Immortals After Dark 09 - Pleasure of a Dark Prince

Regin gave a snort. “If they’re going to be sneaking out of the kennel, then I guess ‘out of sight, out of mind’ no longer applies, huh?” Regin had nicknamed their compound the
kennel
. To her delight, it’d caught on.
    “Sneaking?” Lucia said. “They acted as if they owned this place.”
    “Well, maybe we need to Cesar Millan their asses and show them who’s boss. Tsst, tsst!”
    “I’m sure that’d do it,” she answered, relieved when Regin’s attention fell back to her papers. Sometimes her sister could be a handful even for Lucia, especially if Regin wasn’t engaging in regular, fatiguing battles—
    Lucia tensed, again thinking she’d spied movement in the bushes outside. Was it MacRieve?
    Since the night they’d met, she’d learned much about him. When his older brother Lachlain had disappeared, Garreth MacRieve had become the
king
of the Lykae clan—though he’d never thought he’d be their leader. Before assuming the throne, he’d been wild, a ladies’ man and a brawler, so bad he’d been nicknamed the Dark Prince.
    He was the best kisser she’d ever imagined.
    And what would Lucia say if MacRieve showed?
It seems you want to have an affair with me. But I can’t have sex. Though I want to in the worst way.
Duty, chastity. Lucia was sick of them. Yet she’d had her shot to find a good man. Her shot at a normal life.
    And I blew both targets by miles.
    She squinted, identifying what had moved. A nefarious tomcat. As she exhaled a pent-up breath, she realized she’d been clutching her bow hard. This morning, she’d checked her abilities, and her skills remained intact. They must truly be penetration-based.
    Still, all day she’d held on to her bow, absently running her fingers over the raised inscriptions. Skathi had hesitated to let Lucia leave Thrymheim with that bow, because of her “darkness.”
    To other Valkyrie, Lucia and Regin were relatively young, but Lucia had lived a long time and seen many things. Never had she encountered a male who brought out her darkness like MacRieve.
    He might be her worst weakness. If so, he couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time. With a glare,Lucia glanced over at their command center. Her duty was coming online soon. She and Regin would do as they did every five hundred years and prevent Cruach from rising.
    But this time, instead of using Skathi’s golden arrow to weaken him until the next Accession, Lucia wanted to discover a way to kill him
for good
.
    One problem: the Broken Bloody One was a… deity. The ancient horned god of human sacrifices and cannibalism.
    So now Lucia and Regin sought the only thing that could obliterate him, a
dieumort
—a god killer. Extremely rare, the dieumorts were created by the Bane-men, a league of immortals from all factions. They’d discovered a means to destroy gods, who in turn sentenced all the Banemen to death. The league had disbanded and fled, hiding their power in talismans, weapons—even in beings—all over the world and adjoining planes.
    Any vessel of the power was considered a dieumort. And there were whisperings of an
arrow
.
    Lucia and Regin had hundreds of leads, everything from riddles to ancient journals to mapped clues. They were nearing the time for action, gearing up for their worldwide search, and Regin liked to spread out their calculations, tips, Post-its, and atlases for clarity when they knew no one was home.
    Tonight Nucking Futs Nïx was the only one upstairs, but she didn’t count—since she truly was mad. She could see the future so clearly that the presentand past gave her fits. If Nïx did stroll by the command center, she’d probably forget or would look at the maps and think to herself,
Greeting cards. Must be December.
    Lucia and Regin had repeatedly requested her help in their quest. The first time they’d asked, she’d answered, “What’s a dieumort?” Once they’d explained, she told them that she’d look into it. When they’d followed up, Nïx had said, “Now what’s a dieumort… ?”
    No one in their coven knew that Lucia and Regin spent a good deal of time researching the god killer, because they’d never told another soul what had happened with Cruach. Their sisters knew that Lucia felt pain when she missed a shot, but they didn’t know
why
. Nor did they know Lucia was a Skathian. There simply was no reason to tell anyone. Lucia had cleaned up her mess last Accession, and the one before that, and she would again—
    Her ears