Leah’s eyes began to water with frustrated emotion. She knew exactly what Noah would say to her if she went to him. He would caution her just as Jasmine had. He might even act more strongly to prevent her from doing anything. This was why she had never voiced the idea before. She was wise enough, even at her young age, to understand the far-reaching ramifications that might come with her gifts if she used them without caution and forethought.
“Such a thoughtful child.”
The compliment was said so snidely that Leah immediately jerked her attention to the speaker. She had been so absorbed in her moral dilemma, she hadn’t realized just how far out of the reach of safety she had traveled.
And she had not realized she had walked right into Ruth’s waiting arms.
“Now let us see,” Ruth mused, her china blue eyes fixing on Leah in a way that paralyzed her. When Jasmine had entered Leah’s mind, it had been almost like a seduction, like falling into the warm embrace of a lover. But having Ruth seize hold of her mind was something cold and terrible. Leah felt her body go dead, as if it weren’t any longer a part of herself. And in a sense it wasn’t. Ruth had cut off her ability to send and receive nerve impulses within her body.
Leah felt herself falling, dropping to the stone floor like a sack of potatoes. The deadly beautiful Demon moved over her, putting her hands on her knees as she peered down at Leah. Ruth’s blond hair was swept to the side and twisted into a fat braid that draped off her shoulder, a strangely incongruous blue ribbon woven into it and tying it off in a big bow. She wore an expensive, luscious evening dress that accented her shoulders and dipped low in front. The midnight blue silk was peppered with sequins that flattered the curves of her figure. But the wide neckline of the dress also accented the vicious bruising and bite marks along both sides of the Demon traitor’s neck.
As if the evidence of her Vampire lover’s existence called him forth, Nicodemous drifted out of the shadows and appeared at Ruth’s side. The smell of them together made Leah gag, making her realize that not all of her senses had been taken from her. What she smelled was the rottenness that filled the flesh of any creature who dabbled in black magics. Selfish, offensive magics. The past decade had shown the Nightwalker world that it was not always so. Natural-born Witches who used well-meant magic in selfless and defensive ways remained clean-smelling and pure. But once they began to dabble in darker arts, they became addicted to them like a poisonous drug, and that drug made them stink of their evilness to any other Nightwalker that came near.
Ruth and Nico reeked of their addiction, their eyes shining in a peculiar way that warned you they were probably a little bit insane from all their power mongering, from all the ways they had altered themselves over the years as they grew stronger and stronger.
“Well, listen to that,” Nico mused as he, too, leaned forward to peer at her. “She’s barely old enough for Fostering and yet her mind reeks of that self-important righteously moral propaganda you Demons are so fond of spewing.”
“Oh, but more than that,” Ruth whispered in a breathless way. “She’s thinking about us, Nico, and how she can go about getting rid of us.”
Panic infused every cell in Leah’s body. Suddenly all the implications of being helpless at the hands of the Demon and, more importantly, the Vampire, who could potentially absorb her power, struck Leah. Since a Vampire could only gain one power from drinking the blood of a Nightwalker, and Leah only had one power to speak of, then that meant ... It made her sick to her stomach to think that Ruth and Nico might obtain her ability to move through time. Suddenly the small ramifications of her one somewhat selfish act meant nothing in the face of the damage these two could do if they gained control over Time and began to leap back and forth within it, changing whatever they wanted to, sneaking up on unwitting historical figures who could never be prepared for their coming.
“I do so love it when they panic,” Ruth mused to her partner, reaching out to fluff a curl near his ear. “They forget we can read their minds and start spewing information in their thoughts.”
“Yes, it is rather handy, is it not?” Nicodemous agreed.
Nico reached down and plucked Leah up by her shirtfront, the T-shirt material stretching under her dead weight as he yanked her up closer to his face and the vicious mouthful of fangs he flashed at her.
“So, morsel, you think you have the key to something your betters have never been able to accomplish? You think you have what it takes to destroy us?”
“She may be right,” Ruth supposed. “If she found a way to attack us before we were strong enough ...” The demented Demon straightened her posture and gently stroked her long, graceful fingers down the length of her braid. “Rip out her throat. Drink what you can and kill the little bitch. Then we’ll have the power of Time and there will be no one to stop us.”
“Finally ... finally I will be Prince of the Vampires,” Nico snarled. “Let Damien find a way to fight me from his crib!”
And in a single savage act he flashed an angry mouthful of fangs at the young girl and sank them viciously into her delicate neck.
Leah screamed. She knew that all it would take was one wrenching pull and she’d be flayed open to bleed to death like her mother had. And all it would take was one swallow and all of the Nightwalker worlds could fall into chaos.
Her panic triggered her power, which whipped through her like the blade of a razor, painful and uncontrolled, nothing but pure instinct. Every molecule of her body began to individually flee from her attacker, leaping through the only thing she had the smallest bit of control of.
Leaping through time.
Chapter 3
About Four Hundred Years Earlier
“Adam!”
