The Dragon's Hunt Read online

  Awakening the dragon

  By day, Leo Ström works as an assistant in a tattoo parlor. By night... Well, he isn’t quite sure what happens at night. He just knows that it’s best if he restrains himself.

  Ink is more than just superficial decoration to Rhea Carlisle. Her ability to read her clients’ souls in their tattoos gives her work its special magic—and it allows her to see that there’s more to Leo than his brilliant blue eyes.

  The passion that kindles between them might be Leo’s salvation. Or it might be the end of the world...

  Rhea set down her mug. “So roll up your sleeve.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of the Midgard Serpent.”

  Rhea laughed nervously. “Right. Because that wasn’t at all awkward the last time.”

  “I wasn’t present the last time,” he reminded her.

  “At least not mentally. And you said you could focus on an event from the past.”

  She looked suspicious. “Why does it have to be the serpent?”

  “Because the question I want answered— Do I tell you beforehand?”

  “It’s not a parlor trick, so, yeah, that information would be useful.”

  “Right. Sorry. I want to find out exactly when and where I got the tattoo.”

  “And you don’t want to know where you got the others?”

  Leo gave her an apologetic smile. “Not from you.”

  Jane Kindred is the author of the Demons of Elysium series of M/M erotic fantasy romance, the Looking Glass Gods dark fantasy tetralogy and the gothic paranormal romance The Lost Coast. Jane spent her formative years ruining her eyes reading romance novels in the Tucson sun and watching Star Trek marathons in the dark. She now writes to the sound of San Francisco foghorns while two cats slowly but surely edge her off the side of the bed.

  Books by Jane Kindred

  Harlequin Nocturne

  Sisters in Sin

  Waking the Serpent

  Bewitching the Dragon

  The Dragon’s Hunt

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  THE DRAGON’S HUNT

  Jane Kindred

  Dear Reader,

  Ever since reading C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair at age seven, I’ve had a soft spot for enchanted princes—especially enchanted princes tied up in chairs. Not that I quite understood why that particular concept interested me at age seven. But I digress.

  Now, my hero in The Dragon’s Hunt isn’t exactly a prince. But what could possibly be better than an enchanted prince tied up in a chair? Why, an enchanted thousand-year-old Viking chieftain tied up in a chair, of course.

  Like the prince in The Silver Chair, Leo Ström is only aware of his true self during those brief hours when he’s bound. But he happens to be bound in the chair of tattoo artist Rhea Carlisle, who has the ability to read the tapestry of fate through the ink on his skin. The ink can’t tell her whether Leo bound or unbound—or leading the Wild Hunt as a disembodied soul—is the true Leo Ström. But that doesn’t mean she can’t have fun trying to find out.

  Wishing you unexpected magic,

  Jane Kindred

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Excerpt from The Witch’s Thirst by Deborah LeBlanc

  Prologue

  Blood ran into his eyes as he struggled to his feet. The groans of the maimed and the dying around him were eclipsed by the battle cries of his comrades who remained, and by the crack of iron against leather and wood—and against flesh and bone. They never should have followed their enemy into the woods. They’d been set upon by forces they couldn’t count, swarming out from behind every tree and every rock like a band of brigands, surrounding them with no room to maneuver, no way to stand in shield formation. It quickly became every man for himself.

  Through the blood and mud caking his vision, he caught sight of the sudden arc of a battle-axe swinging down on him from his left. He’d lost his shield, and he turned and parried with his sword, but he’d taken a fierce blow to his sword arm from the last man he’d killed, and he stumbled back under the force, pain radiating like fire through his arm to the shoulder. The next swing from his opponent’s axe he couldn’t evade, and the blade caught him under the ribs, hooking in the links of his hauberk. He prayed to the Allfather as he went down that he might take one more enemy with him as he died. Let him die an honorable death. The axe descended, and he summoned all his strength, thrusting his sword to meet the bastard’s gut as his enemy fell on him.

  The blade should have split his skull. He thought he’d felt the blow. But he was blind as a newborn kitten in the muck and mud. And then he realized he must have gone deaf as well. Silence fell over him like an oncoming bank of fog, muting the clangs and cries, engulfing him in an utter lack of sensation. Perhaps he’d died. But this was no Valhalla. This was...nothing. Had Odin not chosen him after all? Could this be Fólkvangr, the field of the slain in Freyja’s domain? Or was he in cold and empty Helheim? Surely he’d not been consigned to the Shore of Corpses. He was no oath-breaker; and murder—it didn’t count in war.

  A hand, cool and feminine, touched his forehead. Perhaps this was only the in-between place where warriors waited for the Valkyries to come for them. He tried to clasp the hand but found he couldn’t make his limbs work. A cool kiss now brushed his forehead.

  “Beautiful one.” The whisper at his ear was a soothing breeze, quieting the fire in his veins with the beauty of its cadence. “You shall not die.”

  Was he to go back out to the battle? He must be in the tent being tended by his father’s slave girl. He’d lost consciousness.

