Immortals After Dark 03 - No Rest for the Wicked

was terrified of missing her target, since she’d been cursed to feel indescribable pain every time she did. Nïx feared foreseeing the death of a Valkyrie so much that, to this day, she never had. Regin, always the first to run screaming a war cry into the fray, was afraid of... ghosts.
    And Kaderin? When alone, she had once suffered from lygophobia, the fear of dark or gloomy places, even though she could see near perfectly in the dark.
    By the way she was eyeing the bathroom light switch, she apparently had the fear once more. Yet another weakness from before the blessing, rearing its ugly head. She rose to flip on the light, then returned.
    The sinister Valkyrie with the nightlight—that was her.
    It was uncomfortably quiet here, just as it’d been at her London flat. She’d grown used to living in her coven at Val Hall, amid the reassuring shrieks of her half-sisters and the thunder rattling the manor. All night, Valkyrie pushed in and out of the groaning oak front doors.
    She turned to her side in a huff, glaring at her regular bedmate—her sword. Another huff had her back to it. She was... lonely. She still hadn’t shucked his loneliness from that morning in his wretched castle.
    Why not just think about him? Allow herself to mull over the vampire and be done with it?
    For instance, she could contemplate why he wanted to die. Had he lost a loved one? A woman? It made sense. He was in his thirties, and would likely have been wed. If Kaderin had lost a husband, she’d probably see the appeal of becoming a hermit. She might even consider dying if she thought she could rejoin the one she loved.
    But if he’d been married, then why would he seem so oddly unsure about kissing her at first? Of course, it’d been a while for him, but there was something so hesitant in his demeanor.
    Then he’d quickly gotten back in the saddle.
    She’d found herself thinking sometimes about his consuming kisses, reliving them and that entire morning. Worse, whenever she thought about the details of what she’d done with him, she didn’t feel only shame. She recalled riding his huge shaft, and an answering wetness came between her legs. Her breasts grew swollen and achy. Her claws curled to clutch him to her.
    The changes, these shifts in her personality, couldn’t be explained. She believed a god or some power had blessed her with numbness. A mere spell wouldn’t have lasted this long, and the Valkyrie weren’t very susceptible to spells, anyway.
    No, she’d been blessed by a tremendous power.
    A power that could be neutralized by her attraction to a rumbling-voiced vampire?
    His bottled-up ferocity had a way of calling to her own previously deadened sense of it. Perhaps that was why she was so attracted to him. Because they were alike.
    But why did she have to recover desire now, when so much was on the line? Inconvenient did not begin to describe this timing. She turned to her back and skimmed her hands inside her shirt, but her palms felt too soft against her breasts. His hands had been so enticingly callused, and as hesitant in the beginning as his kisses.
    Rough hands, delectably firm lips, intense eyes. Everything about him was made for decadent dreams of sex, except Kaderin didn’t dream, not since the blessing.
    But she did fantasize, and easily called up a memory of his muscular body. She bit her bottom lip. The truth was that there was a lot of him to like. She’d never accepted many lovers—even when she’d been a feeler—because it was hard for her to trust, and of the handful she had welcomed to her bed, she’d never had an immortal one. None had possessed even half of her strength.
    The vampire was stronger than she was.
    She would never sleep with him.
    If he’s coming, then where the hell is he?

    For hours, Sebastian sifted through all the forms and paperwork in the briefcase, attempting to discern if he had wealth. But his mind was completely preoccupied.
    He knew she couldn’t go after another prize until the scrolls updated, so he didn’t believe she’d be in danger. And yet, at sunset, he finally gave in and traced to her.
    He found himself standing in a spacious bedroom, in what seemed to be a private residence. The clock said it was just after
4 A.M .
, which meant he was on the other side of the world. A bed sat in the center, and he traced to the foot to glance down.
    His Bride was sleeping in the center of it.
    Would he ever get used to tracing directly to her? The advantages of