Page 1 of Captivated
Chapter One
Lance
Ifelt so fuckinguseless.
Four. Hundred. Years. Of waiting. Aching. Needing. Straining to feel my queen anywhere in the world.
I knew she was out there. Somewhere. I could feel her existence in the soft whisper of wind, the sparkle of starlight, and the melody of the rain.
Guinevere lived. My queen needed me. And I was unable to go to her.
I didn’t know why she hadn’t called me to her side, though I could guess all too easily. Most likely, she wasn’tfreeto call me. Or she was protecting me.
I refused to consider that she might have given up on me after so many lifetimes of failure.
I had failed her and she’d died, not once, but many times over the lifetimes of our curse. My beautiful, generous, laughing queen’s life snuffed out by bitter jealousy.
We were doomed to live out the same tragedy each lifetime. I’d lost not just my queen, but also my best friend and many of our other companions. The Round Table had never recovered. Camelot had fallen. Lancelot of the Lake was no more. On the bright side, neither was King Arthur. The man who’d killed our beloved.
The man I’d tear apart with my bare hands on sight.
In this lifetime, I had never been her knight, let alone her champion. The once famous Sir Lancelot had been reduced to hiding in a goddess-forsaken hellhole in the middle of nowhere and attempting to drink myself blind.
Urgency ground my bones to dust. Tension constantly strained inside me. Desperation warred with helplessness. I needed to go to her. I had to do something. Even if I had absolutely no idea where she was, or worse, where our enemies were, I was certain they waited for the slightest hint of a misstep.
Scowling, I tapped my empty glass on the bar. The bartender shot me a wary look to judge how drunk I was, shrugged, and poured me another shot. A human might have been poisoned by so much alcohol, but it didn’t affect most of my kind beyond slowing us down. A couple of drinks dulled the ragged edges of my nerves, a fucking blessing even for a few hours. But I would have to be careful. I never knew when the call would come, and the last thing I wanted to do was show up incapacitated to a fight.
And there would be a fight. There always was. We always died. Selfishly, I preferred to die first, because I fucking hated watching my queen die. But it was inevitable, until we figured out how to break the cycle.
Even with the roaring desperation lowered to an urgent hum, I still wanted to pound some steel, crack some skulls, and drain the blood from a couple of humans.
Risky thoughts that would damn my soul before I could ever find Guinevere. We Aima had few rules that we had to live by but feeding on humans was an unforgivable sin. The goddesses had given us great power and magic, but we couldn’t feed on humans, or risk eternal damnation.
Queens provided the stability, structure, and yes, the blood upon which we fed. Without my queen…
I was a walking, talking time bomb. It was nothing less than a fucking miracle that I’d made it this long.
I heard the door thump open behind me, but I didn’t turn around. Heavy steps approached in a cadence that I knew well, even though no chainmail or spurs jingled. Not here in this modern world of cars and cellphones.
The man leaned against the bar and jerked his head at the bartender, who immediately dropped a cold beer in front of him.
In the original legend, Bors was supposedly my cousin. In this lifetime, we weren’t related by blood or house at all. Yet somehow Bors and I had found each other, even without our queen’s call.
There was an echo between us, a resonant memory of all that had passed before. He was one of the good guys. I could trust him. Even with my queen. I knew it, as surely as I knew that Guinevere lived again. She had loved him once upon a time. She would love him again. As I did.
For nearly four hundred years, we’d roamed the remotest places that remained on earth, trying to stay sane and free, until our queen could call us.
“You’re late,” I said gruffly, turning to face him.
About my height but thicker with solid muscle, Bors was dressed like a modern human in ripped, worn jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and heavy motorcycle boots. He wore his dark hair buzzed short, giving him a mean, fierce look. Not that he needed any help looking tough with all those tats covering his arms and the scar across his forehead.
Without answering, he tipped his head back and drained the bottle in one long swig, opening his throat so the liquid poured into his body without the need for swallowing.
He fed exactly the same way, preferring to puncture the biggest vein and guzzle the resulting fountain as it poured down his throat.
My cock throbbed. It’d been entirely too long since either of us had fed, but we had to be careful. Most Aima could sniff each other out over time, especially if they were feeding. At heart, we were predators. Blood on the air was just as attractive to us as chum in the water for sharks, and Aima blood carried a special pheromone that was a dead giveaway to our kind.
I couldn’t remember all of the other lifetimes I’d lived out this dire curse, but betrayal was always at the core of my failure to save Guinevere. It wasn’t that I distrusted Bors, not at all. But if we were together, it would make it easier to kill two of our queen’s Blood before she could even call us. Until she sealed our bonds, we had no power. While we were physically stronger and faster than humans, we couldn’t shift until our queen’s blood flowed in us.
