Temptations crown, p.1
Temptation's Crown, page 1
part #6 of Mists of Magic and Mayhem Series
TEMPTATION’S CROWN
Book 6 of the
Mists of Magic and Mayhem series
by
H.P. Mallory
~ Copyright ©2020 by HP Mallory~
Published by HP Mallory at Smashwords Smashwords Edition License Notes
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ALSO BY H.P. MALLORY:
Paranormal Series: (Writing as HP Mallory) Lucy Westenra Series
Mists of Magic and Mayhem Series
Lily Harper Series
Dulcie O’Neil Series (over 1 million downloads of the series!) Jolie Wilkins Series (New York Times bestselling series!) Sinjin Sinclair Series
Peyton Clark Series
NuLife Series
Reverse Harem Series: (Writing as Plum Pascal) Happily Never After Series
Sacred Oath Series
F My Life Series
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
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ONE
ROWAN
Back in the heyday of the Underworld, there was a portal to Faery on the shore of Kinloch Kirk, or so I’d been told.
‘ On a bright day ,’ my mum used to tell me, ‘ you could see the portal, even when it was closed; hanging above the water, shimmering like a slimy slug .’
Not the most elegant description , but it used to make me laugh, and that would make her laugh and then my dad would join in.
Those had been happy times.
Exactly what had happened between my mum and my dad to break them up, I didn’t know. I was so young at the time, I couldn’t have understood it, whatever it was, and my mum had made the decision to ‘protect’ me from the truth since then, so I remained none the wiser.
I sometimes wondered if she was protecting herself from having to talk about something which, I knew, still broke her heart. I could see it in her face whenever she mentioned him—this painful expression of longing and betrayal. All I knew was that the man who’d been the sun, the moon and the stars to me (maybe just the moon and the stars—a vampire can never be the sun) was gone and I wouldn’t see him again.
To lose a father at that age meant a lot of tears, but it also meant I had time to get over it. Well, as best I could. Time had
a way of fading the memories of him and after a while, I stopped missing him, specifically. What I missed was the sensation of him. I remembered little things now—like laughter and how happy my mum was. It was the loss of that happy family that still stung.
Not that I didn’t have a happy childhood with M um, my cousin Emma and Mathilda (who acted as a sort of ersatz grandparent).
And not that Mum wasn’t happy too. But there was always an awareness that something was gone, something was missing—we’d lost something. Sometimes I would walk in on Mum, and find her staring out the window, and I always knew she was thinking of him; the lost love of her life. Sometimes I knew she’d been crying, no matter how hard she tried to hide it from me. As a kid, I didn’t understand how she could apparently hate him so much, yet miss him so fervently. As I got older, I understood it better.
So although I was constantly aware of the space that my father’s absence left in our lives, I hadn’t necessarily missed him after those first few months of deep childhood loss. It just started to feel like… I didn’t really have a dad.
Then we’d spoken on the phone. And suddenly I had a dad again.
It seemed impossible that I could remember his voice , but when I heard it, something moved inside me, like my whole body tightened. If I didn’t remember him, my body did and it passed those memories back to my mind—suddenly I could remember bedtime stories, Dad jokes and so many other day to day activities.
And I was elated. Happy in a way I hadn’t been for a long time.
It had just been so… wonderful to talk to my dad again and to know he still loved me, that he hadn’t forgotten about me.
On the other hand, Mum was going to kill me when she got back.
If she got back.
“No!” I slammed my heels into the sand where I sat on the beach, knees drawn up to my chin. I would n’t entertain thoughts like this.
Mum was going to be fine. There was no reason to worry.
But if there hadn’t been a reason to worry , I wouldn’t have called Dad. But, now that I had, I knew he’d protect her. He’d said as much.
So, again; there was no reason to worry.
Mum could look after herself and if, for some reason, she had gotten in over her head, then Dad would look after her.
Of course, there was a decent chance they would kill each other, but that was a problem for another day.
It was weird to think they were both out there on some sort of quest. It was weirder to think that before I was born, they did this sort of thing all the time. Most children have that moment when they realize their parents are human beings who had a prior life; they find pictures of them dancing at a nightclub in a ‘
Party Naked ’ T-shirt or stumble across something they shouldn’t.
In my case, my parents had basically been action heroes until I came along. Maybe they would have gone on being action heroes, but for a while there wasn’t anything to fight against; the world was peaceful.
Then the Queen of the Underworld (my Aunt Jolie) was killed, and everything changed. Especially for me and my cousin Emma. Now there was plenty to fight about, but until recently, it seemed as if both my parents had decided to sit this particular fight out.
Despite the changing world, my mum had been a mum for the last ten years. Whatever it was she was chasing out there, it would have taken something pretty major to tear her away from me and the peace of Kinloch Kirk. And that pretty major thing was Aunt Jolie.
