Borrowed Ember (24 page)
Authors: Samantha Young
Descended by Blood
by Angeline Kace
Brooke Keler's a high school junior who never spent much time living in one place. She's finaly in a town long enough to almost snag the boy of her dreams when her life is threatened by a fanged man in his attempt to kidnap her. Brooke begins a dangerous journey to find out who is after her and how to stop them. Thrown into a world with powerful and prejudiced vampires, Brooke must tap into the side of herself that she never knew existed, at the risk of losing her life in order to save it.
Excerpt
A twig snapped, and I jerked my head to the right. I caught the glint from the eyes of a mountain lion creeping toward us, his ears puled back, teeth bared.
I froze, hoping we weren’t the prey he stalked.
Kaitlynn shrieked. She grabbed my arm and tried puling me with her as she ran back to the cars.
The lion rose from his crouch and started charging down the mountain straight for us.
We didn’t have enough time for both of us to make it out of there alive, and the lion sped up at the site of Kaitlynn running away.
I planted my feet. Something clicked inside of me; heat coursed through my veins. My vision intensified, and I could distinguish the areas of down between the lion’s coarse fur as his muscles flexed and stretched.
I’d heard before that you shouldn’t look a wild animal directly in its eyes, but my instinct screamed for me to not turn my back on my attacker. I listened to my gut and looked the mountain lion square into his charging eyes.
The lion and I connected on an intelectual level: predator versus predator. Only I knew, and I deemed the lion knew, as wel, that I outranked him as the more fearsome predator. How I recognized this, or how I knew the lion realized this, I couldn’t fathom. I had never been hunting before, so this instinct didn’t come from a belief that man ruled supreme on the food chain. And this moment felt different somehow. It wasn’t man versus beast; it was beast versus beast.
“Stop!” I commanded.
The lion skidded to a halt four feet in front of me, his back fixed in its pre-lunge arch. He stared into my eyes, his ears perked back, fangs exposed in a snarl and hackles raised, but he didn’t move a centimeter closer.
I towered over him. My pulse pounded at the sides of my neck; my shoulders rose and fel with my deep breaths. My gaze pierced him, welding his toes and the pads of his feet into the ground. Somehow, I had been able to force my command over him, and when I told him to stop, I never considered that he would deny my order.
The nerves along my scalp tingled with the sensation that the lion hungered to attack me, but he
couldn’t
. The only thing holding him back from pouncing me was my decree that he shouldn’t. My beast had prevailed as the most dominant between us.
Panic filed my lungs at the realization that something stirred within me and it caused me to look at myself as a beast. I yearned for the retreat that Kaitlynn had made. I yeled, “Leave!” before the lion could translate my hesitance and continue his attack.
He hissed, spun around, and ran up the side of the hil, tail flogging behind him. I studied his movements, hoping that he wouldn’t change his mind and come back.
Kaitlynn rushed up behind me. “Brooke, let’s go!” she pleaded, voice shaking.
I stood there, to make absolutely sure. We had some distance to run before we’d get back to our vehicles, and I wasn’t going to take any chances on being stuck in that lion’s jaws.
The creature was almost out of the smal clearing and about to enter into the thick forest when a man stepped out from between two spruce trees. Like a housecat, the lion rubbed his fawn pelt against the man’s leg and purred. My hypersensitive hearing digested the happy rumble cascading down the hil. Over the purring, I heard the tril of crickets and further out, the crunch of leaves underneath smal feet. How was that possible?
The man loomed, barely outside the shadows, in a dark trench coat, smiling. His malignant stare reached my eyes, and his smirk grew by spades.
For more information on where to buy
Descended by Blood
please visit Angeline’s website: http://www.angelinekace.com/.
You are about to read an excerpt from the first in the Madly series. Thanks so much, Samantha, for pimping me out (LOL) and thanks to each of you who give my book a try :-)
M. Leighton
MADLY
Madly is your average nearly-eighteen year old girl—for a princess, that is.
Madly James is thoroughly enjoying her internship in the smal town of Slumber when the unthinkable happens—there’s a prison break in Atlas, the magicaly-protected home of Madly’s race. A traitor has set free eight
Lore
, the spirits of what humans know as fairy tales, and they are making their way to Slumber to awaken their descendants.
In order to save her home, the lives of her family, and al of humanity, Madly must learn to wield her exceptional powers and recapture the Lore before it’s too late and al is lost. But Madly’s only help are her two best friends and the Sentinel, Jackson Hamilton, that threatens both her heart and her destiny. Madly has loved Jackson as long as she can remember, but he is the one thing even a princess can’t have. Can she resist love to become the queen she was fated to be? Or can she find a way to have both?
I looked out the classroom window, wishing I was outdoors enjoying the ambient conditions of Slumber, conditions that I’d come to love in a relatively short amount of time. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the humid sea breeze ruffling my hair, the hot sun shining down on my face. I could almost smel the sweet hint of jasmine in the air, too.
Sighing, I turned my attention to the back of Aidan’s sandy head. My lazy musings coupled with the soft drone of Mr. Laraby’s voice provided the perfect
background noise to lul me into a semi-comatose state.
Aidan turned around and winked at me. Whether he’d known I was watching him or he was just being his fun-loving self, I didn’t know. With Aidan, you
could never tel what went on behind his warm hazel eyes, but either way he made me smile. He was constantly teasing me or doing something funny to make me
laugh.
When he turned back toward the front of the class, I sighed. I couldn’t wait for our mating tie to materialize, for the time when the mere sight of him would make me swoon. That’s what happened between al fated mates and, since I was to be betrothed to Aidan in nine more months, I fuly expected it would happen
with us. But right now, he just felt like my big brother.
