the transition from water to land as smoothly as she had made all her others, tossing back her dark hair as it dripped sparkling water into the air around her. He uncrossed his legs, opening his arms to her, and she slid into his embrace as she knelt before the rock that made up his makeshift seat.
Damien sighed in tandem with her as she accepted his strong comfort. He placed a gentle line of kisses across her forehead and down to her ear, where he spoke softly to her. “If it will make you feel better, I can send Jasmine to Noah instead of going myself.”
She released a breath that gave her away, reflecting how much she would prefer that. “But you said, as a matter of protocol and respect, you should bring this bad news to him yourself. And I hate to say so, but I agree it might be the better choice. Jasmine can be—well, she’s your counselor, not one of your diplomats. Even she would agree there is a good reason for that.”
Damien chuckled at the politely worded assessment of Jasmine’s frequently volatile temperament. “True, but through everything she has been perfectly loyal to me. She would never upset my carefully cultivated relations with Noah and the Demon people. She knows how important peace among the Nightwalker clans is going to be for everyone’s future.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “Come to think of it, Jasmine could also stay there until some of this is resolved. Between her and Horatio, they would be best able to sense a threat of this nature.”
“Mmm, and he is her brother. They should have a chance to visit.”
“And I get to stay here with you.”
“Now, that is definitely a bonus,” she laughed. “Of course, Jasmine being hundreds of miles away skulking in someone else’s hallways is a special benefit.”
“You are very naughty,” he scolded. “I would think you two would have resolved your issues by now. It has been almost a year.”
“Yes, well…” She smiled briefly before she leaned in to kiss him, taking his flavor onto her tongue hungrily for a long moment before releasing him and licking her damp lips. His hands slid over her chilled back, her bare skin cool but still somehow warmer than his in some places.
“It is settled, then,” he murmured softly against her mouth as he readied to kiss her once again. “Jasmine will go in my stead to warn Noah. We will stay here with Stephan and try to resolve the situation on our end. Perhaps all of this will be over quickly and come to nothing. Meanwhile, I will be home with my wife, keeping her warm and comfortable, and…”
“And taking advantage of her heat cycle so we can try to get pregnant,” she finished for him with relief. “Damien, I have waited so long to begin a family. If you left during my heat, I don’t think I could bear the loneliness and knowing that every day you are gone will be an opportunity wasted. We have talked of nothing else for the past three months, ever since we decided we were ready for it…and that it would be the best thing we could do to bring our disparate backgrounds together. Perhaps, if you have an heir with me, the Vampires will stop all this infighting and will finally begin to accept the choice you made in me.”