The Shifter's Choice (21 page)

Johnny stood beside her in his dress blues looking so handsome he took her breath away. She was even getting used to his new haircut, though she did miss all that thick long hair. Johnny had promised to grow it back when he was discharged. Sonia suspected she would have a long wait.

Behind them, their guests filled the first three rows of the nondenominational chapel on Marine base as the chaplin, Father Tejada preformed the ceremony. Beside him, a female translator kept up with his words. To John’s left, Captain MacConnelly stood, ramrod stiff, clutching their two rings in his fist as if their protection was vital to national security. Marianna, Sonia’s sister stood to Sonia’s left. As maid of honor, she held both bouquets in a gentle hand, rendering her momentarily speechless. Her sister shifted her attention between the translator and the chaplin, reading the signs and his lips as she waited for the moment when she would return her sister’s cascading arrangement of white orchids and rosebuds. Beside Marianna stood Johnny’s sister, Joon, as her only bridesmaid.

The chaplin called for the rings. Her captain dropped them from his hand onto the open bible as one might release dice and stepped back, his duty done. The rings came to rest and where exchanged.

Sonia stared down at the twinkling diamonds that studded the white-gold band and felt herself well up. It was real and really happening. Johnny’s mom and sister had flown all the way from San Francisco to Germany to see them wed. And somewhere back a few rows, as far from the others as possible was Brianna, Mac’s wife, intentionally leaving space between her and the humans she so affected.

Father Tejada raised a hand to God as he spoke about the power vested in him and gave his permission for John to kiss his bride. Johnny turned to her and lifted the short, modest veil.

Sonia beamed up at her new husband who looked proud enough to bust a polished brass button. He held her lightly by each shoulder and leaned forward from the waist to kiss her lips, sealing his promise. The cheers reached her and Johnny drew back to present his bride to the assemblage, raising their joined hands as if they had just completed a race.

Sonia looked out at the happy faces, some cheering, some whistling and others dabbing their eyes. Marianna kissed her sister and returned her bouquet. Johnny drew Sonia’s hand into the warm crook of his arm and covered it with his opposite hand. Then they marched in unison down the aisle and toward the new life they would make together.

In that moment she felt the promise of a future bright with love and hope. He said she had given him a reason to live again but he’d given her much more than that. Johnny had made her a part of his family, his brotherhood and his life. He had given her his love and her first real home, right there in his heart.

* * * * *

Can a werewolf with deadly secrets reclaim a future with the witch he never stopped loving?

Read on for a sneak peek at the next installment of Rhyannon Byrd’s Bloodrunners series,

BLOOD WOLF DAWNING

Only from Harlequin
®
Nocturne

“Cian, please,” she said as carefully as she could manage, praying her voice wouldn’t tremble. “Say whatever you came to say and then leave. I honestly don’t want you here. It isn’t...it isn’t good for me.”

She watched his throat work as he swallowed, his voice low and rough in a way that had never failed to make her shiver from the inside out. “There’s a lot I need to explain. I know that, Sayre. But we don’t have the time. We need to leave this place.”

“Not a chance,” she tossed back, wondering if he’d been hit over his gorgeous head with a crazy stick. “
We
don’t need to do anything. I live here; you don’t. Whatever you want from me is nothing but a waste of your time. I don’t give second chances.”

Frustration shot through his narrowed eyes, making them as dark as smoke. “You never even really gave me a first chance, much less a second one.”

Amazed by those quiet, almost bitter words, she slowly shook her head, then pulled her shoulders back and glared. “Don’t make it sound like you even wanted one. You made my life hell!”

He came another step closer. “Right back at you, Sayre.”

“Then why are you even here?” she shouted, watching his eyes get wider as he slowly looked her over again. Oh...
hell
. Her power had just slipped free of her hold with the galvanic rise of her temper, skittering around her body in a fine spray of tiny golden sparks.

Instead of commenting, he cleared his throat and looked her right in the eye as he said, “There isn’t time to explain, but you
can’t
stay here, Sayre. I’m taking you back to the Alley, where you belong.”

She blinked back at him, unable to believe his arrogance.

All the pain she’d tried so hard to bury these past years came rushing back in a surge of emotion. “Cian, just stop,” she said with a derisive snort.

