A Stone-Kissed Sea Read online

  Contents

  A Stone-Kissed Sea

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Saba I

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Saba II

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Saba III

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Saba IV

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Saba V

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Connect with Elizabeth

  From the Author

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Hunter

  Copyright

  An immortal wanderer. A brilliant scientist. A centuries-old menace written in blood.

  A STONE-KISSED SEA

  Lucien Thrax, son of the earth and child of the ancients, is a healer of immense power. But years of work on a deadly vampire virus have not led to a cure, nor have they softened the wall he built around his heart. When he’s forced to work with Dr. Makeda Abel, Lucien is convinced he’s reached the limit of his patience with humanity.

  Makeda Abel may be human, but she’s far from impressed with the brooding vampire healer even if his mind draws her admiration. She’s learned how to survive in the immortal world, and it’s not by being timid. Working together may lead them to answers, but it also pushes Lucien and Makeda’s reluctant attraction to the boiling point.

  When nightmares become reality, Makeda will have to trust Lucien with her life. Finding answers has never been more vital. Finding love has never been more deadly. To heal the Elemental World, Lucien and Makeda must follow ancient paths and ask for help from the most inhuman of immortals. Because even with a cure in hand, the battle has only begun.

  A Stone-Kissed Sea

  Elemental World Book Four

  ELIZABETH HUNTER

  To the people and country of Ethiopia

  She sends out her children Threaded through time Mother.

  Land.

  And every blood, every line Her diaspora.

  Her sons, rooted in earth Her daughters, reaching to heaven Immense.

  Larger than a single branch, unaware we are the tree.

  Errant children who wander Crossing seas and mountains until We return.

  Rest.

  Look out across her belly, see the world born at dawn and finally

  Finally.

  Understand home.

  —E.H.

  Prologue

  “Makeda!”

  His face swam in and out of Makeda’s vision. Not him. He couldn’t be the last thing she saw.

  Not him.

  Chipped-granite eyes in a coldly handsome face. Hard eyes. Hard face. Planed and ancient like the earth he controlled. Old eyes. Young face. His shaggy, rain-soaked hair dripped water onto her lips. She closed them as another stab of pain hit her chest.

  “Dr. Abel,” he said, “stay awake. Emergency services are on the way.”

  Images swam to the surface of Makeda’s mind. Her mother laughing in the kitchen and her father behind his desk. The sun setting over the ocean near their home on the Puget Sound. She could hear the crashing water that reached the cliffs in this place she loved and hated.

  Love and hate.

  Like two beings struggling beneath her skin.

  Always always always.

  Torn in two. Something in her was so torn.

  “Makeda!” He slapped her, and she took a sharp breath.

  The quick inhalation hurt so badly she felt the tears come. They wet her cheeks like the mist rolling off the ocean. She could hear it. Hear the tide going out.

  No. No, she was too far. Too far from the sea.

  Wasn’t she?

  Her heart. It pulsed in her ears, surging, then falling off. Waves receding.

  “Makeda, stay awake.”

  Tired. Hurts.

  “I know it hurts.” Another slap. Harder this time. “Stay awake, dammit!”

  Not him. She didn’t want to see him. She was dying, and it was his fault. Makeda felt him bend over, put his mouth at her ear, his breath cold because he couldn’t be bothered to heat it. Couldn’t be bothered with even a semblance of humanity to comfort her. She wanted her mother. Her sisters. She wanted home.

  “Yene konjo,” he whispered, “you may hate me, but I will not let you die.”

  Unbidden, old images came to her, aching scenes from her childhood. Mountains rising above the mist, sweeping ranges covered by a blanket of green. Raw beauty covered by dense clouds and a sky pregnant with rain.

  Rain.

  She felt it falling on her cheeks. Her forehead. Her lips.

  Another slap to her cheek, but Makeda decided not to breathe. Not this time.

  It hurt too much.

  Everything hurt…

  “Makeda!”

  ❖

  Baojia knelt next to Lucien, surprised to find the usually composed doctor in a silent panic. When he knelt down and examined the human, he understood why. The woman’s body was a crumpled heap. She’d been dragged away from the wreckage of the Jeep, which had spun out on the wet roads, the vehicle tumbled on its side and wrapped around a tree, lying on the drenched ground, as broken as the human stretched out in the mud.

  Lucien began to administer CPR.

  “The ambulance will not get here in time,” Baojia said quietly. “Lucien—”

  “I’ve stabilized her as much as I can, but she’s lost too much blood.” Lucien didn’t take his eyes off the woman. Didn’t stop the chest compressions or the respiration. “She needs blood. I can’t do anything more without it, and we don’t have enough at the clinic. We don’t…” A strangled laugh burst from his throat. “We don’t have enough blood! How can we be short of blood?”

  The blood they kept at the clinic was preserved blood for vampire sustenance or samples for laboratory testing. None of it could be transfused into a human. No one had planned for donor blood. They hadn’t thought there was a need.

