Chapter FiveLuna
Chapter Five
Luna
There was something special about standing in Sacred Valley since it was where my village had been when I was younger. My parents had walked this land, farmed this land, and added their energy into the very soil I now stood on.
The past collided with the present, and I swear I could almost hear Father’s voice on the wind that moved the trees. I had spent countless nights standing here watching the moon, and now I could only visit it as a guest.
A market had vendors selling keepsakes for people to take home with them, but none of that interested me. The two wolves who had been following us had disappeared two days ago, and their absence added to the mystery of what was happening here.
I only allowed myself to visit this place once every hundred years on the anniversary of my leaving, and this was the first time I had felt such a difference in the energy, as if something was draining the very life from the land.
“It’s such a beautiful place, isn’t it?” Sylvia asked, stopping beside me as her husband Frank negotiated with one of the vendors.
“Almost untouched by the passage of time,” I replied.
Sylvia linked her arm through mine, leading me back into the hustle and bustle of the marketplace. “We’re going to a traditional café for lunch and empanadas,” she said, making me smile since everything in her life revolved around food. Other people in the group wanted to experience Peru through the landscape, but Sylvia wanted to create her memories through food.
The little café had an open oven, and a guinea pig enclosure that looked like a terracotta castle at the back. Sylvia thought they were pets to entertain the children, and I wasn’t going to upset her with the truth.
“Did you buy anything nice?” I asked Frank, nodding at his bag.
“Some carved wooden figures to put in our travel room back home.” He pulled out a wooden llama to show me, followed by a hummingbird. Their love of life and the simple things associated with it appealed to me. There were times when I envied humans and the one lifetime allotted to them, and because their time was limited, they packed so much into their eighty years.
I left them to finish their lunch since they were taking photographs of everything before they ate it, and wandered outside to pretend to look at the stalls. A prickling at the back of my neck told me someone was watching me, and I touched the pendant at my neck to ensure the null shield was in place around me. Anyone searching for magical abilities would see only a human when they looked at me.
I randomly picked up items in the pretence of being interested, but I was trying to ascertain who was taking an interest in me. A few moments later, someone brushed against my arm, and the flash of a vision manifested in my head, the image of a man falling to his knees with his arms wrapped around his head as he screamed in emotional agony.
I jolted back, directly into a hard chest. Strong hands gripped my arms to prevent me from tumbling over.
“I’m so sorry,” I muttered, trying to free myself but entangling myself further.
“Maybe stop moving,” a deep male voice said from behind me. “Then we can free ourselves.”
I froze, my teeth catching my bottom lip as my cheeks warmed.
He expertly managed to separate us, and I found myself staring at a black T-shirt that was stretched across a muscular chest. My gaze slowly moved up his chest to a firm jaw with a short beard. His eyes were covered with dark sunglasses, and his messy black hair fell forward toward his eyes.
“Sorry again,” I mumbled. “I seem to be a little skittery today.”
He stared down at me, and I couldn’t explain it but it felt as if he saw through the enchantment surrounding me and into my soul. The man nodded once, and turned on his heel to stalk away from me. A memory from so long ago returned to my mind, the moment that Salvator walked away from me.
My hand lifted unconsciously as if to try and stop the stranger.
I was brought back into the present when Sylvia and Frank appeared, chattering away about the lunch. She handed me a cool bottle of water.
“Who was that tall, dark, and handsome stranger you were talking to?” Sylvia nudged me, bouncing her eyebrows.
“I have no idea, but do you ever get the feeling you’ve met someone before?” I asked, trying to place where I knew the stranger from. The problem was that I seemed to constantly be searching for Salvator in every person I met, trying to piece the fragments of what I remembered about him onto strangers. The main memory of him was the way he made me feel, the safety he brought to my life, and how my heart responded to his energy.
The tour guide took that moment to call us all back to the bus. Even as I stepped up onto the bus, I stopped for a moment to look back to where I watched the stranger walk away. This place was filled with too many ghosts of the past that were haunting me everywhere I visited.
