All Chapters of Moon kissed, Blood crowned: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

TylerThe fire had burned down to glowing coals, and I let it. Too much light was a liability at night. My eyes were better in the darkness, and I needed to see or hear anything that might be following us. I sat with my back against a birch trunk, listening to the forest.The creek murmured somewhere nearby. Leaves whispered overhead. Occasionally, a branch creaked in the distance. And beneath all of it was her scent. The wind was coming off the creek, carrying it straight toward me with a persistence I was beginning to find unreasonable. The masking potion was completely gone now, washed away in the creek along with two days of road dust and sweat.What remained underneath was a problem. A significant, ongoing problem, vanilla, and beneath it, something else.Something warm, luminous, and faintly wild. Something I had no name for.My wolf had been paying very close and entirely unwelcome attention to that scent since the moment Maya Russell had grabbed my neck, fallen against my ches

Kai The inn was called The Dovecote. It was warm, with a low ceiling, and smelled of woodsmoke, roasted meat, and spilled ale. Under different circumstances, I would have been glad to see it. I handed my horse to the stable boy, pushed through the door, and stood there for a moment, letting the warmth hit me.The room was half full. Farmers occupied most of the tables, with a couple of merchants by the look of them, and a group of men crowded around a table in the far corner. They had the loud, loose quality of people several tankards of ale deep into their evening.Zane came in behind me.Then Finn and Liam followed, both looking around the tavern with bright-eyed appreciation. Liam, especially, looked like an eighteen-year-old encountering his first proper inn without parental supervision.“Food first,” Zane said wearily. “Then sleep.”“I want to ask around,” I said. “Someone might have seen something.”Zane looked at me for a moment. “Then do that quietly and carefully,” he said.

Lord Draken I was not asleep. Vampires did not sleep. Precisely, we stilled. The body’s endless, restless machinery would wind down to its lowest possible register. Breath became almost nothing. The heart slowed to a distant, occasional knock. The mind released its grip on the present moment and drifted somewhere between consciousness and its absence. It was not sleep.It was the closest thing to death that we were permitted. Perhaps that was why so many of my kind found it difficult. I had never found it difficult. I had five centuries of practice.Tonight, I had been lying in the dark gloom of my chamber, perfectly still as stone, when she came to me.She always came eventually.That was the thing I had learned about her during these encounters over the past few months. She did not navigate the dreamspace so much as drift through it, pulled by currents she was unaware of, finding her way to me the way water found its way downhill.Without intention.Without understanding.Simply t

AuroraWe rode in silence for what felt like an eternity. Questions crowded my mind, one after another, but I kept forcing them down. I had learned enough about Tyler during the past few days to know when to speak and when to remain quiet. The hard set of his jaw told me everything.He was thinking. And whenever Tyler was thinking, interrupting him only earned me brief, clipped answers. Waiting, however, sometimes made him talk.So I waited.But patience was becoming increasingly difficult. Anxiety crawled beneath my skin, tightening around my chest as the memory of the man in red and black flashed through my mind again.Valeria hadn’t spoken either.That worried me more than my own silence. She only became this quiet when she was afraid and she had seen everything.She had watched the tracker fall from his horse after Tyler reached him on the ridge. She had seen the ease with which he had handled the man. More importantly, she had seen Tyler’s expression when he returned.Valeria was

Lord DrakenTobias came to me an hour after sunset with a tense face that meant bad news. The kind of bad news that had to be delivered carefully.I stood at the open window of the south gallery, my hands resting lightly against the cold stone as I stared down at the courtyard below. Torches burned along the walls, their flames dancing restlessly in the evening breeze. Beyond them, the fortress disappeared into darkness.The night air was cool and clean. I had been standing there since the moment the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, waiting for that first breath of darkness.In five centuries, I had never taken the night for granted. The day was a cage and the night was mine. But tonight, for the first time in a very long time, the night felt insufficient. Something was wrong, and I had felt it long before Tobias entered the gallery.“My lord,” he said.I didn’t turn around. “Tell me.”“Argos has not reported in.”That made me look at him, Tobias stopped several feet away, his hand