Black Widow Demon
The Demon Outlaws series
Book 2
Paula Altenburg
Genre:
Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance
Publisher:
Entangled Publishing
Date of
Publication: November 26th, 2013
Cover
Artist: Kim Killion
Book
Description:
Passionate
and headstrong, half-demon Raven is nearly executed on the orders of her
fundamentalist stepfather. She escapes from the burning stake using the gifts
of her otherworldly heritage and the help of a mortal stranger named Blade. Now
she’s set on revenge, and only quiet, intense Blade stands in her way.
A retired
assassin weary of the weight of his past, Blade has crossed the desert to seek
out a new life. His journey is interrupted when his conscience demands he help
Raven find an old friend who can help her. Saving her from her need for revenge
and delivering her into the hands of loved ones means he’s one step closer to
redemption.
But as
Blade’s sense of duty becomes something more and threats, both mortal and
immortal, stalk the woman he can’t abandon, he could very well fall back into
the life he’s trying so hard to escape.
Excerpt:
Tidy towns often concealed dirty secrets. And
this small mining town was too tidy for Blade’s liking. It was nothing like he had
expected.
Nestled amongst the foothills of the
Godseeker Mountains, it suffered from too-uniform construction and a general
lack of aesthetic design. But after several months of crossing the desert alone,
Blade’s standards were not all that high. He wanted a bath, a hot meal, and a
soft bed.
A bed he could wake up in alone. The
two-foot goldthief, one of the more dangerous variety of snakes in these parts,
he had found in his blankets that morning had been an unwelcome surprise.
Fortunately, Blade was neither a restless sleeper nor easily startled and
possessed a great deal of natural patience. Once the sun came up on the desert,
the well-rested serpent had slithered off on its own without incident.
Blade studied the mining settlement deep in
the valley below from the outcropping of weathered sandstone. Layers of desert dirt
coated the rooftops, painting the entire town a dull shade of gray. Beyond it,
the hills rose to flat peaks of a vast rocky mountain range, sparsely forested
with juniper and yellow pine. Narrow ribbons of silvery water streamed down to
filter through sand dunes on the valley floor and irrigate the town’s gardens,
ones that were now spent and shriveled by this time of year. Behind and above, past
the top of the mesa, stretched the desert.
This bold new settlement had sprung up arrogantly
close to what had, until recently, been demon territory. It possessed no protective
ramparts, something Blade thought a serious oversight on the part of its founders.
Demons might be gone, yet the world contained any number of mortal dangers.
When he considered his near-empty pack,
however, and that this was the first sign of civilization he’d come across in
several weeks, its proximity to evil and its underwhelming neatness was not enough
of a deterrent. He did not know for certain what had drawn him back to this
land of his youth, anyway. He’d had no particular destination in mind. Perhaps,
after more than a decade away, it was time to lay old ghosts to rest.
He patted down his clothing to confirm that
his knives were secure and at hand. He doubted if he would be recognized here,
or if it would mean much to anyone anymore if he were, but he’d already
received his second chance in life and he intended to treat the gift with
respect.
A slight breeze stirred the warm, late
afternoon air and he made a face—he stank, no doubt about it. If he did not get
that bath, he could forget about finding the hot meal and soft bed. Although
waking up alone would be guaranteed.
As he turned, he detected movement at the
far edge of the town, near the dunes. From this distance it was difficult to
say for certain, but it looked as if they were building a very large bonfire.
He wondered what they were celebrating.
Shrugging his pack higher on his shoulders,
he picked his way off the outcropping. Once on the valley floor, he carefully circled
the town to approach via the main street that cut through its heart. It was
time to go home.
* * *
Fair trial, be damned. Without the arrival
of some sort of miracle, come nightfall the townspeople intended to burn Raven at
the stake as a spawn.
