Dark Possession - Aja James Page 0,57
hours ago, she could only dry heave.
Her skin was cold and clammy with sweat, her extremities shaking with stress. The witch’s words echoed ominously in her head.
A King falls in flames…
Ramses’ Challenge was—her eyes darted to the digital clock on the far wall—in less than four hours…
Eveline had an awful, terrible premonition.
Although the witch in her dreams was speaking from a long-ago ancient past, her words could be prophetic for any time in the future.
Even the present future.
As the Seer for the Pure Ones, it was Eveline’s role to anticipate and interpret these divinations. As the Scribe and now temporary Keeper, she knew without a doubt that history always repeated itself. So even if the witch’s words had already been played out in some distant past, it didn’t mean that similar events wouldn’t happen again.
A King falls in flames.
A winner loses in games.
Eveline scrambled out of her apartment wearing the clothes she had on the day before and raced down the corridors in an anxious blur to the Cove’s library.
She climbed the circular staircase that was suspended from almost invisible wire cables from the three-story domed ceiling to the secluded archival section that was tucked into a dark elevated corner. Ancient scrolls and tablets sat shrouded in mystery in their gilded cages, almost taunting her with their silence.
As usual, when Eveline reached out, the cages didn’t automatically open for her like the rest of the library did.
“Come on, you lovely, fickle things,” she coaxed, “open up for me. I just want to meet you in person. I promise I’ll treat you with the utmost care.”
She wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt and even patted down the parts of her birds-nest hair that usually stuck out haphazardly upon waking from sleep.
“I’ll be so gentle you’ll barely feel my touch,” she continued to book-whisper to the ancient tomes.
“I need to learn your secrets, my friends. I have a feeling you hold the key to a buried past, which could very well become present danger. I need your help to prevent calamities. Or at least to give them a wide berth. I need your secrets to protect someone I…”
Eveline stalled at the thought of Ramses.
What was he to her? Someone she was intrigued by, certainly. Attracted to, and that’s putting it extremely mildly.
Addicted to.
Intoxicated with.
She winced inwardly at that.
It made her seem so helpless and weak against his “charms.” It made her feel like she was no different from any other female who’d ever looked upon and interacted with him.
She didn’t like that idea at all. She didn’t like what it implied about Ramses and what it said about her. No, what she felt for him, or beginning to feel and growing exponentially by the day, was something deeper, stronger, and imminently irrevocable.
Even when he tried to bully her in their negotiations (though his bark was worse than his bite). Even when he rejected her in no uncertain terms.
She couldn’t even blame it on the Blood Contract. But she did blame it on their chemistry, confound it all!
“I wish to protect someone I care about,” she finally told the caged treasures.
“I don’t want him to get hurt. I don’t want to contemplate the possibility that he might ‘fall.’ He is a good, worthy male, I know this with every fiber of my being.”
Until she said those words aloud, Eveline hadn’t really known.
Ramses was a complex male. A dominant male. A sexual, powerful, mesmerizing male. He was difficult, vulnerable, controlled, yet also wild and passionate when he simply let go. But Eveline didn’t have a lot of evidence that he was “good.”
Jade spoke very highly of Ramses. She spoke highly of all of her former Chosen. She’d shared with Eveline that Ramses’ call sign was the “Sage.” This connoted a wealth of knowledge and wisdom.
Eveline could see it in his eyes. There was an ancient history there in those dark, obsidian orbs. And life-altering experiences across an existence that likely spanned several millennia.
He kept so much locked up inside. Hidden from observers. But she’d gotten glimpses of his past in her dreams, she was sure of it. There was no mistake who Prince Hulaal was. No one, across time and space, looked like this beautiful, sinfully sensual, magnificent male.
She didn’t recall all of the dreams upon waking, only flashes here and there. But what she did remember made her heart ache for the lonely boy he was, feared and shunned by everyone around him. Deceived by the one person he trusted.
Unloved, misled, misused.
And