Black Widow Demon
The Demon Outlaws #2
Paula Altenburg
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Paranormal
Romance
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Date of Publication: November
26th, 2013
ISBN-10: 1622660455
ISBN-13: 978-1622660452
Number of pages: 400
Word Count: 90,000
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
Guest Post:
I would like to welcome Paula Altenburg and thank her for today's guest post.
Santa Never Knew What Hit Him
I’d like to thank you for having me here today!
I’m busy promoting my latest release from Entangled
Publishing, Black Widow Demon, but
poor Blade’s getting a little tired from all the hype. He’s fairly anti-social
for a former saloon keeper. He’s also a retired assassin though, so I guess
that explains that.
So instead, I thought I’d share a Christmas memory with
everyone.
I was four or five years old, so my memory may be somewhat influenced
by time. And possibly television.
We were living in an old farmhouse, and the building creaked
at night. A lot. I have a feeling mice weren’t the only things stirring in
those walls, either. I remember my uncle, who was twenty or twenty-one at the
time, used to catch bats that lived in the attic.
This was an awesome house for kids to grow up in, with lots
of dark corners and rickety grates. There was even a cistern in the cellar for
catching rainwater.
My sister and I shared the “hired man’s room” above the
kitchen, which had its own back stairwell. This particular December 24th,
she and I decided we were old enough to wait up for Santa. Our window
overlooked the dooryard between the kitchen and the barn, so we figured we had
a pretty good vantage point to spot his arrival.
“Santa won’t come if you’re awake,” our mother warned us.
Not a problem. If we
could fake sleep well enough to fool her, Santa didn’t stand a chance.
So there we were, alone in our creaky bedroom above the old
kitchen, with everyone else in the house sound asleep, when we heard it.
Reindeer hooves on the rooftop.
There’s no mistaking that sound, and frankly, I have no idea
how Santa managed to pull off special ops for so many centuries. “Twas the
Night before Christmas” had the story right. He certainly did raise quite the
clatter. And my parents must have slept like the dead because the chimney went
right past their bedroom. We could hear him wedging his way into it all the way
from ours.
My sister and I sprang into action. We’d planned this for a
few weeks. As we rolled out of bed, she hiked up her pajamas and adjusted her
pull-ups. I passed her the baseball bat
and took Dad’s hunting rifle for myself. Her arm wasn’t long enough for her
finger to reach the trigger. The rifle had a kick to it, so you had to prop it
on top of your shoulder when you were our size or get knocked flat on your
backside when it fired.
Like I said. We’d planned this.
We crept down the back stairwell to the kitchen. The living
room, where the Christmas tree was, could be accessed from two different
directions. Three, if you counted the
chimney. I motioned for her to fan out. She’d go in from the front entry and
creep up on him from behind. I’d go around through the dining room and confront
him head on.
It was supposed to be a snatch and grab. She wasn’t tall
enough to do more than cap his knees.
I hadn’t counted on him being bent over.
“Freeze, Santa,” I said, and cocked the trigger.
He looked up, surprised, his hand tangled in the bag of
gifts on the floor in front of the
fireplace.
That was when my sister struck. Hard. (She’s grown up to be
quite the softball player, I might add.) She caught him in the side of the head
with the bat. Santa went down like a sack of potatoes.
We both stared at him for a long time.
“Well, now we have a problem,” I finally said.
My sister rested the baseball bat on her shoulder and stuck
her thumb in her mouth. Her pajama bottoms had sagged again. Since both her
hands were busy I hauled them up for her, not wanting her to trip.
“We can still salvage this,” I said to her. “You grab one
foot. I’ll take the other.”
After about an hour we finally managed to drag him onto the
front porch and dump him in the snow. We locked the door behind him. When he
finally came to, he saw us staring at him through the window beside the door. I
held up the rifle and patted it. He said a few un-Santa-like words, but decided
it best to cut his losses. He summoned the reindeer, and a few minutes later,
he was gone.
My sister and I piled the booty under the tree. I could
spell, so I labeled the gifts. Then we went back to bed. A few high fives may
have been exchanged.
And the next morning, as we tore off the wrapping, my mother
held up one present with a puzzled look on her face. “Why do you suppose Santa left me a snorkel
and fins?”
Blade and Raven asked me to pass on their best wishes for
the holiday season, and a Happy New Year to everyone. Their story, Black Widow Demon, is about new
beginnings, and they’re kind of psyched.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Giveaway:
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