Demon Marked: Book 1 of the Venandi Chronicles ( An Urban Paranormal Romance Series)

by Sara Snow

  Strange. I didn’t consider myself the type of immortal who got stuck in the past, but sometimes I had trouble wrapping my head around modern trends like minimalism. She didn’t even have a kitchen table.

  “Georgia, you’re special. I think you already know that, though,” I said, holding up the knife she’d thrown at me with her mind.

  “You think?” she retorted, breaking eye contact. I wanted to reach out and lift her chin, to make her keep up the fierce, almost challenging way she was looking at me, because it showed that she had plenty of strength. But I didn’t because the move would be too intimate.

  “You’re special,” I repeated. Kingston had advised me not to tell her she was half-demon. He was worried it would just freak her out and confuse her more. Seeing how she was reacting now, I had to agree. “If you want answers, I know where you can find them.”

  I pulled a card out from the pocket of my trench coat. It was white cardstock with black lettering, and the only thing printed on it was an address. I held it out, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “We are the Venandi,” I told her. “We’re the good guys, and we want to help you.”

  The distrust in Georgia’s eyes made me feel strangely proud of her. Yes, it made my life more difficult, but she didn’t know me or my intentions. It would be foolish to hand over her trust so easily. I would have to earn it.

  And I would.

  “What are you?” she asked suddenly.

  “The Venandi are a group of slayers who fight demons, vampires, and other supernatural creatures,” I rattled off, purposefully misunderstanding her.

  “I was talking about you,” she insisted, but I shook my head.

  “Let’s save that one for another time, introduce you to the world of the supernatural slowly.”

  “World of the supernatural?” She let out a chuckle that wasn’t the least bit humorous. “Are you for real? I guess my brain injury must be flaring up again.”

  “Trust me, I’m real.” Walking over to the kitchen, I placed the card with the address on the counter. “Come by if you want to learn the truth. But know this: you’re not safe. That soul-eater was just the beginning. Others will come for you. Let the Venandi teach you how to defend yourself. You’ll need to know if you’re going to survive.”

  Georgia needed time to process everything, so I left the apartment. I’d done my job—the ball was in her court now.

  7

  Georgia

  I felt like I was going crazy as I watched Carter leave my apartment. But when I looked around at the mess left behind, I knew that I couldn’t pretend that the attack hadn’t happened. That thing—whatever it was—had tried to kill me. What had Carter called it? A soul-eater?

  The implications of that were utterly terrifying.

  I could hardly believe this was happening to me, but there was also a small part of me that felt like this made sense in some warped way. I’d always thought that I was somehow different from other people. For years, I had convinced myself that I felt that way because I was a foster kid. I felt like I didn’t belong because I’d never had a home or family.

  But what if there was more to it than that?

  What if I’d felt that way because I had some weird power inside of me all along and didn’t know it? What if I’d felt that way because I was meant to be a part of the “world of the supernatural” that Carter had been talked about?

  He had said I was special, and I couldn’t lie to myself. I wanted to know what he meant. How was I special? Who was I?

  The answers he promised me sounded almost too good to be true.

  But I reminded myself that there was more to this than that. There was clearly danger involved, and how did I know that I could trust Carter, anyway? He might have killed the monster, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was on my side. His arrival was a little too convenient not to be suspicious.

  I set about cleaning up the apartment, straightening the futon, which had been knocked into the wall, and sweeping up the broken glass from the wine bottle. I didn’t have a mop, so I just used a couple of my white towels to wipe up the wine, staining them red.

  By the time the place was back to normal, I’d decided that I didn’t want any part of this. I didn’t want to have these strange powers or be a part of whatever craziness that would put me into the path of creatures like that soul-eater. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal.

  In order to pull that off, I knew that I would have to find a way to prevent accidentally using my telekinetic power. I wasn’t sure how to pull that off, but I would have to figure it out.

