Here's a summary and a very unedited early preview (which I did NOT post on Fanfiction - you'll only see it here!):

Story Summary:

No knowledge of either book series required to understand/enjoy the story. Vampire Academy characters in the Immortals After Dark world. Rose Hathaway is a Valkyrie who's new to being immortal. Dimitri Belikov is a Forebearer (turned human vampire warrior, doesn't drink blood straight from the living human source). After the Valkyries began allying with the Forebearers, Dimitri - as one of the most level-headed Forebearers - was sent to be a diplomat to Rose's Seattle Valkyrie coven, given only one rule: no objectifying the Valkyries or romantic interaction with them. Only problem: one look at Rose and Dimitri's body instantly recognizes her as his fated eternal mate - can he resist her? (Contains mature sexual content)

Preview:

Rose's POV:

As the storm raged on around me, I felt power coursing through me. I was thrumming with it. As an immortal Valkyrie, I get my sustenance from the energy of the earth, and lightning is like food to me - the only thing I eat anymore, unless I am trying to get pregnant the next time I have a good tumble in the sheets, from what I've been told. My strong emotions can cause lightning to flare up, too, but this was just a good old-fashioned thunderstorm. Or at least, it had started that way.

I'm sort of new to this immortality thing, though. All immortals come into their immortality differently, but for Valkyrie, it's somewhere round-about twenty-three to twenty-five. I just had my twenty-fifth birthday a few months ago and transitioned a few months before that. The oldest Valkyrie is over three thousand, so I'm practically a baby in terms of Valkyrie, but there are a handful of us somewhat close to my age.

With immortality comes the change in diet. Last year around this time, I was chowing down on pizza and chocolate donuts, which I absolutely adore. It's probably the one part of being mortal I'm really going to miss.

The other things that come with the immortality for a Valkyrie are some enhanced strength, ability to heal from most injuries, and the body stops aging. One more thing that is pretty universal with all of the immortals when they attain immortality is hyper-sensitivity, also known as over-stimulation. As my senses have improved to accommodate my body changing and coming into its powers, every touch, every smell is intensified, every feeling is more exciting. I can even feel it when guys are staring at my ass, which - if I do say so, myself - is utterly fabulous. The ass, not the staring. So why wouldn't they stare?

Upping the ante a bit is my heritage. I'm not your typical run-of-the-mill Valkyrie, as if there even is such a thing. First-generation Valkyrie are created when a dying female warrior calls out to the gods Freya and Wóden and they strike her with lightning, bringing her back from the brink and making her pregnant with a Valkyrie daughter, meaning all first-gen Valkyries are demigods, and are all half-sisters - or two-thirds sisters, however that works. But I'm a second-gen Valkyrie. My mother's mother - the one that wasn't a god - was a Lykae, otherwise known as a werewolf, before the gods 'struck her pregnant' - so to speak - so my mom was already a little different than your typical Valkyrie born from a human mother. My father, though, was a Sorcerer. My mom hadn't told me a lot about him, just that he was Turkish.

Sorceri like my father had magical powers and not much else beyond standard non-aging immortality and a deep-seated love for anything gold. Beyond their magical abilities, Sorceri are mostly known for their bizarro clothing choices of ostentatious gold apparel and complete lack of physical defenses or abilities. Most of the Valkyries tend to think of Sorceri as evil, though - partially because of who most of them have allied with.

My best friend outside of the Valkyrie is a witch from the Seattle House of Witches named Vasilisa Dragomir, although she goes by Lissa, and she tried teaching me how to harness magic for a little while, but it never really went anywhere. Sorceri are offshoots from witches, although their powers all specialize in enchantment. Although some witches can have more than one, witches have five different castes - sort of like specializations - that they can have to their magic: warriors, healers, enchantresses, conjurers, and seers. Lissa is only a few years older than I am, but she's a healer and she already seems to be a one-caste witch for life.