“Sayre.”
He said her name on a long, drawn-out sigh, and she felt her fury tip from emotion...right into action. Bathed in a fiery shower of sparks, she reached behind her back and whipped out the gun she always kept tucked against her lower back when she was outside on her own. It felt unbelievably sweet to point the gleaming barrel directly at Cian Hennessey’s no-good heart.

“You know that bullets won’t kill me, Sayre.”

“They might not kill you, but they’ll hurt like a bitch.”

“You really think I could believe that you’d pull the trigger? You’re a healer, not a—”

“Seriously?” she laughed, cutting him off as she unlocked the safety with a practiced flick of her thumb. “You might have watched me grow up, Cian, but don’t for an instant think that you know what I’m capable of as a woman. People change.
I’ve
changed. So when I pull a gun out, you can bet your ass that I plan to use it.”

His sexy mouth pressed into a hard, irritated, challenging line. “Then do it.”

She aimed for less than an inch from the toe of his right boot and fired a perfect shot.

He worked his jaw for a few seconds, no doubt cursing her to hell and back. Then he calmly turned on his heel and headed back to his. And
that
made her nervous.

When she called his name out, he looked back at her over his broad shoulder, and she gave him a sharp, icy smile. “If you like your body without any extra holes in it,
don’t
bother coming back.”

Don’t miss

BLOOD WOLF DAWNING

by Rhyannon Byrd

Available January 2015

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Chapter 1

T
he candlelight illuminating the small chamber flickered when the heavy wooden door opened. Daeva looked up from the backgammon board to see who had entered her private room. She smiled as the little green creature, carrying a bronze tea tray, hobbled in on his spindly and knobby legs.

He set the tray on the small round table next to her, then slid onto the velvet-covered chair on the opposite side of the backgammon board.

She reached over and poured tea into two porcelain cups then handed one to him. “Prompt as usual, Klix.”

The creature accepted the offered cup and took a sip, his beady black eyes staring at her over the rim. “I wouldn’t miss our daily game, Mistress.”

She drank the hot, spiced tea and watched the goblin set up the game. It was her one small pleasure in the day, to play the ordinary game with him in her private chamber away from the others. Away from the reality of her situation.

Here she couldn’t smell the rancid odor of brimstone and sulfur or the stench of burning flesh. Here she could block out the woeful screams and pitiful mewls of those being tortured in the fire pits below. She didn’t have to make polite conversation with the other demons she wholly despised. As long as she had to stay in hell, she could at least pretend she was elsewhere when she was here in her room playing her games with her friend Klix.

Hell was the place of Daeva’s birth, but she’d done everything possible for thousands of years to get out and stay out. And she’d done pretty well. Staying topside most of her life, possessing bodies, living their lives, until some clever exorcist or demon hunter would exorcise her back to hell. Then the process would start all over again. It wasn’t perfect but she’d accepted the fact that she’d never be able to walk the mortal realm in her true form, so she’d stolen identities and pretended to be those people. It wasn’t quite like being a real mortal. But it was the best she could do in her circumstances.

At least when she took over a body, she kept her host in a dream state. They didn’t know they were being possessed. They just thought they were having one heck of an amazing dream. Daeva always gave them good, happy dreams.

Despite what a lot of lore said, not all demons were wicked. In fact, most lived, just as other beings did, somewhere between good and evil. Here, in hell, demons were split into seven types. Daeva was of the second, which consisted of lust demons. She wasn’t a full-blooded lust demon though; there had been some mixing of types over millennia, but she had one in the family tree somewhere. She didn’t possess people to just suck the sexual energy from them or those that they seduced. She wasn’t what some people would call a succubus.

But she did derive some energy from sex. Which was one of the reasons she preferred to possess the bodies of women. She liked sex with men. She supposed her affinity to them was one of her weaknesses. She’d been told as much by every other demon in her family tree. Which was one of the many reasons she hated it so much in hell.

She’d been doing okay as a mortal for years, surviving, forging a pretty good new life with a job, a home, friends, family and a man she loved. The woman whom she’d possessed had been near death in a coma when Daeva had come along. Her brain had little function so it would’ve been like being in a dream for her when Daeva had taken over. The girl was mercifully unaware of Daeva’s presence. But that all had come to a halt about three years ago when she’d been exorcised out of her most favorite body, her most favorite life, and sent back to this...hell. She’d been looking for a way back ever since.

She’d been looking for payback on the man who’d sent her back, who just happened to be the same man she’d loved.

Klix had the game set up—he always played the black—then picked up the dice and rolled. She watched him move the pieces with his crooked fingers and smiled. He was her only comfort in a place that offered nothing but misery and suffering.

