“Well, he was,” Penny defended them. “If I’m going to flirt and proposition a man, he’d better be hot or why waste my talents?” She patted Azelie’s hand. “I sacrificed for you, dear.”
“Sacrificed?” Doug spluttered. “You were having so much fun harassing that poor boy you forgot what your mission was.”
Maestro was listening to the familiar teasing between the widows and their male friends, but mostly he was watching Azelie’s face. She was happy. For those few moments, she’d forgotten the bruising and pain of her lip, thighs and ribs, enjoying the bantering between her friends.
“We’re immortalized on the video,” China declared. “I’ll want a copy of it to show to Shaila and David. They come to all our plays.”
“It was truly our finest acting,” Blanc agreed.
Carlton threw his hands into the air. “Save me, Andrii. Show me around your property while the sex-crazed lunatics review their performances.”
“I’m going with you,” Doug declared.
Maestro stepped between China and Blanc to gently cup the side of Azelie’s face that wasn’t so swollen. “Text me if you need me. I won’t be long.” He straightened. “Ladies, she tires easily. If you see she needs to rest, come into the living room. A friend is bringing dinner, and we have rooms available if you’d like to spend the night instead of driving all the way back to San Francisco tonight.”
He got the look from Azelie, her eyes adoring, her features soft with love. His heart nearly exploded in his chest. He had that beauty when he’d never considered it possible.
“Love you, Solnyshkuh. Be good while I’m gone.”
“I love you too, Andrii. The three of you behave yourselves.”
That brought laughter from all five of her friends. Bog, but he loved that. She’d already turned his cold house into a home. He’d gotten a miracle after all.
KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEXT CAPTIVATING NOVEL IN THE CARPATHIAN SERIES BY CHRISTINE FEEHAN
DARK HOPE
In the distance, dark clouds gathered over the sea in an angry roiling boil. The wind slammed hard into the surface, creating rough, hazardous waves that rushed toward shore like angry stallions. There was little beach between the sea and the vast forest that stretched almost to the very shoreline. The canopy swayed and rocked, rustling tree branches and sending leaves and needles swirling through the air like weapons of destruction.
Darkness brought out the creatures of the night. Bats wheeled and dipped as they feasted on insects. Great round yellow eyes blinked from some of the higher tree limbs as the owls surveyed the forest floor, and the voles and mice rushed through rotting vegetation to get home. The merciless wind swept in from the sea, slamming into the stoic trees, bending them, causing creaks of protest, but the trees held as they had for hundreds of years.
The village of Nachtbloem rested on the outskirts of the forest, so close that the wilderness crept forward as if to recover the site that had been carved from the woods. Night flowers grew wild in every meadow, tipping their faces toward the moon. The village was situated near the river and close to the ocean where many of the inhabitants made their living fishing or sending their wares to neighboring countries via the sea route.
Often, fierce storms brewed over the ocean and crashed over their homes, pouring water into the river so that it reacted like a snake. The river would swell up, a thrashing, roaring serpent, spewing the frothing, maddened water from its banks to flood the roads. With the roads impassable, the people were trapped in the village until the abundance of water soaked into the ground or they managed to fix it. It had happened often enough in the last two years that it no longer fazed them.
Silke Vriese knew storms like the ones Nachtbloem experienced weren’t normal. Everyone in the village was aware the weather wasn’t normal even though the storms came consistently in the same months. It rained often in Holland, but in comparison to other countries, the weather was rather mild across the land. Living on the coast, they shouldn’t experience such violent storms.
With one arm, Silke circled a tree trunk while she watched the ferocity of the waves pounding the shore. In the distance, waterspouts leapt across the choppy surface of the water, the towering columns ominous as they spun wildly, forming more and more geysers as they hurtled toward shore.
“Doesn’t look good,” Tora Kros said, standing on the other side of the tree. She was tall and willowy with shining dark hair and gorgeous emerald green eyes.
“I think of these storms as tests,” Silke said. “Look into the clouds, Tora. You can make out the faces of our enemies.”
