Desire Unchained

“Don’t tell me not to worry, Shade. Not when you are obviously concerned about something.”


Dark shadows flickered in his eyes, turning them flat and black, making her shiver. “You’re right, Runa. As long as Roag is still out there, we have every reason to worry.”





No one liked a slow day in the ER, but they made Kynan climb the walls. He wasn’t a kiss-your-boo-boo-and-make-it-better kind of guy. He wanted blood and guts, life or death. The kind of cases that dumped a gallon of adrenaline into the system. As an Army medic, that’s what he’d been best at handling, under fire or in the eye of the storm. He hadn’t even cared whether his patients were human. Car-struck dogs and bullet-riddled camels had received his care right alongside the humans.

And the demon.

Kynan exhaled slowly, the memory crushing in on his chest. He and Lori, who had also been enlisted, had been married four years. They’d been stationed at Fort Lewis, but he’d been deployed to Afghanistan. On the day his life had changed forever, he’d gone to the aid of a team of Rangers who had been ambushed and pinned down. When his team arrived on site, the Rangers were nowhere to be found, and with the amount of blood that had been splashed like paint on the mountain rocks, they couldn’t have humped it out of there on their own.

Ky’s team had conducted a search, an expanding square that turned up jack shit and landed his team in a firefight. In a hail of bullets and never-ending, ground-rocking explosions, Kynan had been separated from the team and pursued by Taliban fighters. He’d taken refuge in a cave.

Nursing a leg wound, he’d radioed for help. The transmission had been spotty, and he’d had no idea if the cavalry would be saving his ass any time soon. As he settled into a defensive position, he stumbled upon what was left of the Rangers. Alongside them were the bodies of enemy fighters, and scattered among the fresh carnage had been hundreds of human and animal bones.

Ky’s mind had barely registered the horror when a two-headed monster—a demon, Kynan knew now—emerged from deep inside the cave. He shot it and then tried to save its life, mainly because someone somewhere would want the thing alive.

The enemy fighters had attacked while he’d been distracted, and he’d taken a shot to the throat. His memory from that point on was hazy at best, but later he’d learned that when fellow soldiers discovered him, they’d also found the men who’d attacked him torn limb from limb. There was no sign of the monster, but shortly after Kynan woke in the military hospital after life-saving surgery, the Men in Black—well, green, actually—had come for him.

With his enlistment nearly up, they couldn’t force him into the Army’s supersecret paranormal defense division, the R-XR, but the civilian equivalent, The Aegis, had approached him with an offer he couldn’t refuse. They’d guaranteed double what the military paid, medical and retirement benefits, as well as his own cell, to be co-supervised with Lori. They’d also wanted him to travel, to train other Regents in both tactical fighting techniques and emergency medicine.

So the moment he was honorably discharged from the Army, he and Lori had signed on to fight demons.

Funny, since here he was, working in a demon hospital and saving their lives. At the moment, however, he was standing at the triage desk, filling out a chart for an infant Daeva who’d been brought in for a cough.

A cough.

Christ, demon parents could be as paranoid as human ones.

He heard footsteps, felt the warm swirl of air that accompanied Dr. Shakvhan, an ancient succubus who practiced Druidic medicine by day and stole human souls by night. Kynan had no problem working with her, but outside the hospital, Dr. Shakvhan would definitely meet the sharp end of his stang.

“Did you discharge the Neethul this morning?” she asked in a voice dripping with sensual promise she wasn’t faking.

“Why?”

She shrugged one shapely shoulder, making the pale blonde hair draped over it shimmer. Little wonder that human men went willingly to their deaths with her. She was Playboy-centerfold gorgeous.

“Eidolon wanted me to take a blood sample for the DNA bank.”

Kynan dotted his I’s and crossed his T’s on the chart. “Did it this morning.”

Eidolon went ballistic if every patient wasn’t checked against his list of catalogued species. Any species of demon not previously admitted to the hospital must be DNA tested and asked to donate blood to the bank for future use in others of the same species.

Dr. Shakvhan smiled and patted him on his head. “Such a responsible human. I think I’d leave your soul intact after I drained you of your seed.” She sauntered away, hips rolling in a rhythm that left most males panting.

Kynan hadn’t panted for anyone since his wife died, and he wasn’t going to start now, especially not for an evil succubus.