Mom, or as my friends and I all call her, Janine Hathaway, had a bit more Lykae in her, which - again, thankfully - I seemed to have avoided. Lykae have a lot of ... umm .. dog-like characteristics to them. As a Valkyrie, we all have fangs, but hers are a bit more pronounced than the average. Her strength is off the charts, too. Lykae tend to all revel in the physical: touch, taste, drink, sex. Mom has always kept a tight leash on such things - no pun intended -, but I could see it in her eyes from time to time; that desire to just go wild and howl at the moon. That whole full-moon-werewolf thing is a real thing, too. Though she could unleash her inner beast in a fight whenever she needed to, the full moon always made it come out to play a little. Her beast wasn't half what a 'real' Lykae was, but she definitely had to work to control it. That dog-like loyalty is nice, too - or it would be if I ever personally experienced it from her. Much to the chagrin of my Valkyrie coven, I've had a few Lykae friends over the years and they've always been intensely loyal.

There's also this thing called the Instinct. For Mom and the Lykae that I've known, it's like an actual voice in your head whispering at you and telling you what to do when it really matters. For me, I get glimpses of what feels right, but the Instinct doesn't speak to me. It's more of a dull humming in the back of my brain or women's intuition.

Even though I'm kind of a mutt, thankfully, Valkyrie won out between my parents' races in the gene pool with me. I was a female - since there's no male Valkyrie - and I wasn't born with any significant magical powers. If I get really pissed or excited, my hands will glow, but that's about it for Sorceri abilities. I'm also just a touch physically stronger and more impulsive than my Valkyrie aunts and cousins, thanks to my Lykae grandmother.

As the storm continued to rumble and light up the sky, I stood out in the field, arms spread, hoping and waiting for lightning to hit me. It wasn't often that a Valkyrie got a direct hit, but it was said to be almost a spiritual experience and known to super-charge you. I was so excited by the idea and the feelings I was feeling that my hands were glowing a bright green color. I think my excitement was amping up the lightning, too.

"Rose, I'm gonna need you to come inside," Alberta called from the doorway of our house, "I know you're enjoying the storm, but I got a phone call from Annika in the New Orleans coven and we have a job for you."

All Valkyrie live in covens, which are basically like sorority houses for us, and Alberta is sort of our resident house mother. Our coven is in Seattle, but New Orleans is our HQ. The Valkyrie queen, Furie, had lived there, but she has been missing as a prisoner of war for fifty years, which is longer than I've been alive. Annika has been running QB in her absence, with the help of Nïx, the first Valkyrie to ever be born - and our Valkyrie faction's resident soothsayer.

As anger from being torn from the storm surged through me, a couple of big bolts rumbled nearby. Yup, that was my lightning. I punched one of the lightning-ravaged trees in the yard on my way in and made a mental note to give the tree nymphs a call to fix that tree when I put a hole in the trunk. Those slores could prove useful occasionally.

"What's up?" I asked Alberta, taking a seat on the couch and putting my feet up on the table.

"Don't be gauche, Rose," Alberta said, giving my feet a shove to knock them back down to the floor, "This table cost more than your favorite pair of Louboutins."

A lot of what we Valkyrie owned were the best, most expensive things. When you don't have to eat and you live forever, you can accumulate wealth pretty easily, and Nïx used her - literal - fortune-telling ability to help us to get in on good investments to make that wealth grow. Also, as Valkyrie, we all shared Freya's acquisitiveness - some more than others - so we always wanted to buy things. A lot of us can become mesmerized by jewels and often have to go through years of aversion training to overcome it. Of course, coming from Sorceri, who value gold, and Valkyrie roots, I was particularly susceptible to it, so no one had even wasted their time trying to break me of it yet.

"By now, you've heard some of the rumors about alliances, I assume?" Alberta asked.

We had entered an Accession, a battle to the death of all the immortal and mythical species that happens every five hundred years or so, a few years ago. Alliances were often made during the Accession and fought together through the duration.

"I heard about the Lykae. Were there other alliances?" I asked.

"Quite a few, actually. But today, we're going to talk about the one I thought would never happen. Nïx and Annika have us allied with the leeches."

