Rogue Huntress: a new adult urban fantasy novel (Rogue Huntress Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Some Kind of Creative

  Whatever's Easiest

  A Newborn Mouse

  Take off Your Pants

  Panic Mode

  Apple Juice

  Kundalini Regrets

  Flannel PJs

  Picnicing with Wolfs

  No Rage for You

  A Woman a Wolf Doesn't Know

  A Kiss and a Kit

  Some Badass Assassin

  I Want You to Struggle

  Liberation and Permission

  Choices

  Going Upwind

  The Glee of Killing

  To Bond or Not to Bond

  Rogue Huntress

  Where to Next

  Rogue Huntress

  ROGUE HUNTRESS CHRONICLES

  Book One

  Copyright 2016 Thea Atkinson

  Published by Thea Atkinson

  Edited by Laura Kingsley

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form electronic or otherwise without permission from the author.

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  Some Kind of Creative

  There are a dozen ways to commit suicide if a gal is creative, and hanging wasn't one of my better ideas. I'd done a good job of stringing myself up, one a gal could be proud of actually. Problem was, I didn't want to die. Hadn't for one second intended it. As I dangled from the girder of my cell door, my legs already beginning their involuntary spasms against the finality of death, I realized threatening to off myself in the first place had been a stupid idea, not a brilliant one. To hold any water, a threat needed to be pressed all the way home. There wasn't much room to play chicken and win when you've shouted at your captor you'd rather die than let yourself be mated to the bastard who killed your father.

  So there I dangled, lead assassin for Beo pack, a shifter who put everything she had into doing damn fine work -- especially the nasty business of killing -- dying like some regular schlep. The knot at the back of my neck was perfectly tight even if it was strung by silk bedsheets from the top girder of the panic room's barred door. I was just off the floor enough I couldn't touch even a toe to the hardwood floor. I'd even chosen the best, most optic spot in the middle of the girder, straight in view of anyone who came up the stairs of my father's mansion to its suite of rooms I occupied as a prisoner. I dangled in plain view of the stairs with the bedroom suite behind me, and in front, through my cell door and beyond-- the broad portico that broke the wing into suites.

  I knew my prison all too well. My real mother had designed it as her own panic suite when she and my father rebuilt this mansion back in the 70s and it was newly fortified in the months before she panicked herself right out of our lives. It was outfitted with a bedroom and bath, a store of food and weapons, and a reading room that joined the bedroom suite to a portico leading out to the rest of the mansion. None of that familiarity helped my circumstance one bit. For the last few heart-sickening seconds, I'd been gaping at a bowl of fruit on the table, put there obviously by my captor, Caleb, with the thought that I'd be grateful for that small generosity.

  All it served to do was taunt me as I dangled, fighting the gravity until the idiot jailer could find me.

  I should have seen half a dozen guards running my way by now, barreling up the stairs and sprinting down the hallway toward me. There were none. There might never be any until it was too damn late. Mistake number two: if you're stupid enough to threaten your captor with your own death, thus making mistake number one, then don't decide to kill yourself at dinner time.

  I struggled to reach above my head and resist the deadly pull of gravity. My biceps felt like they'd been tied to the floor. I didn't need to try kicking at the bars with plenty of noise to wake the dead. My legs found plenty of energy to do that all on their own. Hell if I didn't truly do a damn good job.

  If I looked up from where I hung, I would see the slot where a three inch thick steel door could be dropped down, effectively sealing off the suite from the portico. It should have protected my family from invasion, except how could they know and be prepared for such an intimate invasion from within the ranks, from a man they had trusted for almost twenty decades.

  Now the bastard thought he would tame me long enough to make me his mate and secure the rest of the pack to his cause. Except it wasn't going quite as well as he'd hoped. I would have chuckled at that if I could have found the air.

  I kicked out again, banging on the bars with my booted foot. I strangled out a groan in an attempt to force the ninny jailer to investigate, thinking that if I ever got my hands around his throat, I'd make sure he didn't procreate and pass on his stupidity.

  "Fuck you," I gargled out at the MIA jailer, jamming my fingers into the material cutting off my air supply. I needed a bit of air. Just enough to keep me going. I was a fighter dammit. Just let me fight something other than my own survival instinct. And yet, it had been just that brawling attitude that had got me into this mess in the first place.

  I'd been lured days earlier into believing my pack was in danger. Since I was our pack's assassin, it was my job to neutralize any threat. I killed each fully human zealot hunter over the last week that came my way, not thinking for one second the threat that had sent them had come from within my own pack. Too late, I'd swarmed my father's sprawling mansion to discover he'd already been murdered by my foster brother, Caleb, and in doing so, left myself open to capture by a mercenary human man Caleb had hired. Under threat of having my younger brothers murdered as well, I'd given in. Consequently, there I hung.

  I managed for one moment to relieve the pressure with clawing fingers, and raked in a sweet but thin funnel of air.

  "Bastard," I squeezed out around the stringy knot, but I couldn't do more. I was losing strength and ended up hanging there as my arms fell to my sides limp and useless. Some part of my brain thought I should transform, but even that seemed beyond me without the ability to suck in enough air to fill my lungs. My legs were quickly losing any oxygenated blood that would fuel the muscles to keep kicking. My bladder even ached in anticipation of letting go my last bit of fluid.

