Night Kissed (Chosen Vampire Slayer #1) - Mila Young Page 0,21

break in the ice.”

“And what do we do if he doesn’t go under?” Seth demanded. The question was on my mind as well, but I let him have the honor of asking. Judging by the way Orion’s gaze narrowed slightly, it was a wise decision.

“He will.” The phrase rang with finality—our leader had spoken. Seth grumbled something else under his breath. Orion turned his attention to me. “Close your eyes,” he ordered. The strangeness of his command didn’t strike me until I had already done as he asked. His voice, low and insidious, now sounded in the back of my mind. “Do you sense that?”

At first, no. But then I caught a foreign vibration, hiding beneath the clutter of everything else. The aura hummed in the background, quiet, unassuming. The only thing I knew initially was that it belonged to a living creature.

“Who is it?” Even as I asked it, I understood the question to be moot.

“You are about to find out.” Orion steered me firmly in the direction from which the unidentified aura emanated. “Go and teach our little visitor some proper manners. And bring her back when you’re finished.”

I left the riverbank and headed once more into the trees. Whoever she was, she thought she was hidden. In the hush of a thickening night, I sensed her heartbeat—a little too quick. Maybe she was scared. And, well, maybe she wasn’t wrong to be. As I moved among the dark trunks, she began to move in opposition. The prey could tell she had been rousted out.

This knowledge would not help her. I was nothing if not far too adept in the search for and subsequent extinguishing of life. But Orion had said to bring her back, hadn’t he? That was something new and intriguing. Who was this individual, that I had not been granted the typical permission to kill on sight?

The game of cat-and-mouse went on between us for only a couple of minutes—as long as I allowed. She had nowhere to go but away from me, and I was the faster between us. Her pulse grew steadily louder in my ears, until I could nearly feel it with my own. Silent as a shadow, I rounded the trunk of the next tree…and heard a tiny gasp.

The human girl knelt on the frozen ground, staring up at me through huge, moonlike eyes. She had taken the chance to remain inconspicuous, efforts that struck me as pitiable more than anything. The dark hat over her head struggled to contain unnaturally bright waves of hair. I reached out to touch one of the escaping locks, momentarily transfixed. She made a valiant effort not to flinch.

In that moment, an impossible note of familiarity sounded within me, like the chime of a sacred bell. I looked down into her wide blue eyes and wondered if it was possible that we might have something, anything, in common.

“Who are you?” Her impressively calm inquiry shattered the spell.

“It doesn’t matter.” I grasped her by the arm, though not as firmly as I had meant to. She was small beneath my hands, but sturdy too. A woman of tempered glass and secret steel. And unlike the bodies I had grown so accustomed to handling, she was warm.

In a heartbeat, her free arm lashed forward, and she drove the heel of her palm into my chest, catching me off guard, which surprised me. She wrenched her other arm from my grip, and stepped back. I already liked her. She didn’t let anyone push her around.

“Why not?” The girl planted her feet as hard as she could into ground. I looked into her then, at the face of her soul, the relative newness of her life. So young and vital, and yet oddly wise. Was that why Orion wanted her? I doubted it. He had never struck me as a man appreciative of depth.

“Because.” I spoke in measured tones. “Ask me again, and you’ll be dead.” Briefly, I regretted my coarse phrasing; that type of rhetoric was usually enough to induce panic in the hearts of mortals.

She narrowed her gaze at me, her pose ready to fight me. “Fine. What do you want, then? Why are you tracking me?” The considerable weight of either courage or stupidity filling her voice was enough to give me a moment of pause. I turned halfway to see her once more. She was a mortal, wasn’t she? The echo of that one clear note haunted me. Maybe I was misjudging her. There was