Elemental Dawn (Paranormal Public) Read Free

she’ll now be a
target for demons?” I breathed, feeling so sorry for my friend.
    Lisabelle growled in frustration.
“She’s already been a target for demons. This will just intensify the
situation, and if she doesn’t go haring off on her own with vampires she can’t
trust, it won’t be an issue.”
    “What do you mean vampires she
can’t trust?” I asked.
    “Her father was traveling with a
small party of trusted advisors. He thought it would be safer to go with a
small group, so as to be less noticeable. Demons look for large signatures of
power in much the same way that they look for elemental magic, and he thought
that if the group generated only a small signature, he had less chance of
getting caught. One of the advisors was not as well known to him as he should
have been, the brother of a friend. He led the demons to King Daemon. There
were hundreds of them. His party never had a chance. The worst part is that he
was coming from visiting Dirr.
    I shook my head in disbelief.
“Isn’t there someone to advise Lanca? Isn’t she too young to take on the responsibility
of the throne?”
    Lisabelle waved her hand at me
impatiently, as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world. “First of
all, that’s not how it works. The heir is the heir. Second of all, Lanca is
twenty-two. She is a college graduate, brilliant and beloved by the vampires.
There really is no second choice. She is ready.”
    “But what about her life?” I
breathed. “Didn’t she want to travel? Have boyfriends and a family?”
    Princess Lanca’s dating life had
always been the talk of Public. She never dated anyone there, instead spending
time with glamour vampire princes from Europe. At the time of her graduation,
though, she had been single. Now I wondered how she would ever find a vampire
willing to take on the burden of being her soulless mate.
    “She’ll be fine,” said Lisabelle.
“Boys are overrated. You are dating one of the only decent ones.”
    “Lough is decent,” I said.
    “Humph,” said Lisabelle.
    “How eloquent.”
    Lisabelle’s face was stony. “The
point is that tomorrow you and I head to Sip’s, and from there we go to the
coronation,” she said. “All of that has to happen before winter break ends.”
    We paused the conversation only
to order our drinks, and once we had them we found an empty table in the
corner.
    “Poor Lanca,” I said sadly, as we
slid into a booth at the coffee shop. I wrapped my shaky hands around my hot
chocolate, searching for comfort from the warmth, but I was beginning to feel
cold inside, deep in my bones, and it was not a cold that felt likely to go
away any time soon.
    “There’s more,” said Lisabelle.
    “Oh good,” I said. “I don’t
suppose it’s good news.”
    “Nope,” said Lisabelle, frowning
into her mug. She had coffee, black, of course, and she was staring at it as if
there were answers in the dark liquid.
    “President Malle is starting to
make demands.”
    “You mean other than for all
paranormals to hand over the elemental and roll over and die?”
    “Yes,” Lisabelle sniffed. “The
demons’ power has grown exponentially. Now that they have their own council,
complete with darkness mages, for all practical purposes their power is
unlimited.”
    “What about vampires?” I asked,
taking a long sip of hot chocolate. “Why did they go after King Daemon if
vampires are the only paranormals not on their side that have darkness magic?”
    “I’m not on their side,” Lisabelle
pointed out, her face tight.
    I reached a hand across the table
and touched my friend. At first she flinched away, but I held firm.
“Lisabelle,” I whispered. “Love keeps us all anchored to sanity. It’s our moor
in the throes of a storm, our light when the rain comes down. You are no
different in that. I know what you are and who you are. You can be as gruff as
you want with Sip and me and it won’t change the fact that I will love you
until the day I