Damien. Jacquelyn Frank

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      Syreena was close.

      He was approaching the situation almost blind. Only his knowledge of his enemy was girding him for this potential battle. The ideal choice would be to find a way to recover Syreena, moving in and out of the danger as undetected as was vampirically possible. The first thing he had to do was determine if she was even alive. If she was, then he must act on the moment. If she was not, he could take the time to regroup and bring in others who would help even the odds at retrieving her body and punishing those who had harmed her.

      The thought was logical and practical, but Damien found it did not sit well with him. A sliver of chill bitterness walked his backbone at the idea of harm coming to one so special. The Princess was a one-of-a-kind creature. Her death would be a heart-wrenching tragedy, even to one such as himself who had grown used to seeing death and its many faces.

      It was an intolerable idea, he thought to himself as he edged closer to a large stone storehouse that his trail was leading him directly to. He might be guilty of his passing frivolities, but he abhorred waste of any kind.

      Therefore, even though there was a great potential that he was walking into a trap set for whomever Ruth would expect to hunt after Syreena—Siena and Elijah, for example—he would do everything in his power to see if the Princess could be saved.

      As Damien came close enough to the building to touch the wall, warning bells screamed across his senses and instincts. The place reeked of magic, probably warning, repelling wards that would shoot first and ask questions an hour or so later.

      Magic could be circumvented, given time and knowledge, but Damien was feeling an instinctive pressure that told him he was already riding low on time. He could shield his approach from Ruth for only so long. She was a master at the manipulations of the mind, and just as he had done, she would soon discover she was being misled and toyed with by an outside mental influence. Frankly, even with his mental power, he could never go toe to toe with a Mind Demon. His ability to sway the thoughts of others was strictly a hunting tool. It chased away ambitious predators so he would not waste time in power struggles, it baited and lured potential prey into well-crafted traps, and it even altered memory and perception so he could feed or come and go without arousing questions and suspicions.

      Damien walked slowly around the perimeter of the wards, testing their power as unobtrusively and delicately as a member of a bomb squad would study an explosive.

      He could only hope this all would not suddenly click to zero and blow up in his face.

      Ruth was growing wiser over time, it seemed. This time her wards were layered to accommodate all Nightwalkers, rather than just Demons or whomever she would expect to encounter. She had learned her lessons well after the Nightwalkers had joined in collaborations against her.

      She was not simply a loose renegade from her own people. She was a threat and a terrible danger to them all. Every encounter with her only supported that understanding more and more.

      Damien flicked sensitive membranes in his eyes and immediately was blinded by the glare of heat from all the bodies tucked tightly into the central room of the building. There were back rooms, upper stories as well, and they had a scattering of bodies exuding heat within them as well.

      However, it was the incredibly hot flare of a Lycanthrope he was looking for, and it was that burn that he quickly found. Rolled into a ball in the corner of an upstairs room she lay, the cool-toned body of her captor standing over her.

      Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have her heart beating in my hand, Damien thought angrily of Ruth. If for no other reason than to put an end to the havoc and the pain she wreaked so willingly. So ably. It seemed ridiculous that so hunted a creature could so easily elude the best hunting species on the planet.

      The trouble was, she knew them and their abilities too well, from an insider’s perspective. She used that knowledge in combination with her mental trickery until they were literally chasing themselves into circles. When they did run her to ground, as they had done once already, the fact that she was willing to sacrifice any number of humans to save herself had thwarted their capture of her. She was constantly throwing the misguided mortals into battle so they could distract her pursuers while she beat a hasty retreat.

      Since she had a roomful of those same types of hapless people just beneath her feet, Damien had to formulate his plans in a way that would deprive her of the opportunity to sic them on him.

      He levitated from the ground, staying in the shadows as he came very near the small window that led into the room where Ruth was storing her prize. The window was inconveniently tiny, little more than the height and width of his hand.

      Clever, clever, he mused.

      Small enough to keep out everything except, say, a Wind Demon in his molecularized form. No doubt fully equipped with a bar that would snap down on his head as he tried to reach for the tidbit of cheese Syreena had become.

      Damien waited patiently for Ruth to exit the room. He was completely focused on his coming actions and on hiding his presence from her astute senses, except for the moment he took to calculate the time left until dawn. In a couple of hours, neither he nor Syreena would want to be running around unprotected. Ruth was quite capable of putting off the Demon lethargy that would try to drag her into sleep for the day. The eldest and most powerful of her kind could often circumvent that debilitation, at least for a few hours.

      He and Syreena were less lucky. She would become the equivalent of tenth-degree sunburn, and he would start to smolder like barbeque coals. After only so much of that, Syreena would die from the poisons in her blood, and he would eventually become little more than a pile of ash.

      They needed to escape, dodge the pursuit of not only the Demon, but the humans who had no shyness toward the sun whatsoever, and find shelter.

      All within a couple of very short hours.

      It took the better part of forty minutes before Damien’s heat-sensing vision told him that Ruth had grown tired of her new captive and had left her alone. Whether that would last, he did not know. All he did know was that once he got hold of the Princess, he was going to have to figure out a way to keep Ruth from tracking them right back down again, just as he had done to the female Demon. He could shield himself, but he could not affect Syreena’s trail.

      He took the opportunity of Ruth’s absence to peer into the window.

      Damien could not see Syreena because she was tucked into the corner closest to him, out of his line of sight as he looked through the tiny window. What he could see was walls of stone that literally glowed with spells and wards.

      Damn.

      There was nothing for it. She was too tightly guarded. There was no way he would ever be able to slip beneath such powerful mystical fences unnoticed.

      Therefore, he would have to resort to the direct approach, and break right through them.

      Syreena was fading in and out of consciousness up until the moment stone seemed to explode and rain down all around her. The force was monstrous, shaking the entire room like an earthquake. The next moment was nothing but a storm of what she could only describe as hellish feedback. Power lashed all around her, some of it lancing through her. Luckily, she was too deep in shock to really even feel it.

      She felt as though a firestorm was blowing toward her, and she had nothing but the curl of her own body to protect herself with. Even in her numbed state, she tucked her head down and СКАЧАТЬ