It was perplexing at best, disturbing at the least, how some distant part of her felt inexplicably drawn to his animal nature, curiously intrigued by his inhuman qualities…bizarrely compelled to comply with his demands. And perhaps that was it, precisely what was happening: Arielle was being compelled by Kagen Silivasi, quite literally.
But why?
Why was he doing this?
Why did he insist on avowing that she belonged to him? Why did he behave as if he had the indelible right to stake some claim over her?
Arielle Nightsong was a lot of things, but she wasn’t easily manipulated, and she wasn’t a bad judge of character. Kagen Silivasi was not a fickle male, nor was he irrational, unduly impulsive, or reckless by nature. In fact, Keitaro had described him as loyal, honorable, and responsible to a fault, yet he had displayed each of the former traits with reckless abandon when it came to his dealings with her. And it just didn’t make any sense.
It was irrational for him to keep calling her sweeting; impulsive of him to give into some transitory, base attraction; reckless at best to keep insisting that she belonged to him in some strange, barbaric way, knowing that she did not.
That she could not.
And it was slowly wearing her down.
Making her as fearful as she was confused.
And yet, there was something in his voice that seeped past her barriers, something in his soul that reached out to hers, if only for a fleeting instant…now and then.
There was something magnetic, powerful, and undeniable in his soul.
Something that tugged at her heart.
She eyed him sideways, trying to discern what it was, and he met her stare head-on, those damnable eyes illuminating like soft silvery-brown shadows in the sparkling glow of the firelight. What do you want from me? she asked him in her mind, half expecting him to answer her in kind.
When nothing but silence met her probe, she quickly looked away.
In truth, she was positively terrified of the male: terrified that he had the power to destroy her, and those of her kind; terrified that he had the means to compel her to do his bidding, whatever it may be; terrified that he could take her life—and her heart—and shred it into a thousand unrecognizable pieces, each one more damaged than the last. And then, he could take Keitaro, the father of her heart, and leave her carelessly behind, alone in a barren world, broken, with all she had ever known left in ruins.
From where Arielle sat, Kagen Silivasi may as well have been the devil in disguise, the most dangerous adversary she had ever encountered.
By all the ancestors, please—just leave me alone.
She spoke the words silently, once again, hoping that at least the intensity of her plea would break through.
“Please,” she repeated, one last time, not realizing she had spoken the word aloud.
fourteen
The next day
“Are you tired? Do you need to rest?” Kagen asked Arielle, his voice thick with concern.
Marquis had set a brutal yet necessary pace for the team, and they had been walking for hours, trudging their way through the cold Mystic Mountains, headed toward the slave encampment in a furious effort to reach Keitaro in time.
As they continued to climb in elevation, the crowns of the white-bark pines became increasingly dusted with frost; light purple blooms of wolfsbane progressively dotted the land; and the smell of the air grew crisper, strangely bitter, as if the icy chill that surrounded them foretold of trials to come.
Arielle shivered. She fisted her hands in her animal-hide gloves and tried to appear stoic. “I’m fine,” she told Kagen assuredly, careful to keep an arm’s-length distance between them as they walked. “I’ve taken this trail more times than I can count. I’ll be fine.”
“Perhaps,” Kagen said thoughtfully, and then he looked up at the sky and frowned. “But does it always snow in May?”
“In the Mystic Mountains?” Arielle laughed in spite of her reticence. “Unfortunately, yes.” She stomped some snow off her boots. “In Mhier, it’s not so much a function of seasons but surroundings. It depends more on where you are than when you pass by.” She tucked her hands beneath the crooks of her arms and continued to trek forward.
Kagen reached out and grasped her by the sleeve of her heavy parka—late the night before, he had followed the rebels back to their camp, and using Arielle’s memories as a guide, he had packed a small bundle of appropriate clothing and food to see her through the journey. He had been back before Arielle or his brothers had awakened. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll feel better if you at least allow me to warm your hands.”
Arielle turned to face him, which was at least something, but by the cautious look in her eyes, she was weighing the pros and cons of allowing him even that small indulgence.
Kagen sighed. “It doesn’t have to mean that we’re married.” He tried to keep his tone light. “Don’t make it harder than it is, Arielle. Just let me attend to your hands.”
