Lauren Hawkeye - Awaken to Pleasure

The entire city of Jackson was being annihilated by the fire.

But she hadn’t been blind enough to miss seeing what had been done to her parents. The witches had burned them alive, right before her eyes, and Moira hadn’t been able to save them. Hadn’t even tried, because she been so paralyzed by fear that she’d run.

Not that she could have done anything. She knew that now, and yet it haunted her every waking moment—and sometimes the sleeping ones as well.

It was guilt of the survivor. But she should have died with them. And the only reason she hadn’t was because of a man—a man with a pair of bright blue eyes.

If she ever found that man, she would kill him. Moira would rather be dead, after all.

Instead, she was still alive when, numb with grief, she and the other survivors of what the world had come to call the Great Witch War struggled to pick up the pieces of their existence, to save the last of their race. She scavenged on the streets, seeking out bits of treasure to barter for food while those who were able tried to protect their kind from the witches who would leach the energy from every last one of them.

And now she was a prisoner in one of these shelters. Those who lived in the enclosed villages called them havens, but she knew better.

They were prisons. Incarceration for those who had done nothing more than act on the basic human instinct to survive.

And so Moira existed, helping those who couldn’t help themselves as a way of making amends to the parents she hadn’t helped. And all the time, she dreamed of the man who had saved her life. Over the years, her hatred for the witches slowly bled over until it focused entirely on him. Why had he let her live but not saved her parents?

It was because of him that she was still here, trapped in the numbness of her grief.

Because of him she could commit the most cardinal sin of the survivors—she could kill. Kill him.

The kicker of it all?

She wouldn’t even know him if she saw him. For all she remembered was the color of his eyes.

Chapter One

Present Day

The late-afternoon sun glinted off the sand surrounding the haven village of Mavi, causing temporary blindness even as it mercilessly made sweat flow. Moira squinted against the glare, wishing that she had brought her goggles, but months of living in the cool comfort of Mavi had softened her once keen instincts for survival. While she had remembered to wear a hood to protect her tender scalp, her goggles had remained, likely buried at the bottom of the box that held all reminders of her former career as a treasure hunter.

Well, it was her own damn fault. Her destination wasn’t far, after all, and if she hurt herself on the way, she had no pressing matters to attend to that would intrude upon her healing. Not anymore, not since she and all other humans had been forced to close themselves in the dome-covered villages that were their only protection against the dark magic that had taken over the world.

Plus, that was just what she did. She took care of the humans who couldn’t do so for themselves. And she knew why she did it, but didn’t care to think on the matter overmuch.

It seemed silly, really, to go to so much trouble for a sack of rice, but the tiny store located within the dome of Mavi’s haven had been running low, and there were others who needed it, others who couldn’t venture out onto the now barren plains of Mississippi to get it. And it was no skin off of her back, after all…not unless she ran into a witch. But those with magic ventured onto the plains even more rarely than humans did now…they had little need to, after all.

Almost there. Just a few more steps and she could step into the relative cool of Gale’s Groceries, the only building for miles in No Man’s Land. It was run by a man who was neither human nor witch, but something else entirely—she’d never asked what.

“Ouch!” Stepping on something that protruded out of the sand, Moira went down on all fours, hard. Cursing loudly, she rubbed her right ankle, which had taken the brunt of the fall, before turning to glare at the item that had made her trip. It was a tarnished silver bottle of some sort, or a lamp, and it looked old. Set deeply on one side, surrounded by delicate engravings, was a deep blue sapphire gem that glinted brighter than all of the tiny grains of sand put together. Moira’s annoyance quickly turned to curiosity. Even though it was pretty, she suspected the trinket had no real value, but it might pay for her sack of rice. If she could trade this shiny little bottle for food instead of spending some of her hard-earned and well-hoarded coin, then she would. So she tucked the object into the long folds of her cloak and staggered the remaining few feet to the store, stumbling a bit on her now slightly twisted ankle.

“Hiya, Moira.” Gale Grocer, the owner of the store, greeted Moira as she entered the tiny shack. Though Gale was always friendly enough to her, there was something about the reedy little man, with his oiled black hair and his nervous twitch, that didn’t sit quite right in her gut…something beyond the lizard-like tail that slithered on the floor behind him.

But she had braved the plains to buy goods, not to make friends, so she figured the man selling them was of no concern to her.

“What can I do ya for?”

She ignored the deliberate entendre in the man’s greeting, though she inwardly shuddered.

Moira liked sex. She liked it a lot. But she’d stick to humans.

“A drink of water would be great, for starters,” she told him tartly, shifting her weight to relieve the pressure on her ankle. “And a sack of rice. That’s it.”

Gale’s face fell a bit beneath the pencil-thin mustache that Moira imagined he shaped painstakingly in front of a mirror every morning. “Rice? That’s it?” He filled a clay cup with grayish water from a bucket and passed it over the counter. “What you coming all the way out here to get rice for? Don’t they got any in that fancy store over in that haven village of yours?” He leered a bit and Moira knew that he was flattering himself, thinking that she’d come all this way to get a look at him. She struggled to keep from wrinkling her nose in distaste and instead gulped at the slightly stale-tasting water.

“I have my reasons,” she informed him flatly, with no intention of revealing what those reasons were. “Just give me the rice, Gale.”

The man pressed his lips together sourly and hauled the woven sack onto the counter with a grunt. It bore an upside-down pentagram, a mark that made Moira shudder—this rice had been supplied by the witches rather than grown under a dome. That fact alone almost made her refuse it.

They all hated the witches for stealing what had once been their world, but not all of them had seen firsthand what horrors they were capable of.

The younger ones, the children…they had no idea. And Moira would do everything in her power to make sure that it stayed that way.

Her fingers curled over the coarsely woven bag, a shudder passing through her as she imagined tendrils of dark power woven right into the bag, grown right into the food.

She wanted to refuse the rice provided by those who had murdered her family.

But those same innocent children had mouths to feed. Bellies that could be filled with this rice.

“That’ll be five coppers for the rice, and a tin for the water.” Gale’s expression dared her to challenge his charge on the water, which any decent soul would have provided as a courtesy, but Moira said nothing. She had no wish to prolong the encounter. Where she once would have yanked him over the counter and squeezed his throat tight, just to prove a point, the relatively newfound peace in her life helped to calm her instant rage.