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“YOU DON’T LIKE ME!” SHE BLURTED OUT.
That only made him smile as he bent his head close to hers, the soft tilt of his lips amused and even a little arrogant.
“I think I shall have to test that theory,” he mused softly as his breath skated across her mouth.
Then Valera realized that this tall, gorgeous, and nearly naked male was about to kiss her, and the idea that there might be something to worry about simply flew out the window. Her heart began to race like it had been entered in the Daytona 500. Her hands quickly jumped on the bandwagon of throwing caution to the wind, and she slid them over some of that heated naked skin until she had skimmed his ribs and back on her way up to his shoulders. She felt the roadwork of muscles flexing in response to her passing in little stimulated jumps.
Sagan heard a chorus in the back of his brain warning him of doom and gloom like something out of a Greek play, but there was a much stronger voice drowning it out, demanding he taste his pretty little forbidden fruit.
Just one small taste.
Also Available from Jacquelyn Frank
The Nightwalkers
JACOB
GIDEON
ELIJAH
DAMIEN
NOAH
The Shadowdwellers
ECSTASY
RAPTURE
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
PLEASURE
The Shadowdwellers
JACQUELYN FRANK
For Susan.
A fan who became a wonderful friend.
Contents
Vocabulary of Shadese Terms
Sagan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Malaya
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Vocabulary of Shadese Terms
Please keep in mind no translations are exact. These are meant to guide you to the general implied meaning.
Sagan
Chapter One
The effects of the racially engineered poison coursing through his system were wide and varied, but he quickly lost track of his symptoms as one in particular overtook him.
Hallucinations.
Sagan could barely determine reality from the wild rushes of strange things that went hurrying through his feverish mind. The priest tried to fight it every step of the way by repeating even the most mundane facts to himself. Anything to keep himself grounded in the here and now instead of launching into raving waves of nightmarish unreality.
I am Sagan. I am a penance priest, one of the five elite chosen ones of the gods. I hunt those who Sin and force them to repent for what they have done. I am a Shadowdweller, a Nightwalker, and my world is a nighttime realm of blessed blackness.
I am going to die.
Sagan actually took comfort in that truth, as well as all the others, because he knew they were valid. He knew he had lost a crucial battle against enemies of Sanctuary, the Shadowdwellers’ religious house, and the royal house of the Chancellery. The wicked k’ypruti Nicoya had dipped her weapons in the poison that now burned into him, and all it had taken was the smallest scratch for him to fall in defeat. Now she would go off unchallenged into the world to do more of her sinister evil as her mother, Acadian, had her lackeys drag him away to become her newest toy.
Provided he survived that long. And having seen Acadian’s handiwork on the scarred and tortured body of a friend—again, he took comfort in that possibility. After all, he was a man of deep faith and he had to believe Drenna would welcome him softly once he passed into the Beyond.
Unfortunately, until then…
The priest cried out as the poison scorched agony across every nerve in his body. One minute the pain was bracing and clarifying, but the next his mind became a zoo of wild images and screaming visions. One minute he thought he was in Shadowscape, running through the lightless dimension trying to escape a predator that chased him down, the next it was Dreamscape and he was the predator, hunting Sinner prey.
Everything blended and rushed together in a fury until every corner of his mind lit up with activity, thought, and response. The nerves of his body and his brain went into overload, and like the massive malfunction of an entire electrical grid, everything shut down.
Something wasn’t quite right.
Valera knew it immediately as she stepped out into the blackness of the Alaskan morning. It was winter now, and there were so few hours of daylight that it was dark almost constantly. It was dawn in other parts of the world, but in her little secluded part of central Alaska, nighttime skies would reign for quite some time yet.
Valera was used to this. She was used to the deadly brace of the ultimate cold, too, as she stepped out of her cabin to face the mountainous woodlands. Even the constant wail of the wind and scouring of snow was perfectly in place.
So what was out of place?
She wasn’t accustomed to ignoring her intuition, but it was too cold to dwell on the problem while standing out in the snow like an idiot. She hurried to get the firewood she needed, making several trips from the pile to the inside entry where the snow would melt off it, making it ready for the cozy fireplace she kept going all season long. A couple of times she paused to look around, trying to puzzle what it was she sensed as being out of place.
It was a ridiculous notion, really. Her closest neighbor was some kind of research station at least a hundred miles away and at a much higher elevation. And frankly, it was a long way off to borrow a cup of flour, so she’d never even seen the place. She just knew it was there.
She made her last trip for wood and then hurried out to the storage shed. She made certain there