Book: The Moon Bunny & the Sun Lion
An Arcana Glen Sweet Paranormal Romance (click here to buy):
Dahlia was hired to hunt down a Lion Shifter who stole a deadly weapon.
Aaresh was a mild-mannered school teacher by day. By night, he turned into a monster he couldn’t control…
But when Dahlia hunts him down and he traps her in his lair, who is the hunter and who is the prey?
The loneliest portion of her run home was through a thick pine forest. When Dahlia entered the tree cover, she heard another runner’s footsteps pacing behind her to match her foot falls. Someone was following her. He was using stealth, trying to hide his presence. Almost certainly he was up to nothing good.
It was going to be one of those nights when some cocky, predacious Shifter attacked Dahlia to rob her, rape her, kidnap her or kill her.
Awesome.
She looked forward to taking out another loser who thought to prey on the weak.
Adrenaline zinged through her body, followed by the zip-zap tingling feeling of magic growing and pooling in her fingertips.
There was nothing special about the magical talent she had been born with. Like all Rabbit Shifters, her ancestors originally came from Springvale. Elemental Water magic came easily to her. In terms of her psychic abilities, she did not have telepathy, but again like many Springvale arcanes, she had some Empathy.
Water Magic and Empathy: that was all. Like being a Bunny shifter, that combination of powers suggested to most people that Dahlia should have chosen a career in something soft and comforting, like healer, counselor, gardener or cook.
Ha. Not Dahlia.
She had honed her generic magic to be focused and specific. She enhanced her natural ability to run and hide to become completely invisible through a glamour that used mist and refractions to camouflage herself in any environment. If there wasn’t enough Elemental Water in the dry Colorado atmosphere, she drew on one of the leylines under Arcana Glen, veins of magic that had been laid by mages like an energy grid under the whole area. These rivers or tendrils of magic were not native to this earthly sphere. They stretched out from any spot where magic from the other spheres was frequently used. Magic users called them leylines and tried to live near them so that they could tap into the magic the way the appliances in a house would tap into the electrical grid.
She could also create a rope out of Elemental Water that she could climb high into the sky, which she could use to evade any predator. She called that her Climb to the Moon trick.
And she had honed her sense of Empathy to detect any predator in her vicinity.
These two common abilities, through hard work, diligence, study, and practice, she had turned into three very specific and unique skills. Her techniques were all the more powerful because no one had any way to anticipate that she had those talents merely from looking at her or smelling her or knowing her kind. They were unique to her, to Dahlia Moon.
She extended her Empathy into the area around her, feeling for the predatory mind. She was puzzled. She did not encounter any hunting sentience. And yet she had the sense of being hunted. She trusted her instinct.
She adjusted her pace, noting that the one who was shadowing her also adjusted his pace. Her hearing was excellent, and she was certain her stalker was a man, either human or humanoid—at the moment—probably a good hundred pounds heavier than she was, but obviously athletic, deliberately slowing his pace and shortening his stride to match hers.
And yet she couldn’t sense his mind hunting her.
She couldn’t smell any animal either. The wind was going the wrong direction to let her sniff him, but if he was something dangerous, she should have at least been able to pick up the odor of a Wolf or a Hell Hound or a Dragon. To a Rabbit Shifter, even a Weasel or an Owl stank like a predator.
Whoever was chasing her could have special abilities as well. Special abilities that were like hers, indistinguishable from ordinary powers unless one knew how they had been trained and honed.
Either that, or the person following her was genuinely not hunting her.
She slowed down and the man following her also slowed down. She picked up her pace and he picked up his pace.
She came to a complete stop. “Who are you?” she shouted. “Why are you following me?”
The footsteps stopped.
And then, a moment later, a man swung down out of a tree, spun himself in the air like a martial artist, and landed only a few feet from her. He was gorgeous, gleaming with sweat, his hair wild and dark and uncombed.
And he was stark naked.
His eyes burned with the intensity of a pure predator.
Click here to read the whole book.
Comments