"Leeches? We've allied with the Dacians, now that they've come out of hiding?"

Although I'd been kept out of the thick of the fighting until I reached immortality, the Valkyrie had fought and killed more than a few vampires in the past year that I'd been fighting with them, all of those vampires well and truly evil, but vampires weren't all that way. The Dacians were a group of natural-born vampires who had been in hiding, in their own hidden and cloaked homeland for several centuries, so long that most of us thought they were dead, or a myth. Just goes to show that all of the myths are true. They were the most 'civilized' of the leeches, if you can call them that, in that they'd built up a society and government for themselves and mostly stayed out of wars and conquests. Although they were still fierce in battle if needed, they were all well-educated, many devoting their lives to art and culture. They still drank blood, but never took lives for it; never straight from the source.

I gasped. "The Horde?"

The Horde was a group of homicidal vampires with red eyes, driven insane by blood-lust and by being cosas - those who could take memories from blood when drank directly from the flesh. They were the ones we fought. The evil ones.

"No, although it's not much better."

"Forebearers," I grumbled. The Forebearers were a group of warrior vampires headed by a vampire named Kristoff who was the heir-apparent to the Horde throne, but was raised by humans and, as a result, had a completely different ideology. All of his soldiers were turned humans he pulled from the battlefield at their time of death, offering them the choice of dying there or a life of servitude with him. As I understood it, Kristoff had two rules: swear your allegiance to him and never drink blood straight from a living person.

"Forebearers," Alberta confirmed.

"And where do I come into this?" I asked, getting more irritated by the minute with where I dreaded this was going.

"Every Valkyrie coven has been asked to choose a Valkyrie to pair up with one of their soldiers. As our youngest Valkyrie in Seattle, Nïx insisted it be you. According to Nïx, since he's in our territory, you'll be the one in charge here, but he'll be exchanging knowledge with you, so draw up a schedule for his time here. He'll train you to fight, and you'll teach him about Valkyrie life."

I asked, "How am I supposed to teach him about Valkyrie life without telling them about the Lore?"

All the beings who were immortal or mythical - Valkyrie, Lykae, Sorceri, Witches, Vampires, Nymphs, and more - could be grouped together into what you'd call the Lore, or Loreans. Almost the only universal thing among all of the factions is that no one believes that we're real. That, and that all of our eyes change with heightened emotions. As a Valkyrie, mine turned silver. For vampires? Usually an inky black color.

Most of us in the Lore knew a lot about each other, thanks to all of us being around for so long ... Most of us did. Not the Forebearers. All Loreans had one universal rule, which was punishable by the gods: Never let humans know about the Lore. As turned humans, we all kind of cautiously kept the Forebearers uninformed, if and when we ever ran into them and let them live.

"I'm not sure why, but Nïx said that the rules didn't apply to this one. I think maybe that's part of why she picked you; because at your age, you know the least. And because you have the most to gain by learning to fight from a warrior who has been fighting since the rule of Rasputin."

Most of the Forebearers were either Russian or Estonian, since Kristoff hailed from somewhere around there. I scowled. "Does this guy at least speak English?"

"I don't know yet. Annika emailed me a dossier tonight for you to look over. I'm sending that to you now. Along with it, she sent his picture so we could identify him. Here it is." Alberta flicked through a couple of things on her phone and brought up an image and showed it to me. He had shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes, with lightly tanned skin, in direct contrast to his species. His eyes were so dark that it might even be hard to tell if they were to flicker black. Like most Lorean males, he looked incredibly tall, maybe over six and a half feet. And under different circumstances - say, if he wasn't a vampire - I would have thought he was hot. "According to Annika, though, a group of the Forebearers have been living in New Orleans for a couple of years now, ever since shortly after Myst the Coveted blooded one of them."

Blooding. Ah. That. When a vampire came into his immortality, his body 'died', in a manner of speaking. His heart stopped beating, his lungs no longer took in air. And, most curious of all, he could no longer 'get it up' - if you know what I mean - like a normal man. When a vampire identifies his Bride - the female that fate decides is the one he is most compatible with, most likely to spend his forever with, that all changes.

