Ascended (War of the Covens 3)

Second millennium anno Domini … dear Gaia!

“A child will be born into the end of the twentieth century … a child with blood of both covens running in her veins—a half lykan, half magik who will bring this war to a conclusion.”

Kirios shook his head in amazement. “What has any of this to do with me?”

His eyes blazed, his face taut with emotion. “I see you in that future. You are an important element of that future.” With that, the Prophet seized a hold of Kirios’s head and pressed Kirios’s open mouth to his neck, forcing the vampyre to drink from his blood. Sixty years of starvation … force was not really necessary.

Kirios groaned with exultation and sank his teeth through the soft flesh of the Prophet’s neck, drinking and drinking until the blood flowed into every cell of his being, blood unlike any other he had tasted. He jerked back careful, even when so hungry, to take only what he needed. He underestimated his sudden speed and smacked his head off the wall. He barely felt it. Kirios gasped, reaching up to feel his skull … no mark, no blood. Nothing. He laughed, and the Prophet smiled, shuffling back into a sitting position.

Kirios stared at his hands, looking for some sign in his skin to explain this entirely new feeling in his body. He felt stronger than he ever had before.

“What have you done?” he asked.

The Prophet shook his head. “The gods … they made me special. My blood … it has changed you. You will be faster, stronger, and you will be able to mask other supernaturals’ trace.”

“Why?”

“I do not know. I am only doing what I’ve been led to do in my visions.”

Kirios nodded. “I understand. But what am I to do with this?”

The Prophet shrugged. “Whatever comes naturally to you, my son.”

The seer struggled to his feet and Kirios rushed to help him. “I have taken too much.”

“No, no. You did fine. Most vampyres do not have your restraint.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you out of here.”

At that, he yelled at the top of his voice, screaming for help. When they heard the shuffling of feet drawing closer, the Prophet turned away from the entrance so their captors would not see the neck wound, only the blood on his hands. Kirios lay on the ground, his mouth wiped clean of the blood, pretending to be as weak as ever. It was a masquerade that would end once the Midnights looked close enough to see the fullness in his body, the healthy sheen of his skin and hair.

“What is all this yelling?”

“I’ve been hurt,” the Prophet grumbled.

“Let me have … dear goddess, man, what the Hades have you done?”

“I slipped. I’m bleeding badly.”

“Can’t you fix that yourself?”

“You haven’t fed me for days. I don’t have the energy.”

“Fine.” The first magik turned to the other. “Take the spell down.”

There was only a moment’s silence and then a rush like waves crashing onshore.

“Go, Kirios!” the Prophet yelled.

He was gone before they even knew what had happened, running like the wind itself, brushing by blurred magiks and out of their citadel. Yes, he was a different creature from the one that had been thrown into the prison. He was an altogether new breed.

Paris, 1385

“I have something to tell you.”

Kirios narrowed his eyes on the beautiful woman in his bed. Her long, elegant lines were enticing as all Hades, and any other time he would have been perusing them languidly. But her tone was not something to be dismissed. The faerie in his bed had been keeping secrets from him.

“Are you going to spoil the party, love?” he asked lazily, disguising how tense he had grown. The party he referred to was the one going on as they spoke. The young Charles VI of France had just been wed to his even younger bride, Isabeau of Bavaria, and France was holding its first-ever court ball to celebrate. The faerie in his bed was a Daylight spy he had met a few years ago when tracking a rogue vampyre. She had been gathering evidence that the vampyre was a dog working for the Midnights, and the two of them had collided on the hunt. Collided and then fallen straight into bed with one another.

Theirs was a casual relationship, but one of mutual respect and trust. Or so he had thought. She told Kirios the coven had reason to believe the Midnights would use the celebration of the king’s marriage as an opportune time to attack the Daylights, who had set up one of their largest branches of the coven in Paris. Kirios had been in Scotland at the time, hunting a particularly nasty lykan with his gang of hunters, when the faerie appeared, asking for help. He gladly acquiesced. They’d just heard word that Richard II of England was sending a small army invasion force against the Scots, and Kirios didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of his idiocy. It seemed he was forever dodging the battles involving the English and the French. Now, after twenty-eight years, the English were trying to pull the Scottish back into another damn war.