Immortals After Dark 09 - Pleasure of a Dark Prince by Kresley Cole Page B

here from Scotland as well.
    “I hope they’re in town. I want to face them!” Regin stood and brandished one of the two swords that she usually wore in sheaths crisscrossed over her back—in addition to the dagger sheath she customarily wore on her forearm. “I’ll lunch on their balls!”
    That was Regin’s new threat: to lunch on enemies’ balls. “Reege, when you threaten males with that, I don’t think it has the result you intend. They think less
Lunchables
, more
tea bag
.”
    “Huh? Whatever!”
    Before Annika had left, she’d ordered Regin and Lucia to contact traveling coven members and get them home at once. But above all else, they were to make sureEmma, Annika’s halfling foster daughter, returned to Val Hall from Paris.
    Unfortunately, once they’d gotten in touch with Emma at last, the normally meek half vampire/half Valkyrie had
declined
to return. There was talk of a man she’d met—a
hot
man.
    Annika was going to go berserk. Regin secretly called their coven leader Annika the Aneurismal for good reason.
    “Dude, you’ve been antsy all day,” Regin said, sheathing her sword. “What’s wrong with you?”
    I stood up a Lykae with delicious lips and intense golden eyes who, for a time, looked at me like I was the best thing in the entire world.
    “Is it because of the new neighbors you saw?” Regin asked.
    Lucia had reported back to the coven that Lykae were encroaching on Valkyrie territory.
    “Ah-oooooo, werewolves in NOLA.” Regin gave a snort. “If they’re going to be sneaking out of the kennel, then I guess ‘out of sight, out of mind’ no longer applies, huh?” Regin had nicknamed their compound the
kennel
. To her delight, it’d caught on.
    “Sneaking?” Lucia said. “They acted as if they owned this place.”
    “Well, maybe we need to Cesar Millan their asses and show them who’s boss. Tsst, tsst!”
    “I’m sure that’d do it,” she answered, relieved when Regin’s attention fell back to her papers. Sometimes her sister could be a handful even for Lucia, especially if Regin wasn’t engaging in regular, fatiguing battles—
    Lucia tensed, again thinking she’d spied movement in the bushes outside. Was it MacRieve?
    Since the night they’d met, she’d learned much about him. When his older brother Lachlain had disappeared, Garreth MacRieve had become the
king
of the Lykae clan—though he’d never thought he’d be their leader. Before assuming the throne, he’d been wild, a ladies’ man and a brawler, so bad he’d been nicknamed the Dark Prince.
    He was the best kisser she’d ever imagined.
    And what would Lucia say if MacRieve showed?
It seems you want to have an affair with me. But I can’t have sex. Though I want to in the worst way.
Duty, chastity. Lucia was sick of them. Yet she’d had her shot to find a good man. Her shot at a normal life.
    And I blew both targets by miles.
    She squinted, identifying what had moved. A nefarious tomcat. As she exhaled a pent-up breath, she realized she’d been clutching her bow hard. This morning, she’d checked her abilities, and her skills remained intact. They must truly be penetration-based.
    Still, all day she’d held on to her bow, absently running her fingers over the raised inscriptions. Skathi had hesitated to let Lucia leave Thrymheim with that bow, because of her “darkness.”
    To other Valkyrie, Lucia and Regin were relatively young, but Lucia had lived a long time and seen many things. Never had she encountered a male who brought out her darkness like MacRieve.
    He might be her worst weakness. If so, he couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time. With a glare,Lucia glanced over at their command center. Her duty was coming online soon. She and Regin would do as they did every five hundred years and prevent Cruach from rising.
    But this time, instead of using Skathi’s golden arrow to weaken him until the next Accession, Lucia wanted to discover a way to kill him
for good
.
    One problem: the