A handful of other Lore species also had similar fated mates, all with different ways of determining mate-hood. Just because fate has decided you're the female he's most compatible with, though, doesn't mean the reverse is true. Unless you're the same species, Bridehood or mate-dom or whatever you want to call it doesn't have to run both ways.

As for that 'most curious' part I mentioned, here's where it gets even more curious: the first time he gets wood after he's blooded, he can only make it go away with his Bride. If he gets excited that very first time and she's not there for relieving it, he's in for a whole lot of agony for however long it takes until she is there for him - or he dies.

Not that all Brides have a choice in the matter. Although becoming an immortal vampire would make him exceptionally strong, with blooding came additional strength in spades, too. Even more than your typical Valkyrie. Granted, especially with a face like this guy's, a lot of females would probably be more than willing to put him out of that particular misery. Although, most of the Lorean females I knew would probably take his head off while basking in the afterglow, just because he's a leech.

Myst, however, had gotten off with her vamp five years ago, even though she did leave him to go back to her coven. And let him live to tell the tale. Doing so had earned her the nickname of Mysty the Vampire-Layer.

"Now," Alberta continued, "Annika said he would be in Seattle tomorrow night, an hour after dusk. The plan is for him to stay in Seattle for the next two weeks."

"How is he arriving? Seems like flying in a plane, or - gods forbid! - driving could mean that instead of this Forebearer arriving here, we get a smoldering pile of ash. He's never been to Seattle, has he?"

Vampires and demons had the ability to 'trace' - a sort of form of teleportation - but it only worked for places that they could remember having been to before or could see with your eyes.

"Deshazior," Alberta replied. Deshazior, or Desh as he liked to be called by his friends, was a storm demon who used to make his living as an honest-to-goodness pirate, sailing the seven seas. Like 'Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum' and all that good stuff. These days he was pretty much a Lore taxi service, for the right price. And Desh was one of the few beings who could trace that had been right in our coven's living room, not to mention one of the few males who'd almost made it to my bedroom. Desh was scruffy and rough around the edges, but hotter than a direct lightning strike.

"Greedy opportunistic mercenaries," I grumbled, "I thought he liked me. So, where is this leech going to stay for the next two weeks?"

"As far as I have heard, this leech still has a dead ticker, so Annika and I were thinking let's isolate him. We've asked to keep him from the rest of the coven. Deshazior was instructed not to drop him off on our doorstep, so he'll call you with a pick-up point - probably a bar somewhere, knowing Deshazior. Hopefully not somewhere too populated. After that, you're going to take him to a hotel in Seattle and he won't be coming back here. We'll arrange for you to have reserved access to a gym somewhere that you can train at. No need to subject him to any more Lorean females if there's even a chance of blooding him here."

"Agreed. Gods, what a mess that would be!" I exclaimed, almost chuckling at the thought.

"So, we'll just have you stay with him in the same hotel room until he leaves town again. Don't worry, Rose; it has two beds. I'm sure it'll be fine."

"In the same room? But what if I blood him?" I asked, "Oh gods, what if he wants to bite me? If he's supposed to be our ally, I don't want to have to kill him."

"What are the chances of him being blooded, at all? Especially if you're the only one he sees?" Alberta asked, "And just don't let him bite you. Have him promise it or something. I was told he places an extremely high value on honor, so you can use that to your advantage. And not that I'm recommending it or anything of the sort - gods know I'd rather kill him than have him bite me -, but getting bitten might not be that bad. From what Nïx says - she seemed mostly lucid this time - Myst the Coveted, Daniela the Ice Maiden, and even Kaderin the Cold-Hearted are all married to Forebearers now. She even said that they can't get enough of their husbands' bites. Called it orgasmic, even. Chances are that if you blooded him, it could actually be a match."

Orgasmic? No leech is going to be a match to me. Even if it is orgasmic, I'm not sure any orgasm is worth letting a fang take a piece of me.