Cruel Enchantment Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  GLOSSARY

  Teaser chapter

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF ANYA BAST

  WICKED ENCHANTMENT

  “A superb romantic fantasy . . . Wickedly enchanting.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Wicked Enchantment will draw the reader in from the very start and I absolutely can’t wait to read the next installment in this great new series.”

  —The Book Lush

  “I love Anya Bast’s books. Her imagination is incredible and her ability to share the worlds she develops is out of this world . . . This book was excellent.”

  —Night Owl Romance Reviews

  WITCH FURY

  “Full of action, excitement, and sexy fun . . . Another delectable tale that will keep your eyes glued to every word.”

  —Bitten by Books

  “Hot romance, interesting characters, intriguing demons, and powerful emotions. I didn’t want to put it down and now that I’ve finished this book, I’m ready for the next!”

  —Night Owl Romance Reviews

  WITCH HEART

  “[A] fabulous tale . . . The story line is fast-paced from the onset . . . Fans will enjoy the third bewitching blast.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “Smart, dangerous, and sexy as hell, the witches are more than a match for the warlocks and demons who’d like nothing more than to bring hell to earth and enslave mankind. Always an exhilarating read.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Witch Heart is a story that will captivate its readers. It will hook you from the first few pages and then take you on a wild ride. It is a fast-paced story but it is also a story that will make you feel emotion. Anya Bast uses words like Monet used paint. It’s vibrant. It’s alive. Readers will be able to see the story come to life as it just leaps out of the pages.”

  —Bitten by Books

  WITCH BLOOD

  “Any paranormal fan will be guaranteed a Top Pick read. Anya has provided it all in this hot new paranormal series. You get great suspense, vivid characters, and a world that just pops off the pages . . . Not to be missed.”

  —Night Owl Romance Reviews

  “Gritty danger and red-hot sensuality make this book and series smoking!”

  —Romantic Times

  WITCH FIRE

  “Deliciously sexy and intriguingly original.”

  —Angela Knight, USA Today bestselling author

  “Sizzling suspense and sexy magic are sure to propel this hot new series onto the charts. Bast is a talent to watch, and her magical world is one to revisit.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A sensual feast sure to sate even the most finicky of palates. Richly drawn, dynamic characters dictate the direction of this fascinating story. You can’t miss with Anya.”

  —A Romance Review

  “Fast-paced, edgy suspense . . . The paranormal elements are fresh and original. This reader was immediately drawn into the story from the opening abduction, and obsessively read straight through to the dramatic final altercation. Bravo, Ms. Bast; Witch Fire is sure to be a fan favorite.”

  —Paranormal Romance Reviews

  “A fabulously written ultimate romance. Anya Bast tells a really passionate story and leaves you wanting more . . . The elemental witch series will be a fantastic read.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “A terrific romantic fantasy starring two volatile lead characters . . . The relationship between fire and air [makes] the tale a blast to read.”

  —The Best Reviews

  Berkley Sensation titles by Anya Bast

  WITCH FIRE

  WITCH BLOOD

  WITCH HEART

  WITCH FURY

  WICKED ENCHANTMENT

  CRUEL ENCHANTMENT

  Heat titles by Anya Bast

  THE CHOSEN SIN

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CRUEL ENCHANTMENT

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / September 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Anya Bast.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44287-6

  BERKLEY® SENSATION

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® SENSATION and the “B” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my husband. Only you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Reece Notley, Brenda Maxfield, and my awesome agent, Laura Bradford, for doing read throughs and giving their opinions when I needed them.

  Many thanks to the Bradford Bunch for always being there to offer suggestions and commiserations. You are an awesome group of ladies!

  Thanks, once again, to artist Axel de Roy for creating the interactive map of Piefferburg that can be found on my website, www.anyabast.com.

&nbs
p; ONE

  EMMALINE Siobhan Keara Gallagher.

  Clang. Clang. Clang. The shock of hammer to hot iron reverberated up his arm and through his shoulders. As Aeric shaped the hunk of iron into a charmed blade, Emmaline’s name beat a staccato rhythm in his mind.