She sat in a makeshift jail cell on the
edge of a rough wooden bed, its wool blanket scratchy beneath her flattened palms,
and her feet dangling well off the whitewashed pine floor. The jailor’s chair
and a desk with a crooked leg were the only other furnishings in the room, and
were well out of her reach on the other side of the iron bars.
For the hundredth time she mentally raced
through her options. All of them involved killing her stepfather. But her first
attempt was what had gotten her into this trouble.
She toppled to her side and tucked her clasped
hands beneath her cheek, staring at the bars. It was his own fault that she’d
stabbed him. He had slipped his hand down the front of her dress. When she
defended herself, he’d had the nerve to blame her for his wrongdoing. He
claimed she had tempted him.
Then, he’d told others her mother had slept
with a demon and that Raven was spawn.
The injustice of her situation quivered
through her slight frame. She was not a whore, and she would rather be burned as
a spawn than become one for him. If Creed knew how her stepfather had touched
her, he would kill him on her behalf. Her friend, however, was miles away and
knew nothing of this.
Time crept by as the shadows deepened.
The front door of the jailhouse creaked
open and she sat up with a start, her heart hammering in her chest. She blinked
her eyes against the sudden stream of light from outdoors.
Justice appeared before her—Justice in the
form of her stepfather, and not any sudden righting of wrongs. Hate unfurled in
her stomach at the sight of him.
She rose from the bed and stood at the bars
of her cell. His gait was stiff as he walked into the room to set a lantern on
the desk. She had jabbed the knife into his thigh and that the wound pained him
filled her with joy, although he had been lucky. That was not where she’d
aimed.
“There is still time to change your mind,” he
said to her, speaking softly so as not to be overheard in case anyone lurked
outside the jailhouse door. “I can help you exorcise the demon in you.”
Raven met his eyes. It was a talent of hers
that she could sometimes read people’s darkest thoughts, particularly when
emotions ran high, and his were darker than most.
She no longer had any reason to disguise
her contempt for him. “You would love to see me humiliated, stripped naked, and
flogged to within an inch of my life. Then you would take me. Afterward, you
would drink my blood because you believe what it contains can give you a demon’s
strength.”
His face flushed with anger. He had been a
handsome man once. Still was, in fact, despite the silver threads lacing his
brown hair and the deep creases around his eyes and mouth. He had a presence
about him that commanded a high level of respect. But Raven saw the ugliness simmering
beneath the surface. Her mother had died a broken woman because of him.
Hatred and fear fed her strength. She
gripped the cell bars so tight, she knew when she released them the imprints of
her fingers would remain.
You could
break free if you choose.
That inner voice terrified her far more
than the man who faced her.
Her stepfather’s eyes followed hers to the
bars that contained her. “That’s it, little demon,” he taunted, his words soft.
“Show the world what you are. What the blood you say I’d love to drink
contains. How far do you think you could run then? How safe from the
Godseekers’ assassins would you be?”
That was what stopped her. She did not want
people to think of her as a demon spawn. She did not want to be hunted, nor for
Justice to be proven right in anyone’s eyes. She had to find another way to
escape.
When she did, she would kill him.
“There are some who suspect you for what you are,” she said in return. “If I
burn, more will begin to doubt you. They will watch you.” Her glance flickered
to the amulet he wore around his throat. “And eventually, when the goddesses
fail to return, no matter how many so-called spawn you torture and kill, the
people will turn from you.”
Justice hooked the wooden jailor’s chair
with his foot and swung it around, favoring his injured leg, then sat with his
arms folded across the chair’s spindled back as if he had all the time in the
world. He planted his chin on the crook of one elbow and studied her.
She had never fully understood the way he
watched her until a few short nights ago. Now, she read raw hunger in his
expression and thoughts. Her dinner rebelled at the memory of his touch on her
bare flesh.
“It seems people have already turned from
you,” he observed.
He, too, spoke the truth. Raven had not
believed that people she’d known her whole life would go through with his plan.
She had hoped they would see the wrongness of it long before now. Sundown,
however, had already passed.
