"Ravenous" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Sherri L. - Horde Wars 1 - Ravenousvoto6 (html))

She braced herself by holding onto his wrists with both hands. He certainly was strong. His arm didn’t even tremble under her weight. Their breath met between them—his deep and calm, hers shallow and rapid. He brought his free hand up to lay it softly over hers. She wondered if he meant his gesture to be comforting. Oddly enough, it did serve to comfort her a little…until another wave of pain swept her up once more.

“Daemons, monsters, hell-spawn—they are the things whose blood now soak your clothing,” he breathed deeply as if scenting some fragrant perfume on the wind, “as well as your own.”

“I killed seven of them tonight.” Her voice shook with the effort of biting back her cries of pain. “I’ll kill you as well and break even with my record of eight…just give me a second to catch my breath, okay?” She knew her boasting words were foolhardy in the extreme, but she couldn’t help it. More than the pain, she hated being at his mercy, and the only way she could lash out was with words.

“Such brave boasts from so small a mortal woman. So you are no friend to the Daemons. You’ve met them in battle and triumphed. But you are a woman, not a Shikar warrior. How can this be? I sense the truth of your words, but how is it possible? You are…human,” he spat out the last word as if it were some vile epithet.

“It hurts…hurts so bad,” she whispered weakly. She could no longer focus on his words, but she was far beyond caring. Her head was swimming, her brain going fuzzy. She hated her weakness, but she’d never felt such an invasive pain before. In all her years of battling against the forces of evil she’d never before sustained such a debilitating and painful injury.

“I will leave for now. The dawn has arrived. But I will be back—and we will talk. You have caught the attention of my people, and we will have the answers we seek from you.” He pulled the blade from her shoulder, catching her to him as she fell.

“Until we meet again, woman.” He breathed the words at her ear, making them a promise. A threat.

Her world became darkness, as she fell into a swoon to escape the pain.

Chapter Two



Obsidian ran his hands over his bleary eyes. He was tired and weary after the night’s events, looking forward to finding his rest for the night. First however, he must go before the Elder and make his report concerning his altercation with the mortal woman. This was a meeting he did not anticipate attending in the least.

He should not have hurt her.

Guilt washed over him. He hadn’t intended to harm the woman, but his anger at her possible involvement with the Horde had driven his actions. He’d lost control. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, the thought that she might be aiding and abetting his enemies had felt like a personal betrayal. It was a reaction that he could not explain—even to himself. He had almost wanted to hurt her. To make her feel the pain that he felt over her seeming choice of alliances.

But then he had discovered that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Her confusion alone over his questions concerning the Daemons should have been enough to convince him of her innocence. It had only served to anger him more, for it proved beyond any doubt that she was a mere human. To his mind she therefore had placed herself recklessly in the path of the invading Horde with her heroics. The little fool.

No human had the power to stand and win against a Daemon.

Oh yes, he and his allies had heard of her victories against the evil scourges that managed to evade the Shikar warriors. Her legend had spread far and wide amongst the Shikar Alliance. But legend—myth—it was surely, for no Shikar warrior had ever encountered a mortal with the strength or cunning to outmatch even the weakest Daemon. It just wasn’t possible.

Was it?

After this morning’s struggles with one Cady Swann, mortal woman, Daemon Hunter, he just wasn’t so sure of anything anymore. He’d never been bested in battle, but somehow that slip of a woman had charged past his defenses as if they were naught. She’d actually succeeded in wounding him!

She’d marked him with her sharp teeth, a deep ugly bruise at his shoulder, and she’d nearly broken his cheekbone with her fist. It had taken great concentration to mentally heal the knife-wound in his side after he’d left her. Not to mention the other various bruises he’d sustained while trying to subdue her.

He’d elected to leave the bite-wound unhealed, as a reminder that he was not invincible. To remind him of his ill treatment of Cady. But deep down, on some primal level, he knew that he’d left the bruise because he relished bearing her brand upon his flesh. He wondered fleetingly what it would be like to have her mark him thusly in a fit of passion, instead of rage.

Bah! Such thoughts were unlike him. Where was his warrior’s honor? It lay wounded at the mortal woman’s feet. That’s where.

His humiliating wounding at her hands had fueled the fire of his temper. He’d warned her not to struggle against him, but she had paid him little heed. She should have known better than to defy the most feared warrior of the Shikar Alliance.

But now that he could repent his actions at leisure, he wished that he’d refrained from retaliating against her using his foils. He’d known that the foils would inflict great pain upon her. It was, after all, their very purpose. His species had evolved in such a way that the foils—deadly retractable blades embedded deep within their bones—excreted a fatal poison into the wounds of a foe. The poison killed slowly, so slowly in fact that the victim could well die from the pain of it long before the poison reached the heart.

He had, of course, only allowed a tiny amount of venom to seep into Cady’s wound. It had taken great amounts of mental control, but he had managed to keep her from feeling the brunt of the foils’ poisonous bite. When she’d passed out in his arms, he’d promptly neutralized the venom and healed her wound—not wanting her to die from the poison. Not wanting her to feel any more pain due to his rough treatment of her.

He’d removed her shirt to see to her injuries, and it was then that he’d noticed the vicious claw marks that ran down her back. The wounds had clearly been inflicted by a Daemon, for they’d already begun to fester and boil. He saw to the healing of those wounds as well as the other scrapes and bruises that dotted the rest of her lush body. He’d left no portion of her body unexplored, seeing to even the smallest of injuries.