  He glanced up at the portrait of Aileen, the one he kept in his forge as a reminder, and his hammer came down harder. It wasn’t every night the fire of vengeance burned so hot and so hard in him. Over three hundred and sixty years had passed since the Summer Queen’s assassin had murdered his love, Aileen.

  Emmaline Siobhan Keara Gallagher.

  He’d had plenty of time to move past his loss. Yet his rage burned bright tonight, as if it had happened three days ago instead of three hundred years. It was almost as if the object of his vengeance were close by, or thinking about him. Perhaps, as he’d imagined for so many years, he shared a psychic connection with her.

  One born of cruel and violent intention.

  He was certain that if the power of his thoughts truly did penetrate her mind, she had nightmares about him. If she ever thought his name, it was with a shudder and a chill.

  If Aeric knew what she really looked like, he would envision her face with every downward impact of his hammer. Instead he only brought her essence to mind while forging weapons others would wield to kill, maim, and bring misery. If he could name them all, he would name them Emmaline.

  It was the least he could do, but he wanted to do so much more. Maybe one day he would get the chance, though odds were against him. He was stuck in Piefferburg while she roamed free outside its barriers. Aileen was far from him, too, lost to the shadowy Netherworld.

  He tossed the hammer aside. Sweat trickling down his bare chest and into his belly button, he turned with the red-hot length of charmed iron held in a pair of tongs and dunked it into a tub of cold water, making the iron spit and steam. As he worked the metal, his magick pulled out of him in a long, thin thread, imbuing the weapon with the ability to extract a fae’s power and cause illness.

  Aeric O’Malley was the Blacksmith, the only fae in the world who could create weapons of charmed iron. His father had once also possessed the same magick, but he’d been badly affected by Watt syndrome at the time of the Great Sweep. These days he wasn’t fit for the forge, leaving the family tradition to Aeric.

  Making these weapons every night was his ritual, one he had kept secret from all who knew him. His forge was hidden in the back of his apartment, deep at the base of the Black Tower. The former Shadow King, Aodh Críostóir Ruadhán O’Dubhuir, had been the only one who’d known about his illicit work; he’d been the one to set him up in it.

  Now the Unseelie had a Shadow Queen instead of a king. She was a good queen, but one who was still finding her footing in the Black Tower. Queen Aislinn might not look kindly on the fact the Blacksmith was still producing weapons that could be used on his own people. Queen Aislinn wasn’t as . . . practical as her foul biological father had been.

  He pulled off his thick gloves and wiped the back of his arm across his sweat-soaked forehead with a groan of fatigue. The iron called to him at all hours of the day and night. Even after he had done his sacred duty riding in the Wild Hunt every night, the forge summoned him before dawn. He spent most nights fulfilling orders for illegal weaponry or sometimes just making it because he had to, because his fae blood called him to do it. As long as his magick held out, he created.

  The walls of his iron world glinted silver and deadly with the products of his labor and in the middle of it all hung Aileen’s portrait, the one he’d painted with his own hands so he would never forget what she looked like.

  So he never forgot.

  Despite the heat and grime of the room, her portrait was still pristine, even as old as it was. Angel pale and golden beautiful, she hung on the wall and gazed down at him with eyes of green, green as the grass of the country she’d died in.

  His fingers curled, remembering the softness of her skin and how her silky hair had slipped over his palms and mouth. His gaze caught and lingered on the shape of her mouth. Not that he needed to commit the way she looked to memory. He remembered Aileen Arabella Edmé McIlvernock. His fiancée had looked like an angel, walked like one, thought like one . . . and made love like one. Maybe she hadn’t been an angel in all ways—no, definitely not—but his memory never snagged on those jagged places. There was no point in remembering the dark, only the light. And there was no forgetting her. He never would.

  Nor would he ever forget her murderer.

  Emmaline had managed to escape the Great Sweep and probably Watt syndrome, too. He couldn’t know for sure; he just suspected. His gut simply told him she was out there in the world somewhere and he lived for the day he would find her. She’d taken his soul apart the day she’d killed Aileen and he’d never been able to put it completely back together again.

