Soar: A Warrior's Fight (Immortal Elements Series Book 2) Read online

  Soar

  A Warrior’s Fight

  Immortal Elements Series Bk. 2

  Sarah Zolton Arthur

  Soar: A Warrior’s Fight © 2019 Sarah Zolton Arthur

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Soar: A Warrior’s Fight

  When destiny calls, you answer… or die trying.

  Saahirah of the Gyr is a falcon-shifter on the vacation of a lifetime when her camp is attacked and her family is murdered—then Saahirah is sold into a harem kept by the regent of the land. Desperate to escape, Saahirah clings to one thought: there’s a mate somewhere destined for her. She can’t give in to the regent or she’ll never know true happiness.

  There’s just one little problem: the regent has one of the world’s most powerful witches in his employ. It takes witchy power to fight witchy power, so Saahirah does what any smart-minded twenty-something shifter girl would do—she teaches herself magic. The magic, however, works a little too well, connecting her with a mysterious figure with honey-amber eyes that pulls her heartstring taut, and Saahirah knows she’s in a whole different kind of trouble.

  Crest, aerie-lord and youngest brother to the future King of the Roc, is the one to answer her call. Even though the timing seems off, with an evil presence threatening the world, they discover they’re stronger together and their bond is exactly what’s needed—a reminder of what they’re fighting for... and why they have to win.

  See how Hunt’s story goes in:

  Run: The Viking Pack (Immortal Elements Series Bk 3) due out in October

  Flight: The Roc Warriors (Immortal Elements Bk. 1)

  Soar: A Warrior’s Fight (Immortal Elements Series Bk 2)

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  Run: The Viking Pack (Immortal Elements Series Bk. 3)

  When the bad guy is the only one you can trust, you’re screwed… sometimes in the best way possible.

  Breya is a woman on a mission to take care of LA’s homeless instead of shunning them, and hopefully find her missing brother among them one day.

  But fate’s a bitch who has a way of messing with the best of plans. That’s what it boils down to when Breya is attacked while delivering food to those who need her help most. She’s rescued by a man identifying himself only as Hunt, who has her stealing cars and lifting people’s wallets while on the run from a seriously bad dude.

  What’s worse, she can’t fight this biting attraction to the infuriating man who could quite possibly be a Viking warrior god, if not for all his sullen, broody behavior.

  That is, until the day she watches his skin rip away from his body to reveal a wolf dead-set on protecting her from others like him—and ensuring the future they’re destined to have together… if they can save the world in time to have it.

  Also by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  Adult Romance

  Series

  Brimstone Lords MC

  Bossman: Undone (Brimstone Lords MC 1)

  Duke: Redeemed (Brimstone Lords MC 2)

  Chaos: Calmed (Brimstone Lords MC 3)

  Standalones

  Summer of the Boy

  The Significance of Moving On

  Skydiving, Skinny-Dipping & Other Ways to Enjoy Your Fake Boyfriend

  Audio

  Summer of the Boy

  Skydiving, Skinny-Dipping & Other Ways to Enjoy Your Fake Boyfriend

  Chapter 1

  Saahirah Lost

  “Get up.” A giant of a man, a bird-shifter for certain—I could smell the bird—but bigger than our kind, jabbed the blunt end of his spear into my side. He towered over me. “Get up,” he yelled again.

  I swallowed back the bile, praying for fortitude enough to do what needed to be done. They’d slaughtered my entire family, these men. My mother’s dead, prone body covered mine. She’d died where she’d fallen, blocking me from view. He’d shown her no mercy. The giant man had thrust the sharp arrow-tipped end of his spear into her gut and pulled up sharply. The scream she’d let out. Her intestines spilling outside of her skin. And finally, the gurgle that had fallen from her mouth the way words might have right before she’d collapsed to the dirt floor of our mud hut, all gave credence as to why I should do the exact opposite. I needed to play dead. But it was too late. My gasp when my mother had dropped—it was too loud for him not to have heard.

  He poked me again, this time harder, bruising the spot right away. One great breath in, one great breath out, I rolled my mother off of me and stood. Her blood stained my clothing and streaked my skin. The pain in my heart was worse than any pain I could imagine.

  “Move,” growled the man.

  My sweet baby sister, the youngest of us, only eleven, had tried to fight back but she’d never stood a chance and paid with her life. My father and younger brothers laid slain, too. Broken. Bleeding out. Not a breath left in them. It seemed I had no choice but to leave. I stepped over the remains of my once-vibrant family with guards to the front and rear of me.

  Outside the sand picked up. We were in for a storm. This was supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime. The desert. The mud huts. We’d ridden on the backs of camels by day to disguise our true selves. By night, we’d shifted. Free to fly. My father was doing research for his Ph.D. on the ancient mating rites of the Roc, one of the oldest bird-shifting clans in the world. The first, as far as I knew. Ours showed up on the shifter timeline about a thousand years after.

