“What is all this yelling?!”
“I’ve been hurt,” the Prophet grumbled.
“Let me have… dear goddess, man, what the Hades have you done?”
“I slipped. I’m bleeding badly.”
“Can’t you fix that yourself?” The magik sighed in irritation.
“You haven’t fed me for days. I don’t have the energy.”
“Fine.” The first magik turned to the other. “Take the spell down.”
There was only a moments silence and then a rush of sound like waves crashing on shore.
“Go, Kirios!” the Prophet yelled.
He was gone before they even knew what had happened, running like the wind itself, brushing by blurred magiks and out of their citadel. Yes, he was a different creature from the one that had been thrown into the prison. He was an altogether new breed.
Paris, 1385
“I have something to tell you.”
Kirios turned slowly and narrowed his eyes on the beautiful woman in his bed. Her long elegant lines were enticing as all Hades and any other time he would have been perusing them languidly. But her tone was not something to be dismissed. The faerie in his bed had been keeping secrets from him.
“Are you going to spoil the party, love?” he asked lazily, deceptively disguising how tense he had grown. The party he referred to was the one going on as they spoke. The young Charles VI of France had just been wed to his even younger bride, Isabeau of Bavaria, and France was holding its first ever court ball to celebrate. The faerie in his bed was a Daylight spy he had met a few years ago when tracking a rogue vampyre. She had been gathering evidence that the vampyre was a dog working for the Midnights and the two of them had collided on the hunt. Collided and then fallen straight into bed with one another. Theirs was a casual relationship, but one of mutual respect and trust. Or so he had thought. She had told Kirios the Coven had reason to believe the Midnights would use the celebration of the king’s marriage as an opportune time to attack the Daylights, who had set up one of their largest branches of the Coven in Paris. Kirios had been in Scotland at the time, hunting a particularly nasty lykan with his gang of hunters, when she had appeared asking for help. He had gladly acquiesced. They had just heard word that Richard II of England was sending a small army invasion force against the Scots and Kirios really hadn’t wanted to get stuck in the middle of his idiocy. It seemed he was forever dodging the battles involving the English and the French. Now after twenty-eight years the English were trying to pull the Scottish back into another damn war.
Dear Gaia, one war was enough for Kirios.
His people had assured him they could find the lykan without him and off he’d gone. It was, after all, a break from the tedium of hunting rogue Daylights. He much preferred the chance to cut down Midnights, whether magik or faerie, loving the complete shock on their face when they realized he was impervious to their magik; another beautiful gift from the Prophet’s blood.
“We did not just meet by chance,” she said softly, drawing the bed coverings over herself nervously.
Kirios shook his head. “I’m not sure I understand, Saffron.”
Saffron sighed. “I was captured within the stronghold of the Midnight Coven when I was spying. I was careless. Or maybe I wasn’t. He was a Cassandrian after all. He knew I was there. He told me to call him the Prophet. That he had seen me in his visions. That I would play a part in bringing the war to an end… 700 years in the future.” She shook her head in amazement. All the time she had been speaking Kirios’ heart had been racing. He stumbled over to the bed and plunked down beside her, his eyes wide with excitement. All these years and nothing. He had almost gone crazy with frustration because nothing had pointed him in the right direction. Finally, here was something.
“Only the strongest of us live that long now, Kirios. He says I am strong too.” She smiled a little shyly.
Kirios chuckled and stroked her cheek affectionately. “I’m not surprised. You’re just a baby and already you’re one of the greatest spies the Coven has.”
She blushed. “You really think so?”
He tut-tutted. “No more compliments for you until you tell me what else he said.”
“He told me about you. Nothing more… just where to find you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this when we first met?”
“I was afraid. I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
“And now…”
She laughed. “Kirios, I brought you all the way to France with false information in order to speak with you about this.”
He snorted. So that was why things had been so quiet around here; why they couldn’t find any signs of an imminent attack from the Midnights.
“Why did you not speak with me in Scotland?”