  It was only fair he should be able to take Emmaline’s soul apart in return. Slowly. Piece by bloody piece.

  The chances she’d walk through the gates of Piefferburg and into the web of pain that awaited her was infinitesimal, but tonight, as Aeric gazed at the portrait of Aileen, he hoped for a miracle.

  Danu help Emmaline if she ever did cross that threshold into Piefferburg.

  He’d be waiting.

  THE fae checked in, but they never checked out. It was a fae roach motel. Did she really want to cross that threshold and possibly end up a squashed bug? No, of course not. Problem was, she had no choice.

  Emmaline Siobhan Keara Gallagher stared at the outer gates of Piefferburg. Was she really ready to take this risk? After all she’d done, all the years and energy she’d committed to the cause, she still shuddered at the thought of going in there for fear she may never come out.

  She stared at the hazy warding that guarded the fae from the human world, set a few inches out from a thick, tall brick wall. The wall didn’t go all the way around Piefferburg, since the detention compound—resettlement area was the more PC term—was enormous and the borders included not only marshlands, where a wall could not be built, but the ocean, too. It was the Phaendir’s warding that kept the fae imprisoned, not that thick wall. That was there only for the eye of the humans. An almost organic thing, the warding existed in a subconscious, hive portion of the Phaendir’s collective mind—fueled by their breath, thoughts, magick and, most of all, by their very strong belief system.

  That warding was unbreakable.

  Or so it was thought.

  “Emily?”

  She jumped, startled. Emmaline turned at the name the Phaendir knew her by, something close enough to her real name to make it comfortable. Well, as comfortable as she could be while undercover in a nest of her mortal enemies. That didn’t exactly make every day a picnic.

  Schooling her expression and double-checking her glamour—she was paranoid about keeping it in place—she turned with a forced smile. “Brother Gideon, you frightened me.”

  His thin lips pursed and he smoothed his thinning brown hair over his head, favoring her with a glance that anyone who didn’t know him would call nervous. Emmaline, of all people, knew better. Gideon was confident, dangerous. The face he presented to the world was one calculated to make people underestimate him.

  Brother Gideon was average in every way possible—medium brown hair, average height and build, unremarkable brown eyes, weak chin, receding hairline. A person walking by him on the street would glance at him and immediately dismiss him as nonthreatening. In reality, Brother Gideon was the most menacing of all the Phaendir, a black mamba in a cave filled with rattlers. While you were busy overlooking and underestimating him, he’d be busy killing you. That’s what made him extra dangerous.

  It was no secret that Gideon was nursing a crush on her. She’d been carefully fostering that crush for quite some time now, using it as an effective tool. It wasn’t a pleasant or easy thing, having a man as vicious as Brother Gideon admiring her. It was, however, a useful thing. Useful to the HFF—Humans for t
he Freedom of the Fae—an organization to which she’d dedicated her life.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” he replied in his very average light tenor of a voice. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just saw you standing out here and wanted to see you off.”

  A little over a year ago Brother Gideon had attempted a coup. He’d tried to obtain the Book of Bindings before Brother Maddoc, the Archdirector of the Phaendir, could do it. Emmaline was certain it had been a move to take over Maddoc’s place. Brother Gideon strove very hard to implement his much bloodier agenda for dealing with the fae and he needed that top spot to put it into action.

  Luckily Gideon had been caught and punished by being demoted four places in the Phaendir power structure. But Maddoc should have killed him. During the last year, two of the Phaendir who occupied spots above Gideon had met their ends in freak, horrific accidents. The murders had been brilliantly executed and no one could prove Gideon had anything to do with the deaths. Emmaline had no doubt he was behind them.

  Maddoc needed to watch his back.

  The prospect of having Gideon leading the Phaendir made her mission more critical. It even made her fingers itch for her old crossbow and it took a hell of a lot for that to happen. If anyone needed a quarrel through the throat, it was Brother Gideon. Maddoc needed killing, too, but he was several shades less threatening.