Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The chill in the air almost equaled the ice running through Evie’s veins. Frigid gusts pierced her rain-soaked wool cape and dress to settle into her bones.
Her feet dangled over the edge of a stone bridge that crossed the Seine.
How she despised Paris. Not for the streets that reeked of human refuse, but for the fact the city served as the epicenter of the elite lycan mating market.
Unknown to the thousands of humans in this city, lycans, along with other non-human species, thrived among them.
The nonhumans—be they vampires or witches or lycans—upheld a tacit agreement to keep humans ignorant.
If discovered, memories were altered. Sometimes, lives were ended.
Two hundred yards away five black-cloaked figures appeared out of thin air. They dragged a man with his hands bound behind him to the riverbank. He struggled but made no sound. The wind gusts picked up, whipping the wet strands of his long black hair around his head.
She flattened herself on the bridge. Smart of her to have ditched the crinoline understructure of the dress.
In her peripheral vision something fluttered above her on a tree branch.
A falcon-like bird sat vigilant in the rain, watching.
What was a bird like that doing in the rain on a cold night like this?
Lightning streaked down to strike a nearby rooftop in a brilliant display of sparks.
It illuminated everything about the prisoner.
He was harsh, powerful, and flawless—as if an artist had carved his face in the image an ancient god.
The only roughness to the planes of his face was the dark stubble on his chin.
Hair raised on the back of her neck when the cloaked figures encircled him and chanted. A fiery pentagram lit up around the captive.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Those were witches.
Lycans had waged war against them for the past twenty-two years.
Recently, witches had shifted their strategy to target lycan females for elimination to weaken her species.
Already, lycan female numbers had been decimated.
This made the practice of mating move away from traditional, genuine connections between pairs to selling females to the highest bidder.
Evie was viewed as a vessel for a future generation.
The air crackled with a slithery sensation.
Something evil had arrived. Her heart pounded a loud warning that she should bolt.
Best not to get trapped by whatever magic had been cast. Instead, she remained still.
If she ran, they’d see her. She wasn’t daring enough to face off with that many witches.
A shadowy, wraithlike entity appeared inside the circle of witches but outside the pentagram of fire. Their victim backed away but didn’t cower. He hit one of the edges of the fiery shape surrounding him and reacted as if burned.
The wraith cackled and muttered words in an unfamiliar language.
He wielded a curved blade. Evie winced when it brutally sliced the prisoner’s throat.
The wraith reached across the pentagram to toss the captive into the river.
Between one eye blink and the next, all the witches and the wraith disappeared.
The pentagram fire puffed out, leaving a brief haze of smoke before the rain washed it away.
The prisoner’s head surfaced. He bobbled and struggled in the water, but his movements were awkward. How could he be alive? The blade looked to have sliced so deep his head almost came off.
She sprinted to the shore and leaned over as far as she dared to see him. Should I help someone a group of witches deemed so bad they tried to execute him? Common enemies might make him a friend.
“Swim toward me. Can you hear me?”
Somehow, he kicked his way to her. Lifting him from the water wasn’t about the strength she had no trouble mustering. It was about balancing at an awkward angle to prevent taking a header into the stinky water.
Once she hefted him ashore, she untied his gag. Using her small dagger, she cut the rope around his wrists.
He sat upright. While massaging his arms he scanned around them. “How did you cut the binding? It was held by magic.” The low, gritty timbre of his voice sizzled down her spine.
She shrugged and rolled the dagger in her hands. “My father gave it to me. Nothing special.”
He should be shaking from the river’s freezing water, but he wasn’t. His gaze snapped to hers. His eyes were dark except for the copper flecks that appeared backlit by an otherworldly glow, as if they could shoot fire.
No injury remained where he’d been almost decapitated.
This was no human. Obviously. He must heal quickly like her, but he wasn’t lycan.
He also didn’t smell like a witch or vampire.
Odd that all smell of the river had disappeared from him.
Magic. That meant this was some species of wild magical being.
She shot upright and stepped back. Friend or foe?
Her nails elongated into daggers and her teeth sharpened, a partial transition to her feral state.