  “Did I kill him?” His voice came out in not much more of a whisper than his benefactor’s, though much rougher. His throat still felt the fire that had eased from the rest of him. A fever, no doubt, had taken him. He’d lain delirious and was only now coming around. Yes, this made sense. “Did I send my foe to Hel?”

  “You were victorious. And I have claimed you.”

  Before he could ask her to repeat the odd phrase, a searing pain encircled his heart, not fire this time, but the burn of ice, accompanied by the sensation of pins and needles in the flesh of his forearms. He could neither move nor speak, and the pain was becoming intense.

  “Hush, beautiful one. Now they cannot have you.”

  “They?” He managed to croak out the single word, though his tongue felt like wool batting.

  Soft lips breathed against his. “That Which Became, That Which is Happening, That Which Must Become.”

  Chapter 1

  Summoning a demon probably wasn’t th
e smartest thing Rhea Carlisle had ever done. But the Carlisle sisters weren’t exactly known for doing the smart thing. Phoebe let dead people step into her, and Ione had picked up a dude in a bar and boinked him until he turned into a dragon, so, really, anything Rhea did after that was fair game.

  Technically, though, it wasn’t her fault. The ink was to blame.

  Rhea had picked it up at a body art convention in Flagstaff from a guy who sold his own custom blends—pigments supposedly mixed with the ash of Mount Eyjafjallajökull and consecrated under the full moon. All that mattered to her was the exceptionally rich color. It was the perfect deep poppy red with just the slightest whisper of blue. It made her think of a dark chocolate cherry cordial spilling open. Or pools of fresh blood. Maybe pools of blood oozing out of a dark chocolate cherry cordial. It was just the thing to fill in the crescent moon and descending cross she’d outlined on her calf—a symbol representing the “Black Moon Lilith,” the geometric position of the moon at the apogee of its elliptical orbit.

  It was Rhea’s way of claiming her heritage as a descendent of the goddess. Demoness. Whatever. Whether a real “Lilith” had ever existed, Rhea’s great-great-great-grand-whatever, Madeleine Marchant, had believed she was her direct descendent. It had been enough to get Madeleine kicked out of her coven in fifteenth-century France and burned at the stake. It seemed the decent thing to do to claim Madeleine’s blood. Not to mention defiant. Ione was a high priestess in that same coven today, which made things a little awkward for everyone involved.

  Before she’d even finished inking the tattoo, Rhea felt the tremors of a vision moving in the pigment. Reading the ink was her gift—she’d dubbed it “pictomancy”—and one that had been growing with her skill as a tattoo artist, but the visions were becoming increasingly intrusive, and she’d been actively trying to avoid them. They came now without conscious effort, giving her glimpses into minds she’d rather not have access to. But she hadn’t yet been able to read a tattoo on her own skin. Maybe this was her opportunity to get some answers about her own fate for once. She smoothed her thumb along the edge of the fresh pigment and concentrated on what she wanted to know: What does my future hold? Will my business be a success?

  The room around her winked out, replaced with the image of a snow-covered hill and a frigid sky blazing with stars.

  Rhea leaped to her feet as thunder rumbled over the hill, a froth of dark snow clouds swiftly gathering as though in time-lapse. From within them, what could only be a Viking horde emerged on horseback, wolflike hounds howling as they charged through a bank of snow that billowed and roiled like an ocean of thunderheads beneath the horses’ hooves. The leader of the hunt, ruddy-blond hair wild about his head, and eyes the pale, bleached cornflower blue of the Sedona winter sky, was close enough to touch as the horses rumbled right through Rhea like spectral apparitions. Or maybe she was the apparition.

  Either way, the hunters vanished as swiftly as they’d come, leaving her standing in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment—with the fully solid figure of a demon. At least, she thought it must be a demon. Standing on its hind legs, the creature was the size of a human with the appearance of a fox, green eyes fixed on Rhea. It was a weirdly attractive fox, red fur flowing down its back in feminine waves, piercing eyes rimmed in black that rose to a charming point at the outside corners, putting Rhea’s cosmetic attempts at the effect to shame.

  “Why have you summoned me?”

  She hadn’t expected the fox to speak. Which, given that it was standing on its hind legs in her living room giving her its foxy resting bitch face, seemed a little obvious now that she thought about it. The voice was decidedly female.

  “I didn’t. Summon you. At least, I wasn’t aware I was summoning...anyone.”

  “But you’re a sorceress.”

  Rhea laughed. “Sorceress? You’ve got the wrong sister. I’m just a college graduate with a useless degree and a crap-ton of student loan debt trying to make a living as a tattoo artist.”

  The fox narrowed her eyes and gave Rhea an up-and-down look, taking in the slightly overgrown shock of unnaturally blond hair streaked with rainbow pastel hues, the oversize flannel shirt, and Rhea’s bare legs. Because who didn’t tattoo herself in her underwear?