  These men, dressed as Bedouins—heads and faces wrapped in linen scarves, leather sandals on their feet—continued to push me until I reached the back of a camel-drawn cart. The cart held a cage made of thin logs and already held two other women whom I’d never seen before in my life. They were beautiful. Long, flowing hair the deepest brown imaginable. Their skin a deep tan, as if they’d spent many a day in the sun.

  Unlike me, with pale skin and hair so naturally silver, it almost appeared white. We stood out from other bird-shifters. We were the Gyr—falcon-shifters. Proud. Beautiful. Our clan wasn’t the most populous and now we were six less. Why?

  A man unlocked the cage door to swing it open and another hoisted me up into the cart. With spear tips at my back, I stepped inside, watching through tear-filled eyes as they snapped the door shut again and refastened the lock.

  There wasn’t even enough room for us to sit without piling our legs on one another and clearly the wheels of the cart lacked shock absorbers, as we jostled and knocked our heads about—against a bar or someone’s shoulder—for what had to be miles through the devastating heat. My exposed skin pinked.

&n
bsp; One of my captors must have noticed because he called to the others to halt and unwrapped a long length of linen from around his waist, shoving it through the bars as he barked orders at me. I didn’t speak their language. Some shifter clans still held the magic that allowed them to communicate with other shifters. The Gyr, however, had stayed isolated on our island in the icy Atlantic waters between the U.S. and Canada for so many years that we’d lost the ability eons ago. Gods, did I wish we’d retained that power.

  Though, with the women moving their hands in a circle around the tops of their heads, it didn’t take a genius to see that I was supposed to wrap it around myself. It was a nice gesture in spite of the reason behind it.

  They’d not let me in on their plans, not that I would’ve understood them anyway. Two more raids landed four more gorgeous women in our tiny cage. The carnage left behind made me want to vomit, but they’d not given us any water, and thus I had nothing to vomit up. We could no longer sit.

  And like me, the other women were all covered in blood. The screams—I’d never forget the screams for the rest of my life and we were, for all intents and purposes, immortal, with a lifespan of millennia so long as no one, say, stuck a spear through our guts or anything of a violent nature. We couldn’t catch diseases like the humans and our aging slowed to a pinprick once we reached maturity around eighteen years, though we still needed food, water and air to survive.

  So much death—for what? What were we in for?

  As dusk began to set and the cooling air danced across our skin, we arrived at the base of a great mountain. All bird-shifters nested in cities above the mountains, keeping us hidden from the humans.

  Guards in leather vests and headdresses pointed arrows cocked in bows at our heads. Our captors called up to them, but it was too far up to hear properly. Only our bird eyes could see them. One of the guards dropped his human form to reveal a mighty, if not unbelievably ugly, raptor. A vulture. Totally not one of the Roc. He flew up to speak with the armed men. After several long moments, a hidden entrance opened up, revealing a path up the mountain. A path no one would see unless looking for it directly.

  One of my captors whipped the camel to get it moving. As the cart moved up, we in the cage crushed against each other. An elbow to my gut. A headbutt to my chin. I grunted on that one. It hurt and my eyes watered. The whimpers of the other women filled the silent space around us. Their constant tears dampened my skin.

  After hours and hours of moving slowly, bumping over pebbles and dipping in small craters, we reached the summit. There, the guards lowered a large wooden door suspended by chains that they cranked down using a wheel, like an old-timey ship’s steering wheel. The camel moved over the wood inside the city, an ancient city built from sandstone walls. In the center of it all, set upon the highest hill, sat a grand palace with a mushroom-capped center and six mushroom-capped turrets. Between each turret hung a grottoesque, mostly the carved representations of severed heads. Wolves. Ravens. Camels.

  They drove the cart around the back of the palace and stopped. Several guards in bold indigo-dyed leather chaps and vests spilled out. The biggest of the men, the one with the most Xs stitched to his vest, stepped forward. He barked something at the lead of my captors and then another man hopped up onto the back of the cart and unlocked the door.

  Then that same indigo-dyed guard turned to bark his orders at us. The other women stepped free from the cage. I let them go first before exiting along with them. The men transferred our custody to the palace guards. The only good to come from this was that although they used the end of their spears to prod us inside, they did it without actually making bodily contact.

  We were bustled up a set of steep stairs and emerged inside an empty ballroom. There, a woman greeted us, if you could call it that. She ordered us to line up, and after going down the line to look us over once—grabbing our boobs, fluffing our hair and running her hand over our derrières—she turned to the lead captor and handed him a brown leather pouch tied off with a leather string.

  Did she just pay for us?

  Pay for us?