Despair settled in with the night. No one
had come to her rescue. Creed, her only real hope, was far away, and oblivious
to her situation. If she chose to save herself, it meant releasing a presence inside
her she had never before allowed to be free.
The thought frightened her. There would be
no turning back from it if she did.
The ugliness of her stepfather’s thoughts
decided it for her, though. She would not burn, and she would not live in fear.
She would not be broken by him as her mother was.
She would save herself.
She wore the same dress he’d deemed
indecent two nights prior when the nightmare began. Tracing a finger along its prim
neckline, she let her eyelids droop to examine him from beneath a dark fringe
of thick, curling lashes. Her golden-toned skin gleamed in the lamplight as she
pressed against the bars of the cell.
Justice swallowed, then with unsteady
fingers gripped the amulet he wore around his neck. Once, a long time ago, he
had been a goddess’s favorite. The amulet protected him from the seduction of another
immortal.
But it did nothing to protect Raven from
him.
“Whore,” he spat at her, and with that
single utterance, she knew she had lost.
“Enjoy your final moments of glory,” she
said, dropping her hand to her side. “Women cannot all be whores and spawn, and
Faith will not remain silent forever. Not after tonight.”
It had been a wild guess on her part, based
on what she’d read of his ugliest desires, but her words struck home. His face
reddened, then paled.
Fear flamed in her chest—not for herself, but
for the frail, timid woman she had named.
What had she done?
“Undertaker!” Justice shouted, half turning
toward the door. It opened at once, and a tall, gaunt man stuck his head into
the room. “It is time.”
Raven watched her stepfather lift a heavy black
key from a hook on the wall behind the desk, then move to insert it in the lock
on the cell door. She held her breath, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Justice drew his hand back without
unlocking the cell door and regarded her thoughtfully. He turned back to the
battered desk, then rooted around in a drawer. He hauled out a shining pair of
handcuffs crafted from silver metal that had been mined in the nearby mountains
and hardened with a special alloy. “Hold out your hands.”
She did not want to be bound. If she were,
she would be twice as helpless. “No.”
“If you do not,”—his tone was harsh and
deliberate, his eyes hard—“I will burn the jail down around you.”
She felt the truth in him. He would do it.
Stunned into obedience, she held out her hands and he snapped the cuffs in
place. Then, he opened the cell door.
Undertaker reached in to capture her arm.
“Don’t touch her!” Justice snapped,
slapping the other man’s hand aside. Undertaker turned to him, his bushy black
eyebrows raised in silent surprise. “She’s a spawn. If you touch her, she can
claim you.”
The lie came so easily to him.
And yet, it was not quite a lie. Raven
could not claim a man. But she could cloud his thoughts long enough to defend
herself from him. Justice had the knife wound in his leg to prove it.
“Ask him how he knows that,” she said to
Undertaker, her gaze never leaving her stepfather. “Ask him how he touched me,
and for what purpose.”
Justice slapped her hard across the face,
and her head snapped back. Pain blossomed, blinding her. The world darkened.
“You disrespect your mother’s memory when
you speak like this. She was an innocent, lured by a demon—just as you tried to
lure me. She raised you to be better.”
Raven’s eyes watered, the pain now more
than physical, but she refused to shed tears. He had not married her mother out
of love or respect for her innocence. She had been a beautiful woman, a master
artisan and an asset for him to own, nothing more, and he had destroyed her.
Raven touched the back of one shackled
wrist to the corner of her mouth and wiped away a trickle of blood. It left a
dark smear on her skin in the fading light. Undertaker had given her candy when
she was a child, yet he’d neither made a move to protect her from Justice’s
blow nor uttered one word of protest against it. Pity for him displaced the
hurt in her heart. He was simple-minded and easily led. She read no malice toward
her on his part.
Her chin went up and she gazed steadily at
both men. “There is no need for either of you to touch me. I will walk on my
own.”
She displayed all the dignity she possessed
as she crossed the small jailhouse and stepped into the cool embrace of the
night.
