A World Apart

A World Apart

Nora Roberts

Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

Chapter 1

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In the sweltering jungle, under the blood-red sun, Kadra hunted. Her steps were silent, her eyes—green as the trio of stones that encrusted the hilt of her sword—were alert, watchful, merciless.

For four days and four nights she had tracked her prey, over the Stone Mountains, beyond the Singing River, and into the verdant heat of the Land of Tulle.

What she stalked rarely ventured to these borders, and she herself had never traveled so far in the south of A'Dair.

There were villages here, small enclaves of lesser hunters, settlements of farmers and weavers with their young and their animals. The young were as much food to what she hunted as the cattle and mounts were.

She trod on the mad red flowers that were strewn on the path, ignored the sly silver slide of a snake down the trunk of a tree. She saw, sensed, scented both, but they were of no interest to her.

The Bok demons were her only interest now, and destroying them her only goal.

It was what she had been born for.

Other scents came to her—the beasts, large and small, that inhabited the jungle, and the thick, wet fragrance of vine and blossom. The blood—no longer fresh—of one that had been caught and consumed by what she hunted.

She passed a great fall of water that raged over the cliffs to pound its drumbeat into the river below. Though she had never walked upon this ground, this she knew by its light and music as a sacred place. One that no demon could enter. So she stopped to drink of its purifying waters, to fill her water bag for the journey yet to come.

And poured drops from her hand to the ground in thanks to the powers of life.

Beyond the falls, the busier scents of people—sweat, flesh, cooking, springwater from a village well—reached her keen senses.

It was her duty to protect them, and her fate that none among them could ever be her companion, her friend, her lifemate. These were truths she had never questioned.

At last she caught the overripe stench that was Bok.

The sword streaked out of its sheath, a bright battle sound as she pivoted on the heels of her soft leather boots. The dagger, its point a diamond in the sun, flipped from its wrist mount to her hand.

The dark blue claws of the Bok that had leaped from a branch overhead whizzed past her face, missing their mark. She set into a fighting stance and waited for his next charge.

It looked oddly normal. Other than those lethal retractable claws, the scent, the needle-sharp fangs that snapped out when the lips were peeled back for battle, the Bok looked no different from the people they devoured at every opportunity.

This one was small for his species, no more than six feet, which put him on a level with her. He was naked but for the thin skin of his traveling armor. Except for claws and teeth, he was unarmed. The vicious gouges across his chest and arms were stained from his pale green blood. And told her he had run afoul of his companions and had been forced out of the pack.