  When I went to bed that night, I kept a light on. Logically, I knew that it wouldn’t do anything to help me if another monster showed up, but it made me feel a little better. Still, I couldn’t sleep for a long time, and when I finally drifted off, it was a restless, uneasy sleep plagued by nightmares.

  Between my jangled nerves and my memory of the battle that had wrecked my apartment, I barely slept that night. With my eyes squeezed shut, I tried to force myself into unconsciousness, but every time I dropped off, the night came back to me in flashes of red and black. I saw the creature dragging a mask of human flesh over its leathery face, revealing the sucker that wanted to inhale my soul. I saw the man who called himself Carter plowing his blade into the soul-eater, leaving it to flail on the ground like a dying fish before disappearing in a veil of smoke.

  Weirdest of all, in the ten or fifteen minutes that I did sleep, I saw Carter standing over the monster, the blade flashing in his hand. He had cut into that thing as easily as if he’d been slicing a birthday cake. In my dream, he handed me the knife and let me caress the hard length of steel.

  It felt good to hold his weapon. Comforting, safe, like a security blanket, only with a gleaming blade attached to it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like someone stronger than me was there to back me up.

  “Great,” I muttered to myself as I threw the blanket off my body and dragged myself across the futon. “I barely know this guy, and I’m dreaming about caressing his weapon.”

  What if Carter wasn’t there the next time some creature from Hell came after me? I could try throwing wine bottles with my new-found power, but that wouldn’t be too effective. Sucker-Face probably would have laughed at my attempt and mocked my choice of cheap red wines.

  The alarm on my phone went off while I boiled hot water for coffee. That alarm was supposed to wake me from the beauty sleep I so badly needed, but I had beaten it to the punch. No beauty for me—I would have to drag my tired ass into the call center looking like I’d spent the night on the sidelines of a supernatural battle.

  Somehow, I knew that excuse wouldn’t go over well with my boss.

  I took my time in the shower, letting the hot water wash off the sulfuric odor of the night. If nothing else, my new apartment had decent water pressure. The sharp, scalding drops made my skin tingle, and suddenly Carter’s dark eyes flashed in my memory again.

  I could have sworn that those eyes lingered on my face and body a few seconds longer than decency allowed.

  Enough of that. I didn’t have the time or the energy to think about Carter. Sure, he had saved my life, but he wasn’t going to pay my rent or cover the whopping hospital bill that was sure to land in my mailbox any day now.

  I turned off the faucet, stepped out of the shower, and toweled myself off. Wiping the steam off the bathroom mirror, I saw that I didn’t look nearly as haggard as I’d expected. Maybe those bizarre healing powers that had helped me walk out of the hospital after a three-month coma had smoothed out the bags under my eyes.

  In spite of my wretched night, I clocked in at the call center with four minutes to spare. I wish the rest of the day had gone so well. As I took call after call—mostly from customers who were irate that their cable had gone off during their favorite infomercial—I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me. When one of my co-workers knocked on the wall of my cubicle, I just about jumped
out of my skin.

  “Hey,” she chirped, holding out a pink box of donuts. “Did I scare you? I thought you might need a little sugar, honey. You look exhausted.”

  The woman with the donuts had a round, cheerful face framed by feathers of gray hair. She looked cozy and reassuring, like one of those ladies who ladles out casseroles at school cafeterias. With a shaky hand, I reached for a glazed donut. I didn’t even wait for her to leave before I gulped down the sweet glob of dough.

  “Have another one.” She extended the pink box. “You’re so thin—you could use the calories.”

  With the instinct of a girl who had grown up semi-feral in a revolving series of dysfunctional households, I grabbed an apple fritter. Never knowing when food would be yanked away, I had learned to never turn down treats. No eating disorders for this girl—I ate whenever I had the chance.

  The woman smiled and trundled off to the next cubicle. I sighed and went back to my phone calls. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d stayed for a while, calling me “honey”, and coaxing me to eat more.

