Deadly Attraction

“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “He has a dislocated shoulder, but I’ve already seen to it. Walker brought him to me earlier.”

Darien asked, “What happened to him?”

“Wraith’s horse,” Jade said, her voice weak.

He didn’t have to ask her why Michael had been at the cottage earlier. It was Jade’s birthday, after all. And they were friends. Darien himself had been on the way to the village to see her for the same reason when he’d heard her screaming.

He told her, “Dr. Schaeffer says Michael is fine. Now you’ve got to help yourself along.”

She swallowed hard. “I need to sleep.”

Not exactly what Darien wanted to hear, since it slowed the healing process. But he could understand how exhausted she’d be.

The physician left a small bottle of morphine

on the nightstand and packed up. Then he said, “Check her pulse regularly. She’s improving, but should be monitored closely for the next twenty-four hours.” He studied her a moment longer before adding, “I don’t understand how the blood soaks into her skin.”

“It’s a strange phenomenon for a human, obviously. But she can repair herself if she has the energy—and needs the blood to do it.”

“This is…extraordinary.”

“Yes, she is.” Darien glanced down at her again. “She just needs to believe it.”

“Well. There’s clearly nothing else I can do for her right now. I’ll check by in the morning, but if anything happens this evening, send for me.”

“Thank you. I’ll be sure to have my assistant pay your bill immediately.”

The doctor spared one more look at Jade. “I’d like to continue to follow her progress, if you wouldn’t mind, your Highness. And tend to her back as soon as it’s safe to move her.”

“I’d prefer that, in fact. But she does seem to require lengthy sleeping periods when she’s injured.”

“I’ll leave my visits to your discretion then.”

The doctor collected his bag. Darien experienced a moment of hesitancy as his concern for Jade’s condition caused him to wonder whether he and Sheena could help nurse her back to health this time. Her wounds were much greater this evening than with the broken hand and wrist.

But as her breathing turned steady with sleep, and was not as labored as it had been previously, he said, “Please come by late morning. That should give her some time.”

“Very good.”

Darien saw Schaeffer out of the cottage and then noticed the bottle of wine on the end table in the living room. He found a collection of small juice glasses in her tiny kitchen and poured a healthy amount of the merlot into one. He sat bedside, trying to gauge Jade’s progress.

The laceration on her chest still appeared angry and red, despite the stitches. He couldn’t see if she’d made any headway with her back, since she lay propped against the pillows. From the way she occasionally squirmed on the bed, he deduced not.

He sipped his wine and tried to get his anxiety under control. When he felt he could speak calmly and rationally—without his deepest fears of whether she’d live or die lacing his tone—he leaned close to her and spoke. It was a gamble when trying to help her recover, like every other chance he’d taken along that vein. But perhaps his voice might keep her fighting…

“I told you I’ve regretted the result of the wars,” he said in a low tone. “But I didn’t tell you why.”

He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “My grandfather attempted to rally the first revolution against the humans in the late 1300s. His reign, however, eventually passed without any success toward his mission. Centuries later, my father felt he was in the position to take up the quest, when settlers came to North America and the continent wasn’t so heavily populated with humans.”

He sipped before continuing.

“Unfortunately, transporting demons from other continents to this one in order to build an army proved challenging back then. The vampires couldn’t resist the human blood on the ships that crossed the ocean. The shifters couldn’t survive the captivity. And other demons had difficulty going undetected. There were many demonic possessions during those times and most of the passenger ships eventually carried priests on board to perform exorcisms.”

Coming across the Atlantic from Europe in the mid-1800s had been difficult for him as well.

“The demon world hadn’t been able to form a war strategy with all the disjointed factions and their idiosyncrasies. Not to mention their various politics that couldn’t be reconciled or coalesced. Each group had their own idea of the power they purportedly possessed and how significant they thought their kind was. Unity had been impossible.”

With a low groan over the demon drama, he told her, “Then I came of age, so to speak, around my two-hundredth birthday. I studied the potential of the demon community for a long time and it suddenly clicked into place for me. I realized that every type of demon also requires what humans thrive upon—leadership. Whether the dominant political stance is fully agreed upon or not, every species looks to a leader to guide them. I merely had to find common ground to band them all together.”