Darkness Hunts: The Maurin Kincaide Series, #6

By Rachel Rawlings

I'm proud of the reputation I've made for myself as the woman that chases after the things that go bump in the night. Uttering my name evokes fear in the hearts of the most vile beasts. Unfortunately, there are those capable of harnessing the power of a name and twisting it into a formidable weapon of darkness.
Wolves from the Salem pack are being killed, their bodies left as calling cards to lure me towards the Fae. Following those morbid breadcrumbs, my roll quickly shifts from hunter to hunted.
Can I break the ugly habit of reacting, and strengthen myself with action? Or will the next body to fall be my own?
My name is Maurin Kincaide; Regulator and the long arm of the Council's law.
Fans of mysterious intrigue, thrilling detective work, and hints of sizzling romance will flock to The Maurin Kincaide Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rachel Rawlings
• Release date: Dec 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386099932

Rachel Rawlings

Rachel Rawlings was born and raised in the Baltimore Metropolitan area. Her family, originally from Rhode Island, spent summers in New England sparking her fascination with Salem, MA. She has been writing fictional stories and poems since middle school, but it wasn't until 2009 that she found the inspiration to create her heroine Maurin Kincaide and complete her first full length novel, The Morrigna.  When she isn't writing Paranormal Romance, Psychic Romance Suspense or Urban Fantasy, Rachel can often be found with her nose buried in a good book. An avid reader of Paranormal/Urban Fantasy, Horror and Steampunk herself, Rachel founded Hallowread- an interactive convention for both authors and fans of those genres. More information on Hallowread, its schedule of events and participating authors can be found at www.hallowread.blogspot.com and www.facebook.com/Hallowread. She still lives in Maryland with her husband and three children.  Want to find out about new releases, appearances, contests and give-aways? Sign up for her newsletter-https://mailchi.mp/rachelrawlings/newsletter-sign-up-form Be sure to check out Rachel's Facebook page- www.facebook.com/rachelrawlingsauthor

Book preview

Chapter One

A steaming cup of coffee warmed my hands through the wool gloves I wore but did little else to chase away the winter chill. Unusually cold, even for coastal Massachusetts, the thermometer hadn’t risen above single digits in weeks. It was shaping up to be the coldest February on record. Visits to my father’s grave and the subsequent attempts to alter time to save him were stretched further and further apart due to the bitter winter weather. I’d had high hopes, certain I could accomplish the impossible, but each visit proved to be a disaster. Rather than exhaust myself and log yet another failure in my journal, I simply stood in the alcove by the marker bearing his name and chronicled the events of my life since I’d visited him last. Which wasn’t much.

The harsh temps and heavy snowfalls drove the guilty along with the innocent indoors, leaving little for my team or the Hunt to do. Mason wanted to take the welcomed reprieve from chasing bad guys to do a little wedding planning, but that just drove my need to change the events of that fateful night in faerie even more. Focusing on the one task he’d assigned solely to me, picking out my dress, became almost impossible. The need to succeed, to bring back Arawn, consumed everything else.

Mason knew what I did when I came to the church. He always knew, but never uttered a word to stop me. He missed my father as much as I did. Maybe more. He certainly knew Arawn better than I did, having served alongside him in the Hunt for so many years. Perhaps that’s why he let me go again and again; even knowing the results would most likely be the same.

Rays from the distant winter sun beat against my back, penetrating the layers beneath my clothes to warm my skin. Sweat began to bead along my spine as if I’d moved indoors and kept all my winter gear on. Instinct said to remove my coat, strip out of the wool sweater and fleece-lined leggings. My gloves and hat hit the frozen ground before my common sense returned. Cursing over the coffee I’d dropped to remove my clothes and the damned fae who was responsible, I picked the cup up in hopes of salvaging a few of the now lukewarm sips remaining.

Nice parlor trick Ballard. Calling the sun, I thought that would be just beyond your reach, being from the Court of Shadows and all. Doing my best to hide my irritation at another interrupted visit with my father, I picked a leaf off the plastic lid and took a swig of the rapidly cooling coffee.

The fae king had taken an interest in my time at the gravesite. At first, I thought it was to keep a watchful eye on my attempts to unravel the fabric of time and return my father to his rightful place at the head of the Wild Hunt. It wasn’t. Not entirely. Ballard found the one-sided conversations I’d begun having with the small marker placed beside the church fascinating. Talking with the dead was a foreign concept to the fae. Living eternally, they’d have no use for the customs mortals had when it came to death. Centuries pass, millennia, and you begin to grasp the circle of life that surrounds you. The pomp and circumstance of a funeral, the continued visitations with one who has left the mortal realm forever was foreign to them.

But my father was no mortal.