  Lucien said, “The ambulance will get here in time.”

  Baojia put a hand on Lucien’s shoulder. “My friend—”

  “No!” Lucien shoved Baojia’s hand away. The vampire’s face turned feral and his fangs dropped. He looked toward the muddy road leading to the isolated compound on the Northern California coast, his eyes searching.

  Nothing but sheets of rain blanketing the isolated cliffs that jutted over the sea. The storm had rolled in suddenly and brought high winds and a deluge.

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  “It was an accident.”

  “This is my…” Lucien’s eyes turned from wild to calculating in a second. “I call.”

  “What?” Baojia’s eyes widened. “No.”

  “That’s not the deal. No questions, remember? No obligations. I’m calling. Do it now.”

  “For her?”

  “Yes.”

  Everything honorable in Baojia rebelled at the thought. “She doesn’t want this. We both know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lucien said. “She was coming here tonight because she said she’d had a breakthrough.”

  “A breakthro
ugh? This is about more than the Elixir. She did not want to be a vampire, Lucien.”

  Lucien grabbed him by the throat, and Baojia felt the earth rise up and grip his legs. He was reminded in a heartbeat that the immortal in front of him wasn’t just a healer with stunning intellect but an ancient killer, one with thousands of years of survival behind him.

  “You will change her,” Lucien said calmly. “We have a deal. Do it now because she is dying. Do it now, Baojia.”

  Baojia hesitated a fraction of a second before he saw something in his friend’s eyes.

  Something he recognized.

  He shoved Lucien back and let his fangs fall. He felt the earth around his legs recede as he picked up the body of the tall woman who had become a respected colleague—a friend—and put his teeth to her neck.

  From that night on, she’d be far more than a colleague or a friend.

  She would be his immortal child.

  Baojia struck quickly. Makeda’s heartbeat was already faltering. He would have to be very, very fast. He could feel Lucien watching his every move, feel the ancient vampire’s focused attention.

  “I give you my word, Baojia,” he said quietly. “I’ll kill her myself if she hates this life. I promise you. But right now I need her mind.”

  Oh, my friend. Baojia said nothing as he drained the blood from Dr. Makeda Abel’s body. You need far more than that.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Near Chencha, Ethiopia

  2012

  The first thing Lucien remembered when he woke from death was the familiar sound of his mother’s people. The staccato rhythm of Amharic dropped around him like rain hitting dusty earth. He opened his eyes to darkness, but the musky scent of burning bamboo and the mixed accents told him he was high in the mountains.

  The last thing he remembered was intense heat and the sound of trickling water in the courtyard in Rome where he’d waited for dawn, hoping to end the confusion and suffering of his plague-ridden mind.

  “I’m tired… I’m so tired.”

  Now he lay in a round tukul, the faint glow from the fire enough to illuminate the distinctive bamboo house recognizable for its twin smoke vents and bamboo screens. He was far from the heat of the Mediterranean. He was in Ethiopia, in the mountains of the Dorze people, high in one of his mother’s remote compounds above the sister lakes of Abaya and Chamo.

  And he was alive.

  Damn.

  His hair fell nearly to his shoulders, a shaggy brown and silver mix incongruous with a face humans usually assumed to be near thirty years. Saba must have given him a hell of a lot of blood for his hair to have grown that long. He reached up and touched his face, remembering the ache of the sun burning his skin.

  “My son. My lovely child, what have you done?”

  A wave of guilt at the memory of his mother’s voice.

  He was tired in spirit, but his body had not felt this strong in years. He could feel the hum of energy as the earth held him. He was stripped to his skin, the dark red soil rising from the Great Rift Valley cradling his body. The ancient energy soaked into him, making his blood and his mind race.

  Home.

  If there was any place on the earth that was home to him, it was this one. These mountains. Perhaps some might call it a strange thought for a pale, foreign creature who lived in the shadows, but this was the place Saba had brought him when he’d first been sired to immortal life. This was the place where the earth first fell under his aegis and the land spoke to him. Home wasn’t the blood-soaked forests of Europe where his human life had come to an end. It was here.

  Something in his soul realigned as he lay in the furrowed earth of his mother’s land.

  Life. The long, aching, glorious stretch of it appeared before his mind’s eye.

  Life.

  Or some imitation of it.

  Lucien closed his eyes and let himself fall back into sleep.

  ❖

  2013

  “You need to leave,” Saba said.

  Lucien swung the sharp-bladed hoe into the earth in time with the human next to him. Though he could turn the earth faster on his own—could upend the whole of the topsoil with his amnis—the rhythmic labor with the men around him satisfied something essential. Though he did not sweat, the mist on the mountainside had gathered on his bare chest and arms. A fire burned nearby, warming the men who worked beside him. They were readying the fields for planting maize, the steep mountainside too difficult for the horse-drawn plow to traverse.