Salvator had promised that he would find me if he survived the war, and I believed him. He was the reason I survived that first night, paying the trader to smuggle me out of the territory. The kindness of his wife had helped me survive the fever that consumed me for days as the cuts on my body became infected. She had cared for me, and I ended up spending several weeks with them, helping them to make their lotions for ailments.
A feeling of unrest settled in the bottom of my stomach, making me nervous and jumpy. I couldn’t shake the sensation that events were developing around me and there was nothing I could do but watch it unfold.
That night, I fell into a deep dream vision, the barriers of the past falling away to leave me vulnerable to memories that tormented me. In my vision, I visited the last day I spent with my sister in the temple, the night Balor seized power. I was as helpless tonight as I was back then, forced to relive the moment my life was ripped from me by men seeking power.
There was the moment Salvator found me in the darkness, pulling me against him until I calmed down. My body heated at the memory of being pulled against his hard chest, his hands clutching me. The sensation of his body carrying mine when I could walk no further, my arms and legs wrapped around him. Every moment replayed in my head right up to the moment I watched him walk away from me.
Then my mind travelled through time to today, and the scene replayed in modern times, with the same wide shoulders and lean hips, the same gait as he made his way through the market. My skin hummed at the memory of his hands on it, butterflies erupting in my chest.
It couldn’t be.
Salvator was dead or he would have used my pendant to find me.
I tried to wake myself, tried to escape this nightmare, but it refused to release me.
“You need to breathe.” I heard his voice in the darkness. “Stop fighting and just breathe.”
“You’re dead,” I whispered. “You left me and never returned.”
A sensation of soft lips touched my forehead and my body stilled. “I could never leave you, Lunabelle. Mates are for life.”
I relaxed into the rise and fall of his chest, his fingers tracing trails over my skin. “I waited for you,” I revealed. “I stayed close to the border for years.” More atrocities had been revealed every day, but I had stayed in the hope that Salvator would find me.
“Wars take a long time to burn out.” His voice still held the slight accent he had from childhood.
I had dreamt of him before, my mind trying to keep his features alive. In my private home, there were drawings that I had created from memory, some from magic so that I always had a reminder of him.
There was something different about tonight, almost as if his touch was real, the sensation on my skin caused by his touch. I had tried to find another lover, but something always stopped me, an external force that refused to let anyone close to me.
I remembered every stolen kiss and promises made to each other, holding hands and moon-gazing together. The nights we couldn’t get enough of each other, driven by that animalistic need to mate. There was a craving inside me that demanded I throw caution to the wind and experience the sensation of skin sliding against skin in the erotic dance of desire.
The sensation of his fingertips on me ignited the smouldering embers deep in my stomach into a blazing inferno. My hand caught his, moving it from the innocent area he touched to my breast.
His low gasp in the darkness made me hesitate, but his fingers spread across my delicate flesh, his thumbnail grazing my nipple. His touch sent tremors rippling through me, goosebumps rising to meet his fingers.
I rolled over, hitching my nightdress up my thighs as I straddled his lean hips. In this dim light, I couldn’t see his face, leaving him an anonymous lover. His hands curved around my ass, dragging me closer to him as I ground myself on his pelvis.
Our mouths seemed to have a magnetic pull that drew them together with a force I couldn’t resist. My lips brushed against his in a light caress, testing and tasting our reactions. His fingers tightened on my ass and my hands grasped his face as I gave myself up to emotion. Salvator’s tongue seduced and bewitched me, dragging me into a world where I was a slave to sensations. His mouth spoke to mine, creating a spell that held me captive, his hands hauling me closer to the hardness of his chest.
I had never had a dream like this before, my body warm and flushed, an uncomfortable ache between my legs. Salvator rolled me onto my back, his weight holding me prisoner to his strength. My legs wrapped around him, claiming his body back in return, my body arching in need.