Tora followed her gaze to the dark clouds laced with lightning. As each cloud rolled and boiled as if in a cauldron, eyes glowed from the jagged lightning, demonic faces staring malevolently at the shore, forest, and village. The faces distorted eerily as the clouds roiled and churned. Each face twisted and turned, but it was clear the glowing, malevolent eyes were marking the village and forest, attempting to see everything they could.
“A war is coming,” she whispered aloud to her best friend. “I read it again in the cards this evening, just as the cards have warned me for the last two years.”
The tree she held on to was solid, although slenderer than quite a few of the others. She needed the grounding when she was all too aware of the land shifting under her feet. In days long past, mythical creatures and demon slayers were considered part of everyday life. Now they seemingly existed only in video games. Movies were made about vampires and evil demons. Television shows depicted supernatural beings. No one believed in these things in modern times; at least, it seemed that way. Those living in Nachtbloem knew better.
Three hundred people, give or take a few when elders died and babies were born, resided in the village of Nachtbloem. Although many people in Germany, the Netherlands and even Belgium claimed to be fully Frisii, the people living in that remote village were direct descendants of those from Germania times. The story of the battle between the Frisii and Roman invaders was always kept fresh in their minds, handed down from generation to generation during storytelling time.
In AD 28, the Frisii were the only people able to defeat the Roman army when their land was invaded. At first, the Frisians lived alongside the Romans without rancor. When new leadership of the Romans demanded taxes be paid in forms the Frisians didn’t have, wives and daughters were sold into slavery in order to satisfy the leader of the Romans. The Frisians rebelled and decided, with a small force, to attack the fortress where the leader was hiding. The Romans fought back and even managed to get reinforcements.
The Frisii were a people who, once riled, refused to quit. They got the job done. The Romans had an overpowering force, so the villagers pulled back to the forest they were so familiar with and prepared for battle. The forest held its own secrets, only known to those people long ago and to many of the villagers in the present day.
“The demons are looking to map out the land. To see the best way to attack us,” Tora said. “Notice they are particularly studying the forest.”
As the stories of that epic battle unfolded, much was lost in the translation of accounts. Many simply believed that the woman leading the battle and aiding the small army was mythical. Unreal. She was called Baduhenna and named goddess. The suffix -henna often denoted a female deity. The prefix Badw- or Badu- meant battle. Baduhenna’s daring and skills became the things of legends as she became known as the Frisian goddess of war and battle.
To the villagers living in Nachtbloem, Baduhenna was very real. In the stories, Baduhenna led her small army into the darkened forest. There, crows aided her, flying through the woods or circling above. The cries of the crows instilled fear in the hearts of the enemies as the sounds pierced the absolute quiet just before the battle ensued.
Many believed another goddess, Morrigan in the form of a crow, aided Baduhenna. She helped to bring panic and confusion to the enemy. The small force of Frisians using only light weapons, such as hand axes, had killed over nine hundred Roman soldiers in a day. In their confusion and paranoia, the Romans had killed an additional four hundred of their own men before they fled, making the Frisians the only people to defeat the Romans.
The villagers living in Nachtboem were extremely proud of their ancestors. They also believed the rest of the legend—the part history left out. That the Romans had been aided by demons from the underworld in their invasion. Without Baduhenna and Morrigan to aid them, even with their fighting skills and the affinity they had with the forest, they would have been defeated.
Legend said history would repeat itself. They would be invaded again. This time the battle wouldn’t be for their small village but for all mankind. No one knew how they could defeat a modern-day army aided by creatures from the underworld; they just knew they would have to do so.
“I suspected these storms covered the movements of those sent to spy on us,” Silke said. “I can’t command the weather the way you do, but I’ve been practicing.”
Silke was a demon hunter. A slayer. Her mother had died in childbirth, passing her gifts, her responsibilities and powerful tarot cards to her only daughter. Tora and several elders in the village had begun her training when she was a child. Most of the techniques for killing demons known to her female ancestors had been passed on to her at birth. She had to perfect each one. Learn the names of demons, what they were capable of, and how best to slay them.
She knew there was a hierarchy among demons, and some were far more powerful than others. Tora had three friends who knew demon slayers. They didn’t live close, but like Tora, they were guardians of the gate and the Carpathian species. Carpathians were nearly immortal, existed on blood, and slept during the day in the rejuvenating soil. The other three women were very generous in passing the information on fighting demons to Tora, who shared it with Silke so they could better defend their people when the time came.
