BOOK 2 - Viktoria Ch. 01

He scanned the room again and his eyes landed on the tall woman with the striking platinum hair. She was wearing nothing but some strings on the upper half of her body, and the high slits in the sides of the floor length skirt did nothing to hide her legs when she walked.

She must not have a man, because she was unaccompanied and no man in his right mind would let his woman out of the house looking like that. The thought of no man in her life pleased him. If she was his, he would rip those strings right off of her and use them to tie her down to something waist high so he could...

Jael ripped his thoughts away from the image of her naked and ready for him. What was wrong with him? He was no monk, but he hadn’t had those kinds of thoughts about a woman since he’d been human.

The woman laughed at something, a low chuckle in her smokey voice that seemed to float across the room to him and stroke his cock. He shifted his stance trying to find some extra room in his now too tight pants. He was no hormonal teenager, what the fuck was wrong with him?

He stared at the woman, his eyes boring into her almost naked back as he followed the curve of her ass to her hip, and up the column of her spine.

She turned to face him, seeming to sense his gaze on her. Their eyes met, and something in a soul he’d thought long dead stirred to life.

His heart beat once in his chest.

Draga.

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Jael followed the woman, Viktoria, he’d found out her name was, when she left the gallery. He was sure the man who had taken her attention from him worked for mages. Jael recognized the type. When the man left Zeke followed him. Stryx had left with Ember, mumbling something about a gift for his strygoi, and taken Melchior with them, which left Jael to stalk his new favorite prey.

He hadn’t decided if he wanted to catch her yet. He recognized what his instincts told him she was to him, but in spite of the thousands of years that had passed, he still remembered having a woman taken from him by mages. And not just his woman, they’d taken his daughter too. He never wanted to feel that way again.

But he’d not been trained as an assassin then. Or turned vampire. He was just a nineteen year old human. Hardly more than a boy nowadays, but three millennia ago, he’d been considered an adult, and already married for five years. He’d been taken in by words of peace, then betrayed and devastated in a way that ripped away everything he loved. Any mage trying to take someone from him now would find it much harder. But a Draga, his Draga... he’d lived for so long without the possibility of finding her he wasn’t sure what to do now that he had.

Caught up in the past, he’d let himself slow and lost sight of his prey when she turned a corner. He made the turn a moment later, but she wasn’t in sight. There were a number of different buildings she could have entered, but her scent stopped right here.

He couldn’t track her like Stryx could Ember—not yet, that required her blood. But the scent of her, vanilla and something cool, was unmistakable. More than her scent, though, he could feel her, feel her eyes on him.

There was nothing here, nowhere for her to hide, so where did she disappear to? He waited to see if her scent returned to him, but it didn’t come. He took a deep breath. Still nothing. Puzzled, he moved down the street hoping he could pick up her scent at whichever of these buildings she had entered. It had to be one of the closest ones, she’d only been out of his sight for a few seconds.

As he reached the third building the barest swish of material caught his attention. He spun, but there was no one behind him. He backtracked, stopping at a shadow near the corner. The scent of her perfume was stronger here now.

He crouched, and picked up the small bottle and its cap. He didn’t know how she’d managed to pull this off, but his lips curved into a smile. His Draga was clever, and she wanted to play.

She would be fun to hunt.

Capping and pocketing the bottle, Jael looked around. His nose was ruined for tracking her perfume now, the scent from the bottle had flooded his senses. Where would his clever Draga go? He walked back to the corner. She hadn’t gone past him. He looked to his right. Would she go back to the gallery to throw him off? No, she would be too easily found there. He looked to his left. There were residential areas in that direction. Ahead of him was nothing. Well, not nothing, but it was the ocean, there was nowhere—

He smiled. His Draga would go to the ocean.

He crossed the street and looked down at the beach. There, to the left almost out of his range of vision, a flash of almost-white hair.

She led him on a merry chase and had almost lost him a few times. Almost. Lost. Him! She had disappeared around a corner, hid her scent in the ocean, vanished in front of his eyes, and somehow doubled back to get behind him. His Draga was good. He’d never hunted prey like her before, and he still hadn’t figured out how she was pulling some of her tricks, but in the end she had come to roost in her home and he had followed her there.

It was a brick, two story house, set on a large acreage of woodlands. She probably had views of the ocean from here—the crash and hiss of waves surging onto the beach and receding into the ocean sounded inches away, not across the street and down a hill. Tall walls and massive trees provided privacy from her neighbors. Lights came on and went off as she moved through the house until only one stayed on in a room on the second story.

Jael scaled the wall, swung into one of the large trees, and over the railing of a wide balcony, built on top of the covered porch that ran the length of the house below it.

She opened French doors leading into what he could now see was her bedroom and turned away, leaving them standing wide open. He felt a pang of disappointment at how unprotected her home was. Anyone could get to her here. He had expected more from her after the difficulties she’d given him when he stalked her. Did she think she’d managed to lose him after all? Did she imagine she was safe?

Jael hadn’t seen the man that had spoken to Viktoria at the gallery following her, so she probably wasn’t in any danger, but she needed to be more cautious. He sent a text to Zeke asking where the man went to make sure he was far from her home. Zeke texted back he was still following him, and they were nowhere near Viktoria’s house.

Now that he knew where his Draga lived he could find her whenever he wanted. They still had the mage who had hurt Ember locked up. Jael toyed with the idea of returning to the compound and interrogating him again. Mages always said they didn’t know anything else, but Jael had discovered he was a much better judge of when they didn’t know anything else than they were. Their mage still had some secrets, and Jael would not let him die until he spilled them all.

The mage wasn’t going anywhere, Jael reasoned. He should stay here. Not because he was stalking his Draga. No, he needed to stay to make sure no more mage minions were coming for her. They tended to work in teams, and where there was one, there would be more. It was still early, not even midnight yet. There were hours until he had to return to the compound before sunrise.