Ignite me, p.29
Ignite Me, page 29
“I found my way home,” I finally said, voice thick with emotions.
She nodded and grinned widely, her hand reaching up to touch me but stopping before she got too close. “Yes, you did.”
Grayson joined us, and he offered a hand to…my mother. “I’m Grayson. Her mate.”
She accepted his gesture. “I’m Rosella. Her…”
“My mom,” I finished for her as more tears fell down my cheeks.
“Would you like to come inside?” Grayson asked, nodding toward the house.
Her eyes met mine again. “Only if that’s okay with you.”
I swallowed thickly. “It is. Go on in, and we’ll be right behind you.”
I needed a minute to breathe before we sat down for whatever conversation was about to happen.
She smiled and dipped her head. “Of course.”
Once she opened our door on her own, I fell into Grayson’s arms and let my emotions run rampant. “She came for me.”
His hands rubbed over my back. “But she doesn’t have to stay.”
“I know, but I think I want her to.”
He squeezed me tighter, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “I had a feeling.”
I took a few calming breaths before pulling back and looking up at my mate. “Is this all real? Or am I going to wake up alone back in my apartment any moment now?”
His lips pressed against my forehead, and he squeezed my hips. “This is very real, and you’re never going to be alone again.”
A shudder rolled through me at the intensity of truth I felt from his words.
It might have taken me longer than I’d have liked, but I’d found my family and my home. I wouldn’t ever stop being grateful for everyone who helped me to get here.
Especially the man beside me who knew just when to hold me up and when to stand by my side.
If you’ve enjoyed Kinsley and Grayson’s story, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Thank you so much for reading!
Corrupt Me by Everly Frost is the next standalone release in this world and will feature the Triarchy, the three powerful witches that you just met at the end of this book. You can also get a sneak peek of the first two chapters at the end of this book and flip the page to see the full line up!
Want to know about future releases without having to follow the authors everywhere? Text “IMMORTAL” to (844) 506-1510
Immortal Vices and Virtues World
Want to read more from this world? Great news! Ten other authors have and/or are writing stories in the world!
Here is the recommended reading order for your enjoyment:
Reject Me by Kel Carpenter and Aurelia Jane (where Markus first appears)
Queen Me by Amber Lynn Natusch (Myra and The Riff-Raff bar are in this one)
Haunt Me by Amanda Pillar
Crave Me by Lexi C Foss
Expose Me by Kaydence Snow
Ruin Me by Jenna Wolfhart
Ignite Me by Heather Renee
Corrupt Me by Everly Frost (the Triarchy witches are here)
Burn Me by KA Knight and Kendra Moreno
Slay Me by Jessica Wayne (D from the circus will be here)
Each story is a complete stand alone and they can be read in any order, but they’re best consumed consecutively.
If you love spicy paranormal romance, angst, feisty heroines, and the darkly delicious men who sweep them off their feet, you’re going to devour this world! See them all HERE.
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Also by Heather Renee
Mystics and Mayhem Series
Fated to the Wolf
A complete New Adult Witch and Wolf series (dual POV) featuring an abandoned witch, a rogue wolf, and their broken bond.
Scorned by Blood
A complete New Adult Vampire series featuring a supernatural hunter and the sexy vampire bound to protect her no matter the cost.
Luna Marked
A complete New Adult wolf shifter series (dual POV) featuring a strong-willed leading lady and a patient, yet fierce alpha male.
Broken Court
A complete New Adult Urban Fantasy series featuring an unconventional and anti-heroine leading lady, a broody love interest, and a fae kingdom with a vile king.
Individual Series
Raven Point Pack Series
A complete Upper Young Adult Paranormal Romance series featuring wolves, witches, vengeance, and fated mates.
Shadow Veil Academy
A complete Upper Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy series featuring shifters, elves, witches, and more.
Elite Supernatural Trackers
A complete New Adult Urban Fantasy series featuring witches, demons, a smart-mouthed female lead, alpha males, and a snarky fairy sidekick.
Royal Fae Guardians
A complete Young Adult Urban Fantasy series featuring fae, magic users, a sweet romance, along with snark and humor.
Blood of the Sea Series
A complete Young Adult Paranormal Romance series featuring vampires, open seas adventures, and the occasional pirate.
Standalone Books
Ignite Me - A spicy wolf shifter story featuring a lost heir, the mate who doesn’t want her, and the enemies who wish them dead.
Marked Paradox - A Young Adult fae story about a realm divided and one fae to bring them back together.
About the Author
Heather Renee is a USA Today Bestselling author who lives in Oregon. She writes Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy novels with a mixture of romance, humor, and sass. Her love of reading eventually led to her passion of writing and giving the gift of escapism.
