A Hunger Like No Other (Immortals After Dark #2)(50)

N?x clapped her hands. “I know this one! I know this one! Ask…Lucia!”

Lucia looked up sharply and hissed at N?x, but there was no true venom behind it. She answered in a monotone, “He’s the Lykae who saved our lives two nights ago.”

Annika turned from the window. “Then I’m sorry that we have to do what we’re about to do.”

Lucia turned questioning eyes to Annika.

“We’re going to trap him.”

“How? He’s strong, and from what I can tell, he’s clever.”

“Lucia, I need you to miss again.”





18


T hroughout the day, Lachlain stayed by Emma’s side, sunproofing any hint of a crack in the thick curtains and checking her wounds to make sure they were healing.

He took no chances, though, even lying beside her, cutting the side of his neck and coaxing her to drink from him.

The wee vampire had softly lapped at him, sighing in sleep. She must have bewitched him, because it had felt like the most natural thing in the world.

By afternoon, when he removed the bandages, he found the wounds still tender and raised, but fully closed.

The worst of his worry abated, he mused on what he’d learned.

Now that he knew the truth about everything, he looked at Emma differently, though he had to admit he didn’t feel any differently. He’d already accepted her as his mate even when he’d thought she was part of the Horde. Now he knew that not only was she not part of the Horde, she wasn’t even exactly a vampire.

Over the long years alone, he’d envisioned his mate in a thousand different lights. He’d prayed she would be intelligent and attractive, prayed that she would be caring. And now Emma, a half-vampire, half-Valkyrie, was shaming even his wildest fantasies.

But her family…He exhaled wearily. Lachlain had never fought against them, thinking them beneath him, and had only seen them from a distance. But he knew the Valkyrie were weird, fey little creatures, swift and strong with lightning firing all around them—firing somehow through them. Rumor had it that they derived nourishment from electricity. As he’d discovered in Emma, they were known to be extremely intelligent. Unlike Emma, they were almost as violent and warmongering as the vampires.

Though the Valkyrie had few known weaknesses, it was said they could be mesmerized by glittering objects—and that they were the only species in the Lore that could die of sorrow.

In a quick perusal of what the clan had compiled on them, he was able to find a tale of their origin. The Lore said that millennia ago, Wóden and Freya were awakened from a decade of sleep by a maiden warrior’s scream as she died in battle. Freya had marveled at the maiden’s courage and wanted to preserve it, so she and Wóden struck the human with their lightning. The maiden woke in their great hall, healed but untouched—still mortal—and pregnant with an immortal Valkyrie daughter.

In the years that came, their lightning would strike dying women warriors from all species of the Lore—Valkyrie like Furie were truly part Fury. Freya and Wóden gave the daughters Freya’s fey beauty and his cunning. They combined these traits with the mother’s valor and individual ancestry. This made the daughters all unique, but according to the Lore, one could recognize a Valkyrie if her eyes fired silver with strong emotion.

Emma’s had turned when she’d drunk from him.

If this legend was true—and Lachlain believed it was—then that would mean Emma was the granddaughter of…gods.

And he’d thought her beneath him. A strong Lykae king saddled with a lacking mate.

He pinched his forehead, struggling with regret, but forced himself to read on. He found brief descriptions of the Valkyrie he knew were directly connected to her. N?x was the oldest, and some said a soothsayer. Levelheaded Lucia was an expert archer, rumored to be cursed to feel indescribable pain whenever she missed a target.

Furie had been their queen, living under the same roof as gentle Emma when she’d been a child. Now, the Valkyrie suspected that Demestriu had trapped Furie at the bottom of the ocean for an eternity of torture. Based on Lachlain’s experience, he could say without a doubt that she was choking saltwater into her lungs somewhere in the freezing dark right now.

But the entries on Regin and Annika troubled him the most. Regin’s mother’s entire race had been exterminated by the Horde. Annika, who was known as a brilliant strategist and a fearless fighter, had devoted her life to destroying vampires.

When Emma’s family voiced their hatred of vampires, when they celebrated each kill, how could Emma not feel like an outsider? How could she not inwardly flinch? The Valkyrie were all centuries old to her mere decades, and she was what the Lore called “other”—or outside one’s species. Emma was other from everything on the entire earth.

Was this the root of the pain he’d discovered within her? Did her family differentiate between what the Horde was and what Emma was? He would have to be careful with that himself. He could curse vampires to hell and not be thinking of Emma whatsoever.

The only positive thing he could find about the Valkyrie was that they’d always maintained an uneasy truce with the Lykae, reasoning that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Until the Accession. When all immortals were forced to fight for survival in the Lore.

This news was a thousand times better than if her family was of the Horde. But it still had its share of problems.