“So, my friend, what is the word out in the world?” she asked as she took her turn.

“Loir is going topside,” he said as he rolled again.

“Really?” This surprised Daeva. Loir was Klix’s twin sister. Goblins usually didn’t go to the mortal realm. They weren’t very good at assimilating into the human world. Seeing a four-foot, bald, green-skinned creature with bulbous eyes, razor-sharp talons and four sets of teeth would send anyone into a panic or an asylum. “What is her purpose?”

Klix shrugged. “I am not sure. She would not tell me much.”

“She must be accompanying someone on a task.”

He nodded. “Yes, that would be logical.” He moved some of his black pieces into the winning box. “She did say something about a key.”

This perked Daeva up. There were only a few important keys up there in the world. “What kind of key, do you know?”

“Not sure. But I did hear it is supposed to open something of great value to demons. Something powerful. Something ancient.”

Daeva nearly dropped her teacup. She set it on the table, her hand shaking.

“Are you ill, Mistress?”

She swallowed, then gave him a small smile. “I must be a bit under the weather, Klix. Could we finish our game later? I believe I need to rest a bit.”

“Yes, of course.” He rose from his seat. “Shall I take the tea tray?”

“No, that’s fine.”

He bowed his bald head to her. “I will be back later to check on you, Mistress.”

“Oh, Klix, could you deliver a message to your sister for me?” Daeva reached for parchment and a quill. She scrawled three words on it, and folded the paper. She handed it to the goblin.

“I will do this right away.”

“Thank you, Klix. Please tell her to burn it after she reads it.”

The little goblin left her chamber, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Once he was gone, Daeva rose from her chair and went to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase along one wall. She ran her finger along the book titles until she found the one she needed. She slid it off the shelf and went to sit on the sofa.

She opened the thick tome on her lap and flipped through the pages. She stopped at a picture of a large wooden box with an elaborate lock on it. She read the text that went with it, then her finger circled another picture, that of a key. A skeleton key. The key that fit the lock. The key that opened a box that had been buried.

A plain wooden box she had buried herself, over a hundred years ago.

She sighed and leaned back against the sofa cushions. She prayed that this wasn’t the key Loir had gone topside to look for. As far as she knew, she was one of only a few people who knew who had the key. If someone was looking for it, then they were looking for the box.

The box had been entrusted to her more than a century ago by an elderly human scholar. He’d been an intelligent, well-read man who knew about the curse on the box. He knew exactly what had been sealed inside. And he had pleaded with her to bury it where no one, no human, no demon, would be able to find it again. He had been her friend, one of the few she had as a demon, so she did as he asked. With the help of a local man, she’d buried it deep in the earth in northern Canada.

They couldn’t allow what lay inside the box to be used again. Daeva feared what would happen if it fell into demon hands. It had been used against demonkind two millennia ago, used to enslave them and do one insane man’s bidding. But if it fell into demon hands, it could be used to subjugate the entire human population. It would overthrow humanity.

Recently, she had heard rumors and whispers about who possessed the key. And the last confirmed report had chilled her blood. If only she was still topside, she could’ve protected him, the key keeper, and he would never have even known.

Because she’d spent years right under his nose, hiding in plain sight. Hiding inside the woman he’d fallen in love with. The woman she’d been possessing for years, before she even met him. So, in Daeva’s mind, he had fallen in love with her.

And she had loved him. Damn him for it.

She pushed the book to the side and stood. Pacing the room she flicked her hand and all the candles in her chamber lit. She tried to warm her body with their flames. It would surprise everyone to know that even in hell she could be cold. She worried about what was to come, fretted about the future.

Daeva knew she would be called upon. There was only one being still alive who knew she’d hidden the box. The man she’d loved, the man who had sent her back to hell.

Soon, Quinn Strom, exorcist extraordinaire, would come a-knocking at her hellish “door.”

A knock startled her. It couldn’t be Klix; she had told him to come back later. Her heart thudding in her chest, she opened the door.

Two soldiers with swords at their sides stood waiting for her. “Daeva, you must come with us.”

“What is this about?” Although, deep down in her churning gut, she knew.

“Please comply, or we will be forced to be unpleasant.”

Swallowing the fear that was quickly rising, she nodded and stepped out between them, firmly shutting her door behind her.

Copyright © 2014 by Vivi Anna