Was it possible she really was alive after all these years? It didn’t seem possible to me, but Kinloch Kirk was a place where the line between possible and impossible was blurry as hell.
I stared out across the waters of the Kinloch bay, so still and quiet. This had been a wonderful place to grow up, but it had been a lot more wonderful when Emma was here too. Now she was off hav ing adventures at school, Mum and Dad were off doing their thing, and me? I was stuck here with Mathilda—who I loved, but my life wasn’t exactly exciting. I couldn’t help but wonder: why was everyone else out there living and not me? When did I get to have an adventure?
The sun was starting to set, sending red and orange rays shimmering across the undulating surface of the water. The tide was coming in and as I watched the horizon, the first wave reached my bare feet, making my toes curl defensively into the sand, away from the cold water. I scooted my bum back a foot or so. It was probably time for me to go in, but I wasn’t ready yet.
Days like these you had to savor.
What was that…?
Raising my hand to my eyes against the dying sun and squinting , I tried to make out the blurry shadows in the sky, coming this way. They were unlike any birds I’d ever seen before, and seemed to be travelling faster than the average bird, as well. I could hear them now, a strange screeching call, like a war-cry, reaching me from across the water. We got a lot of weird sea
birds around this way—sometimes I wondered if they had somehow stumbled through from another realm—and yet, there was something about these birds that was making me uneasy.
A shiver tingled down my spine.
As they came closer, I could now see these weren’t birds at all.
No, they were human—or, at least, human shaped—they had pink skin (like, bright pink) and a shock of red hair that was blowing out behind them as they came towards me at speed. They seemed to be riding something—maybe brooms? Yet, they weren’t like any witches I’d ever seen (and I’d seen a few). Their screams were growing louder now, reminding me of howler monkeys, ululating back and forth.
Nervously, I got to my feet and began to back away from the water’s edge. When you were the niece of the Queen of Underworld, and the daughter of an Elemental and a Master Vampire, you learned that not everyone in the world looked like you and you shouldn’t judge people by appearances. Werewolves looked scary as hell, but I’d had tea with a few and they had been perfectly charming. I didn’t want to be the bigot here, but there was something about these creatures, whatever they were, that was ringing alarm bells in my head.
As I took another step back, the leader of the group spotted me.
He raised his arm, whooping loudly to the rest of the aerial squadron to get their attention, then pointed down at me again, turned the nose of his stick downwards. Then he dived, the rest of the party following.
I turned and ran.
From behind me, I heard the screams and cries over the rushing air as the creatures tore down towards me. Stupidly, I looked back to see how close they were ( very ). As I did, my foot caught something on the ground and down I went into the sand, tossing and tumbling and landing on my face. I scrabbled around onto my butt and saw the leader of the creatures screaming towards me, almost on top of me, his clawed hand outstretched to grab me.
I screamed, terror pounding through me.
From nowhere, two figures leapt out in front of me, one of them knocking the creature off the stick it was riding, sending it to the ground in a cloud of sand.
“Are you alright?”
“Wuh?” I answered (best I could do, but it was a pretty dumb question).
“Good.”
The figures were dressed in camouflage gear and wore masks. I had no idea who they were, where they’d come from or how they’d happened to be passing by when I needed help. And, to be honest, as long as they were on my side, I didn’t care. The one thing I did know was that they knew how to fight and were currently kicking weird monster ass. They were super-strong too, and I wondered if they might be vampires—they’d appeared just as the sun had gone down.
Whatever the flying things were, I was clearly their target. They swooped down from the sky in twos and threes, aiming directly for me, and my mysterious protectors did their best to fend them off.
Both were now armed with sticks (the ones the creatures had been riding on before my new friends knocked them onto their rear ends), and were whirling them around like high-speed windmills, keeping the creatures at bay. But, good though they were, there were only two of them against a whole host of the flying things.
“Get back to the house!” One of the masked people yelled—
revealing that she was, in fact, a woman.
I scrambled up from the sand and took off as fast I could—which wasn’t all that fast because running on sand is hard. But the creatures saw me trying to make a break for it, and a pair of them tore after me at breakneck pace.
I hurled myself to one side, hitting the ground, arms protectively covering my head, feeling the rush of air across my back as they zoomed over me.
“Stay down!” yelled my male protector when I raised my head long enough to spit the sand out of my mouth. “What now?”
He was talking to his companion.
“I’m open to suggestions. There’s too many of them.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
Suddenly, I felt a hand on the back of my shirt and I was pulled from the sand. I was quickly turned around and found myself staring into a masked face.
“Right. We’re going to try this again. You run for the house and this time, we’ll come with you to cover your back. Stop for nothing. Fast as you can go. When you get there, head for the cellar. Got it?”
I nodded feebly as a pair of hands grabbed me under the arms and hoisted me back onto my feet.
“GO!”
