Read Online Master of Smoke by Angela Knight - Free Book Online

the way to her own bedroom, flipped back the covers, and crawled between them as he joined her.
    He pulled her into his arms and curled his big body around her like a boy with a teddy bear.
    Lying on her side, her head pillowed on his brawny biceps, Eva felt surrounded by him—not just the muscular power of his body, but the in-and-out puff of his breath on her cheek. A thick lock of his long hair lay across her face, mixing with her own chocolate strands. It felt ... good. She hadn’t slept with a man since she’d broken up with Joel. Being what she was, her nightmares could have ugly consequences for the man in her bed. Luckily, tonight had proved that David could take care of himself. It was safe to cuddle into him and drift off to sleep.
    Dreams would do no harm tonight.

    He ran with her through the rain forest, his big paws thudding over the ground as she raced at his side. He’d never felt such pure joy.
    Shooting through a tangle of brush, David plunged into a tendril of mist on the other side. The mist instantly thickened, going as impenetrably dark as a burning house. He skidded to a stop, afraid of colliding head-on with a tree.
    He listened to his breathing rasp in the blackness until it suddenly melted away. He was human again.
    Carnage surrounded him.
    Corpses lay sprawled among blazing huts, bodies twisted, horribly burned. Men, women, children, orbited by clouds of flies. Crows hopped among the bodies, pecking at flesh, cawing and squabbling and plucking out eyes.
    He turned in a slow, horrified circle. Grief tore at him, sharp as a vulture’s beak. He knew these people. They weren’t random victims of a horrible disaster. They were friends, relatives, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews.
    Yet he didn’t remember them. How could he have forgotten his people?
    “This is on your head.” The woman’s voice was as chill and acid as iced poison.
    He turned to find a Sidhe female standing naked among the bodies. Blood smeared her body and hair, as if she’d bathed in it. Her blue eyes stared out of the gory mask of her face, pale and insane.
    “How could you do this?” he whispered, disbelief and betrayal a ball of cold lead in his chest. “How could you murder our people?”
    “Our people?” She curled her lips—the lips he’d once kissed with such delicious greed. “Your people. They loved you, not me. Yet you would be nothing without me! They would be nothing without me.” She smiled viciously, spreading her arms to indicate the carnage. “And now that’s exactly what they are. Nothing.”
    Fury replaced the grief and shock with a blinding red haze. He threw up a hand and sent a roiling blast of magic right at her murderous face.

    “David! ” Eva’s alarmed shout snapped him out of the dream.
    He was kneeling on the bed, hand still lifted just as it had been in the nightmare. Across the room, one of Eva’s figurines lay in smoking fragments.
    “You blew up Batman.” Eva stared at the remains of the statuette. “How the hell did you blow up Batman?”
    “I have no idea.” He fell back against the pillow, his mind still reverberating with grief and rage from the remains of the dream.
    “That must have been one nasty dream.”
    He stared blindly at the ceiling. “It was. Gods, it was.”

    Warlock jolted up on the thick pile of cushions and silk. His heart pounded in his furry chest as he bounded out of his sleeping pit to stand there panting, fighting his fear, his clawed hands shaking.
    For a moment, the Demigod had taken some of his power and memories back. Warlock had felt them being dragged away, had felt the ruthless strength of the immortal’s mind.
    He’d felt himself weaken.
    His shaking morphed from fear to rage. Weakness was unacceptable. Merlin had chosen him to become the wizard werewolf because he was the strongest, the most worthy of his Saxon race. And Merlin had needed someone like him to make sure Arthur’s knights didn’t turn on humanity.
    For centuries,