Ruby Shadows (65 page)

“
Who…who are you?” The golden eyes reflected his image back to
him—tall and dark and menacing. “Who are you and what do you
want?”

“
Relax,” Tragar rumbled, trying to sound reassuring.
Apparently he failed.

“
Let me go!” She began to struggle again and this time her
pure gold eyes were filled not with fury but with fear. “Let me go,
I won’t let you!” She glanced at the blond male who was still
moaning and nursing his wounds. “I won’t let you do it! I won’t go
through it again—I won’t!”

Tragar felt his
heart fist in his chest. Gods, she thought he was a rapist, no
better than the bastard that had ripped her maidenhood from her and
taken her against her will!

“
I’m not what you think,” he said more roughly than he
intended. “I didn’t come to rape you, Emily. I was sent to kill
you.”

Cardinal Sins

Born to Darkness book 4

Coming Soon

Even angels have to get a little dirty
sometimes…

Pure as the driven snow, Eyrn is an angel,
captured from the fields of Heaven and held by an evil demon who
plans to defile her. She escapes from Hell with the help of a
friendly witch and a protection spell. But the magic backfires and
she finds herself thrown literally into the lap of a man she has
never met before.

Jake Shadowlock is a rancher in Southeast
Texas—or at least that’s what he’d like to be. Unfortunately,
ranching is expensive so he has to make ends meet in other
ways—like by using his warlock powers for clients across the world
who want dark magic done. Jake specializes is the most evil spells
imaginable so he can’t understand why he has been chosen as Eyrn’s
protector. After all, the little angel is sweet and good and
pure—pretty much his exact opposite. How is he supposed to keep her
safe from whatever is stalking her?

He doesn’t have long to find out. For Eryn is
special among her kind—a unique angel with abilities no other
celestial entity possesses. And there is a Prince of Night and
Shadows stalking her, intent on dragging her back to Hell to
despoil her purity and plunder her innocence.

Can Jake protect her from the Demon’s lust?
And will Eryn be able to keep her purity, especially with all the
new, strange feelings blossoming inside her for her grim and
mysterious protector?

You’ll have to read
Cardinal Sins
to
find out. Coming soon in the Born to Darkness series…

EXCERPT:

“
That’s it girl, one more for the road before I go.” I pulled
another shiny red apple out of my pocket and held it out to
Jenny.

The pregnant mare
snorted and lipped the apple out of my palm eagerly before messily
crunching it in half. A good chunk flew wide and landed in the
straw of her stable and she went for it at once, moving pretty fast
despite how big she was getting.

I eyed her
critically—she was going to drop that foal any time now. In the
next week or so I’d have to start sleeping in the stable to be sure
I was here in case she needed help. Maybe even tonight?

I put a hand on her
rounded side and felt the foal push back against me. Little guy was
eager to get out and about—he was probably feeling pretty cramped
up inside his mamma right about now. But just feeling him wasn’t
going to give me an idea.

Closing my eyes, I let myself go and reached out with my
magic. Witches use a lot of paraphernalia and chanting and rites
and rituals to do their magic. With warlocks, it’s different.
We
can
do the rites and rituals
and often as not I do them for clients who want things to look all
officially magical. But they aren’t really necessary—not for
someone who knows what he’s doing. And I did—after all, I’d been
doing magic since the age of fourteen.

What my magic sense
was telling me now was that the foal was still a good week off, at
least. So I could relax and sleep in my own bed tonight.

Or
at least I
thought
I was
going to get to relax. Little did I know I was in for a surprise—a
big
feathery
surprise. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I gave Jenny one
last pat and went back to the house, whistling a little as I went.
It had been a long day but a good one—filled with what my
Granddaddy would have called “honest work.” Doing chores around the
house… mending one of my barbed wire fences around the edge of my
property—a forty acre ranch just north of Austin, Texas—mucking out
the stables and making sure Jenny was settled well. All of it good,
hard manual labor that makes a man sweat. And aside from checking
on my pregnant mare just now, I hadn’t had to use my magic once.
Like I said, a good day.

Inside I stripped
off and got in the shower, letting the steaming water wash over my
sore muscles. I wished I could end every day this way—I much
preferred honest work to making a living with my magic.
Unfortunately, ranching wasn’t very profitable unless you had a
thousand head of cattle or you wanted to run one of those tourist
orientated “dude ranches” that caters to idiots who want to come
play cowboy for a week at a time. Either of those options required
working with people—something I generally tried to avoid if I could
help it.

Of course I dealt
with people when I went out on a job—couldn’t help that. But I
liked to keep my home private, which is something I couldn’t do if
I had to keep a bunch of ranch hands to run cattle or a staff to
cater to whiney tourists. And since the ranch wouldn’t pay for
itself, magic was my only option.

You’d think I’d be
glad to use my gifts to make a living but you’d be wrong. It hadn’t
used to bother me but lately I’d been rethinking things a little.
The last job I had taken, down in Tampa, Florida, had been a bad
one. It involved working for a Three Star Vampire who wanted me to
help sacrifice another vampire in order to steal her powers.

I didn’t think the
job would bother me. After all, I’d had to do some dark things in
my day. Not only that but I’d gained a certain reputation for doing
them well and thoroughly. It also didn’t hurt that I was the
strongest warlock in the southern US—maybe the entire US, depending
on what you wanted done. My reputation drew clients like honey
draws flies and some of them were willing to pay a hell of a
lot—like the vampire I mentioned—Celeste was her name.

Anyway, Celeste
wanted to drain the blood and power from one of the vamps she’d
spawned which sounded like a pretty straightforward deal to me. Of
course, she hadn’t told me that the vamp she was looking to drain
was a female. I don’t take jobs that involve hurting women—for
personal reasons. By the time I found out who the victim was, it
was too late to back out and I was bound by the magical contract we
had signed. I tried to get out of it early but Celeste was having
none of it. Still, I figured one vamp killing another was no big
deal. Hell, it’s like one snake swallowing another, or one spider
draining another one dry, right? The bloodsuckers are vermin—who
the hell cares what they do?