Arielle puffed out a frozen breath and shuffled in place to stay warm. “Fine,” she said, glancing ahead at the trail. “Go ahead. Just hurry.” She quickly removed her gloves, tucked them beneath her left arm, and held her hands out in front of him.
Kagen gasped at the sight before him. “Arielle, your fingertips are blue.”
She shrugged and tried to force a smile. “The color always comes back once I reach the valley.”
Kagen bit his lip and stifled a growl. “If you keep acting foolishly, I will insist upon carrying you.”
“You will not!” she snapped, her vivid eyes flashing hot with defiance.
The left corner of Kagen’s mouth turned up in a grin—the woman was positively adorable. “You’re right; I will not.” He chuckled softly, unable to contain his amusement.
To his surprise, Arielle smacked him across the arm and glared at him mischievously. “You really do enjoy nettling me, don’t you?”
He grinned from ear to ear. “You make it far too easy, Miss Nightsong.”
“What?” she said, without thinking. “I’m no longer your sweeting?”
Kagen’s nonchalance disappeared. He took both of her hands in his, raised them to his mouth, and blew soft, gentle air over her fingertips, his breath as warm as a summer’s day. He continued to repeat the process until a healthy pinkish tone reappeared, and then he whispered softly, “Is that better…sweeting?”
She swallowed convulsively and tried to look away, but her eyes came immediately back to his, as if drawn by an unseen magnet. She opened her mouth to speak and then slowly closed it, which only drew Kagen’s attention to her lips: They were the color of pink pearl roses, as full as they were sculpted, and more tempting than a pond full of cold, inviting water on a hot summer’s day. He bent his head, and his hair fell forward to shade his eyes. Still, he managed to hold her gaze through a disheveled curtain of brown locks. He released her hands, placed two fingers beneath her jaw, and gently lifted her head to force her to maintain the eye contact. “I want to kiss you,” he said, closing the distance between them slowly, carefully, until his mouth hovered mere whispers over hers.
Again, Arielle tried to speak but failed, and her parted lips were too tempting an offer for Kagen to pass up.
He brushed her lips with his, so softly that the contact was almost imperceptible, a mere grazing of souls, and then he deepened the contact, molding the contours of his mouth to hers with a slightly firmer touch. His tongue swept softly over that adorable pout, and she immediately pulled away, practically jolting from the sensation, as if she had been prodded with a hot iron. “No,” she said with insistence. She took a hasty step back and almost stumbled over a fallen branch. “No, Kagen. No.”
Kagen watched as various emotions swept over Arielle’s face—desire, confusion, and fear, each one in turn, warring for a dominant place—and he rubbed his forehead in frustration. Bewildered, he cupped her face in his hand and gently stroked her cheek. “Very well.” He spoke quietly, though no longer in a whisper. “I
…I must’ve misread your signals. I’m sorry.”
Arielle shook her head from side to side and gently removed his hand, looking more than a little…perturbed? She wrung her hands together in a rare show of nervousness and continued to back away. “I mean it, Kagen. Please. Please don’t do that kind of thing again.”
Kagen Silivasi was not accustomed to this level of rejection, but even if he were, this would have rattled him deeply: There was something else going on with Arielle, something much deeper, much more complex, than a misguided kiss. And he didn’t want to leave her this unsettled, this uncertain within herself. “Come to me,” he said, gesturing her forward with his hand.
She looked like a frightened rabbit as she shook her head. “No.”
“Shh,” he coaxed tenderly. “Silly warrior, come.”
She took a tentative step forward, and he met her halfway, immediately enfolding her waist with his arm. He pulled her gently into the security of his chest, and then he kissed her lightly, chastely, on the top of her head. “I already told you, I will never force you. You have no reason to fear me, Arielle.”
Arielle buried her head in the crook of his arm and shivered. “I have every reason, Kagen. And that’s why the answer is no.”
He ran his hand upward along the small of her back, swept it along the ridge of her shoulders, and buried his fingers in her silky, wild hair. Then he gently grasped a handful of untamed tendrils and wound them through his fingers, allowing the long, curly ends to slowly fall away. “Your words do not fall on deaf ears, Arielle. I am not without compassion.” He stepped away from her then and continued to walk in silence.
