Sample Chapters!
Chapter One
Luna
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester."
"Is it morning yet? ‘Cuz I really wanna go slay stuff. Like demons and
whatnot."
Hex was still sitting in the same spot in the bay window where he had been
before I had fallen asleep. It was dark out side still, but I wasn’t sure if the
darkness belonged to the morning or to the night.
"That depends. Am I a demon you wish to slay?"
I thought about this for a moment. "Maybe," I said, kicking the covers off of
my legs.
"Then it is not morning yet."
I sighed. I was feeling restless. It seemed like I had been bed-ridden
forever. I was ready to rise up and face my world of monsters and madness. I sat
up in my bed.
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester?"
"Is Izzy doing all right? How are her wounds?"
"She is doing well. She has been resting in your mother’s bed."
"How is Roman?"
"Roman is Roman," Hex’s tone hardened.
"I can’t believe he kicked your butt!" But what I really meant to say was
that I couldn’t believe a huge, demonic angel got the freak kicked out of him
but just some guy.
"Roman is not just some guy," Hex said, defensively.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. He was in my head, listening to me from there.
"Roman is very much a beast," he said, sounding resentful.
"How did you get him off of me after he stuck the knife through my chest? You
knocked him out."
"You are remembering more, I see."
"I really don’t think that answers my question." I gathered long locks of
white, silky hair and pulled them over my shoulder to play with them in my
lap.
"My father is the Prince of the Powers of Air. I have been given gifts by
default."
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester?"
"Is it morning now?"
Hex did not answer. I was beginning to believe that the darkness outside did
not belong to the night.
"Were you there? In My grandmother’s world?" I asked.
It took so long for Hex to reply that I thought he wasn’t going to answer
me.
"I was there," he finally said.
"Where? I mean, I know you possessed the Lanchester warriors –by default–
but I mean, where were you when Jade was forced to marry Lord Lanchester?"
"I was many places, Luna. But I spent most my time in a dragman," he said,
sounding irritated by the topic of our conversation.
"Why was it so important that I was born?"
"You already know the answer to that question, Lanchester. Jade revealed it
to you in your dream."
"The thirteenth daughter to the Lanchester bloodline—" I sifted through the
many new thoughts in my memory and found what I was looking for. "I’m supposed
to break the curse." I remembered my conversation with Bane when he was taking
me back to The Coven’s mansion. In my mind, I could see him: Bane wrapped his
wings around us, blotting out the sun and walling us away from the world. He
took me by the shoulders and looked down into my eyes. He stayed like this for a
moment. Then he cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes at me.
"Me," he said. "I knew you were fated to save me from me. To turn me away
from my father."
"Why me, Hex? Why not someone else? I mean, it was sealed in blood by fate
that I be the one to break the curse, but why me?"
"I can not answer that for you, Lanchester."
A sliver of red light stretched across the sky beyond Hex, flirting with the
idea of a beautiful sunrise.
"Where is Jade? She was immortal, right? So where is she?"
"I can not answer that for you, Lanchester."
"Why do I have the feeling I wasn’t supposed to wake up from that dream? Like
there was more I should have been shown?"
"Because you were not supposed to wake up from that dream."
"Well, that don’t make sense, cuz Bane cant stop me from dreaming when he
cant even spend the energy to look into my thoughts without risking the chance
that his father will get me. So why didn’t I finish the dream, then?"
"I stopped you."
"What? Why would you do that?"
"I knew my brother would be upset if he knew what you were dreaming. So I put
an end to it."
"Ok. That don’t make any sense either, ‘cuz you wouldn’t have let me dream it
all in the first place," I said, accusingly.
"I promised my brother I would not intervene or alter your thoughts in
anyway. It was the one condition he had in order to grant me exclusive access to
your thoughts. I pondered the idea of stopping the dream before you dreamt it.
It took some convincing of my self to decide Bane would have wanted me to stop
you from dreaming. Therefore I stopped you."
Yeah, so this annoyed me; demons having control of my thoughts.
"Why would Bane not want me to learn about Jade?"
"It is him of whom he does not wish you to learn."
