The Witch's Dream by Victoria Danann, now you can read online.
FOREWORD
Thousands of dimensional variants are anchored to Earth each one believing it is "the world", the third planet from the Sun. As might be expected, many of those have developed simultaneously with cultures expressing almost identical parallels to ours. Mystics and magicians have always been aware that our dimension is not alone.
Religions allude to these with names like heaven, hell, purgatory, summerland, and nirvana. Myths call them by names such as Shangri La and Merlin's crystal cave. They are real places on Earth. They just aren't real places on our Earth. Interactions with other dimensions are often explained as ghosts, poltergeists or myriad other paranormal phenomena. Sometimes people and things simply vanish.
Just one small deviance from our own history, here or there, could have drastically changed our reality. Imagine, for instance, what the U.S. would be like if we had reached the twenty-first century without a Civil Rights Movement. What if there had been no Henry Ford? Were you to visit one of these other worlds you might be struck by the juxtaposition of the alien and the familiar, the familiar sometimes manifesting in more than curious ways.
PROLOGUE
Book Two picks up where Book One, My Familiar Stranger, ended. Following is a brief synopsis of what has happened previously.
There is a very old and secret society of paranormal investigators and protectors known as The Order of the Black Swan. In modern times, in a dimension similar to our own, they continue to operate, as they always have, to keep the human population safe. For centuries they have relied on a formula that outlines recruitment of certain second sons, in their early, post pubescent youth, who match a narrow and highly specialized psychological profile. Those who agree to forego the ordinary pleasures and freedoms of adolescence receive the best education available anywhere, along with the training and discipline necessary for a possible future as active operatives in the Hunters Division. In recognition of the personal sacrifice and inherent danger, The Order bestows knighthoods on those who accept.
Ten months ago, the elite B Team of Jefferson Unit in New York, also known as Bad Company, lost one of its four members in a battle with vampire. A few days later Elora Laiken, an accidental pilgrim from another dimension, literally landed at their feet so physically damaged by the journey they weren't even sure of her species. After a lengthy recovery, they discovered that she had gained amazing speed and strength through the cross-dimension translation. She earned the trust and respect of the knights of B Team and eventually replaced the fourth member who had been killed in the line of duty.
She was also forced to choose between three suitors: Istvan Baka, a devastatingly seductive six-hundred-year-old vampire, who worked as a consultant to neutralize an epidemic of vampire abductions, Engel Storm, the noble and stalwart leader of B Team who saved her life twice, and Rammel Hawking, the elf who persuaded her that she was destined to be his alone.
This story begins at Rammel's home in Derry, Ireland. B Team has been temporarily assigned to Edinburgh, but they have been given leave for a week to celebrate a handfasting for Ram and Elora, who have learned they are expecting.
CHAPTER 1
It's true that love expresses itself in myriad forms. Occasionally it manifests as the perfect alignment of two beings that almost creates the balance the universe seeks and can never quite achieve. That alignment is sometimes achieved by bringing opposites together and sometimes by matching pairs.
Natives of the fire dimension of Ovelgoth Alla take their sustenance from various forms of emotion-generated energy. All Ovelgoth Alla demons are born with the ability to slip dimensions through any deliberately constructed portal or naturally occurring vortex. by a simple mental process. They are not immortal, but, like their brethren called angels, have much longer life spans than most of the humanoid races.
Abraxas demons are one of the races who call Ovelgoth Alla home. Abraxas are the spiritual expression of sex - which has two faces - the power of love and joys of mutual sharing or its opposite: domination, humiliation, sadism, cruelty, selfishness.
Abraxas demons procreate in matched pairs of light and dark. In a cosmic reenactment of an endless play of futility, light offers love to darkness knowing that darkness is incapable of receiving the gift; like offering a beautifully wrapped package to someone without hands to take it from you. Light's gift is predestined to be misunderstood, predisposed to be desecrated, doomed to be wounded.