Mason told me when I was ready he would show me how to connect with what remained of my father in the between. Fragments of him collected in the void separating the two realms I’d straddled all my life. He was formed from the between, and those particles had returned to the grey. If I slipped through the veil, I would feel his energy; could tune mine to his and feel his presence.

But his presence couldn’t walk me down the aisle.

I never stood on tradition, in fact, my life had been pretty damn untraditional, but from the moment Mason asked me to marry him I wanted nothing more than to have my father give me away. Such a simple thing after being separated for so long and denied so many moments and memories that would have made his absence easier to bear. There had been too few after he’d returned to my life and the what ifs I was left with offered little consolation.

"I thought it rather clever. The king of shadows calling upon the sun, that’s more than a parlor trick. That is a grand illusion, a perfectly constructed glamour. A few more seconds and you’d have been as bare as the day you were born. Ballard rested upon a tombstone several yards away, but his voice caressed my skin as if he stood right behind me. Did the appearance of the Krampus teach you nothing? The solstice has come and gone. Almost two full cycles of the moon have passed, and still, you have not begun your training. Each time I slip into the grey to search for you, I find you here. Wallowing in mortal emotions and regrets. There are more creatures within your domain than the horses and hounds of the hunt. They grow restless Maurin, and the Huntsman in your favor cannot control them much longer."

I’m not wallowing. Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to remain calm. Unleashing the anger that settled around my heart, keeping everyone I loved, including Mason, at arm’s length, would get me nowhere with the king. "I am trying to set things right, to undo the wrong your wife did." Despite my best effort that last barb slipped out and based on Ballard’s expression, he wasn’t pleased with the reminder of who was responsible for the imbalance in the fae realms.

Without warning Ballard moved in, snatching me off my feet. The remains of my coffee cup hit the ground as he threw back the veil and dragged me into the between. He covered my eyes with one hand and my mouth with the other, leaving only my nose exposed, so I didn’t suffocate. I wasn’t entirely fae after all, and he wasn’t sure if lack of oxygen would kill me. Despite being held only by my head, I could no more move the rest of body than if I’d been strapped to the length of him. Still, I tried to free myself, cursing under the hand clamped over my mouth the entire time.

‘Be still." My body answered the king’s command, remaining frozen in place even after he released me. Ballard swept his arms out in broad strokes. The motions reminded me of an artist, his hands the brush, the between both his medium and canvas.

Images formed in the grey, swirling around us until his mural was complete and I was surrounded by my father. Tears streamed down my face as I watched our lives unfold, from the moment he held me the first time as a baby until he closed his eyes for the last time in the court of light. It was over almost before it began. Our time together had been brief, having missed the awkward years of my youth while I group up amongst the Norms. Would I have become the same person had I been raised with the fae, known the Hunt all my life? Decidedly not.

My mother’s fear that the fae realms would be destroyed and all of its inhabitants with it during the last fae war drove her to take me away. She expelled every ounce of magic she’d been born with and even that which she’d been granted upon marrying my father to save me from a fate that never unfolded. I mourned her when I first learned of her, who my birth mother really was and what she’d done. Ballard shed light on her shadowed past as his concubine when I’d visited him the first time at his court. There were more stories to be told, more to learn about the woman she was. Unfortunately, Ballard was the only one who knew them. Mason joined the Hunt long after her death and my disappearance from my father’s home. He never knew her, only the great hole that remained in the heart of Arawn, lord of the Wild Hunt. The king promised to tell me more about my mother, but that required a trip to faerie, something I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do as of late.

The brief flashes of my mother didn’t impact me the same way as seeing my father. I’d mourned her when Arawn first told me of her and the sacrifice she made for me. But I hadn’t met her, and the pain and disappointment of a life that could have been was easier to put behind me because of it. My father on the other hand.... Fate had decided to return him to me. Only briefly, long enough for me to know what family really was and what I’d been missing all my life.

Sure, I’d made a family of my own with Mason, Amalie, and Cash among its members but none of them were Arawn. Having them in my life has gone a long way to filling the emptiness I’ve felt since I was old enough to know what I was missing but there would always be a hole in my heart from the loss of Arawn. Which is why, no matter how many times Mason asked if I wanted to come here, wanted to see my father again, I’d refused. Pretty pictures could not replace the man. They only fueled the fire raging within me to undo what the fae queen had done.

I do believe you’re missing the point of this little visit Maurin. Your father is here whenever you wish to see him. I told you before; you cannot unmake the same fabric of time. You altered it once. A decision was made, and you must live with it. It’s the choice he would have wanted you to make; one with a future in it. The king sighed, the weight of both courts expelled in one breath. With a swipe of his hand, the images changed. My father no longer in the picture, had been replaced solely by images of my mother. A younger version of her, one of the stories I’d yet to hear.

