Pleasure of a Dark Prince (Immortals After Dark 9)

"Why, what's happening?"

Garreth said, "Ah, brother, a storm's coming!"

By midafternoon, once they were both spent, Garreth petted her hair, gently sifting his fingers through it, watching fascinated as the lamp light played off the strands.

"Your eyes turned completely blue," she said, her voice drowsy. "Is it because the full moon is tonight?"

When he nodded, she said, "The cuff will work?"

"Aye. It's working." Because already his reaction would've been much stronger.

"Tell me more about the beast inside you, about turning."

"It's like a possession. When we turn, we call the transformation saorachadh ainmhidh bho a cliabhan - letting the beast out of its cage. Think of it as four different levels of turning. Say I got into a heated dispute. I'd feel the beast stirring inside me - like it's waking. If I felt rage, it'd make my claws flare, my fangs sharpen. And lust to mark a mate?" He raked his gaze over her. "It'd take over my body. I'd still be there, still remembering all, comprehending everything, but the beast is definitely in control. To fight it would take a will that few are known to possess."

"What's the fourth level?"

"It's the worst - turning so much that you canna come back. If one of our kind canna handle some experience, something that's too hard to take, the beast rises too much, maddening its Lykae host forever. He'd never revert from his animal state."

 13

"What happens then?"

"He'd have to be locked away in our dungeons," Garreth said. They should have known something was amiss with Bowen's first "mate" - since he'd still been able to carry on after he thought she'd died.... "That's why we doona change others into our kind - anyone newly made would have to learn to control the beast, a process that takes decades, if it works at all. We'd be forced to imprison them for all that time before we could even think of freeing them."

"Change others, like Rossiter."

"Exactly," Garreth said, not unmoved by the mortal's plight. "He's no' out of the game yet. Maybe he'll find his orchid - or a pretty immortal who does no' follow Lore rules...."

As the rain poured outside, they talked of other things, plotting what would happen tomorrow night when they arrived at Rio Labyrinto. With each stroke of her hair, her lids grew heavier, her expression soft and sleepy, until she finally drifted off.

Now he lay beside her with his head propped in his hand, lightly grazing his fingers up and down her sleek back. He exhaled, simply savoring the luxury of having her with him, in his bed, in his life.

But she didn't trust him. And that pained him.

When she whimpered, his brows drew together. Again, she suffered nightmares, her low cries building with the tempest brewing outside.

She was of a warrior race, and yet she was terrified, speaking in some old Norse tongue he didn't understand.

Who the hell had hurt his woman? Why did she refuse to tell him? His claws dug into his palms as he fought to control the beast within him, the beast that needed to punish any f**k who'd given her pain.

 32

When Crom had asked Lucia to come with him and leave Valhalla, she'd eagerly agreed, though she'd known that once a Valkyrie left that plane, she could never return.

Lucia was sixteen and in love. Nothing, not her godparents' warnings or Regin's pleading, could dissuade her. She'd wedded Crom with no reservations, despite his strange customs - they couldn't touch whatsoever until after they'd been married, and they had to wed in a bizarre stone temple with robed strangers all around.

At the altar, after they'd been joined forever, she'd turned to her beloved. And he'd vanished. In his place was one of the strangers with a raised club. He'd struck, knocking her unconscious.

Too late, Lucia had learned that Crom Cruach had never even been at the portal. Instead, he'd been trapped in a fetid lair in the earth, projecting the image of the fair-haired young man.

For as long as she'd been watching the sky, Cruach had been watching her. He'd needed a bride born of gods to beget heirs on, and like so many deities, he could project illusions for women he wanted to seduce.

When Lucia had awakened, she'd been trapped in his prison with her fair-haired man standing over her. Only then had Cruach unveiled his true self to her. His beautiful face had fallen away, revealing the Broken Bloody One.

A cloven-footed monster, Cruach clad himself in scraps of metal strung together, taken from his slaughtered victims' proud shields or armor. On his massive head, stringy white hair hung sparsely around horns that jutted up like giant splayed fingers. His face was ghoulish, his eyes yellow, slitted with red and running with pus.

He was broken, his body misshapen, his bones having fractured and healed at odd angles. But even with his hunched form, he stood seven feet tall. He was bloody as well - his scaly snakelike skin seeped blood and was rotting away in places, exposing those fused bones beneath.

A line of drool had dripped from the corner of his gaping mouth when he'd smiled down at her.

Once she'd been able to scream no more, she'd learned the truth about all his lies. He had told her he'd make her mistress of his castle and shower her with gifts. His "castle" was a corpse-strewn tunnel in a seaside cliff, thick with maggots and stench.

The gifts? Dead bodies and parts of them - ragged limbs, heads with sightless eyes. He intended for her to... eat them.

The adoration he vowed? Each day, his Cromites had prepared her body with vile rituals, marking her skin with blood, drawing sinister marks from the black arts all over her.

There was no escaping him. Cromite swordsmen guarded the entrance to the lair and the tunnel ended in a cliff two hundred feet above the ocean.

Toward the end of her captivity, she'd been so starved, her stomach had cleaved to her spine. "You go hungry?" Cruach had said, waving at the pools of oily blood and gruesome limbs. "When I give you meat and wine, my love?"

Once she'd begun to sicken with fever, she'd heard someone calling her name from down at the base of the cliff and thought it a delirium.

But it was all too real. Young Regin - who'd sensed Cruach's deception and had begged Lucia not to leave - had followed her out of Valhalla. Never to return, cast out forever. Lucia had wept to hear her sister's plaintive cries for her.

"How do I reach you, Lucia? I don't... I don't know how to get up there!"

Never would she have let Regin enter that place - even before Lucia's eventual wedding night....

As she weakly screamed, his followers laid her on his altar, holding her down. When he heaved himself above her, blood spilled from his mouth, from between gritted teeth, pouring over her face, into her eyes. His organ would rip her in two - she'd known he would kill her like this.