Adam’s dark head picked up, sweat flinging off his brow as he swung unruly black curls dripping with the salty liquid out of his eyes. They were his mother’s eyes, much to his father’s consternation. Mother and son both had eyes of the palest green, so clear and so light that it was almost as if they were incandescent. It enhanced the powerful ability both had to seemingly peer straight into someone’s soul. Those on the receiving end of that pale jade stare often confessed the total truth, behaving themselves, or rectifying wrongs, whether they wanted to or not.
It was that very same set of eyes that had forced Adam’s father, Asher, to confess his undying admiration to a saucy, stubborn, raven-haired female in spite of the fact that he had sworn himself to bachelorhood forever. Now he was two grown sons’ deep into the union and had never been happier.
That same female, now three centuries older but no less saucy or beautiful for it, was calling Adam from the turrets of the family castle. He could see the long braid of her hair hanging six feet down over her shoulder, the fanned tail of it fluttering in the breeze like the family crest she stood near as she leaned over the wall to call him.
“Madam,” he addressed her, his deep voice booming up to the ramparts and farther still. “I have asked you not to disturb me when I am at practice.” He swept a hand behind himself to indicate the four other Demons lying in various positions of semiconsciousness on the dusty ground, as well as the tall, lanky figure of his brother Jacob, who was leaning casually against the back of a stone statue of their grandfather that stood at the edge of the practice grounds. Jacob almost looked as though he were commiserating with the old man, who grinned deviously down on the practice field where, like his eldest grandson, he’d had a rather nasty habit of tearing through practice partners with god-awful speed.
“It would seem you are due to give your men a reprieve,” their mother rejoined boldly, taking note of his exhausted opponents with far too much motherly humor in her voice.
Adam hated it when she did that. Treated him like a son. Of course, he also adored her for it. Being his mother, she could always be counted on to be the one person on the planet who, though she supported and praised him constantly, somehow still managed to be entirely unimpressed and unaffected by the man he had become. Even their fathe
r would have shown Adam far more respect for his rank and position in the grand scheme of things. Adam supposed, however, that it was a mother’s prerogative to always treat her son the same as she had when he was just a boy, and it was a son’s prerogative to indulge her in her desire to do so.
“I suppose you have a point,” he conceded, turning to flash an enormous grin at his baby brother, if a man 221 years of age could be considered a baby still. Jacob grinned back, running a hand through the brown-black hair that he kept far too loose and wild for Adam’s tastes. “Will you require your youngest son as well?” he asked her.
“As a matter of fact, I should appreciate that.”
“What is the matter, Adam, are you afraid that if I get a few minutes’ extra practice in, I will become better than you?”
“A fear like that would not only be ridiculous, it would be a complete waste of time,” Adam shot back to his cocky sibling. He would have to make Jacob eat a bit of arena dirt later on, just to keep him humble. The upstart was beginning to get as good as he thought he was, and that had the potential to make him unbearable to live with.
The ribbing and boasts continued as the sons moved into their home to seek out their mother and discover what her bidding would be.
Eleanor had come in from the upper walkway, a bit windblown and breathless, but rosy with merriment and her clear delight in her offspring as they entered her salon on the top floor of the north tower. She took a moment to look over her sons, so different in many ways, and yet so clearly cut from the same cloth. Adam had inherited her hair color along with her eyes, but his towering height and almost beastly build was a throwback to his grandfather on his father’s side. His best friend, and also his cousin, was a Demon named Noah, the only Demon in existence who even came close to matching up to Adam’s behemoth proportions. Adam sported shoulders that seemed a mile wide, a chest just as broad, and a waist that narrowed fit and tight with straps of well-worked muscles, but was still thick like the trunk of a sturdy oak tree.
In contrast, his younger brother Jacob was lean and athletic, sleek where Adam was more bullish, flexible where his brother was brutally forceful. Eleanor’s younger son had his father’s hair and build, as well as his dark brown eyes that turned ebony with a rise in temper or other emotive passions.
But even as they differed in looks and build, they rang in perfect tune when it came to morals. Both were obsessed with the nature of the law, crime and its appropriate punishment. Both had a sense of right and wrong that was implacable and unwavering. They were highly moral creatures, something that she demurely credited herself with lending to their makeup. Unfortunately, his conscience gave Jacob the tendency to be very hard on himself should he make some sort of error; and Adam ...
Adam always wanted to save the world at all costs. Or at least the Demon part of the world. He was protective of humans, respectful of those other Nightwalkers that deserved respect. But he clearly did not know his own limitations. Eleanor herself had yet to see what they were, but she was worried that one day he would find out the point at which he fell short—only after he had raced headlong over the edge of the cliff. She dreaded the day he would subsequently plummet to the ground, brought rudely to earth and awakened to the fact that he would never be able to save everyone and do the right thing on time, all of the time.
As a mother, it was Eleanor’s job to worry about her sons’ sensitivities and vulnerabilities. It was also her job never to insult their egos by letting them know she still fretted over them in such ways. Asher was always warning her that their boys were far more intuitive than she gave them credit for, and though they allowed her these motherly eccentricities, she’d best not test them too far.
But Eleanor already knew that. She had no intention of ever making her children regret her behavior toward them. They had worked too hard to earn their manhood to be undermined by her.