When Heather's not writing, she's spending time with her loving husband and beautiful daughter, going on their own adventures. She loves to hear from her fans, so visit her website: www.HeatherReneeAuthor.com and check out the Contact Me page for ways to connect.
Corrupt Me Excerpt
EVERLY FROST
Chapter One - Slater
I’m all out of options.
The desert wind plucks at my wings, a hot gust knocking me down toward the endless sand dunes that stretch in every direction. My bird-shaped shadow looms up at me as the wind threatens to drive me into the scorching sand while I fight to remain airborne.
I’ve stayed in my raven form for the last five days. Five long, sweltering days with nothing but golden sand below me and a clear sky above me. Freezing at night. Boiling during the day. Somehow, I’m still alive, but I won’t be for long.
This harsh environment will end me.
The horizon blurs and shimmers, and the only thing that keeps me flying is the tendril of magic I’m following.
It’s become a lifeline; a bright spark in the darkness overtaking my mind.
A fucking deceptive bright spark because it will almost certainly lead to my death.
But, hell, I don’t have a choice.
I’ve been cursed.
The dark magic that is stealing my life away is evident in the three white feathers standing out among the otherwise inky plumage on my right wing.
My only hope is a secretive coven of three witches who answer to no one and won’t appreciate my intrusion. It’s taken me months to track the thread of their magic. Along the way, I’ve encountered nearly every kind of witch and each of them told me the same thing: They can’t help me. Not with the curse. Certainly not with finding the reclusive coven of witches who might have the power to save my life.
I lost count of the times I was told: “Give up. Better to die cursed than to face the wrath of The Maiden, The Mother, and the Crone.”
I wouldn’t give up. Not least because my pride wouldn’t let me. My skill is tracking the untraceable, and I refused to accept that three witches could evade me.
Then two weeks ago, I finally sensed the distinctly sharp energy of powerful witches traveling together. I was in Portland at the time, in the headquarters of the House of Fire and Fluorite. It was a dangerous place for me to be since I hadn’t been invited into their territory and that House has been in turmoil for some time now.
Luckily for me, when I’m in raven form, I don’t cast an aura. I can soar right across territory lines unobserved, which has made me invaluable to the House of Gold and Garnet, a House of mercenaries. Being able to blend into the shadows while tracking a target comes in handy in my line of work.
The thread of magic I’m now following is faint and skillfully concealed, the finest of filaments consisting of three distinct magics wound around each other. It led me here to the vast Sahara desert.
Each of their magics warns me that their power is beyond compare.
If I find them, they’ll most likely kill me.
If I don’t find them… well… the curse will finish me.
Fucking awesome choices.
As the desert wind plucks at me again, I’m increasingly aware that I won’t last much longer. Taking my raven form was tactical—not only can I travel faster, but I can survive in this form for longer without food or water. But not forever.
My raven’s talons cling to the only belongings I brought with me into the desert. I started off with a small satchel containing water, food, a phone, and a pair of boxers so I wouldn’t be forced to walk around naked when I shifted back into my human form.
I don’t carry jewelry or an object adorned with a stone representing my House. In Gold and Garnet, we favor tattoos.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Houses went to war in a battle that came to be known as the Great Sacrifice, my family was wiped out. Vesperus, the former King of Gold and Garnet, took me in when I had nowhere else to go. Sure, he saw my potential, but his heart is honorable.
He could have killed me. Instead, he gave me a home.
Now, the new Gold and Garnet King, Kaspian, has my faith and trust. I consider him, and his top assassin, the archangel Nolan, to be my brothers.
I wear my dagger-shaped tattoo across my heart as a mark of my loyalty to my House.
As for my supplies, my weakening state demanded that I ditch everything heavy.
Once I drank my last ration of water, I sent Kaspian a final text message. I let him know I was still searching. I didn’t tell him that I might not remain alive much longer. If I gave him even a hint that I was in dire trouble, he’d send someone after me, and I won’t risk anyone else’s life in the pursuit of these witches.
After that, I pared my luggage down to my boxers.
Now, I’m not even sure I need those.
My dignity is losing priority to my need to conserve energy.
I convince myself I have one more day of life in me, and I ignore the fact that it’s probably more like one more hour.
The weaker I grow, the brighter the feathers on my wing appear, their ivory color even more brilliant in the sunlight reflected off the sand.
I have no fucking idea how the curse happened. Or why I was cursed. I only know when and where.
I was tracking an unknown magical entity that had slipped through one of the portals. I located the strange entity in an old pub in Dublin. The last thing I remember was prowling across the street outside the pub, intending to go inside. My hand had connected with the front door, and then…
I have only snatches of memory.
Exploding glass and wood and bricks.
The crunch of my bones as the impact of the explosion and the weight of rubble bore down on me.
