Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 141492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 707(@200wpm)___ 566(@250wpm)___ 472(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 707(@200wpm)___ 566(@250wpm)___ 472(@300wpm)
He shook her. “Look at him.” The sound grated, booming across the valley as Eduardo’s army of lesser vampires attacked, coming at Petru from all directions. Demons leapt on him, ripping at his legs and arms with teeth, clawing at his belly to eviscerate him.
“Look at your mother and father. Your grandparents. Your own lifemate rejected you when no Carpathian has ever done such a thing. They betrayed you. No one wanted you enough to save you. You are nothing to them. You are unworthy. Always remember that. Remember that in the end, they will always sacrifice you, because you are truly nothing to them.” The vampire drove his teeth into the child’s neck and deliberately drank from her.
Still the child made no sound, her eyes on Petru as he fought, slashing with his shocking speed and calling down lightning when he extracted hearts with blurring swiftness. Petru didn’t tell the others that part of the battle—he couldn’t. He allowed himself to feel her emotions. It was the only thing he could do for her. He stayed with her as he fought to get close. He stayed with her as Eduardo took her blood. Fighting vampire and demon alike, slick with his own blood and covered in wounds, he drew close, knowing it was too late.
Eduardo waited until he was nearly staring right into those baby jade eyes before he dug his talons cruelly into the child’s chest and slowly, as painfully as possible, extracted her heart.
CHAPTER
4
Aura Zeroual was one of the most striking women Safia knew. She was tall and slender, with dark flowing hair and very intelligent vivid blue eyes. She always arrived in the cave of the ancestors silently, so that even the bats, Safia’s sentries, didn’t seem to notice her entrance. Safia knew she herself moved with grace, but Aura took it to an entirely different level. She seemed to flow across the ground, no matter how uneven it was. Safia did her best to emulate her, practicing for hundreds of hours in the hope that she could achieve Aura’s level of expertise.
“The time has finally come,” Aura said softly. “The moment you were born, I knew you were the one.”
Safia regarded her best friend, the woman she loved as a sister, and tried not to allow hurt to show on her face. “Yet you said nothing to me.”
“There was no point, Safia,” Aura responded. “No one trained harder than you. You’re nearly as fast as I am, and that should be impossible. I didn’t want anything to get in your way, especially your head. Worrying about reality would have done that.”
“What we’re facing is terrifying. For the first time, I caught glimpses of the past. I seem to be having more and more memories of them, almost as if I were there myself.”
Aura’s blue eyes regarded her steadily, coolly. “You were.”
Safia’s heart accelerated for a moment before she could slow it down and keep it under control. The nightmares that had crept into her bedroom despite all the preventions she’d taken to keep them at bay might be all too real. She’d been getting little bits and pieces of demons and vampires ripping at a child’s body while a man fought desperately to come to her aid. She would force herself to wake up because the nightmares were terrifying and left her nearly paralyzed with fear.
Sometimes her chest had hurt. Not just hurt but was horribly painful. She would rub her fingers over the strange birthmark she’d been born with. It was a whitish-blue star shape right over her heart.
“I need to explain to you about my people in order for you to understand,” Aura said. “We live very long lives and have extraordinary gifts. It isn’t as if we can’t be killed—we can—but it is difficult. When a male child is born, his soul is split in half. All the light goes into a female soul, and he has all the darkness. There is only one woman for him, the woman protecting the light of his soul. He must search for her, and when he finds her, the ritual words, imprinted on him before his birth, are spoken, binding the two together, weaving their souls back together so they’re complete.”
Safia struggled to understand what Aura was telling her. “Like a marriage ceremony?”
Aura shook her head slowly. “It is more than that. Once the binding is done, it cannot be broken. The two cannot be apart.”
“What if one of them isn’t happy?” Safia couldn’t imagine being happy away from her family.
“Let me keep explaining our people to you, Safia. I know being promised to this man must be frightening, especially since he’s not only a complete stranger but an entirely different species. Let me tell you about us—and about him.”
Safia knew that was only fair. She shouldn’t be so resistant. This man deserved courtesy, and so did Aura after all the time she’d spent training Safia to fight. The truth was, she wanted to know about these people.