You remind me so much of her. Not just the way you look, that part is obvious to any who knew her but your spirit. She had that same fire within her, one that burned just as hot, just as wild and out of control as you. It’s what ultimately killed her, you know. Not the trip to deliver you to a human couple itself.

Ballard looked wistfully at my mother, her death and the years that had passed since her time as his consort hadn’t changed the way he felt about her. He missed her, which explained why he’d taken such a liking to me.

Her magic burned brighter than any fae, and that was before your father bestowed more upon her at their nuptials. She loved the feel of wild magic for she was a wild creature in her heart but if you feed a fire, eventually it will consume everything in its path. Your mother foresaw her end, and it drove her to the brink of insanity. She’d convinced herself the usual power plays and vies for the different seats of power within the realms would be our demise. Your father couldn’t convince her differently, even reached out to me for help before the end, something I never thought he’d do given our long-standing quarrel over him stealing her away from my court. For her sake and yours, I did as he asked but could no more break through her damaged mind than your father. She was lost to us and shortly thereafter so were you.

Fashioning a comfortable chair out of the grey, the king forced me to sit as he continued to speak of my mother’s power and how her refusal to harness it, to fully control it, set the series of unfortunate events that would become my life into motion and ultimately her death. There was a moral buried beneath the history lesson. Something I’d seen in a Spiderman movie once. With great power comes great responsibility. And I was ignoring mine. But I’d never asked for more power and certainly not any more responsibility.

I had my hands full keeping the peace in Salem’s supernatural community.

Tired of the detour down his memory lane, I harnessed the between and tuned back into my father. A little reminder of why we were here in the first place. Ballard looked at me with a new fascination. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t squirm in my seat a little.

That’s her, right there! What you just did! Your mother through and through. This is a cautionary tale, Maurin. Heed my warning, take control of the power and responsibility you have inherited, or it will consume you and everything around you. The Wild Hunt cannot roam outside of faerie unchecked and if you do not assume your place as the Huntress that is exactly what they will do. Should they forget their place and purpose, should darkness and malice be allowed to overtake them they will run down more than the guilty and the chambers of Annwn will be filled with the souls of the innocent as well.

What if I give it all to you? Right now? The thought had occurred to me more than once since he’d mentioned it the night we hunted the Krampus together. Okay, I hunted the Krampus, he dispelled it back to Otherworld. Either way, he planted the seed, and the idea of signing everything away had been growing in the recesses of my mind ever since. Mason and I could continue on as we had been before my father’s death, with him running SPTF and me as the Regulator. Everything would be the same. Well, sort of.

You would do it, wouldn’t you? The king was right behind me, his lips a hairsbreadth away from my ear. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the borders of Annwn dissolve, returning it to my domain once again. I admit, having Otherworld and the creatures who call it home back within the Court of Shadows is a reunion I have longed for. To have everything and everyone under my rule again. Ballard sucked in a breath, drawing goosebumps along my skin. Still, it would serve you well to begin your training. You may even find a use for it among the rabble living outside the realms.

Before I could protest any further to the idea of replacing my father, because that would be admitting I couldn’t bring him back and unfortunately for everyone around me I hadn’t come to that conclusion yet, Ballard dropped me back into the churchyard where I spent most of my mornings.

A great hulking man knelt in front of the alcove, examining the ground with my hat and gloves in a death grip in one hand and the crumpled remains of my coffee cup in the other. There was no mistaking the muscular frame or the way it filled out the jeans he was wearing. Mason. My hunter, doing what he did best, tracking his prey.

Which in this case was me.

His head snapped around at the sound of my whistle, ready to attack the suspected threat. His shoulders eased, the fear and worry leaving his body as each coiled muscle relaxed at the sight of me. Dark circles and signs of wear I hadn’t given enough attention marred his handsome face. Suddenly weary from the realization I’d neglected one man for the memory of another, it felt as if I’d picked up every ounce of stress he’d laid down.

Hounds of hell Maurin, you’re going to be the death of me. I thought something happened to you. His brow furrowed, gaze darkening as he focused on something behind me. Was that Ballard?

Yes. Seems he’s taken an interest in my visits with Arawn. And my lack of thereof in the hunt. There was no point in hiding any part of my conversation with Mason. He’d ferret it out of me sooner or later.

Conry chose that moment to make his presence known, standing squarely behind Mason to let me know he hadn’t forgiven me for leaving him behind. Again.

This has gone on long enough Maurin. You can’t keep doing this. My fiancé stood, brushing the leaves and dirt from his jeans before walking toward me with my ethereal dog keeping pace beside him. In my time, before joining the hunt, a man would simply forbid it. His word was final, and a woman obligated to obey him in all things.

"Try it. See how well that works