Immortals After Dark 09 - Pleasure of a Dark Prince

and loped out into the night.
    The deadly shadow that was Garreth MacRieve disappeared.
    But she knew he’d be back.

NINE

    He
hadn’t
been back.
    But unfortunately for MacRieve, for most nights over the last week, he hadn’t strayed far from Lucia.
    “Celts’ pelts! Celts’ pelts!” Nïx cried happily, summing up the reason there was a hunting party of over two dozen Valkyrie gathered in a remote swamp on this desolate eve.
    Lucia, Regin, Annika, Nïx, and several others were stationed in a carefully selected clearing, while even more Valkyrie were positioned throughout the misty bayou to call in sightings from distant vistas or trees.
    All this effort was to trap…
Garreth
. And Lucia was the bait.
    “Helloooo.” Regin snapped her fingers. “Lore to Lucia!”
    “Huh? Yeah.”
    “You’re spacing again.” Regin’s look of irritation immediately shifted to one of concern. “It’s too soon. I told Annika it was too soon.”
    Though Lucia had just missed a shot so recently, the coven had asked her to shank one more, predicting that if Garreth had come running the first time, he would again. “No, I’m good,” Lucia said. She’d had to delaythem a few days to build her strength—and nerve—back. She paid for each miss, had nearly forgotten how much, it’d been so long since the last time.
    “You sure? Let’s call this off.” Regin alone comprehended how punishing this would be.
    “I can handle it,” she insisted, even as she nervously plucked her bowstring.
    “All right. They wouldn’t have asked, but….”
    But aggression against any of the Valkyrie was always met with a show of force—swift, vicious force. And a Lykae had seriously aggressed them.
    Garreth’s older brother, Lachlain MacRieve, had returned as if from the dead to reclaim his crown. But his very first order of business? Nabbing little Emmaline the Timid, Annika’s foster daughter.
    King Lachlain had been the “hottie” Emma had mistakenly trusted in Paris. And now he had her trapped at the Lykae castle in Scotland.
    After Annika had gone aneurismal, shrieking until car alarms blared in three parishes, she’d hatched this plan: trap Lachlain’s only living immediate family and use him as leverage to get Emma back.
    Garreth MacRieve. With his firm lips and maddening touch…
    Regin said, “If not the pain, then what gives with you? You’re not thinking about MacRieve, are you?” She tossed up her dagger, catching the tip in her fore-claw. “Since you’re his mate and all. And for the record,
ewww
.”
    Lucia drilled her knuckle into Regin’s upper arm. “Take it back.”
    “Yow!”
    “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not his mate! Full moon—no MacRieve. Case closed.” To her everlasting confusion, he hadn’t come for her the night it’d been full. Legend held that nothing could stop a male Lykae from reaching his mate on that night.
    Lucia had been so sure she was his. Now she didn’t know what to think.
    Of course, she’d been pleased to confirm that she wasn’t. Who would want a hulking male like that, one with a face that fell away, revealing a beast?
    Yet, strangely, seeing him at his worst during the vampire attack hadn’t been as bad as she’d imagined it. He’d been brutal and unsettling, but the terror she’d felt that night had ebbed—because once she got past her memories of Cruach, she saw how different MacRieve was from the Broken Bloody One.
    That didn’t mean she liked MacRieve’s beast or anything; it just reminded her that
nothing
could be as bad as Cruach.
    “Wait!” Nïx suddenly blurted. “Is anyone else seeing a pattern here?”
    They all stared blankly at her.
    She tilted her head. “Yeah, me neither.” Then she grew enthralled with her palm.
Nïx, crazy as ever.
    Still rubbing her arm, Regin asked, “If you’re not MacRieve’s mate, then why does he keep following you?”
    “I don’t know,” she lied. MacRieve had clearly ground out the words
protect you.
And she suspected he had been doing just that.
    Just last night in the city, as she’d hunted back alleys for kobolds, an animus demon had been hunting
her
. Right when she’d been about to confront the colossal male, she heard a thud behind her. She’d whirled around and had seen the demon on the ground. Or at least his legs. The rest of his body had been concealed behind a building, but only for a split second, before he’d been yanked back out of her sight….
    Annika hastened by then, with