A brief instinct to take raven form and fly, but it was already too late.
I experienced a sharp pain like a needle of power piercing my heart, and then I lost consciousness.
I awoke to find a witch named Trixie fussing over me, a deep worry in her vibrant, blue eyes. I waved her away, not only because I felt fine, but because her healing magic had felt weirdly abrasive. Like my body was rejecting it.
Clearly miffed, she announced that she couldn’t cure the kind of darkness that had taken over me.
“You’ve lost all your light,” she warned me.
Now, I experience a pang of regret at the memory of how blithely I dismissed her concerns.
As it turned out, the magical entity I was tracking had nothing to do with my curse.
But all too soon, it became apparent that Trixie was right.
I lost my light, and now darkness is swamping me, clouding my thoughts, hindering my reason. The harder I push back against it, the more aggressive it becomes.
I used to believe that I could survive anything. Evade any threat. My ability to shift into the form of a raven gave me anonymity and allowed me to move in the shadows. I worked hard and proved my loyalty to my House.
I wanted nothing but the chance to prove myself.
None of that seems to matter now.
In the distance, the sand dunes appear a little less even. The bumpy formations give me a burst of hope that I might finally reach my destination, until my raven’s sharp eyesight confirms it’s simply rubble.
If there were buildings there once, they’re gone now. A fucking mirage to give me false hope.
The desert wind billows up around me and I’m forced to acknowledge that my time is up. The tendril of magic stretches into the distance and I’ll never make it to its source.
Darkness encroaches on the edges of my raven’s vision, shadows extend across the golden landscape like clawed fingers stretching toward me, and an icy sensation strangles my heart.
I’m suddenly struck with a sense that death might only be the beginning.
Something’s shifting within my mind.
I can barely breathe as my raven’s chest squeezes and his wings fail to beat.
As I plummet toward the sand, I’m not sure who or what I’m becoming.
Chapter Two - Emmaline
A sudden blast of hot air hits my cheeks.
I pause in the middle of pressing a belladonna seed into a pot of moist soil. My focus flashes across my garden to the doorway in the stone wall on the far side—the direction from which the gust of wind came.
An impossible gust of wind.
The desert air doesn’t pass into our haven. Or, rather, it shouldn’t.
We live in the center of the Sahara near one of the major portals.
From the outside, it looks like nothing more than the remnants of a crumbling, sandstone structure. Anyone who makes it this far into the desert would dismiss the few collapsed walls as rubble. They would pass by, unaware that stepping through the only intact doorway in the crumbling wall will lead them into an oasis.
My garden.
It’s the one place I can feel truly at peace.
Smoothing down my white linen dress, I retrieve my house ring from the little wooden table I use for potting plants and herbs that I use in potions.
The sapphire set atop the ring glints as I pull it onto my left ring finger. The stone is evidence that I belong to the House of Spirit and Sapphire. Not all members choose to wear a ring; some place a sapphire on another object they carry with them.
The other two witches in my coven wear their house rings on their right hand, but my right hand is already adorned. A wide, lace bracelet sits around my right wrist. A silver chain extends from the bracelet down the back of my hand to a pearlescent ring on my forefinger. All three pieces—the bracelet, chain, and pearl ring—are magically protected from the dirt I was just burying my hands in.
They are pure. Like me.
In this world, the strength of a witch’s magic is given labels. Crones are the most powerful, mothers are somewhere in the middle, and maidens have mild magic.
In my coven, things are different.
We are a coven of three witches and have taken pains to keep our existence and location a secret. Some who have heard whispers about us call us ‘The Triarchy.’ Others call us ‘The Coven of Three.’ I’m sure we have other names, but to our House leaders, we are simply ‘The Three.’
The Crone is a mistress of illusion, and she created this place to protect and conceal us. She wears a glamour to conceal her natural features, which are too ghastly for other supernaturals to behold.
The Mother is a mistress of destiny, who weaves a tapestry made up of the threads of fate. Every supernatural, living and dead, has a place in her tapestry. But more importantly, she can identify the pivotal moments along a thread where a person’s fate can be changed one way or another.
Then there’s me.
I swivel to the part of the garden behind me that contains a small waterfall that drops tranquilly into a grotto. That waterfall is another illusion hiding a second layer of building within our home.
A castle sits behind it, unseen from this side.
Within the castle, The Crone and The Mother are busy deciding the next move we’ll make in the fate they’re weaving for this world.
In our haven, time behaves differently. It’s slower, allowing The Crone and The Mother to check and consider their next moves carefully before acting.
Nothing is done in haste.
They don’t involve me in their machinations, and I’ve learned not to ask questions. I’ve been taught my place. Sometimes, they have to make ‘difficult’ decisions and my hands are to remain clean.
