Lord of the Wolfyn and Twin Targets Read Online Free PDF Page A

manage.
    She tried to call for help but couldn’t, tried to tear her eyes from the book but couldn’t do that, either. She was snapping, losing it. She screamed but made no sound, fought but didn’t move. The woodcutter’s eyes grew larger and larger in her vision, until she saw nothing but the inky-black, heard nothing but the wind, and felt…
    Nothing.
    Kingdom realm
     
    Moragh snapped out of her trance as the divination was interrupted by magic of another kind—a blood-linked power the likes of which she hadn’t sensed in many years.
    “The prince!” she hissed, excitement firing in her veins as she recognized the signal’s source. Finally— finally —after all this time she could feel the spell that had snatched her prey from her. More, she could follow it. Even after the first flare of power leveled off, the connection remained inside her, throbbing like a heartbeat. One that said, This way. I can lead you to him.
    The spell had reactivated. Thank the dark lords.
    Her lips curved in a smile that the ornate, gilt-edged divination mirror showed as feral, with a hint of fang gleaming from behind the lips of a coolly gorgeous brunette in her forties. She had survived the Blood Sorcerer’s wrath over her failure to kill Prince Dayn the first time, and had eventually won her way back into his graces. But she hadn’t ever escaped the failure. And now… “Redemption,” she said, the word echoing off the cool stone walls of the castle’s upper reaches.
    Over near the hearth, her servant, Nasri, looked up from his mopping. The old, crooked-fingered gnome—who now had only seven of those crooked fingers, having recently been caught filching a meat pie he’d had plenty of coin to buy—was cleaning last night’s bloodstains up off the stonework. The water in his bucket was dark, the gray mop gory. “Mistress?”
    “Send word to the bestiary. I want the largest two ettins ready to hunt in an hour.” The three-headed giants were pure rage wrapped up with hunger, killing machines that need only be pointed toward their target. “And have the beast master reinforce their collars and control spells. I’ll be handling them myself, with you along to help tend them.”
    He cringed and whined low in his throat. “Wouldn’t you rather—”
    “Go,” she snapped with enough force to have him squealing and bolting out the door. When he was gone, she smiled again into the warped mirror. “By my life and blood, I’ll get him this time.”
    She had missed before. She wouldn’t miss again.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    Wolfyn realm
     
    A S THE BLOOD MOON EDGED over the dark tree line, a perfect blue-white circle visible through the windowed wall of the big bedroom, Dayn did up the last button of his plaid shirt and shrugged into his fleece-lined bomber jacket.
    “You could stay, you know. Be here when I get back.”
    He glanced over. A cut-glass lamp shone from the bedside table—a Tiffany knockoff that had been imported from the human realm and converted to run off the quasi-magical energy that powered the wolfyn’s gadgets. The pale glow lit the room’s earthy brown walls and finely carved furniture, both of which were subtly worked with the Scratch-Eye pack’s sigil: four parallel bloodred slashes crossing an amber wolf’s eye. The bed was piled with luxurious crimson-dyed furs, but the room’s true centerpiece was Keely. The pack’s alpha bitch lay stretched, sinuous and satisfied, her scent musky with arousal and the magic of the blood moon. Graced with the toned body of a huntress and the ruddy hair of a bitch in her prime, she was unmated and independent, just like him.
    Except that she was nothing like him. Not really.
    They met and mated this one night each year, when sex sparked the strongest of changes and the wolfyn stayed largely in wolf form for the next three days, running together, renewing their magic and making or breaking new alliances. She didn’t dare mate with a male of her kind during the blood