When Salvator dragged his mouth from mine, we were both breathing heavily, our chests heaving. His forehead pressed to mine and all I could see was the dark beauty of his eyes.
His ghost had followed me my entire life, the promise of what might have been a constant pain in my heart. I had lived a long time and truly believed that you only had one soulmate, and they tended to be reincarnated at the same time as you, so you could find each other again in the crazy mess of life and learn to love them all over again.
“This is madness,” he said, his lips touching mine as he spoke. “I need you more than words.”
Something sharp grazed the seam of my mouth and I groaned, my thumb reaching up to find his canines lengthened, his eyes glowing a soft amber.
“Please,” I muttered, canting my head to the side to offer him my throat. I needed to feel his teeth biting into my flesh, the climax of him claiming me in a way only he could. Tingles tippled up and down my spine, my stomach tightening at the thought of that intimate gesture.
Salvator’s teeth grazed the delicate skin at my throat, his lips leaving the hint of a kiss. When his canines sank in, my eyes flew open, and I was lying in a hotel room alone and covered in a layer of perspiration.
“What the hell?” I muttering, dragging my heavy limbs out of bed, my flesh covered in goosebumps, and my hair tangled around me. I stumbled to the bathroom to wash my face with cold water. The woman who stared back at me from the mirror had flushed cheeks, bright eyes, and swollen lips. I tentatively touched my lips and swore I could still feel the imprint of Salvator’s mouth.
“He’s dead,” I told myself in the mirror. “You accepted that fact a long time ago.”
It didn’t change the truth that he was the one man who had a hold on me. I had searched the world for him, looking for him in reincarnated souls, other lycan packs, but my soul didn’t recognise him anywhere.
My mind flashed to the man in the market, and I splashed more cold water on my face to try and clear my head.
“It’s because you’re home,” I rationalised. “You’re seeing what you desire the most.” There were a lot of tall men with dark hair in the world. I was just spooked because of what had happened the past few days.
I opened the window to allow some air into the room, my heart still beating fast after that dream. I’d had erotic dreams before, but this time it felt as if it was real and not a dream. The clock on the wall revealed it was just after three in the morning, but I could no longer sleep.
I logged into our secure server of The Chimaera Foundation to track what was happening in the rest of our organisation. A war between vampires and lycans had raged for centuries, but there had been rumours about a tentative peace, and I knew it had something to do with Tasha. She had been a child when her mother Annalise brought her to me, terrified and needing to protect her baby. I had bound her powers as a temporary measure, but my gift of sight had shown me that she was an Elemental Sorceress who would find love with a lycan. The hellspawn who had been stalking her wouldn’t be able to find her with her powers hidden.
There were reports from my operatives in both the vampire and lycan world, and they had finally realised they should be fighting the hellspawn instead of each other. It was the curse of the gift of sight—you saw the future before it became solidified, and one wrong word could change that future. I had learned to say nothing, and watch as it played in real time, nudging it every so often when it veered off track.
I padded back to the bathroom with an ache in my neck, and my heart skipped a beat. There was a bruise on the side of my neck, the right size to correlate to a bite. My fingertips shook as they touched the area, and I was unable to explain where it came from.
My legs felt weak and shaky as I sat on the side of the bath.
“I shouldn’t have come back here,” I muttered, trailing my fingers through my hair in an attempt to tame it. Everything was becoming too real, and part of me wondered if someone was trying to influence me with a spell.
In the end, I crawled into the shower to shock my system with cold water. I tried to ignore the ache of my body, the craving to leave this place and follow my instincts to go to a building I could see in my head.
At six in the morning, I texted Maia.
Me: No idea what is happening here, but maybe I should come home.
My phone pinged about half an hour later.
Maia: What’s up?
Maia: You need me to send someone to you?
Maia: I’ll book tickets for the closest airport.
Maia: Text me your location.
Her panic calmed me down since it was a welcome normality.
Me: Still in Cusco. I just feel as if someone is watching me. The two lycans have disappeared and yet something seems to be stalking us.