"Why?" As I asked this, I began to think of all the things I learned about
Bane when he was possessing Lord Lanchester. Bane was absolutely heinous. He
murdered Kaneesis and King Trentis and treated everyone around him like
worthless slaves. And I had this feeling what little I learned of Bane was only
a drop in the bucket. I still had no idea how awful of a demon Bane was. The
dream helped me to believed that un-loving Bane was going to be super easy
now.
"Exactly," Hex said.
I thought about this. Bane had come to me in my dreams my entire life. He was
the breath I breathed, my souls’ embrace. He was my home, my everything.
And he still is.
I did not want to admit it to myself, because what kind of monster loves a
monster like Bane? But I did. And maybe this was it: Maybe the monster in me
loved the monster in Bane. Therefore I could never possibly fully un-love
him.
Unless, I was somehow bound to his heart like I was bound to Sean’s body.
Maybe it was magic. Or a curse. Maybe Bane put a spell on me that would keep me
loving him until the day I died. Just like I would long to be near Sean
Hylander, always and forever. It ached. It was a miserable ache that not only
disgusted me on the inside but on the outside as well. The whole idea of wanting
to be near Sean Hylander made me totally want to puke.
"What am I supposed to do with the vase, Hex?" I quickly forced myself to
think about something else. Morning was coming. The stretch of red across the
sky was brightening and slowly melting the darkness around it. I had to get by
thoughts organized before I went and slain stuff. Heck, I had to know what to
slay before I could slay it. Then again, maybe not. I was most-likely considered
clinically insane. I’d have an excuse to go on a frenzied, slaying rampage,
right?
"Keep it out of your mind, Lanchester," Hex said, sternly.
I giggled. "Yeah, kind of like keeping the fact from my mind that I got a
demon baby growing in my body?" This slipped out. I didn’t even know the thought
of Rune, and what he did, had wriggled its way out of its hiding spot within me.
But there it was, waving at me from the shadows of the words that just fell from
my mouth.
I hung my head. Frigid, black stillness spread through my insides, freezing
everything in its path, leaving me numb. And sinking me into that place of
knowing, that place where I could feel the life within me; the life of Rune’s
baby.
Hex stood from the window and moved across the room. He stopped a few feet
from my bed and ruffled his wings as if anxious to fly away from my sorrow.
I lifted my eyes and looked at him. I could see the shadow of his face,
specks of light in his silver eyes. He did not say anything, and I had to wonder
if he came to me to comfort me but had changed his mind. He only stared down at
me.
"You haven’t told anyone, have you?" I knew he would know that I was talking
about the pregnancy.
"Your secret is safe with me," Hex said.
"Bane knows, doesn’t he?"
"Yes, of course. He knew before you did."
I hadn’t planed on asking this next question because I had convinced myself
that it didn’t matter, but I changed my mind. "Where is he? Where is Bane?"
Hex looked uncomfortable all of a sudden. He took a step back, as if he could
step out of the reach of my question.
My heart quickened. Something was wrong.
"Hex, where is Bane?" I demanded, ready to burst out of bed and battle the
world for Bane, if I had to.
"Aradia took him. She brought him to Lilith."
My heart sank into my belly. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. There was
only one reason why Lilith would want to have Bane.
"Yes. Lilith plans to torture him," Hex said, but there was something he was
not telling me. I could feel it. I could hear it in the way he ended his
statement. I was about to ask him what it was, but then he said, "Then she will
quarter him."
****
Chapter Two
Bane
Lilith’s dungeon was very similar to the one in the bowls of the mansion in
Sleepy Hallow. There was a prison, just like this, in four other coven lairs.
But the one here, in the bowls of Lilith’s estate in Italy, was one I’d spent a
good portion of my time in.
And here I was again.
Lilith’s prisoner.
The bars would not have been enough to keep me from escaping had it not been
for the wards humming with thick and potent magic like an invisible wall just
beyond the iron bars of my cell.
I had beaten myself up for falling into the trap that landed me here. There
would be no escape, and I knew this. But it was Luna, the fact that I was now
thousands of miles away from her that bothered me so. She was left in the care
of my inept brother. Hex will be incapable of protecting her when the Hylander
comes for her.
And he would come for her.
I gripped the bars in front of me and squeezed them in my hands. Black
feathers dusted the floor and the walls at my sides as they flared out, flicking
and silently groaning to fly.
He would come for her.
