“Got you covered.” He glanced at Riley. “First time I’ve ever traveled with a werewolf.” And grinned at her low growl. “Okay, gang, second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
“I love you, Sawyer King.”
“Keep that up, too.” He pressed his lips to Annika’s, mentally pulled his battle-scarred friends in close.
With Annika’s arms around him, he took them traveling to where two stars shined quiet, and the third waited to light again.
The mother of lies tumbled through time and space. A storm of wind and sound whirled around her. Worlds rushed by, grazing her flesh with their edges as she fell.
As she bled—bled!—po
wer seeped out of her, drop by drop. She gripped the reins of her fury in hands that burned and burned, gathered all she was, all she had.
Weak, weaker, fading.
She dropped through the world like a comet of ice, and the earth quaked when she fell onto the floor of the cave, by the silver steps she’d created.
She tasted her own blood in her mouth, swallowed it, but had no strength to rise. So she lay, wrapped in pain.
Dimly she heard the click of claws on stone.
“My queen, my god, my love.”
Scaled hands lifted her head, stroked her, while the beast she’d created from man made guttural croons.
“I will kill them all for you,” it promised. “I will help you heal, grow strong. Drink.” It held a goblet to her lips. “Drink, and rest and heal.”
She drank, but the few drops of the seer’s blood barely touched the pain, barely cleared a single layer of mist from her mind.
But she saw now, reflected over and over on the polished stones of the chamber, the beast who cradled her. Saw her garments tattered, torn, singed. Saw a second white streak snaking through her hair.
And the lines carved deep around her mouth.
In her eyes, where lines, more lines, fanned, a vengeful madness bloomed.
It lifted her.
“You will sleep. I will feed you, and tend you, and bathe your wounds. You will heal again, my queen, and I will avenge you.”
Something stirred inside the pain, the fury, that might have been gratitude. Then as it carried her to her bedchamber, she slept, and dropped into bloody dreams.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the final book in the Guardians Trilogy
ISLAND of GLASS
by Nora Roberts
Available December 2016 from Berkley Books
A man who couldn’t die had little to fear. An immortal who’d lived most of his long life as a soldier, waging battle, didn’t turn from a fight with a god. A soldier, though a loner by nature, understood the duty, and loyalty, to those who battled with him.
The man, the soldier, the loner who’d seen his young brother destroyed by black magick, who’d had his own life upended by it, who’d fought a god’s crazed greed, knew the difference between the dark and the light.
Being propelled through space by a fellow soldier, a shifter, while they were all still bloody from the battle didn’t frighten him—but he’d have preferred any other mode of transportation.
Through the whirl of wind, the glare of light, the breathless speed (and all right then, there was a bit of a thrill in the speed), he felt his companions. The sorcerer who held more power than any Doyle had known in all his years. The woman who was as much the glue who bound them together as a seer. The mermaid who was all charm and courage and heart—and a pure pleasure for the eyes. The shifter, loyal and brave, and a dead shot as well. And the female—well, wolf now, as the moon had risen just as they’d prepared to shift from the beauty and battles of Capri.
She howled—no other term for it—and in the sound of it he heard not fear, no, but the same atavistic thrill that beat in his own blood.