As a lycan, her inner creature wouldn’t change her into a small furry animal like in the mythical stories—shapeshifters were a different being entirely—but she could become something more feral and wolf-like in humanoid form.
It was something bound by her instinctual animal side as regulated by the moon cycles, but also an astute strategical fighter with heightened senses and superhuman strength.
Spiral, tattooed scars visible above his shirt across his neck glowed as residual magic ebbed.
How could she have missed those? The marks indicated the use of a type of forbidden magic, a practice she’d heard whispered about but lycans were barred from learning.
The marks signaled him a mage and should have rendered him ugly.
Instead, her inner predator roared to life and noticed him as more… everything.
She couldn’t look away from him.
Although a beautiful creature, the harshness he exuded put her on high alert. Her inner animal wanted to hunt him, not to kill but to seduce. Knock it off.
She glared at the sky where a blue moon lurked behind the clouds. Blue moons only happened once every few years as an extra full moon in the middle of the month. It made her moon craze kick to extra strength with a lust for sex.
Not thinking about how bloody gorgeous he is. He might kill me.
Few mages existed. Those who did were far more powerful than a witch. They could wield all the elements at will, unlike witches, whose magic relied on spells and potions.
He might kill her regardless of the rescue based on inherent interspecies hate.
She kept the dagger in her hand. No one knew she’d trained in secret with her brother to learn combat. Tutoring a female to fight was an act punishable by death according to the Lycan Council. The secret had died with her brother several months ago.
I should run.
Yet, she remained frozen. He appealed to her on levels that defied self-preservation. She had nothing to lose by tempting him to kill her. Death would spare her from the fate of the mating that loomed ahead of her like a dark void.
“Do you think rescuing me is like saving a pixie? I don’t grant wishes.” His accent was unfamiliar to her. Eastern European, perhaps.
He stood to tower over her, not that she was short, but she also wasn’t considered tall for her kind. All humans and lycans she’d known seemed painfully mundane in comparison to the aura and strength of this exceptional being.
His eyes sparkled as if they’d captured all the nearby light…
dark and frighteningly alive. “I won’t be the one to spare you from your future.
We’re doomed to play out the rubbish the Fates set in motion for us.
” His voice trailed off. He squinted at her as if she’d suddenly become a curiosity.
“Like you being here at this precise moment.”
Had he read her mind about her future?
With a slow turn, he scrutinized their surroundings. “It’s not gone.”
He ducked down to grab a white rock. With it, he drew a circle around them. The line barely registered on the wet cobbled road.
“What’s not gone?”
“The demon those reckless witches conjured.” He pushed her behind him. “Stay in the circle. Don’t talk to it.”
The wraith-like creature appeared. It cocked its head and stalked halfway around the circle. Then it disappeared.
The two of them spun, but he kept her behind him.
“Are you sure it’s a demon and not a wraith?
” she whispered. Wraiths were the afterlife incarnation of a witch who attempted to achieve immortality by use of dark magic.
Instead of moving on to the spirit world, the witch’s soul became confiscated for casting the forbidden.
Most wraiths were consumed by anger and hatred.
It reappeared on the other side of the circle and laughed. “You wish me to look like a wraith?” It cackled and changed to have a skeletal face with corpse-like legs and hands.
“I asked that you not speak to it,” he snapped.
“I was talking to you, not it.”
“It’s a demon.” He rotated to keep her behind him as the demon paced around the circle.
The stench of rotting sewage rolled her stomach.
She couldn’t get a good look at it from her post behind the mage, but everything turned colder to the point her extremities tingled with numbness.
Shivers took over. A sense of desolation settled into her gut.
To distract herself, she stared at the white circle that the rain did its best to wash away.
“I need your knife,” the mage whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “You might want to die, but this would be a bad death.”
She handed him the blade.
He chanted in Latin.
“Hunc daemonem unde exiit.” Banish this demon from whence it came.
“Sanguinem eius accipias tesseram ad solam lucem prolatam.” Accept its blood as a token to bring forth only the light as spoken.
The demon thrashed and emitted high-pitched noises.