  Several sparks of white light exploded in the center of my vision just before it went black. The last thing I saw was that damnable platter of fruit with a bright green apple perched at the apex. I couldn't hang onto my consciousness and all I could think was it was over, and I hadn't even been able to sink my teeth into Caleb's throat and tear out his jugular.

  Even as I tried to fight the blackness, I was vaguely aware of the sound of a voice calling out to me.

  "Shana," it said. "Jesus, she's blue."

  The feel of strong hands fumbling for my torso. The weight lifted, and I felt buoyant for one heady second.

  It was just enough time for my beast to suck in air and send prickles of transformation across my skin. The human half felt weak, but the beast within wanted vengeance. It didn't care who the rescuing hands belonged to, they were going to die.

  "She's coming round," someone said, slapping my cheeks. "Shana."

  I tasted blood, I thought I was sawing through someone's skin. Something deep inside my chest grew warm with satisfaction. Take that bastard.

  "She bit her tongue," the voice--male, I realized--kept saying. "It's pretty bad. Get someo
ne."

  I floated to the surface of consciousness and let my hand fly upward, grabbing for the hand that roamed my chest, fleeting over my heart. I felt a thick wrist in my grip. Hair tickled my knuckles.

  "You're a dead man," I roared, the intent to kill, maim and wreak vengeance coiled into my tissues like a cobra. I went completely limp with dismay when I heard how jumbled and incoherent the threat came out. I hated the whimper that prowled along after it for the way it made me seem weak in the face of my enemies. Damn death and his suffocating cloak.

  I blinked open my eyes and took in a set of crystalline ones hovering just above my own.

  "You," I said, recognizing the face. Jeb. The suit from the alley when I'd killed that hunter kid I'd been sent out to track and kill, all so Caleb could end up with free reign of the complex. I'd thought Jeb nothing but an innocent bystander then, a businessman unfortunate enough to have discovered a seemingly human woman crouching over a murdered youth. I'd taken pity on him at the time, knowing I should execute him for bearing witness to what would be considered a crime on the outside, human world. I hadn't.

  Jeb, the man in the Armani suit who later seemed to command an entire platoon of mercenaries. Caleb's hired mercenary muscle.

  For a moment, I thought how similar in coloring he was to Caleb, and I growled at him, listing off all the things I would do to him when I recovered, all the torturous ways I would injure him, all the pain I would inflict. Blood bubbled across my lips, spattering onto his chest as he held me. My tongue refused to act with dignity.

  Jeb's sandy brows scuttled downward as he stared into my face. He'd just saved me from succeeding at my suicide attempt but he looked more confused than concerned I had just threatened to kill him.

  "What?" he said, then shook his head. "Never mind. You're pretty bad off, don't try to talk."

  I squeezed his wrist, doing my best to twist his arm away from my chest. It wouldn't budge. I knew then that I'd done more damage than I'd planned. My tongue, where I'd bit into it, was bleeding down my chin, and it was all I could feel through the numbness of my oxygen-starved skin.

  Despite my best attempts to fight him off, I ended up sagging in his arms as he lifted me to his chest and cradled me there. I felt my beast within letting go. I should flog it for its surrender, except the heat of his body radiated into mine and I realized how cold I'd been. Close. I'd been too close to death for comfort. I snuggled in, greedy for the heat. I'd have to kill him another day.

  "It's OK, Shana," he said, peering down at me. "I've got you."

  As though I needed him. As though his 'having' me made all the difference.

  I hated the way I snuggled in to his heat.

  He strode with me across the room and laid me on the bed. I imagined I could still smell my mother's perfume in the pillows and with an almost nostalgic sense of habit, I ran my fingers to the edge of the mattress and slipped them beneath. I had seen her pull a dagger out from beneath it once, threatening my father as I lay next to her, snuggled in close after a bad training session. She demanded he stay away from her. In my beleaguered and oxygen-starved mind now, I told myself that even if I had searched the room already and found no weapons, I might have missed that one thing. The dagger had been small, needle sharp. In my furious search, it would have been easy to miss, and maybe if I get get my fingers around it, position it to the ready, I could inflict just enough harm to neutralize a human looming over me.

  I could see that human man now through my shuttered eyelids, crossing his arms, the navy suit jacket straining where it was too tight over his shoulders. I just needed a breath or two, wait until the swimming of the air currents stopped making my vision a wash of blurry color. And then I'd transform and my beast would heal those injuries and I'd be ready. Damn them all I'd be ready for vengeance then.

  "It's not there," Jeb drawled.

  Almost as though my fingers themselves felt guilty, they froze in their covert search and slipped to the side of the bed. They fluttered against the bare mattress. Of course there was no dagger. My mother had been gone for decades. I tried on my best innocent damsel look but I knew he wasn't buying it. He held my gaze with his own with a steady, uncomfortable intensity, those blue eyes revealing nothing but a stoic determination.