“You don’t want to draw their attention to you,” Tora cautioned. “I’ve been very careful to counter their storms with a gradual decline, so they don’t notice it’s waning any way but naturally.”
Silke wished she were as adept as Tora. Tora had centuries of experience on her. Her Carpathian heritage allowed her to shape-shift and fly through the air, which Silke very much wanted to do. That was one gift she was especially envious of. Silke had discovered she had a small talent for manipulating weather, but it was underdeveloped. With all she had to do—after all, she had to eat and wear clothes, which meant working a job—time was an issue. She trained as a slayer from the moment she rose to when she finally allowed herself to sleep. In that time, she had to fit her day job into the mix. That left little time to refine the gifts she needed to develop.
“We want to keep every advantage that we can,” Tora added.
Silke nodded her agreement. “I sealed the ground beneath the village the best I could after we found Albert Friesorger dead. His body looked as if animals had torn him apart, but it was a pack of small demons. I tracked them to the edge of the sea as if they found their way to us via water, but I know they came from underground.”
Tora was much older with a vast amount of information on the hunting demons; guarding gates and destroying vampires didn’t argue with her. She trusted Silke as the slayer, with hundreds of years of knowledge passed from mother to daughter. She trained with Silke nightly and knew her abilities. That alone gave Silke confidence in herself, but she also was very aware of the buildup of the enemy. They were becoming much more aggressive, the storms more frequent and much more violent.
“Testing us,” she murmured again.
“We have to continue to look as if we fail to spot them,” Tora said. “The only thing we have going for us is the element of surprise. They can’t know our strengths or weaknesses. We must outsmart them and hope our reinforcements get here on time.”
Silke knew they needed the Carpathian warriors to aid them. There was no hope of winning an intense battle, even in the forest of secrets, without help. She was very conflicted over who would be coming. Every year from the ages of two to twenty-three, Silke had opened a package on her birthday containing recordings from Astrid, her mother. Prior to giving birth, she must have had a premonition that she wouldn’t survive. Silke came from a long line of women with special gifts. All who knew Astrid testified that she’d had special talents in abundance.
Silke had been fourteen when Astrid’s now-familiar voice had told her to go to Tora and ask questions about a species of people called Carpathians. Silke always looked forward to listening to her mother’s voice and hearing her advice. This was the first time the recording hadn’t been about personal advice from mother to daughter. There weren’t her usual thoughts on the recording or even tips on fighting demons. Astrid detailed how important it was for her to learn about the Carpathian species and reiterated several times that she was to rely on Tora to educate her.
Silke had grown up speaking an ancient language, one that Tora referred to as Carpathian. She’d asked, of course, where the origin was, but Tora had simply said she would reveal all to her in time. Silke was so busy learning everything from fighting skills to other languages that she had stopped asking. Now her mother had specifically instructed her to learn what she could about the Carpathian people from Tora.
Tora had been her best friend almost from the first day Silke could remember, even before she could walk. Tora was kind and patient, and Silke considered her family, a sibling. Since both her parents had died, as a child, Silke had clung to Tora. She’d always seemed older, although when they were children, she couldn’t have been more than five years older—at least that was what Silke had thought at the time.
“When I first asked you about the Carpathian species, you told me they were warriors, hunting vampires,” Silke said to Tora. “At that time, you said they slept in rejuvenating soil and drank blood without killing their donors. You told me they had tremendous powers, including shape-shifting and flying. When you told me that every gift comes with drawbacks, and you explained that Carpathians were nearly immortal but would become paralyzed during daylight hours and come out only at night, I realized you were Carpathian. You visited me at night, never during the day. Only once in that conversation did you mention demons and Carpathians in the same breath. I thought you meant vampires, but you didn’t, did you?”
Tora shook her head. “Carpathians view vampires as just that—vampires. They’re wholly evil and prey on every species on this earth they can. They create flesh-eating puppets and ruin the land. They have made alliances in the underworld recently. Banding together and making alliances is new, from what I’m told.”
