Love Bites Read Online Free Page A

baritone, but edged in the same vicious malice.
“You may as well admit your crimes, witch. We all know what you are, what black perversion you hide beneath your beauty. Confess, and seek my mercy!”
    Stop it! They’re dead. They’re both dead. They’ve
been
dead.
    She’d worked so hard to slay her demons. Yes, it had been bad the first three or four decades, but as she’d put her first century behind her, she’d learned to ignore those black memories. She’d often gone years without thinking of either of them, though Mordred’s birthday could bring it all back.
    But then things had . . . changed. The last decade had been a difficult one for the Magekind, as they’d found themselves fighting everything from demons to dragons to werewolves who were immune to magic.
    And Morgana, who’d thought she had everything under control, found she controlled nothing at all. Especially not herself. As her control frayed, it became all too tempting to strike out with her magic against anyone with the bad luck to rouse her ghosts. Including Percival and his team.
    That lack of control, of honor, was one of the things she most despised about herself. Especially since she was surrounded by those whose sense of honor was so acute.
    For fifteen centuries, the Knights of the Round Table had been considered the very embodiment of honor, even by those mortal storytellers who knew nothing of who they truly were. The same bards portrayed Morgana as the villain of the tale. In their songs, she was the witch who’d given birth to Mordred after an incestuous union with Arthur. Mordred, in turn, had led a rebellion against the king that plunged Britain into the Dark Ages. The songs the mortals sung bore little resemblance to reality, yet the bones of the truth were there.
    The poets had been right when they’d said Mordred was Morgana’s son with the High King from an incestuous union. What they hadn’t known was that Morgana and Arthur had been teenagers when the boy was conceived, chance-met strangers. It was only much later that Merlin told them Arthur’s father, King Uther Pendragon, had raped Morgana’s mother, a Druid priestess.
    In retrospect, that revelation had explained a great deal Morgana had never understood about her childhood. Her mother had always treated Morgana with a certain frigid distance. Duana, a Druid priestess, had only shown any interest in her daughter at all when it became obvious the child had a natural talent for healing. Even then, Duana had subjected her to constant stinging criticism of her attempts to master Druid herbal lore.
    Morgana had never understood why her mother treated her so coldly, until Merlin’s revelation. Duana was a tall blonde whose lovely face was a soft oval, while dark-haired Morgana’s features were a more delicate version of Arthur’s strong, angular face.
    And Arthur, she’d been told, looked exactly like his father.
    Every time she looked at Morgana, Duana must have been reminded of Uther Pendragon. Yet her mother had never told Morgana she was a product of rape, probably because of the cold pride that was so much a part of the Druid priestess’s character. If she had, history would have followed a very different course, for Morgana would have never knowingly slept with her half-brother.
    As it was, when Morgana was nineteen, Arthur fought a battle not far from the temple. Morgana was one of the healers called out to tend the wounded, and ended up treating Arthur’s best friend, Lancelot. She’d saved his life—and Arthur, who at seventeen had already been a skilled seducer, had taken her to bed.
    When she’d returned, her mother had taken one look at her and known—probably thanks to the Sight—that she was pregnant. Duana had demanded the father’s identity. When Morgana told her, she’d recoiled in revulsion and driven her daughter from the temple that was the only home she’d ever known. “Take the contents of your cursed womb, and get from my