Inside, she was shaking with anger and
fear. She did not want to die.
But living would come at a heavy price.
***
He had been wrong. No celebration was
planned.
With his angular face freshly shaven, shoulder-grazing
black hair damp and tied back with a worn leather thong, Blade noticed the
increased activity in the dusty, darkening street the instant he stepped from
the bathhouse.
He’d bought a change of clothes to wear,
leaving what he already owned behind to be laundered. A wool-lined coat of
soft, supple leather that fell to his hips, allowing for easy access to his
knives, was his one major investment. Cold ruled in the mountains.
While he was happy to be clean again, he
disliked the feel of his knives in their new and unfamiliar hiding places. He
especially disliked it now, when night was falling and people had gathered in
tight little groups, their hushed voices filled with unmistakable tension.
Years of training, received long ago but
never forgotten, had him react to it out of instinct. He inched the knife in
his sleeve closer to his palm as he pressed deeper into the shadows.
Invisibility was an assassin’s greatest weapon.
He eavesdropped on the conversation of
three men who were standing around the corner of the building from him, on the
street.
“She has always been strange.”
“Perhaps,” a second conceded. “But being
strange does not make her spawn.”
Blade’s interest spiked. The goddesses had
disappeared from the world nearly thirty years before, and more recently,
demons had been scoured from the earth. During the years in between, the shapeshifting
demons had ruled the desert, luring mortal women to them for pleasure. Half
demon spawn, like their fathers, were male—monsters born in demon form to mortal
mothers who had not survived their delivery. Demons, in turn, killed spawn at
birth. Blade knew of only one true, living female spawn in existence—and her mother had been a goddess, not a mortal
woman.
“She bewitched my son,” the first man complained
to the second, defending his stance. “If not for Creed’s interference, he’d be
her slave now. With Creed gone, I don’t know what will happen to him. He has
started to follow her again.”
“Creed thrashed your son to within an inch
of his life for following her around like a pup in the first place,” a third
man pointed out. “He claimed your son tried to touch her against her will.”
“Creed spread that lie because he is
already bewitched by her.”
“If he is bewitched, how could he leave her
for training?”
“Who says no to assassin trainers when they
are recruiting?”
No one could deny the truth of that
observation, Blade thought. Those who declined recruitment ended up dead.
The second man spoke up again. “I’m not
certain luring a man for pleasure warrants burning a woman at the stake.”
The third man murmured an uneasy agreement.
“It’s not the pleasure part that warrants
it,” the first one insisted. “It’s the bewitching. Raven enslaves men. You’ve
seen how the young ones look at her, and how she pretends not to notice. People
always said her mother slept with a demon,” he added. “But when it was a girl that
was born, and the birth didn’t kill her, everyone thought they were wrong.” A
note of worry crept into his tone. “Who knows how many more spawn there might
be? What if there are more like her?”
Blade, from his hiding place in the
shadows, propped his broad shoulders against the wooden wall of a building and
tipped his head back to stare at the emerging stars, lost in thought.
Women had only the protection of men in
this world. Some men were better protectors than others. Many were no
protection at all. But who was he to judge?
He had once been an assassin, although he
had never worked in the service of the Godseekers. He had been strictly for
hire, killing men, women, and children alike, without the luxury and freedom of
choice. Once he had reached a level of skill that let him name his own price,
he became more selective in the work he accepted.
Even at his lowest and most desperate,
however, he had never deliberately made anyone suffer. Whether the woman named
Raven was spawn or not, he wanted no part of this.
What was happening here was not his
problem....
About the Author:
Paula
Altenburg lives in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and two sons.
Once a manager in the aerospace industry, she now enjoys the freedom of working
from home and writing fulltime. Paula currently writes paranormal romance and
category romance for Entangled Publishing.
Visit her at www.paulaaltenburg.com
and follow her on Twitter @PaulaAltenburg.
@PaulaAltenburg
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