I ran as fast as I could, with my masked bodyguards lashing out at any flying creatures that came too close, but there were still
too many of them. Not to mention that they were able to move so much faster in the air than I was able to move on ground. In the skies above us, a few of the monsters streaked ahead to cut us off from the house.
“What do we do?” I yelled, but both of my protectors had their hands full already, fighting back the creatures coming at me from the rear.
What did I do now? If I stopped running, they’d be on me, but if I carried on running, then I was just going to run straight into their waiting claws. Mum had taught me how to fight but little more than the basics of self-defense—mainly owing to the fact that she hadn’t wanted me to follow in her footsteps—taking up the life of a warrior.
I was running out of time.
I could change directions and run elsewhere, but there was nowhere to hide nearby, and I would be totally exposed. That meant, they’d catch me before I’d be able to reach cover. A cold fear lanced through me; there was nothing I could do.
Whatever the creatures were, they were going to get me.
As the thought broke in my mind, I saw the door of my house open and Mathilda walked out. She was glowing brilliant white, her long hair billowing around her head as if she were underwater, her eyes shining with magical energy that crackled across her skin. Looking between the bodies of the creatures waiting in front of me, I could see her feet weren’t touching the ground.
Her lips moved and then I felt the wave of silent sound before I heard the muted boom, like a sonic implosion. From around me, a vast ball of energy blossomed outwards, catching up the pink-skinned creatures and carrying them with it like a riptide, bearing them away into the distance.
I’ d skidded to a halt, and now could only watch from the inside of the magical blossom. My two saviors stood beside me, gazing up. They were as slack-jawed in amazement as I was, from what I could tell. You didn’t often get to see a display of power like this.
I’ d known Mathilda all my life and I knew she was a powerful Fae, but I’d never really seen the powerful side of her. Sure, she did a little magic around the house, but, even then, she usually preferred to use her hands wherever possible—she didn’t believe magic existed to make life easier; it existed to make life better .
Mathilda was like a grandmother to me, and I would never have dreamed she was this powerful. And, yet, here was proof right in front of me.
The shimmering blossom of magical energy vanished, leaving Kinloch Kirk silent except for the wind in the trees. Though you could still taste the trace magic on the air, mixing with the salt spray of the ocean.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Mathilda, that was…” I turned back towards the house where Mathilda still stood. But as I did so, she suddenly collapsed to the ground. My sense of relief was short-lived as I raced back to the house, all exhaustion forgotten.
I dropped to my knees beside Mathilda, gathering her up into my arms. “Mathilda?” I said, my voice stricken. “Please tell me you’re okay.”
Mathilda’s eyes fluttered weakly and her lips move as she whispered, “Might have overdone that a bit.”
“You’ll be okay… right?”
There were tears in my eyes. She’d saved my life, but at a tremendous cost to her, and all I wanted was to call Mum and tell her what happened and have her make it okay—which was what Mums did. But my mum wasn’t here, and I didn’t have any way of getting in touch with her.
I looked back towards the beach to see if I could get any help from my two new friends. But they’d vanished, just as surely as they’d first appeared.
The beach was empty.
TWO
PAGAN
Braden’s garotte dug into my throat as he pulled hard, laughing as he did so.
“Hurts, does it? Big hero’s in pain is he? Why don’t you do something heroic then? Why don’t you save yourself?”
That was the plan. At that moment, though, I had a bag over my head, a pain in my gut where Braden had punched me, and a garotte digging into my windpipe, restricting my breathing.
Everything was against me. Or so it would seem.
“Nothing to say for yourself?”
At moments like this , you have to count your advantages and I had only one; Braden wanted me to know. More than that, he needed me to know. To know he was the one who had beaten me and that he’d won.
Any decent assassin would have looped the garotte over my head—
one swift pull and that was that, I was dead and there would have been nothing I could do about it. I was very lucky that Braden was a conceited idiot. It wasn’t that he couldn’t kill me; he was choosing not to, making the torture last so he could enjoy my suffering. That was a bad mistake, and he was about to learn as much the hard way.
With a grunt, I rammed my head backwards as hard as I could and felt my skull impact Braden’s nose. The young man cried out, letting go of the garotte as he clutched his face. I gasped in breaths as I tore the bag from my head, getting rid of it just in time as Braden’s accomplice came at me with a knife. He lunged at me and I grabbed his knife hand then twisted it up behind his back until he shrieked like a girl and dropped the blade.
“I’ll take that,” I muttered and hurled the man across the room.
Braden grabbed a chair and threw it at me, but I side-stepped. He was seething with fury (much of it at himself for letting me go) but I could also see the terror in his eyes. I decided to give him a reason to be scared. Very deliberately, I tucked the knife into my belt—he was unarmed and I wanted to show him I didn’t need a weapon to kick his ass.
“Come on then ,” I taunted him. “You wanted to kill me. Now’s your chance.”
