Favorite Lines: “His growing erection strained thick against her backside. So the rumors about werewolf males are true, she thought dazedly. Exhibit A is quite insistent.” (p. 14)
Mariketa the Awaited is a witch. A mortal witch all are watching, for it was foretold that she would be the one born that would be all aspects of witchcraft: warrior, healer, enchantress, conjurer and seeress. Until that time, all wait as the mortal witch participates in the Talisman Hie (The Great Race).
With a cape and magic hiding her true appearance, she takes on the other magical races in hopes of winning one for witches. She holds her own until coming up against a lykae male who seals her and five fellow contestants into a tomb with incubi.
Bowen MacRieve of the Lykae clan entered the Talisman Hie for a second chance with his mate who had died several hundreds of years ago. He doesn’t count of the attraction he feels for Mari and assumes it’s due to a hex she placed upon him. Wanting to have his true mate back, yet living with the knowledge that few ever get a second chance, MacRieve decides to see if Mari could possibly be his mate.
But a darkness doesn’t want the two to unite, leaving the couple to battle emotions and others to discover if they’re truly meant to be together.
I’ve been waiting for this book it seems like forever. I knew that I’d like Mari from the snippets I had read and I was right. Her spunkiness was fun and her ability to recognize a need to accept and move forward never went away. She was able to dissect her own emotions and was far from an innocent heroine. She hid things. Things that left me wondering if she was TSTL. (No she wasn’t.)
Bowen needed a swift kick in the ass at times. I really wanted to boot him one. On the flip side, there’s a scene when he is bribing Mari to give him a shot (it involves a tube of lipstick) that left me mortified and giggling. He is an alpha werewolf. He’s strong and tenacious. He’s adorable.
The story is still a good one. There are ways to mess up a story that has characters on a race hoping to capture a prize. Ms. Cole obviously doesn’t know this, as her story was great. It includes competitors and is a vicious game that goes wrong. All sense of right and wrong goes out the window and it isn’t until something goes horribly wrong that the loss of morality seems to be a problem. The contestants don’t consider it at all until an important mortal is placed in jeopardy.
By creating Bowen as such an ass, Ms. Cole allowed the reader to meet great secondary characters. Characters that have left me wondering where they went after the author left them to continue with Bowen and Mari.
I want more! I want to know that the demons and fae have a shot. I want them to each have a story, as they’ve proven worthy to me.
Scooper Speaks 