A deep, guttural growl rolled in my throat then burst from my lips. My voice
rocked the earth at my feet.
"No!" I roared, pulling the iron bars before me, separating them far and
wide. They moaned as they bent against their will. I closed my eyes, thinking
about Hex and how he was able to slip through the wards as if they were not even
there. I stepped through the bars and found myself pressed against the vibratory
wall. Little currents of electricity zapped against my flesh, fluffing the barbs
on my wings. I stepped back into my dark cell.
"Your strength has always amazed me, Bane," Lilith said. She was moving down
the dark hall like a ghost would move. A pale pool of light from the kerosene
Lantern that dangled from her fingers followed her.
"Release me from this ward, woman!" I growled, grabbing the bars at my face
to brace myself against my own fury. It did not help that I was famished. I had
not fed in quite sometime. The pain in my veins was thickening and spreading
like an infectious disease.
Lilith stopped directly in front of me and held the lantern up so that the
spill of light pooled on my face.
"I will never release you, Bane. Never. I have many plans for you. Plans that
will end with you brought to your knees begging me for my forgiveness. You
murdered my daughter. Did you believe you would get away with it, demon?"
"The only way you will bring me to my knees is if you find a way to hack my
legs out from under me," I said, vehemently.
Lilith smiled. I could see her ill-will for me sparkling in her brown
eyes.
"If that is what it takes, demon." She turned, like she was going to leave,
but then she paused, looking at me from over her frail shoulder. "Oh, why, I
almost forgot my purpose for coming down here. I wanted to share with you some
very exciting news!" She turned around so that the full force of what she was
about to say would hit me straight-on.
"My son will be paying me a visit soon. When he learned I had captured the
monster responsible for his sister’s death, he dropped everything in order to
come here. Osiris is not happy with you, Bane." Her gaze dropped from my eyes
and took the full length of me in. Then her eyes returned to mine. "What a pity.
Such a beautiful creature. And to think, after Osiris is through with you, you
will no longer be beautiful." She shook her head in mock pity and then turned
her back to me sharply, like a slap in the face, and she ghosted out of the
dungeon.
I was not afraid of Osiris. Not even in the slightest. Although, I should
have been.
****
Luna
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester."
"Is it morning yet? ‘Cuz I really wanna go slay stuff. Like demons and
whatnot."
Hex was still sitting in the same spot in the bay window where he had been
before I had fallen asleep. It was dark out side still, but I wasn’t sure if the
darkness belonged to the morning or to the night.
"That depends. Am I a demon you wish to slay?"
I thought about this for a moment. "Maybe," I said, kicking the covers off of
my legs.
"Then it is not morning yet."
I sighed. I was feeling restless. It seemed like I had been bed-ridden
forever. I was ready to rise up and face my world of monsters and madness. I sat
up in my bed.
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester?"
"Is Izzy doing all right? How are her wounds?"
"She is doing well. She has been resting in your mother’s bed."
"How is Roman?"
"Roman is Roman," Hex’s tone hardened.
"I can’t believe he kicked your butt!" But what I really meant to say was
that I couldn’t believe a huge, demonic angel got the freak kicked out of him
but just some guy.
"Roman is not just some guy," Hex said, defensively.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. He was in my head, listening to me from there.
"Roman is very much a beast," he said, sounding resentful.
"How did you get him off of me after he stuck the knife through my chest? You
knocked him out."
"You are remembering more, I see."
"I really don’t think that answers my question." I gathered long locks of
white, silky hair and pulled them over my shoulder to play with them in my
lap.
"My father is the Prince of the Powers of Air. I have been given gifts by
default."
"Hex?"
"Yes, Lanchester?"
"Is it morning now?"
Hex did not answer. I was beginning to believe that the darkness outside did
not belong to the night.
"Were you there? In My grandmother’s world?" I asked.
It took so long for Hex to reply that I thought he wasn’t going to answer
me.
"I was there," he finally said.
"Where? I mean, I know you possessed the Lanchester warriors –by default–
but I mean, where were you when Jade was forced to marry Lord Lanchester?"
"I was many places, Luna. But I spent most my time in a dragman," he said,
sounding irritated by the topic of our conversation.
"Why was it so important that I was born?"
"You already know the answer to that question, Lanchester. Jade revealed it
to you in your dream."