  Being made to feel self-conscious made her testy. “Just who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  One tuft of russet fur rose over an outlined eye. “I am Vixen, the Guardian of the Hunt. You have spilled blood upon the pristine snowbanks and summoned me.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to summon you. I was just inking a tattoo.” Rhea pointed her toes and indicated the crescent moon on her left calf still seeping blood in little dots against the fresh ink. “I guess that’s the blood you meant? But I don’t know anything about pristine snowbanks or hunts. I think there’s been some kind of mix-up.”

  Vixen looked offended and crossed her downy little paws in front of her chest. “There is no mix-up. I come when I am summoned. Whom do you wish to have hunted?”

  “Hunted? This is getting a little out of hand. I don’t want anyone hunted.”

  Vixen was looking decidedly more human as she observed Rhea with a slightly suspicious—and more than slightly irritated—expression. “If you did not summon me, how were you privy to the Hunt?”

  “What hunt are you even talking about?”

  “That which rides in Odin’s name to claim the souls of murderers, adulterers and oath-breakers. Odin’s Hunt. The Wild Hunt.”

  “The Wild...?” Rhea felt light-headed. Maybe she was hallucinating from low blood sugar. “Okay, I’m done with this. This isn’t happening. You’re not real. Go away.” She headed into the kitchen. There was orange juice in the fridge. Rhea grabbed it and drank straight from the carton.

  When she set the empty carton down, Vixen was gone. Maybe it was time to wrap this up for the night. She’d finished the fill on the calf piece, anyway; she could do the shading another time. And maybe it was time to quit this pictomancy crap once and for all. Rhea cleaned up and bandaged the tattoo before putting her kit away and heading off to bed.

  The peculiar incident continued to nag at her as she tried to fall asleep. It had been her imagination, hadn’t it? The whole thing was probably the result of the blood sugar drop. She always told her clients to be careful to eat something before she worked on them, and she’d ignored her own advice. It made more sense than having conjured some kind of vulpine Guardian of the Hunt with her own blood. And why a fox, anyway? As a symbol, those were always trouble. Maybe Theia would know.

  Her hand was on her phone on the nightstand, ready to dial her twin out of habit, when she remembered. She wasn’t speaking to Theia. They hadn’t talked since Theia had revealed the bombshell she’d been withholding about their father’s infidelity and his double life with a second family. How could Theia have kept that from her? They’d never had secrets from each other. Even when Rhea had gone off to college at Arizona State in Tempe, and Theia had gone in the opposite direction to Northern Arizona University, it was always “Rhe” and “Thei” against the world. Until now.

  Rhea turned and punched her pillow a few times—fluffing it and getting out her frustrations at the same time—before giving up. She sat up and thumbed through her social media news feed, trying to quiet her mind, unabashedly cyberstalking her own twin sister to see what she was up to. Nothing much, it turned out. In the past week, she’d posted a couple of kitten memes, reposted some inspirational platitudes, and posted a status update consisting of a picture of the Flagstaff sunset over the snow-covered San Francisco Peaks from her back deck, with the caption, “Snowbowl is open. It’s officially assclown season at NAU.”

  * * *

  By the following morning, Rhea was convinced it had been a dream after all, and by noon, she’d forgotten all about the talking fox in her living room. But the images of the Hunt itself stil
l lingered. She sketched out a quick drawing of the riders before heading into Sedona for the day.

  She’d spent her whole life in the town that was part provincial charm, part metaphysical tourist trap—with a dash of Western mystique thrown in for good measure—but now she was a commuter.

  The first half of the drive was dusty high desert dotted with snakeweed and desert broom and scrubby piñon pines until the bluish-gray shades and shadows in the distance differentiated into striations of burnt orange and creamy café au lait and succulent green. But from the moment the pale sandstone dome of Thunder Mountain came fully into view amid the red cliffs and mesas, it was like driving into a secret world. Being away at college had given her a new appreciation for its visual magic.

  Although she’d forgotten just how crazy Uptown could get at Christmastime. Just south of the strip where she’d rented her shop, the Tlaquepaque Arts & Crafts Village was in the grips of a full-on holiday orgy of decorated trees—and decorated saguaros—complete with strolling midday carolers in Dickensian garb.

  The galleries would be stunning at night with the glow of the six thousand luminarias now lining the walkways and walls. Rhea allowed herself a quick drive around the circle to admire the artful kitsch before heading back up the hill to deal with the mundane aspects of starting a business. Pretty much all she’d done so far was hang the sign out front, and there were barely two weeks before her official opening.

  In between setting up her accounting software, filling out DBA forms and scrubbing graffiti off the stairwell, she couldn’t help returning obsessively to the drawing of the Wild Hunt. In the back of her mind, she knew this was classic avoidance—a habit that had plagued her all through school—but the central figure in particular was compelling, as if he demanded to be drawn. She labored over the details of the wild hair and leather armor, trying to remember whether it had been trimmed with fur or whether the fur had been underneath—

  “I have to say, I did not expect to see someone like you sitting behind the counter.”