But I found myself
feeling sorry for the victim—a pretty little gal by the name of
Taylor. She wasn’t your usual vamp, all hard, cold corners and
nasty sharp edges. She seemed like a pretty decent person which
made what I had to do even harder.

Plus my client,
Celeste, was a real bitch and I’m not saying that to be sexist. I
mean she was a piece of work—a cold as ice and cruel as they come.
You pull up a rock and look under it and you’d find nicer critters
crawling there in the mud—she was that bad. I couldn’t say I was
sorry when the spell went south and she wound up getting ripped
apart by a cursed werewolf.

I still wondered
about Taylor, though. The last I’d see there was a witch—one of the
strongest I’d ever felt—working on her and trying to bring her
back. Whether she succeeded or not, I wasn’t sure but she’d been
damn foolish to try what she had—opening a door into the Abyss.
That part of the Underworld or Hell, as most people call it, is a
place that goes beyond dark and into pretty damn scary. I couldn’t
help thinking at the time that the witch, whoever she was, must
have cared a hell of a lot for Taylor to try something so risky to
bring her back.

I tried and tried to
put the whole experience out of my head but the job continued to
bother me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the part I’d played and
thinking that my Nana—who was a full fledged witch—would have been
ashamed of me for playing it.

Should have checked it more carefully before I agreed. Should
never have taken a job from a vamp in the first place.
I normally avoid vamps
like a plague but this one had offered so much I’d let the dollar
signs in my eyes overshadow my good judgment. Well, never again, I
vowed to myself, but the promise didn’t make me feel one bit
better. I kept feeling like it wasn’t over yet—like the rash
decision I’d made to get involved with a vampire was going to come
back and bite me in the ass. Maybe there were consequences
coming…consequences that I couldn’t see yet but would be damn hard
to pay when they finally caught up to me…

I tried to shake off
the dark thoughts as I toweled off and threw on a pair of jeans and
an old black t-shirt. There was a T-bone in the fridge calling my
name and I fixed it just like my Grandaddy had taught me, on a flat
iron pan over the gas stove.

The steak hit the spot and I paired it with a salad, more
because I knew I ought to eat a few greens than because I liked
rabbit food.
After
dinner I had a glass of whiskey—just one, to aid digestion as
Granddaddy would say—put on a pair of worn but comfortable cotton
pajama pants and settled in bed with an old Louis L’Amour
novel.

It was the perfect
end to a perfect day and if my conscious hadn’t still been nagging
me about the job in Florida, I would have drifted off to sleep with
no problem. Funny how that works—you probably don’t want to know
all the awful things I’ve done—but not a one of them had ever
bothered me before. No many how many men I’d killed, I never lost a
wink of sleep. But that night I tossed and turned, trying to find a
comfortable position.

About an hour past
midnight I was just closing my eyes and getting comfortable when
suddenly a door opened in my ceiling.

Of course, I didn’t
know it was a door or what the hell was going on. All I knew was
that a brilliant light was suddenly shining down from above and I
could hear voices talking to each other—or more like yelling at
each other. Several of the voices were light and high—female. But
one was deep and angry and not human—not human at all. Maybe
demonic? The thought made my jaw clench. I didn’t know how I could
tell it was the voice of a demon I was hearing, but even half
asleep, I knew it, right enough.

Then something big
and white fell out of the window directly on top of me.

I was still barely
awake—just registering the light from above and the shouting
voices. I hadn’t even gotten around to moving yet so the thing hit
me square in the chest, nearly knocking the wind out of me. It gave
out a startled cry as it landed.

“
Oh!”

I was pretty damn
startled myself, not to mention surprised that anything could get
at me while I lay in my bed at night. My entire house and ranch are
warded against intruders but that didn’t seem to matter to the
something—or someone—who was struggling in my lap.

“
What the hell?” I exploded, sitting straight up in bed. I was
determined to get the upper hand so I wrapped my arms around the
intruder and held on tight, hoping to throw them off
balance.

“
Oh! Oh, please! Please don’t—my wings!” gasped a frightened,
female voice.

I suddenly became
aware that the intruder in my lap was extremely soft and curvy. It
was a she and she was struggling frantically against my hands which
I had planted firmly on her back to hold her in place.

Then I heard that deep, demonic voice shouting through the
still open doorway,
“Stop—I command you!”
There was a sound of scuffling and then door slammed shut as
abruptly as it had opened. For a moment I could still hear the
demon’s voice shouting, “She’s mine! Mine, I tell you!”

Then even the faint outlines of the door
faded from my ceiling and I was alone in the dark with a strange
woman in my arms. A woman who was still struggling and fighting me
as though she was desperate to be free.

“
Please,
my
wings,”
she begged
again.

“
What the hell?” I growled again, frowning at her. “Who are
you and how did you get here?”

“
I’ll tell you anything you want, only please stop touching my
wings. It’s not right for a male to have his hands on me
there.
Please!”

“
What are you talking about?” I was utterly bewildered. True,
I had my hands on her back but I couldn’t see or feel any kind of
wings.

I turned her
roughly, putting her into a shaft of moonlight coming from the
window so I could examine her shoulders more closely and see what
she was talking about. She was wearing a thin white dress with tiny
string straps that went quite low—almost down to the small of her
back. I brushed her long, white-blonde hair out of the way—it
smelled like flowers—and examined her more closely. There were no
real wings that I could see but the moonlight showed glowing golden
lines etched on her pale skin—lines that looked like feathers
tattooed on her flesh.