  Oh, hell no. This couldn’t be happening, but it was happening. That queasy, needing to vomit sensation came back in a big way. I swallowed back the urge. Then one by one, she began ripping our torn and bloodied clothing from our bodies until each of us was stripped buck-ass naked.

  My head swam from the onset of dizziness. There was tightness in my chest. Without a doubt, I was on the verge of a panic attack. Keep it together, Saahirah.

  She paraded us in a precession down a long corridor, stopping to let any men of the castle look at us before continuing on up a massive grand staircase. On the second floor, we ascended a smaller staircase and from there, a third even smaller one until finally reaching our destination. Everything was out in the open. A massive bathtub/pool thing sat filled with water and bubbles. We were ushered inside. I had to admit, scrubbing the dirt and blood off my skin helped to calm me down some. To massage cleansers and oils through my hair. To feel clean for the moment. If I focused my attention on the little things, then I could—for the moment—push out the big things that hurt too much to think about.

  As we finished and dried off, I looked for more clothing, but she’d left nothing for us. Seven women stood in the room unable to dress. I felt exposed.

  She left us like that for over an hour, or at least it felt that long, when a large man, as round as he was tall—and he hovered around six-and-a-half feet—sauntered in. He looked in human years to be around early thirties. Beady yellow eyes took us in, and he licked his lips. Most Roc men were handsome, and even with the extra weight, he would’ve been if not for the smug way he held himself. He wore robes like he thought he was the king, but from my father’s research, I knew the Roc in these parts had no king on site.

  We were forced by guards back into a line that he walked up and down. I squeezed my hands into fists at my sides, the nerves would be my undoing if I couldn’t keep them in check. He paused in front of one woman and used his finger to lift a tendril of hair from her shoulder. Then he leaned in and licked the pulse point at her neck.

  Inwardly, I cringed. He dropped her hair and kept moving. Please don’t let him stop. Please don’t let him stop, I chanted over and over in my head. To my horror, he stopped in front of me, then lifted a tendril of hair to rub between his fingers, moved it to lick the pulse point on my neck and appeared to take in the taste of my skin, then went in for a second lick.

  I’d only just thought, this isn’t so bad, when he opened his robes to reveal his naked form. One of the guards spun me around and bent me forward. My stomach dropped. This same guard used his finger to manipulate my golden spot in order to prep me, I supposed. And even though I was scared, I widened my legs to let him press harder.

  From behind, the disrobed man shoved inside me. It pinched and I bit my lip to keep from crying out, though tears rolled down my cheeks. Something inside me told me not to cry out. I needed to compartmentalize. If I could do that, keep my wits, then maybe I could figure out how to get myself out of this mess. Clamping my jaw shut, I let my gaze drift around the room until landing on a guard standing by the door, his muscles clenched tight. His eyes looked a combination of sad and angry, and if I read them correctly, they were sad and angry for me. I used him and his perceived sympathy as a focal point to concentrate on instead of what was being done to my body.

  With the way the regent went about it, he didn’t intend to hurt me, just to take what he’d paid for. Still, it wasn’t sweet or romantic, and it happened in front of six other women and a plethora of guards.

  He grunted and breathed heavily as he pushed and pulled in and out of me while the guard continued to touch me. The tears continued to fall from my eyes. My legs shook and began to give out. A third man kept me standing while I took the thrusts over and over.

  I didn’t want this. I hated every man in this room for allowing it to happen. Since it wasn’t my first sexual encounter, he wasn’t hurtin
g me, per se. Not physically, but emotionally. Though, I refused to show them that, allowing icy determination to get through this, to fill my veins. We Gyr liked to play before we settled down with our life partners, but it was with who we wanted and when we wanted it.

  The man pulled out and warm liquid hit my butt and lower back. He used his hand to smear the sticky goo around, then he patted my butt cheek, and the guard dropped his hand from between my legs to stand up, helping me to stand straight.

  The guard pointed for me to head back to the bath and I did, silently crying all the way.

  Chapter 2

  Life in a Harem

  We weren’t allowed to wear clothing. I’d spent the remainder of that first night curled up into a ball on an overly large, fluffy white floor-pillow, crying into the cotton fabric over what had been taken from me. The others tried to soothe me or bring me comfort in any way they could think of, but nothing worked.

  The woman who’d actually bought us, the only woman allowed to wear clothing from what I could see, came to me with a platter of sliced meats and cheeses, and a tankard of strong-smelling ale. I shoved her and the food away.

  “You must eat, young one,” she said, setting the platter on the floor next to my pillow.

  “Go away,” I whispered, turning my whole body away from her, exposing my back in a silent vow to never give her the time of day.

  “You should feel proud… He chose you out of all the other girls to inaugurate. That means you are his first. Any sons you bear him will go on to lead the Damavandi Roc and the city of Imi in raids and battles.”

  Forgetting my vow, I pushed myself to sit up and whipped around at the same time yelling, “Sons?”