Free Adam by Jacquelyn Frank

salon on the top floor of the north tower. She took a moment to look over her sons, so different in many ways, and yet so clearly cut from the same cloth. Adam had inherited her hair color along with her eyes, but his towering height and almost beastly build was a throwback to his grandfather on his father’s side. His best friend, and also his cousin, was a Demon named Noah, the only Demon in existence who even came close to matching up to Adam’s behemoth proportions. Adam sported shoulders that seemed a mile wide, a chest just as broad, and a waist that narrowed fit and tight with straps of well-worked muscles, but was still thick like the trunk of a sturdy oak tree.
    In contrast, his younger brother Jacob was lean and athletic, sleek where Adam was more bullish, flexible where his brother was brutally forceful. Eleanor’s younger son had his father’s hair and build, as well as his dark brown eyes that turned ebony with a rise in temper or other emotive passions.
    But even as they differed in looks and build, they rang in perfect tune when it came to morals. Both were obsessed with the nature of the law, crime and its appropriate punishment. Both had a sense of right and wrong that was implacable and unwavering. They were highly moral creatures, something that she demurely credited herself with lending to their makeup. Unfortunately, his conscience gave Jacob the tendency to be very hard on himself should he make some sort of error; and Adam ...
    Adam always wanted to save the world at all costs. Or at least the Demon part of the world. He was protective of humans, respectful of those other Nightwalkers that deserved respect. But he clearly did not know his own limitations. Eleanor herself had yet to see what they were, but she was worried that one day he would find out the point at which he fell short—only after he had raced headlong over the edge of the cliff. She dreaded the day he would subsequently plummet to the ground, brought rudely to earth and awakened to the fact that he would never be able to save everyone and do the right thing on time, all of the time.
    As a mother, it was Eleanor’s job to worry about her sons’ sensitivities and vulnerabilities. It was also her job never to insult their egos by letting them know she still fretted over them in such ways. Asher was always warning her that their boys were far more intuitive than she gave them credit for, and though they allowed her these motherly eccentricities, she’d best not test them too far.
    But Eleanor already knew that. She had no intention of ever making her children regret her behavior toward them. They had worked too hard to earn their manhood to be undermined by her.
    Of course, that did not mean she would not meddle at all. She was looking forward to grandchildren one day, and if she knew Demon males, they were not likely to go willingly or seek mates eagerly. Well, Demon females could be just as wily as their counterparts, and more than made up for the males’ recalcitrance with their own ambitions. She had faith that one day each of her sons would meet his match in a woman, and she made no secret about it.
    “Mother,” Jacob greeted her, grabbing her extended hands and pulling her close to kiss her peaches-and-cream cheek. Because they’d stopped aging somewhere in their twenties, Eleanor and Jacob could be mistaken for brother and sister, but all one had to do was witness their exchange of fond gazes to see the bond of parental kinship that was there.
    “Madam,” Adam greeted her more gruffly, as if he were too old and too important to call her “Mother” any longer. However, he drew her into an incredible bear hug that broadcast his undying affection for her. “Now suppose you tell us,” he continued after he finally set her back down onto her slender feet with great care, “why you felt it necessary to drag us from training in the middle of the night.”
    “I wish to discuss the festival.”
    Her sons glanced at each