Demon's Daughter (Demon Outlaws) (35 page)

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 had become 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 luxury of working from home and writing fulltime. Paula also co-authors paranormal romance under the pseudonym Taylor Keating. Visit her at
www.paulaaltenburg.com
.

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