Jane Kindred - The Dragon's Hunt

“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 the 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.