She quickly fell into step beside him, her face still flushed with heat.
Just then, Nachari Silivasi appeared on the trail beside them, as if emerging out of a mist, and he nodded to Arielle. “Daughter of my father’s heart,” he addressed her formally and with respect. “Marquis would like to speak with you.”
“What about?” Kagen asked, immediately regretting his proprietary reaction.
If Nachari noticed the tension between them, he was too polite to say anything. “He has a few more questions about the medical condition of our father, the serum that the lycans pump into his veins, and the contraption they use to do it.” He shrugged, apparently trying to remain detached. “We have all tried on many occasions to reach out to Keitaro telepathically, but the communication doesn’t go through, not even as we draw closer to the slave encampment.” He cast a sideways glance at Kagen. “Kagen believes that the diamond dust, the many centuries of infusing Keitaro’s blood with such a debilitating substance, has rendered his ability to receive the transmissions ineffective, that he can no longer receive our probes; but as you can imagine, it is still a cause for concern.”
Arielle nodded, and her voice became all at once firm. “Take my word for this, Nachari. You don’t know Tyrus Thane like I do—he’s a sadist and a narcissist. He will not take your father’s life, or allow anyone else to do it for him, before Sunday. If he wants him to die in the arena, on a grand stage for the entire realm to see, then what King Thane wants, King Thane gets. Your father isn’t silent because he’s…gone.”
Nachari’s deep green eyes softened with gratitude. “Thank you, Arielle.” He gestured toward the front of the trail, pointing in Marquis’s direction. “Just the same, Marquis has many questions: Would you mind walking with him for a bit? Besides”—he turned to regard the healer once more—“I would like to speak with Kagen privately for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
Arielle seemed only too happy to oblige. “Oh, no. Of course, I don’t mind.” She gathered her coat more closely around her shoulders and hurried forward on the trail. Truth be known, she was probably grateful for the reprieve.
Kagen watched her walk away, sighed in frustration, and then he raised his eyebrows and turned his full attention on Nachari. “Well?” he said. “Speak then.”
Nachari fell into easy step beside him, but the awkward silence that followed belied the seriousness of his intent: Kagen could tell there was something important on Nachari’s mind, and the wizard was searching for a way to broach the subject.
“Just pick someplace and dive in,” Kagen said, prompting his little brother with a smile. “I don’t bite, unless your name is Walker.”
Nachari chuckled. “Touché.” His easy step became an easy glide, the cat-like stroll flowing in gentle, rhythmic harmony with the natural landscape around them. He rolled his muscular shoulders in an effort to release some tension, and then he simply dove in like Kagen suggested. “Marquis, Nathaniel, and I have been talking,”—he wet his lips, for courage?—“and we agreed that one of us should approach you.”
Kagen’s eyebrows shot up and he groaned. “Damn, that sounds serious.”
“A little bit,” Nachari agreed.
When the wizard didn’t smile to soften his words, Kagen frowned. “What is it, little brother?”
Nachari sighed. “What’s going on with Arielle?”
Kagen shook his head. “What do you mean?”
Nachari waved his hand through the air as if to dismiss all the extraneous nonsense. “I mean, what’s going on with you and Arielle, with your overwhelming desire to be with this woman…to get close to this human?”
Kagen smirked. “Are we going to talk about the birds and the bees, little brother?”
Nachari leveled a stern glance at the healer. “I’m not playing with you, Kagen.”
Kagen shrugged. “Then what do you want me to say? I don’t know. I honestly…don’t…know.”
Nachari shook his head. “Not good enough, healer. I mean, you almost attacked me that first night in the cave—in fact, you would have attacked me if Nathaniel hadn’t intercepted you. And you got into a physical altercation with your twin. Not to mention, you practically took her right there in front of all of us.”
Kagen visibly recoiled. “I didn’t take her.” His tone was defensive, rising with emphasis. “Not like that.”
“It was pretty—”
“Not like that,” Kagen insisted.