  The morning dragged on forever, and when it was finally time to log off at noon, I leapt out of my seat and scurried to the lunchroom as if something were chasing me. I wish I could say that it was the double-dose of sugar that was making me so edgy, but that would have been a lie. Even under the fluorescent office lights, I felt like I was being chased by shadows.

  I had forgotten to pack a lunch before I left the house, but when I rummaged through the employee refrigerator, I found a green apple and a stick of mozzarella string cheese that I had left last week. Not exactly a feast, but it would keep me from starving.

  I found a paring knife in the drawer and began to cut the apple into slices. The tremor in my hands made the knife slip, and the sharp blade nicked my finger.

  “Ow!” I jammed my finger into my mouth and tasted the metallic tang of blood.

  I pulled my finger out, expecting to see a gash in the skin.

  Yes, there was a cut above the first knuckle of my index finger. But it was already closing, even before my saliva had dried. I stared as my skin neatly and smoothly sealed itself shut.

  “Okay, this is just too weird,” I said to my knuckle. “Let’s see what else we can do.”

  I braced my forearm on the sink, closed my eyes, and drove the knife into my skin. I bit my lip when the blade pierced my flesh, trying not to scream. It hurt like hell, so I definitely wasn’t immune to pain. But by the time I had taken a shuddering breath and opened my eyes, the wound was almost closed.

  So, it wasn’t just a fluke that I had bounced back from a gunshot wound to the head and a three-month coma as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t just the fact that I was young, or that I had a history of surviving trauma.

  I had another superpower.

  The sink suddenly felt soft and spongy under my hand. I sank down to the floor, my vision blurring. I had dealt with a hell of a lot of shitty surprises in my life, but this one blew them all away.

  Even the healthiest of humans took time to heal. I didn’t have to be in nursing school to know that blood needed a few seconds to clot and skin tissue took days or weeks, sometimes months to repair itself. So, if I healed this much faster than a human...then, was I human at all?

  Pride tastes pretty bitter when you’re forced to swallow it, but I didn’t have a choice. There was only one person in my life right now who could help me understand what I was becoming, or what I had always been.

  I scooped up my pitiful lunch and made my way back to my cubicle, legs quivering. First, I would eat. That would give me the strength to make it through the afternoon and back to my apartment to find the business card that Carter had left for me.

  8

  Georgia

  I didn’t really trust the map application on my phone, but it had never led me this far astray before. I guess I had some real trust issues. I found myself parked outside what looked like an abandoned factory less than a mile from the docks. This neighborhood wasn’t some chic warehouse district with gentrified industrial buildings transformed into pricey lofts for urban executives. It was a forgotten wasteland of empty structures, its streets haunted by humanoid forms clad in ragged coats and blankets.

  I shivered in my car, afraid to leave the little security it offered. This couldn’t be the right place. The location matched my electronic map, but the building looked nothing like what I’d imagined. Several stories high, it loomed in the night sky like a ghost ship. Its windows were nailed shut with boards, and its brick walls were decked with graffiti.

  I double-checked the address on the fancy business card that Carter had given me. It matched my location, but it veered wildly from my expectations. Remembering Carter’s elegant coat and the vast array of weapons on his belt—not to mention his haughty attitude—I couldn’t believe he would have anything to do with this scary dump.

  Unless he wanted to lure me here for some dark and devious reason.

  I looked up to see a shadowy form in front of my car, leaning on the hood. My headlights captured the figure’s sunken eyes and concave cheeks, a living skull under a black hood. The figure raised a bony hand. I sucked in my breath, too terrified to scream.

  Was this one of those soul-eaters wearing yet another disguise? A ghost from a different dimension? A monster with an unspeakable grudge?

  “Got any spare change, lady?”

  Shit.

  I shook my head wildly. “I’ve got nothing! I’m broke!” I shouted through the windshield. The old man shook his head in disgust and wandered off into the black chasm between two warehouses.