Incubus demons are the get of a tragic match. They are not evil in themselves, just as pleasure is not evil in itself, but can be made so by its interpretation or application. Like all of us, incubus demons bear traits of both parents and are capable of expressing a range of behaviors from chillingly depraved to spiritually transcendent.
To the woman looking for true love, commitment and emotional security, the incubus is a devil. To the woman in need of a boost to her belief that she is sexually appealing and a simple body buffing, he is an angel. Incubus demons are highly adaptive and flexible. They can be almost anything to anyone. The one thing they cannot be is monogamous.
The incubus demon, Deliverance, was the progeny of such a mating between a dark male named Obizoth and a light female named Ariel. He was conceived in the deep green waters of a fossilized lava pool and, three days later, walked full grown onto the shore in all his glory as the masculine personification of lust. If Deliverance had to be described by one word, it would be irresistible - not in the ordinary usage of the term, but in the true meaning of raw compulsion that cannot be resisted.
Earth Plane X, Loti Dimension, year 7213 D.H.
Deliverance never cared much for his father. Why should he? During the near millennium of his life, he had probably not spent the total of a day in his company. Still, Terrans could not be allowed to go around offing demons with impunity, even when they deserved it.
Terran was the name given the dominant species occupying Loti Dimension by the other beings who share the plane. Terrans, of course, were unaware of what they're called by others just as they were woefully provincial, unaware of most things in the Multiverse. They referred to themselves as human.
Even though demonic family structure was loose at best, survivors of a departed who met a deliberately perpetrated end were expected to seek retribution in kind. So, in the interest of custom, as the only surviving offspring, and for no other reason, Deliverance half-heartedly undertook a vendetta for Obizoth's killing.
It didn't take long to track down the responsible party. Once in possession of the target's name, Deliverance wasn't in any particular hurry. He reasoned that, if the killer died by some other means while Deliverance was working up the motivation to tackle the chore, it would simply save him the trouble. Win. Win.
After a year had passed it came to his attention that there was some public grumbling among his more blood thirsty relatives, which meant he had run out of "reasonable" stall time and needed to start taking retaliation more seriously.
The only relative he cared about was his mother, who was too good to want anyone executed - not even Obizoth, who sort of had it coming. He hadn't seen his mother since Rosie disappeared, but he "felt" her often enough. No, she wasn't part of his reason. It was a simple equation. It would be easier to carry out a vendetta than to put up with gornishit public insults and denouncements for the next thousand years.
Sir Chaos Caelian, usually known as Kay, was everything you expect from clichés about Texans. He was six inches over six feet tall, well built and easy-going to a fault. At least that is the persona he had carefully cultivated.
The back-story is that he was part of the youngest generation of a legendary line of berserkers who had immigrated to South Texas almost two centuries ago and stayed. Kay was unique in the sense that he was the only berserker to ever work for The Order in any capacity, much less in the Hunter Division. Kay had done an outstanding job of mastering the berserker side of his psyche - so much so that he often seemed to be the only voice of reason when other members of B Team were overly emotional.
Kay loved his family, which, in some ways, would have to include his B Teammates because they were that close and had been through too much together. Yes. He loved his family and his friends. But he adored his fiancée, Katrina, whom he had identified as the love of his life when they were children. Kay had never looked at another girl in a romantic way. He'd never asked someone to dance without knowing in advance what the answer would be. Never flirted his way toward enough courage to inquire about a possible dinner and movie. Never studied a stranger surreptitiously while wondering what it might be like to be her lover.
Fortunately, Katrina felt exactly the same way about him. The phrase "made for each other" had been coined to describe the two of them, and in a few months, a lifetime of love was about to culminate in a late summer wedding that would include the entirety of the Houston Social Registry along with corporate clients of Katrina's event planning business.
A year ago, more or less, B Team had been dispatched to New Persia because The Order's Psychic Division had reason to believe a sex trafficking operation was receiving assistance from a paranormal source. The operation had turned ugly overall, but had become super dicey when Kay's berserker made a rare appearance.