“Almost like that,” Nachari argued. Before Kagen could object again, he shrugged his left shoulder and shook his head. “I’m not…I don’t care to get into an argument. This is not about sexual nuances. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a grown male—what you choose to do is your business. But this is something else entirely, brother.” He angled his body toward Kagen’s, and his eyes were brimming with concern. “I don’t know which is more telling, the fact that you wanted to kill Walker on sight for his past insults to the female, or the fact that you restrained yourself from doing just that, in order to pacify and appease her. Both say something important is going on.”
Kagen stopped walking then. “We can catch up to Marquis and Nathaniel in a minute. Look at me, Nachari. What are you trying to say?”
Nachari looked off into the distance as if gathering his words from the Mystic Mountains. When, at last, he met Kagen’s stare head-on, his jaw was set in an uncharacteristically hard line. “Has it ever crossed your mind that this female might be your destiny?”
Kagen chuckled out loud then, although there was nothing humorous in the sound. “Of course it has. You know damn well that was the first thing I checked, but have you seen her wrist lately?”
“I have.”
“Then you know that there are no markings on her flesh: Auriga isn’t there.”
“I realize that.”
“And have you seen the sky recently?” Kagen asked. “The plain white moon?”
“I’ve seen the Mhieridian moon,” Nachari said bluntly. “I haven’t seen the moon in Dark Moon Vale, and neither have you. And trust me, I’ve tried.”
Now this caught Kagen’s attention. “What do you mean, you’ve tried?”
Nachari placed his hand on Kagen’s shoulder. “Last night, after we all went to bed, while you were out collecting Arielle’s things, I tried to send my spirit out of my body in the form of a raven, kind
of like I did from the Abyss. I was hoping to enter Dark Moon Vale and, I don’t know, see what I could see.” He furrowed his brow in consternation. “It wasn’t an easy feat to accomplish from the Valley of Death and Shadows, and I didn’t expect it to be easy from here; but I just couldn’t make it happen.” There was a hint of humility, if not outright apology, in his voice. “I think, perhaps, that when I did it before, it was because Deanna’s spirit called out to mine—our connection was just that intense—there’s nothing calling me now, other than my own desire to know…” His voice trailed off. “Just the same, I tried.”
Kagen placed his hand over Nachari’s and patted it gently. “You did all that for me?”
Nachari rolled his eyes then, the gesture both playful and serious at once. “Of course I did that for you. And for me. I don’t think you quite follow what I’m trying to say…not yet.”
Kagen frowned. “Then perhaps you should spell it out, say it more plainly.”
Nachari took a deep breath, ran his fingers through his hair, and pushed any remaining awkwardness aside. “I don’t care how long it’s been since you’ve had a woman, brother. You are a Master Healer, an Ancient, at that; you shouldn’t be this tied up in knots over a human female, not unless…” He paused again, only this time, he locked his gaze with Kagen’s. “Brother: If, for some strange reason, Arielle Nightsong is, in fact, your destiny, and we manage to rescue Father—”
“When we manage to rescue Father,” Kagen interjected.
“When we manage to rescue Father,” Nachari said, “if we leave with Keitaro, if we leave without Arielle, you are as good as dead.” Although he had tried to speak the words without emotion, his hand began to tremble, and he removed it from Kagen’s shoulder and placed it at his side. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Whether or not she’s your destiny is more than just a little bit significant. Even if there’s only one chance in a million, it’s not a chance we are willing to take. Not when your reaction to her is this extreme…this primal.”
Kagen understood exactly what Nachari was saying, and he wasn’t about to belittle his concern. Still, he really didn’t think it was an issue. “But there’s no reason to believe that she is,” he said—in a sense, he was playing devil’s advocate, trying to get Nachari to convince him. If the wizard’s argument was stronger than his own, he might reconsider the facts. “I mean, think about it, Nachari: The moment we entered Mhier, Marquis and Nathaniel tested all of our vampiric powers, and they work just fine. We’ve been able to communicate telepathically, at least with each other, if not with the warriors back home, and there has been no Blood Moon. Wouldn’t the celestial gods know that I’m here—that she’s here?—and wouldn’t they be capable of marking my destiny, no matter where she was? There are no markings on Arielle’s wrist, and frankly, she doesn’t seem drawn to me in the least.”