Jessica Andersen - Lord of the Wolfyn

Dear Reader,

Blood drinkers, werewolves and warlocks, oh my! Welcome to the Royal House of Shadows…. Do you dare enter this dark, dangerous and sexy world?

I loved, loved, loved writing the story of a secretive magical prince and a redheaded cop with a penchant for archery and no luck with men. When sorcery plucks them from their rightful homes and prophecy throws them together, mayhem, adventure and a hot, sexy romance ensues…and asks the age-old question: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Lord of the Wolfyn follows Gena Showalter’s Lord of the Vampires and Jill Monroe’s Lord of Rage, and next month comes Nalini Singh’s Lord of the Abyss. It was an absolute blast working with these talented ladies and imagining how these royal siblings would avenge their parents and save their kingdom.

Happy reading,

Jessica Andersen

To lone wolves and life mates.

ONCE UPON A TIME in a magical land, a dark sorcerer—the Blood Sorcerer—coveted the only power denied him: the right to rule. So he led his army in a vicious attack on the Royal Castle of Elden, vowing to wipe out the royal family and take the throne. But he hadn’t counted on the king and queen’s love for their children, particularly the rebellious, headstrong Prince Dayn….

BRANCHES STUNG DAYN’S face and lashed at the bloodred chestnut stallion he rode, but neither of them flinched. They were trained for this, had been born for it: Dayn was the king’s second son, Hart a royal warhorse descended from generations of beast-chasers. Together, they guarded Castle Island and the villages surrounding Blood Lake, and kept the foul monsters of sorcery trapped in the Dead Forest.

It was a noble role, a dangerous calling…and an incredible rush. At least, it usually was. Tonight, though, he rode in anger with his reins white-knuckled in one hand and his loaded crossbow in the other, his mind not on protecting his castle or the country folk, but on the kill itself.

Full of his master’s mood, Hart snorted, grabbed the bit in his teeth and leaped a thorny tangle they normally would have dodged around. Dayn shouted and grabbed the sturdy beast-chaser’s flowing mane, and the two landed together and pounded away, now with a clear view of the monster they pursued.

The bristling, pony-size gray creature could have been one of the giant wolves that hunted the high country beyond Elden, save for the saddle of reddish fur at its heavy nape and the golden stripe that ran along its spine. Those things marked it as something else entirely: a wolfyn.

The older hunters told of the wolfyn taking human form and seducing the most beautiful women they could find…and then killing and eating them. Those were just stories, though. And the legendary shape-shifting was a way to explain why, back when they first set out to exterminate the creatures, the ravenous beasts would retaliate by attacking at a village’s weakest point and go straight for the strongest warriors and then their beautiful wives, as if they were at war, not hunting.

Those days were gone now, the wolfyn nearly wiped from the kingdoms. The few that remained, though, were deadly and had to be killed for the safety of all.

At the moment, though, all Dayn cared about was riding hard enough to leave everything else behind—his father’s anger, his mother’s disappointment…and the look on Twilla’s face when he’d broken it off with her after hinting at marriage.

His father’s words echoed in his mind. You must wed a proper princess. You are the protector of the royal forest and your brother’s right hand. And the gods knew that dark, seductive Nicolai wasn’t settling down anytime soon, so the king and queen—and their advisers—had pinned their hopes for profitable alliances on Dayn and his sister, Breena. The very thought of it—and the argument he’d had just now with his parents—had Dayn riding hard away from the castle and its politics. He was twenty and six, and his kind lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. Yet his parents wanted to sell his life to whichever royal house bid highest. Gods and the Abyss, he wished he had been common-born.

But he hadn’t been, so he kicked on until the wind stung his face and the ground blurred beneath Hart’s hooves.

His man-at-arms, Malachai, who was riding well behind them on his sturdy gray gelding, whipped around the thorny brake Dayn and Hart had just sailed over, bellowing, “Damn it, wait!”

Dayn’s former-tutor-turned-companion said something more, but it was lost beneath Hart’s loud snort as the trees thinned and they caught another glimpse of the wolfyn. The stallion accelerated after the beast, which looked back at them with too-intelligent amber eyes, and Dayn gripped with his knees and raised his crossbow as the gap narrowed. The trees opened up around him, but he focused on the reddish saddle mark, which outlined the target for a kill shot.

The wolfyn gathered itself for a last burst of speed, and—

Mindspeak screamed suddenly in Dayn’s skull, filling him with pounding emotions that weren’t his own: rage, defiance, fear, betrayal. Before he could do more than jerk with surprise, wind whipped up around him, squeezing him in a giant’s fist of spell-power, and then yanking him clear out of the saddle and up into a rapidly forming whirlwind that suddenly spun overhead.

“Ambush!” Malachai shouted, his voice wind-distorted and quickly growing faint as the tornado sucked Dayn inward and air screamed past him.

He fought the magic that held him, but it was too powerful, too all-encompassing, a physical force that roared and keened, and then flattened, reverberating in his soul as he reached the calm at the center of the whirlwind. There, he hung suspended—seeing nothing but the moving wall of gray-brown surrounding him, feeling nothing but the magic. His pulse hammered and his muscles screamed for him to fight or run. But there was nothing to fight, nowhere to escape. Gods. What was happening? Mindspeaking was usually nothing more than shared thoughts between blood-drinking kinsmen. He and his father shared the bond most strongly, though he also had it with Nicolai. But this was something different entirely. “Hello?” he shouted. “Father? Are you doing this?” Maybe his sire sought to punish him for refusing to—

The chaos of battle sounds suddenly rang clear in his head: terrible screams, bloodcurdling roars he couldn’t place, the clash of steel on steel, bow-twangs and bellowed battle commands. And his blood ran cold at the realization that this was no punishment. It was a warning.

“Alvina!” he heard his father shout to his mother, “Go back, damn it!” Then there was a wrenching jolt of magic and Dayn was suddenly inside his father’s head, seeing what he was seeing, feeling what he was feeling.

Horror and grim determination thudded in Aelfric’s veins as he slashed at the creature confronting him on the narrow open staircase. He didn’t know how the Blood Sorcerer had gotten his army onto the island undetected, but the castle was overrun.

Monstrous scorpion creatures filled the great hall below the curving staircase, knocking aside elite guard-soldiers with their poison-tipped tails, then slicing through their armor with razor-sharp claws. As blood splashed and men screamed and died, the king slammed a bolt of magic down the stairs, driving back the ettins that were trying to win their way up the steps to the upper level. The huge three-headed ogres stumbled back, dazed, but not for long.