  I had a choice, but it was a bleak one. I could get out of the car and make a mad dash for the boarded-up warehouse where the Venandi supposedly lived, or I could drive off and get lost in this maze of condemned streets. The gas gauge on my car had been dangerously close to the red line before I’d even started, and my phone was beeping a warning that its battery was about to die.

  I would probably die, too, if I didn’t get the hell out of here.

  No Olympic sprinter had ever run faster than I did when I jumped out of that car. I headed straight for the broad door of the warehouse. That door was the only hint that the warehouse held anything other than empty space, rats, and lost souls. Ornately carved, it boasted an enormous brass knocker shaped like the head of some diabolical creature. I grabbed that knocker and pounded it for dear life. The scream that I’d swallowed earlier now came out in full force.

  “Let me in! Damn it, Carter, let me in before they kill me!”

  The door swung open. I raised my hand, hoping it would land squarely on Carter’s cheek. But it wasn’t Carter who greeted me.

  “Before who kills you?” The woman standing in the doorway laughed. Her laughter sounded like a smoky bell. “Most of the humans around here are too weak and hungry to hurt anybody. They’re more scared of you than you are of them. The vampires, on the other hand, can get pretty feisty.”

  She grabbed my raised hand, lowered it gently, and pulled me through the door.

  “Come on in,” she said. “You must be Georgia. I wondered when you’d show up. I’m Olympia, by the way.”

  The first thing I noticed about Olympia, after her sexy laugh, was her hair. The silvery-blonde stuff fell in a waterfall of curls all the way to her slim hips. Tendrils framed her cat-shaped face and green eyes. A jeweled ring glittered in her pierced nose.

  I shrank back into my oversized hoodie and tugged the hem down as low as I could. It was a self-protective gesture that I’d mastered at age thirteen, when I first realized that I had a pair of boobs to hide. Next to Olympia’s long, feline form, I felt short and grubby. I had spent my day slaving away at a call center, while she had probably been doing pilates and tweaking her locks with a curling iron.

  “Don’t worry,” Olympia said. She gave my hand a reassuring squeeze, as if she had read my thoughts. “You’re just as lovely as Jose said you would be. Those violet eyes of yours are amazing. And I can tell you h
ave a gorgeous figure, even under that baggy sweatshirt.”

  Who the hell is Jose, and how does he know what I look like?

  “I actually came to see Carter,” I said coolly. “He told me to come here. He gave me this card.”

  I held out the business card, which was now damp from the sweat of my palm. Olympia didn’t bother to take it. She just laughed again. I couldn’t help thinking that with her laugh, her hair, and her endless legs, this woman must get all kinds of action.

  “Is Carter here?” I repeated.

  She didn’t acknowledge my question, just led me down a wide corridor into the heart of the building. That corridor, with its stone floors and tapestried walls, was bigger than my entire apartment. As I followed Olympia, I snuck glances at the woven tapestries. They were patterned with serpentine mutants sporting wings, forked hooves, and long tails. Looking closer, I could see that they were getting up to all kinds of kinky things, by themselves and with other entities.

  “Aren’t these tapestries fascinating?” Olympia paused to touch the fabric. Chunky silver rings adorned her elegant fingers. “They’re ancient, but they still keep us warm on those windy Chicago nights.”

  I personally thought the tapestries were weird and freaky, but I didn’t share my opinion with Olympia. I still had no clue who she was, much less whether I could trust her with my thoughts. Not that it mattered, since she seemed to read my mind like a book.

  “In case you were wondering who I am, I’m one of the Venandi and a witch,” Olympia said, proving my suspicion. “You’ll be meeting all of us tonight.”

  We had reached the end of the hall. Another tall, intricately carved door awaited us. She stopped in front of that door for a moment, her hand on the doorknob.

  “Before we go in, I want you to know something,” Olympia said. Her tone had been light and playful before, almost mocking. Now, her voice deepened. Those green eyes were hooded in shadows, her lips etched with lines. Maybe it was the dim light, but she suddenly looked decades older than I’d thought she was. Her fingers tightened on my arm.