Tingling fingers of unease lifted the roots of my waist length blonde hair away from my scalp, startling me from my stupor. I sat up in my seat and looked
around. Just as I was about to reassure myself that it had only been my imagination, the shiny, gilded cuff around my wrist began to heat against my skin.
I looked down at my bracelet, the wide gold band that had adorned my arm practicaly since birth. It held a charm tight against the skin on the inside of my wrist, where it continualy leached power straight into my bloodstream.
The charm itself was a blue-green hoop that looked like a delicate, water-filed doughnut. Al of us had a similar charm that we wore somewhere against our
skin. It was the source of our magic on dry land. But at the empty center of mine was a single silvery pearl. Upon casual inspection, it seemed to be part of the circle, but it was not. It wasn’t attached to anything, held in place by nothing more than the potent enchantment that marked my family, my entire race.
Like a bolt of lightning, pain suddenly shot from my wrist straight up my arm and into my head. My sharp inhalation alerted Aidan and Jersey, my two best
friends, both of whom sat in front of me. I saw them turn toward me right before my vision blurred with tears.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I bit my lip to keep the scream on my tongue from finding its way out. Electricity held my arm stiff as the current began to flow through the rest of my body. My hair felt like it was on fire and my toes twitched inside my loafers. Lips that felt like they were melting off my face could no longer hold the cry inside, but when it escaped, it didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded like the high-pitched cal of a siren.
Then, as quickly as it had come upon me, it was over. I felt my body go limp in my seat and I slumped forward over my desk. I didn’t need to open my eyes
to know that every face in class was turned curiously in my direction. Despite the shock of what had just happened, I felt the burn of embarrassment sting my cheeks.
“Madly, what is it?”
Jersey’s concerned voice was near my right ear, concern I knew would be mirrored in her sea foam eyes.
“Hey, James, quit trying to scare us,” Aidan whispered into the other ear. Though his comment was meant to sound casual, I could hear the genuine fear in his voice.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes to Aidan’s. I knew by the frown that appeared on his smooth brow that he knew something was seriously wrong.
“Mr. Laraby, Madly’s not feeling wel, can we take her down the hal to the bathroom?”
“She doesn’t look very good, does she?” Mr. Laraby asked, eyeing me suspiciously. “No, why don’t you take her to the nurse’s office?”
“Yes, sir,” Aidan replied, coming around to throw my arm around his shoulder and slip his hand around my waist. With virtualy no effort, he hauled me to my feet.
“Jersey, grab her bag.”
I heard the rustling of Jersey jumping to obey Aidan and then the patter of her feet as she folowed behind us.
As soon as we were clear of Mr. Laraby’s room, Aidan steered me to the long line of army green lockers on one side of the hal and propped me up against
the cool metal.
“What was that al about? What is it?”
At first when he asked, I wasn’t sure how to answer, wasn’t realy sure what
had
happened. But then, as the fog cleared from my mind, an image was left in its wake. It was the mental picture of someone I recognized.
“It’s Lady Sheelah.”
As my vision came back into ultra-clear focus, I saw Aidan’s pupils dilate and, for the first time since I’d known him, the jokester disappeared into the royalty that he was born to be.
“Then we need to get to her.”
With that, he took my hand, puled me away from the lockers and practicaly dragged me down the hal. I’d forgotten al about Jersey until I heard her speak
up from somewhere behind us.
“Um, helo? Is somebody gonna tel me what the devil is going on?”
“Come on, Jersey,” Aidan caled over his shoulder. “Keep up.”
“I’m trying, but not al of us are giants,” she snipped.
When I turned to look back at her, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her short legs flying in her efforts to reach us.
“Just like not al of us are shrimps,” I teased.
“A shelfish joke? Seriously? Are you actualy gonna go there?”
Jersey’s expression said she was skeptical. I smiled again.
It helped to have her around to lighten the mood. It gave me a reason not to focus on the sinking feeling that was puling at my heart, a feeling that assured me that what had happened in Mr. Laraby’s classroom did not bode wel.
The three of us made our way quickly from Building C to the dorms that crouched in a tight circle in the center of campus. Veritas Academy was a private
school, so our handler, Lady Sheelah, stayed in our dorm acting as our Resident Advisor, a very human-looking position.
As we arrived at her room, Aidan took the lead and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so he knocked a second time. When stil there was no sign
of Lady Sheelah, he reached for the knob. It was unlocked, turning easily.
Pushing the door open a bit, Aidan poked his head into the room and said, “Helo? Sheelah?”
When there was no response, my breath began to come faster. Something was desperately wrong; I could feel it.
“Stay here,” Aidan ordered as he swung the door wide and stepped inside.
He disappeared into the dark interior of the smal room and Jersey and I looked at each other. Then, as she so often did, Jersey said exactly what I was
thinking.
“As if!”
I took the first step into Lady Sheelah’s room. Jersey was right behind me. I felt her fingers fist in the tails of my shirt, tails I’d purposely left hanging out over my cheesy blue plaid skirt.
Leaving my shirt untucked was my tribute to individuality among al the other uniform-clad students. “They” frowned upon it, but Jersey and I had decided two months ago that they could make us wear a uniform at Veritas Academy, but they could never make us al look the same. For Jersey, that meant wearing lots of costume jewelry and fingernail polish in every color of the rainbow.
In the quiet of the room, I heard nothing but the smack of Jersey’s lips as she chomped on her gum.
“Jersey, shh,” I whispered over my shoulder.
“I can’t help it. I’m ‘nervous chewing’,” she explained in a hushed voice.
I don’t know how it was possible that I hadn’t yet become accustomed to her loud gum-chewing. She’d done it almost al our lives, ever since she’d bought a
pack of Hubba Bubba on our first trip to dry land.
Doing my best to tune it out, I caled softly to Aidan.
“Over here,” came his response.