Of course, that did not mean she would not meddle at all. She was looking forward to grandchildren one day, and if she knew Demon males, they were not likely to go willingly or seek mates eagerly. Well, Demon females could be just as wily as their counterparts, and more than made up for the males’ recalcitrance with their own ambitions. She had faith that one day each of her sons would meet his match in a woman, and she made no secret about it.
“Mother,” Jacob greeted her, grabbing her extended hands and pulling her close to kiss her peaches-and-cream cheek. Because they’d stopped aging somewhere in their twenties, Eleanor and Jacob could be mistaken for brother and sister, but all one had to do was witness their exchange of fond gazes to see the bond of parental kinship that was there.
“Madam,” Adam greeted her more gruffly, as if he were too old and too important to call her “Mother” any longer. However, he drew her into an incredible bear hug that broadcast his undying affection for her. “Now suppose you tell us,” he continued after he finally set her back down onto her slender feet with great care, “why you felt it necessary to drag us from training in the middle of the night.”
“I wish to discuss the festival.”
Her sons glanced at each other, exchanging pained but patient expressions.
“Mother, we have had the arrangements in place for months. Beltane is tomorrow, and the festival will be flawless as usual. Why are you fretting?”
“Because I am hostess to your cousin’s royal event this year, and I would see it done perfectly or not at all. Now, did you invite the Gypsies onto our lands?”
“Of course, Mother,” Adam sighed, “It is tradition, after all. And we know you feel it is a good omen.”
“Very well,” Eleanor conceded. “Have you selected your escorts, then?”
This received the expected sounds of protest from both of them.
“Boys,” she said, her tone stern but not too scolding, “you are my sons, and therefore will be expected to bring a proper woman to the table, not just run off and tumble some girl behind a bush later on and consider yourselves as having been social.” She ignored their chuckles and mirth-filled glances at one another. “Some other families may not care about decorum, but I do. Please see that you choose decent Demon girls.”
“No decent Demon girls will have us,” Jacob joked, reaching to tug on her braid in a rascally manner. “I hear that I am far too brooding.”
“And I am Enforcer,” Adam said, that in and of itself an explanation. “I think my time is better spent enforcing the unruly on Beltane rather than finding some chit brave enough to face her fear of the Enforcer so she may share my plate.”
“I swear, you boys would drive Destiny Herself to tears,” Eleanor huffed in exasperation. “Adam, I am well aware you will very likely be called away to work, but the rest of the time I expect you to remain here and be sociable. Jacob, I will take no such excuses from you. Choose or I will choose for you, and I do not think you will like my choice half as well as you would enjoy your own.”
“Just so long as she comes clothed and does not belch at table?”
“Jacob! Honestly!”
“You try too hard, Mother. You should know by now that neither of us will ever be likely to marry. Adam is far too ugly, and I am far too smart.”
Adam reached out and cuffed his brother for his insult, nearly knocking him onto the floor in the process. Eleanor rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling, seeking not only strength, but also possibly reassessing her thoughts on their maturity.
“If we promise to come properly accompanied, will you relax about the festival and allow us to return to work?” Adam asked her.
“Of course,” she said with a show of satisfaction and contentment. She knew her sons would keep their word.
“Then we give you our promise to do so.”
Adam used only a thought to change from flesh and bone into the form of a mist that allowed him to ride the clouds and wind currents. He rose above the home he had grown up in and let the current of the natural wind carry him over the vast Hungarian forest below. As a Water Demon he could travel as
mist or fog or even waves upon the waters, but the superfine mist of a cloud upon the breeze was by far his preferred choice and by far the quickest.
His path of travel ran quite close to the Romanian border, also known as Vampire territory, but the Enforcer was unconcerned in spite of the fact that the two Nightwalker factions—Vampire and Demon—were embroiled in a war. Certainly each side fought with gusto, the Demons believing the Vampires to be unruly and in need of controlling, and the Vampires not liking that idea at all. Adam resented anyone who wasted their time and energy on nothing better than pursuits of pleasure. The Nightwalkers’ long lives were precious gifts. They should be used with far better care than the minions of Prince Damien practiced. That, compounded with their delight in meddling in human affairs, made them dangerous. Their behavior put all Nightwalkers at risk. Perhaps King Noah thought that one day Damien would see reason and suddenly start to give a damn about what his subjects did, but Adam did not subscribe to the belief that there was any such thing as a decent Vampire.
It was an attitude shared by his younger brother. Jacob had become quite an efficient Vampire hunter. Quite a notorious one at that, and Jacob ate up his glory just as he would sweet cakes and wine. He thrilled in the war with Prince Damien’s bloodthirsty little sycophants. The Vampires had proven that they hungered for bloodshed to relieve their boredom. After all, it was taboo and deadly for Vampires to drink the blood of other Nightwalkers, so they certainly weren’t doing it for nutritional purposes. No. The little bastards were simply out to entertain themselves with a few Demon deaths. Unfortunately for them, when they took on his baby brother, all they got was a world of hurt.
Unfortunately for Adam, success was giving Jacob an ego that was becoming unbearable of late.