  "I searched the rooms myself," he said. "They took away a hatchet, four daggers, two pistols, and some weird looking weapon Caleb informed me was a haladie."

  I knew the weapon well. Galen had trained me with one just like it. My stomach sank as I thought of Galen. My trainer. Murdered as well, right in the gardens he had retired to.

  Without stepping closer, Jeb reached for my wrist, several fingers touching the pulse. Clinical, detached, and yet his own throat muscles went tight as he looked down at me.

  "Much more steady," he said, then he dropped my wrist back to the side of the bed. It flopped there and then clenched into a fist.

  He watched my hand, his gaze flitting just once to my face. "He's going to be pissed you know."

  I nodded. Of course he would be. Hell, I was pissed. Stupid, Shana. So stupid. I ran a hand over my throat, testing for soreness and winced at the barest of touch.

  "I think you'll be alright after you shift. Maybe some pain in your throat where you crushed your voicebox."

  I grunted and cringed at the rasping burn.

  His charcoal brows scuttled down in confusion and I realized he couldn't make out what I was saying.

  "Don't try to talk," he said. "You're still in a bit of a mess."

  I could imagine. No doubt my eyes were pinpricked with blood, my throat bruised, my cheeks puffy. I could still taste my own blood from where I'd bit down on my tongue, and the hair from my braid clung to my cheek in places. Stuck there with fluid, I imagined. I would have sighed, regretting my actions and the consequences, but an assassin for the Beo pack had no room for vanity. She had only duty. Best I dye my silver hair red and save myself the repeated shocks of seeing it in the mirror go from white to red to white so often.

  I must have sighed; Jeb took a step closer, and he looked like he would speak again, but a ruckus of voices sounded outside the open door. He knew what it meant as surely as I did. Caleb had arrived to see if his prize lived or died.

  Despite my predicament, my heart stuttered when he entered the room and closed the suite's wooden door behind him, shutting us off from view of the portico beyond. Caleb was one of those shifters who could make a human woman climb a greased flagpole just to catch a peek at him. Broad shoulders, muscled from jaw to toe. I'd seen women's knees turn to water when they met him for the first time, and I'd seen him use that to use the women who did. I knew human women didn't understand the way their bodies called out to him. I also knew his profile revealed a hardness that an intuitive human women should retreat from if she was smart enough to listen to it. Caleb was not a woman's wolf. He was a shifter's wolf through and through. A female shifter wanted to cut her meat with the steel of that jaw. She wanted to cozy up next to the lean body and lift her haunches for him.

  I couldn't believe that after all he'd done, my own beast wanted that as much as the human part wanted to kill him. It trembled in my breast, quivering with excitement as it crouched in the center of my core, taking in the man that had been able to overthrow a powerful alpha without so much as a hiccup of indigestion. I hated that my beast recognized that old and primal desire but I understood its respect for it. Regardless, the human half had to flog it silent with the memory of my father's bloody head as it dangled from Caleb's fingers, my step-mother's blood on the tiles. I had to remember my twin brothers in chains as he had paraded them in front of me to show his prowess.

  I was both wolf and woman, and I'd be damned if I'd meet him on my back and not on my feet. All I could see was him as he stood there; the bowl of fruit dissolved into air, the mercenary man--Jeb--ceased to exist. Even the pain in my mouth evaporated in face of that green-eyed stare.

  "Bastard," I garbled out as he stopped on his side of the bars. />
  "Shana," he said, taking great pains to lean in toward the bars without touching them. Silver-coated, I knew because I had burned myself on them earlier. They would hurt where the metal touched his skin. No wolf--alpha or not--wanted to feel that agony.

  I struggled to get up and found I was weaker than I'd thought.

  My efforts didn't go unnoticed by him, of course. "Why don't you strip off those clothes and let your beast take you?" he said. "Heal that wound."

  Something inside me simpered at the suggestion eager to do what he wanted. I mentally slapped its nose with a rolled up paper. I wouldn't strip but I would let the beast come forth just enough to regenerate my tissues.

  I was partially transformed by the time I met the bars at the door, which meant my tongue was already healing from where I had bit down on it. But the restraint of my jeans and T-shirt held my full beast back, the feel of the silver coating singed into the fur of my snout as I jammed my nose between the bars made the beast retreat, leaving me in my fully human form. Burned like a bitch, but I'd be damned if I'd show him I was weak.

  "Impressive," he said with a note of thought in his voice. He had seen me over the decades resist the pain of silver for longer than he had ever been able to, and I knew he wasn't impressed. Not really; it was more of a challenge for me to hold the pose and so I did. Gave him the full show as I took him in. He had on scuffed jeans and wore a red-neck flavored plaid shirt that was tight across his muscled chest. He hadn't shaved in what looked like two or three days. The sand-colored scruff that disappeared into his hairline told me exactly how busy he was. He was always shaved. He took such immaculate pains with his appearance, I guessed he was having some trouble controlling the pack now that he had murdered the alpha and kept my two young brothers prisoner somewhere.

  He crouched down in front of me on his side of the bars, just out of reach with his hands across his knees.

  "You might resist the pain for a moment or two," he said. "But you're not immune, no matter how you bad you might want to look it."