Tempted by a Rogue Prince (2 page)

Bile blazed up his throat. He collapsed onto his hands and knees and vomited, dry heaving until he shook all over and his heart laboured.

He meticulously blanked his mind, killing thought after thought, memory after memory, image after sickening image, until nothing remained but cold emptiness.

His heart settled.

He stared at the black earth and his vision swam out of focus.

He needed to stop thinking about the past. He needed to stop courting the darkness, leading it on a dance as it did the same to him, luring him ever deeper into the black abyss within his soul.

He needed to think about something else.

Vail dragged himself back onto his feet and trudged onwards, staring at the ground. He recited sonnets in his head, filling it with words to keep the shadows at bay.

The terrain grew hilly, challenging his limited strength on every ascent and his ability to maintain his balance on the descents.

At some point, he crossed a border.

Vail became aware of it the moment three large bare-chested demon males teleported in front of him. Warriors. They were mostly human in appearance, but the painted black tips of the grey horns that curled from behind their ears and their vivid green eyes warned him that he had wandered into dangerous territory.

The Fifth Realm.

The three demons advanced.

Vail stood his ground. There was little point in running, and he didn’t have the strength left to teleport or call his swords to him. He couldn’t even muster a telekinetic blast to drive them away from him.

They eyed him suspiciously.

The largest of them, a black-haired brute with a thick scar that cut a diagonal line across his muscular bare chest, stepped forwards and curled his lip.

“Elf.”

Vail bit back his desire to point out that the male was stating the obvious. No other creature in Hell shared the appearance of an elf, and none other had the black armour he wore.

His fangs itched with a need to sink into their flesh. It wouldn’t appease his hunger. Demon blood tasted wretched. Toxic.

The darkness in him began to push, filling his head with visions of attacking these three males. They couldn’t give him life through their blood, but they could give him something far sweeter. Something that had eluded him for so long now.

He snarled and launched himself at the leader, slamming into him and knocking him back into the other two. They immediately attacked him, pummelling him with powerful blows that only served to unleash his hunger for violence and bloodshed, giving it free rein. He turned and took on the weakest of the three, slashing across his chest with his claws and raking them down his arms, cleaving flesh and spilling blood. He laughed as the scent of it drove him onwards, pushing his fatigue to the back of his mind.

The demon blocked his next strike and delivered one of his own, a powerful punch that cracked the left side of Vail’s jaw and snapped his head to his right. His vision wobbled and pain blazed a path across his face, numbing it. The demon struck him again, harder this time, and Vail’s knees crumpled beneath him. Darkness encroached at the corners of his mind.

He shook it off and tried to shove to his feet, but large hands clamped down on his shoulders, two on each, and the third male grabbed his arms. Vail cried out as the leader twisted his arms behind his back, almost popping his shoulders out of their sockets with the force of his actions.

“We take him and put him with the others,” the leader growled in the demon tongue behind him. “The king will be pleased we have an elf. He will want to question him about the war and the Third Realm.”

They thought he was part of Loren’s army that had attended the war between the Third and Fifth Realms on the side of the Third, under the banner of King Thorne.

Vail struggled but it was useless. His strength gave way before he could wrestle himself free. The darkness rose within him again, the mad beast snarling for freedom, caged by his weak body just when he would have embraced it and used it to escape and goad these demons into killing him.

A black hole appeared beneath him and he dropped into it with the demons still holding him. They teleported him into a dark stone room that smelled of fetid things, the odour so foul that it choked his lungs.

“You think we should remove his armour?” one said and Vail growled and used all of his limited strength to fight their hold.

“It needs to go. He’s dangerous with it on.” The leader this time.

Vail shook his head and refused to relinquish it as the three demons set to work on him, trying to slip their fingers into the neck of the black scale-like armour. He snarled and mentally commanded it to form his helm, forcing their hands off him as the scales crawled up his neck. They thickened and smoothed as they covered the back of his head and chased across his forehead, forming a point above his nose and then sweeping back over the top of his head into a series of curved spikes that flared backwards like dragon horns.

“Get it off him.” The leader released his arms and pulled at his helmet, jerking his head with the force of his attempts.

Vail snapped and lashed out at him, catching him across his chest with his claws, adding more scars.

He wouldn’t let them take his armour. It was his only protection right now when he was so weak. As wrecked as it was because he didn’t have the strength to repair it, his claws were still intact and he needed this small connection to his people. His armour was his talisman. He had never been without it. He had always cherished it. It was his sole connection to his past.

To better days.

It kept him sane.

The leader grabbed a heavy black club and swung it at him. It connected hard with his left arm, fracturing the bone. One of the others followed his leader, picking up another of the clubs. Vail ground his teeth and desperately blocked their blows, snarling through his fangs as they beat him, stripping away the last of his strength as his tired body began to give out under the pain and damage.

The third demon, the one he had mercilessly clawed, punched him square in the face, breaking his nose. Blood streamed over his lips. His vision distorted. No. He couldn’t pass out. He couldn’t give in.

His mental link to his armour fragmented. He managed to muster the strength to call a pair of black trousers to encase his lower half before the scales peeled away, rapidly running over his body, and disappeared into the twin black and silver metal bands around his wrists.

Vail collapsed onto the dirty slick stone flags, a black void rising up to swallow him.

The last thing he heard was the leader ordering the others to take him to the cells and have him healed.

He snarled, but barely squeezed the sound out from between his bloodied lips before he sank into the black void, into nightmares filled with horrific replays of Kordula and the cruelty she had inflicted upon him, a torture of mind, body and soul.

Vail swore an oath.

If this healer was a sorceress…

He would kill her.