My phone rang, and I answered as Maia had escalated from texting.
“I don’t like that you are there alone. I’m contacting our nearest people and sending them to your location.” She paused and I imagined her pacing back and forth. “I don’t like the idea of you breaking away from your group. If someone is watching you, that could be what they need to identify you.”
I sucked in a breath and released it slowly. Maia had been monitoring the situation, so was able to analyse it neutrally.
“Yeah, I agree. I just panicked.”
She tutted at me, her Scottish accent growing stronger as she became irritated. “I told you I should go with you, just two women on an adventure to a foreign country. We don’t even let our operatives on a mission alone.”
“This wasn’t supposed to be a mission, just a return home.” I sighed and sat on the bed. “Every time I visit, I hold my breath and expect someone from my past to walk up to me. Then I return to my life, and it takes me another hundred years to find the courage to come back.”
I heard water running in the background, and I knew she was making coffee. “Listen, I know what you’re going through. Every single person in this organisation has found themselves alone, and we give them a family. There is nothing wrong in wanting to connect with what you lost, but in the future you need to be more careful. You are one of the last links that will unlock what Balor wanted all those years ago.”
There had been times I felt like going to him and handing myself over. The expression on the face of mother priestess was the only force stopping me. No one ever had to tell me, I knew deep inside my heart that she had stayed that night and sacrificed herself to allow the rest of us to escape.
“Thanks, Maia,” I said. “I needed to talk to someone about this.”
“There are people on their way to you even as we’re speaking on the phone,” Maia informed me in a matter-of-fact tone. “They will extract you and accompany you back to headquarters.”
“So, what’s not on the briefing reports?” I asked, bringing the conversation away from me.
We spent the next hour or so chatting about what was happening in the vampire-lycan war. Maia had been there when I bound Tasha’s powers, so she had a vested interest in what was happening, and she was the ultimate romantic since she was a love deity. They weren’t tiny cherub creatures with bows and arrows, although she brewed a powerful love potion. Love deities had the ability to locate someone’s soulmate, or ignite a passion in someone’s heart. What she couldn’t do was make someone fall in love who belonged with someone else.
All was fair in love and war, but Fate was easily pissed off and tended to be grumpy when someone interfered in her plans.
According to Maia’s sources, Tasha had met a rather handsome lycan by the name of Levi, and he was changing lycan-vampire politics for them to build a life together. She was almost swooning as she filled me in on all the romantic details that appealed to her in the story, including how he managed to bilocate to reach Tasha in her coven castle.
“Are you sure you weren’t interfering?” I teased Maia.
“I wish!” she replied. “I would have loved to write a story like that, but I’m afraid Fate and her sister Destiny beat me to it.”
“I take it you’ve been observing everything in the mirror Tabitha enchanted?” I asked.
We had a mirror that we could use in the same way as a crystal ball, but technology had evolved and so did the objects we used for magical purposes. Maia had a tendency to sit and watch romantic stories from real life instead of movies, dabbing her eyes and crying at the beauty of love.
“I would never use that mirror as an entertainment system,” she gasped in outrage. “That is a valuable tool to allow us to see what is happening across the globe.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied. “Has he declared his love yet?”
“No, but I can feel the tension building up for the big declaration,” she stopped talking, realising what she was saying. “I haven’t had much to do with you being on holiday.”
I laughed, finding that she had distracted me with her nonsense. “Fair enough. You can keep me updated with the big declaration.”
Maia fell silent and I could almost feel the cogs in her head turning. “What is happening with you?” she asked. “You left here with the energy of a strong, independent woman with no romantic attachments, and now you have the energy of someone in a relationship.”
“Honestly? I don’t know. This place is playing with my head, and I’m seeing ghosts from the past.”
“Be careful,” Maia said. “Sometimes the ghosts are real and they don’t haunt you but hunt you.”
Her words sent tendrils of fear pulsing through me. She was right, the past was a living entity with the power to destroy you.