"The thirteenth daughter to the Lanchester bloodline—" I sifted through the
many new thoughts in my memory and found what I was looking for. "I’m supposed
to break the curse." I remembered my conversation with Bane when he was taking
me back to The Coven’s mansion. In my mind, I could see him: Bane wrapped his
wings around us, blotting out the sun and walling us away from the world. He
took me by the shoulders and looked down into my eyes. He stayed like this for a
moment. Then he cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes at me.
"Me," he said. "I knew you were fated to save me from me. To turn me away
from my father."
"Why me, Hex? Why not someone else? I mean, it was sealed in blood by fate
that I be the one to break the curse, but why me?"
"I can not answer that for you, Lanchester."
A sliver of red light stretched across the sky beyond Hex, flirting with the
idea of a beautiful sunrise.
"Where is Jade? She was immortal, right? So where is she?"
"I can not answer that for you, Lanchester."
"Why do I have the feeling I wasn’t supposed to wake up from that dream? Like
there was more I should have been shown?"
"Because you were not supposed to wake up from that dream."
"Well, that don’t make sense, cuz Bane cant stop me from dreaming when he
cant even spend the energy to look into my thoughts without risking the chance
that his father will get me. So why didn’t I finish the dream, then?"
"I stopped you."
"What? Why would you do that?"
"I knew my brother would be upset if he knew what you were dreaming. So I put
an end to it."
"Ok. That don’t make any sense either, ‘cuz you wouldn’t have let me dream it
all in the first place," I said, accusingly.
"I promised my brother I would not intervene or alter your thoughts in
anyway. It was the one condition he had in order to grant me exclusive access to
your thoughts. I pondered the idea of stopping the dream before you dreamt it.
It took some convincing of my self to decide Bane would have wanted me to stop
you from dreaming. Therefore I stopped you."
Yeah, so this annoyed me; demons having control of my thoughts.
"Why would Bane not want me to learn about Jade?"
"It is him of whom he does not wish you to learn."
"Why?" As I asked this, I began to think of all the things I learned about
Bane when he was possessing Lord Lanchester. Bane was absolutely heinous. He
murdered Kaneesis and King Trentis and treated everyone around him like
worthless slaves. And I had this feeling what little I learned of Bane was only
a drop in the bucket. I still had no idea how awful of a demon Bane was. The
dream helped me to believed that un-loving Bane was going to be super easy
now.
"Exactly," Hex said.
I thought about this. Bane had come to me in my dreams my entire life. He was
the breath I breathed, my souls’ embrace. He was my home, my everything.
And he still is.
I did not want to admit it to myself, because what kind of monster loves a
monster like Bane? But I did. And maybe this was it: Maybe the monster in me
loved the monster in Bane. Therefore I could never possibly fully un-love
him.
Unless, I was somehow bound to his heart like I was bound to Sean’s body.
Maybe it was magic. Or a curse. Maybe Bane put a spell on me that would keep me
loving him until the day I died. Just like I would long to be near Sean
Hylander, always and forever. It ached. It was a miserable ache that not only
disgusted me on the inside but on the outside as well. The whole idea of wanting
to be near Sean Hylander made me totally want to puke.
"What am I supposed to do with the vase, Hex?" I quickly forced myself to
think about something else. Morning was coming. The stretch of red across the
sky was brightening and slowly melting the darkness around it. I had to get by
thoughts organized before I went and slain stuff. Heck, I had to know what to
slay before I could slay it. Then again, maybe not. I was most-likely considered
clinically insane. I’d have an excuse to go on a frenzied, slaying rampage,
right?
"Keep it out of your mind, Lanchester," Hex said, sternly.
I giggled. "Yeah, kind of like keeping the fact from my mind that I got a
demon baby growing in my body?" This slipped out. I didn’t even know the thought
of Rune, and what he did, had wriggled its way out of its hiding spot within me.
But there it was, waving at me from the shadows of the words that just fell from
my mouth.
I hung my head. Frigid, black stillness spread through my insides, freezing
everything in its path, leaving me numb. And sinking me into that place of
knowing, that place where I could feel the life within me; the life of Rune’s
baby.
Hex stood from the window and moved across the room. He stopped a few feet
from my bed and ruffled his wings as if anxious to fly away from my sorrow.
