Free Pray for Dawn by Jocelynn Drake Page B

monster through the quiet courtyard garden before I finally disposed of it.
    In a lonely town south of Liege, Belgium, I encountered an animal clan naturi. In English mythology, the creatures are often referred to as will-o’-the-wisps or hinky punks. The creature was leaving a trail of corpses through the outskirts of the forests of Ardennes. The naturi would often take the form of a large black dog, pretending to be lost or wounded as it lured its prey deeper in the woods. I had initially thought it was a werewolf gone mad without its pack, but the naturi soon proved me wrong.
    Then the South of France, to track down a creature that was leaving behind a number of bodies that had been drained of most of their blood. Most had been an assortment of animals like large cats and dogs, but then two children and one adult went missing on three separate occasions. I passed more than a month in the region searching for the vampire that continued to kill even though I was in its current hunting ground. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sense the undead creature.
    Dawn had just begun to creep over the horizon one cool morning when I felt the naturi lurking nearby. It was another week before I discovered that I was hunting a naturi from the wind clan. The four-foot, bony creature had bat-like wings that it wrapped around its thin frame when it walked on the ground. It was an odd mix of human and dog with its long, narrow snout and fangs poking just over its bottom lip. This strain of the wind clan had started the old popular fairy tale of the streghe , from the island of Corsica. This one either had moved farther north in search of better hunting grounds or had come through one of the doors that had opened in Europe and was on its way to Corsica. It never made it. I could only guess that it was trying to frame a nightwalker for its crimes against man by taking the blood, since it had no use for it. After two weeks of hunting, I finally destroyed the creature shortly after midnight near the Mediterranean shore.
    I had forgotten about Mira until that moment. I had successfully pushed her to the furthest reaches of my mind, burying her under centuries of memories that I never wanted to recall again. Yet, after incinerating the body of the wind naturi, I wandered down to the rocky shore and washed my hands in the warm waters that clapped softly in darkness. Mira had once said that I smelled of the wind and the sea. I had been born in a small village near the sea and could only guess that some part of that beginning was imprinted on my being. And she could smell it, sense it when no one else could.
    Up until my travels with Mira, my experiences with vampires had been extremely limited. In fact, they generally didn’t extend much past a few dark threats of torture and death. None had told me about how my powers felt or that I smelled of the sun. For countless nightwalkers, I had been death.
    But my relationship with Mira would always be different. More than three months ago, we had bonded in a way neither of us had thought possible. We joined powers and destroyed countless naturi across England. And while she managed to remain sarcastic and indifferent, I could taste her fear that night like stomach acid in the back of my throat.
    Both our worlds had changed that night. She became a threat to her own kind and I now had a deep connection to a creature I had sworn to kill. Even now, I could sense her emotions with very little effort. While the emotional world of the vampires had always been open to me, it had been somewhat thin and hazy compared to Mira. Her emotions entwined with my thoughts and soul in such a way that it became difficult to distinguish hers from mine. If I wanted, I could let her wash over me until I was drowning in her. Yet I fought the temptation, erecting mental walls to keep her out, but not before I took a small taste. She was walking down the hall toward my room. She was worried—worried and scared.
    My