R
osalind stared at the unconscious male lying on the stone slab in the middle of the cell. Torchlight from the corridor beyond the thick metal bars lining one side of the dank windowless room flickered across his battered and bruised body, darkening every ugly mark and deep gash, and all the blood that stained him.

Was it his or had he hurt the bastard demons who had put him here?

She liked to think he had given them hell. Mostly because she couldn’t.

He hadn’t stirred in the five minutes she had been kneeling beside him, transfixed by the sight of him. He lay as if dead. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest was indication otherwise.

His hands rested on his stomach, his wrists bound by the same heavy metal cuffs that held hers. She wanted to find whoever had discovered this metal and how to impregnate it with a spell and blast them to hell. The manacles weakened her, stripping her of her powers. The only one available to her was the ability to heal, and she only had that one because the new Fifth King of the demons had given it back to her so she could heal all of the warriors who had been injured in the war with the Third King.

A war the Fifth Realm had lost when the old Fifth King had lost his head.

A war she had fought in on the side of King Thorne of the Third Realm.

A war that had changed her forever.

Since returning her ability to cast healing magic, the new Fifth King had used her whenever he had needed someone fixed, forcing her to do his bidding, and up until today, all of her patients had been demons belonging to his army.

But this man was no demon.

Her knees ached from pressing into the damp uneven stone floor but she couldn’t take her eyes off him. He radiated dark energy that warned her away, telling her that he was dangerous, even as she felt drawn to him, snared by an unbreakable pull towards him.

Shuffling caught her attention and she looked across the unconscious man to the cell opposite his. A handsome man with long dark brown hair flecked with gold tied back with a thong and an unkempt beard leaned against the thick stone wall close to the bars of that cell, as bare-chested as her companion, although his skin was flawless with the exception of the fae markings that tracked up his arms and over his shoulders.

An incubus.

Rosalind muttered a protection spell beneath her breath, even though it wouldn’t work. It was a habit with her. She preferred to arm herself against an incubus’s charms before he could use them on her, luring her under his spell and having his way with her. Code of honour, her arse. These men pretended in public that they upheld their vow to never use their powers to seduce a woman who didn’t want to be seduced, but in private they employed those powers without a flicker of regret or care about their victim. She had seen it.

The man eyed her patient, blue and gold spotting his green irises, a sign of his incubus nature as much as the markings that announced his lineage.

“Let him die,” the man said, his voice a low growl of warning without a shred of compassion, and the swirls, dashes and spikes of his fae markings shimmered in hues of dark blue and burnished gold. Not anger. She knew that an incubus’s markings flared crimson and obsidian when they were angry. Judging by the look in his green eyes, this was something more like apprehension.

Why?

Rosalind glared at him and flicked her knotted blonde hair over her shoulder in defiance. “It isn’t in my nature to ignore the needs of another, especially if I feel I can help them, and I do feel I can help this man.”

He was gaunt though, sick and not from his injuries. His skin was sallow and grey, and he was too thin, the bones visible in the backs of his dirty hands. Many of his nails were cracked, caked with grime and dried blood.

“Let him die,” the incubus whispered. “This one isn’t worth saving, Little Girl.”

Rosalind turned her glare on him again. “Why do you say such nasty things? Do you know him?”

The incubus dropped his green gaze to the man, narrowed it, and then shifted it back to her. “Only by reputation, and if I were in your place, I would kill him and not save him. By killing him, you could be saving many lives, one this man may take if you allow him to live.”

Rosalind looked at the man in question, a cold heavy feeling pulling her insides down. She knew he was dangerous, but she knew nothing else about him. She didn’t know the incubus from Adam either, and for all she did know, he could be a compulsive liar or a sadistic bastard itching to get a hit of pleasure from watching her kill an innocent man.

She lifted her hand with the intent of touching her patient’s arm and funnelling a spell into him to sense whether the incubus was telling the truth about him, and remembered that such spells were beyond her right now. Locked away. She had never been without her magic. It was unsettling, strange, and left her feeling vulnerable.

The man on the cold stone slab before her twitched and moaned, the sound strained and filled with agony that tore at her and compelled her to help him.

“I don’t have power over this man’s life,” she whispered to him in reply to the incubus, her eyes fixed on his face, taking in the dark circles beneath his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks. “I don’t have the right to choose whether he lives or dies.”

“Because the demons told you to heal him?” the incubus said.

“No.” Rosalind shook her head and looked across at him. “Because it isn’t in my nature to do such a thing. I will heal him.”

The man scoffed. “And you will live to regret it, Little Girl.”

“I’m not a girl. I’m over one hundred years old… and do I look like a girl to you?” Rosalind stood and ran her hands down her tattered black dress, the traditional garb of a witch on duty.

The incubus’s eyes followed them, the blue and gold in his irises increasing, and he muttered, “No.”

He turned away, pressing his bare back against the bars of his cell and revealing the twin lines of markings where they joined between his shoulders and formed a line down his back that ended in a diamond above the waist of his low-slung black jeans.

At least he would be quiet now. She hoped. Healing always required focus, and something told her that this time it would need the highest level of concentration she could manage.

Something else told her that the incubus might be right. She might regret healing this man. If he was as dangerous as he felt, he might well kill her upon waking.

But maybe that would be what she deserved after the things she had done.

She had vowed to protect lives, to do all in her power to tend to people’s needs, and she had been protecting lives in the war between the Third and Fifth Realms, but she had also been taking them.

If this man was a killer and deserved death because of it, then surely she deserved the same fate in order to maintain the balance and order of the world?

She closed her eyes against the memories that welled up, lashing at her. She hated that she now knew how to kill. She hated knowing she was capable of that darkness. It scared her.

She feared becoming like her sister, a dark witch drawing on the shadowy other side for her power—the realm of death.