I lifted my eyes and looked at him. I could see the shadow of his face,
specks of light in his silver eyes. He did not say anything, and I had to wonder
if he came to me to comfort me but had changed his mind. He only stared down at
me.
"You haven’t told anyone, have you?" I knew he would know that I was talking
about the pregnancy.
"Your secret is safe with me," Hex said.
"Bane knows, doesn’t he?"
"Yes, of course. He knew before you did."
I hadn’t planed on asking this next question because I had convinced myself
that it didn’t matter, but I changed my mind. "Where is he? Where is Bane?"
Hex looked uncomfortable all of a sudden. He took a step back, as if he could
step out of the reach of my question.
My heart quickened. Something was wrong.
"Hex, where is Bane?" I demanded, ready to burst out of bed and battle the
world for Bane, if I had to.
"Aradia took him. She brought him to Lilith."
My heart sank into my belly. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. There was
only one reason why Lilith would want to have Bane.
"Yes. Lilith plans to torture him," Hex said, but there was something he was
not telling me. I could feel it. I could hear it in the way he ended his
statement. I was about to ask him what it was, but then he said, "Then she will
quarter him."
****
Chapter Two
Bane
Lilith’s dungeon was very similar to the one in the bowls of the mansion in
Sleepy Hallow. There was a prison, just like this, in four other coven lairs.
But the one here, in the bowls of Lilith’s estate in Italy, was one I’d spent a
good portion of my time in.
And here I was again.
Lilith’s prisoner.
The bars would not have been enough to keep me from escaping had it not been
for the wards humming with thick and potent magic like an invisible wall just
beyond the iron bars of my cell.
I had beaten myself up for falling into the trap that landed me here. There
would be no escape, and I knew this. But it was Luna, the fact that I was now
thousands of miles away from her that bothered me so. She was left in the care
of my inept brother. Hex will be incapable of protecting her when the Hylander
comes for her.
And he would come for her.
I gripped the bars in front of me and squeezed them in my hands. Black
feathers dusted the floor and the walls at my sides as they flared out, flicking
and silently groaning to fly.
He would come for her.
A deep, guttural growl rolled in my throat then burst from my lips. My voice
rocked the earth at my feet.
"No!" I roared, pulling the iron bars before me, separating them far and
wide. They moaned as they bent against their will. I closed my eyes, thinking
about Hex and how he was able to slip through the wards as if they were not even
there. I stepped through the bars and found myself pressed against the vibratory
wall. Little currents of electricity zapped against my flesh, fluffing the barbs
on my wings. I stepped back into my dark cell.
"Your strength has always amazed me, Bane," Lilith said. She was moving down
the dark hall like a ghost would move. A pale pool of light from the kerosene
Lantern that dangled from her fingers followed her.
"Release me from this ward, woman!" I growled, grabbing the bars at my face
to brace myself against my own fury. It did not help that I was famished. I had
not fed in quite sometime. The pain in my veins was thickening and spreading
like an infectious disease.
Lilith stopped directly in front of me and held the lantern up so that the
spill of light pooled on my face.
"I will never release you, Bane. Never. I have many plans for you. Plans that
will end with you brought to your knees begging me for my forgiveness. You
murdered my daughter. Did you believe you would get away with it, demon?"
"The only way you will bring me to my knees is if you find a way to hack my
legs out from under me," I said, vehemently.
Lilith smiled. I could see her ill-will for me sparkling in her brown
eyes.
"If that is what it takes, demon." She turned, like she was going to leave,
but then she paused, looking at me from over her frail shoulder. "Oh, why, I
almost forgot my purpose for coming down here. I wanted to share with you some
very exciting news!" She turned around so that the full force of what she was
about to say would hit me straight-on.
"My son will be paying me a visit soon. When he learned I had captured the
monster responsible for his sister’s death, he dropped everything in order to
come here. Osiris is not happy with you, Bane." Her gaze dropped from my eyes
and took the full length of me in. Then her eyes returned to mine. "What a pity.
Such a beautiful creature. And to think, after Osiris is through with you, you
will no longer be beautiful." She shook her head in mock pity and then turned
her back to me sharply, like a slap in the face, and she ghosted out of the
dungeon.
I was not afraid of Osiris. Not even in the slightest. Although, I should
have been.
****