  “Stop,” his mother said. “And listen to me.”

  Ever the faithful child, Lucien stepped away and handed the hoe to one of the men by the fire.

  He wiped the mist from his face, feeling a smear of grit across his cheek. He glanced down at Saba, who stood in the gathering dusk watching the humans who continued working.

  “I’m listening, Emaye,” he said.

  “Yene Luka…” She put her hand on his cheek. “When will you decide to live again?”

  Lucien took a deep breath, tasting the night air and the turned earth. “What do you want from me?”

  “You are my beloved son. I want you to be a man of honor and usefulness.”

  Lucien smiled. A mother in the modern world might have answered “happiness” or “contentment” when asked what she wanted for her child. Saba was not a modern mother. From her regal profile to the scars decorating her body in whirling spirals, his sire was a proud reflection of an ancient past. The oldest known vampire of their race didn’t remember how she had come to be. She’d forgotten more than he’d ever learned. But some traits were eternal.

  From ancient times to modern, mothers nagged their sons.

  “Am I not a man of honor?” he asked.

  “You are one of the finest men I know,” Saba said, her chin lifting. “But you are not useful here.”

  He glanced at the half-plowed field and raised his eyebrows.

  Saba lifted her hand as if she would strike him. She didn’t, but the empty threat made Lucien smile.

  “Do you think me stupid?” She nudged him away from the field and down the muddy path back to the village. “You’re hiding.”

  A stabbing pain in his chest. “I’m mourning.”

  Her eyes, dark as the night sky, softened. “Mourn her, but do not despair. She was not your true mate.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, his voice frustratingly raw.

  Rada’s ghost haunted him. He’d returned to her at the end of her short mortal life, desperate to try anything to cure the cancer riddling her body. His own blood could not heal her. But he had tried everything to save her, including infecting her with Elixir. What he thought was a cure turned into a plague that eventually took her life.

  And nearly took his.

  “She didn’t choose you.” Saba turned to him. “Love her memory, but do not forget that truth. In the end, Luka, she chose a human life and a human death. Your true mate would have chosen you.”

  Bitterness stained his tongue as images of his lost love flipped through his mind. Rada as a young woman, a gifted scientist struggling for validation and respect. The passionate woman who’d become his lover. The woman who’d said good-bye, leaving him to pursue human desires. She’d had a husband. Children. She’d had a good life that ended too soon.

  “I loved her.”

  “I know you did,” Saba said. “Would she have wanted this apathy from you? Would a fellow healer have wanted you to stay on this mountain, hiding your gifts from the world?”

  “What does it matter?” Lucien asked. “I’ve lived thousands of years. Seen humans progress and regress. Nothing changes, and humanity is exhausting. Can’t the world wait for me to like it again?”

  “In another age, I would say yes. But not this one.” She handed him a folded piece of paper. “A message from Ziri.”

  The ancient wind vampire was one of his mother’s dearest friends, though far more politically inclined than Saba. He’d been intimately involved in the creation and the
exposure of the Elixir that had poisoned Lucien and killed Rada. Only a complete transfusion of Saba’s blood had healed him.

  And, for a time, he’d thought that would be the end of it. The poison had been exposed. Its creator had been destroyed.

  But knowledge was the most pernicious virus.

  Elixir hadn’t disappeared. The infection only seemed to be spreading in the human world, putting more and more immortals at risk along with the humans they drank from. Not that it was his problem anymore.

  “What does Ziri want?” Lucien asked quietly, a sense of inevitability falling on him as he took the letter.

  “He bears a request from Rome.” Saba pulled out another letter.

  “And what does Emil Conti want?” Lucien asked, taking the second letter. “He controls Rome now. What more does he need?”

  She pulled out another letter. “It’s a request from Giovanni Vecchio.”

  Lucien closed his eyes and sighed. A request from Vecchio couldn’t be ignored. Not when it was Vecchio and his mate, Beatrice De Novo, who had hosted Lucien in Rome. Not when Vecchio’s ward, Benjamin Vecchio, had been the one to pull Lucien out of the sun and save his life. Whether he’d wanted the rescue or not, Lucien owed them—in particular the young human—an enormous favor, and Vecchio was far too calculating to forget it.

  “Ziri. Conti. And Vecchio.” He counted off the letters. They were being far too formal for a small request. “What do they want?”

  “The vampire who controls the Pacific Northwest is an ally of theirs. They have had an influx of humans whose blood is tainted by the Elixir.” Saba’s face was grim. “This Katya Grigorieva is keeping the women. Building some sort of research facility to study them.”

  “Study them?” Anger was a faded emotion for Lucien, but he felt a flare at the word study.

  “In a sense.” Saba must have seen the disapproval on his face. “What should she do? Leave the humans alone? These women will die. We both know it. Should they infect more of our people because of their ignorance?”