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

by Sara Snow

  “I don’t suppose you thought to bring me a cocktail?” Carter asked Kingston.

  “What am I now, your bartender?”

  “Why not? You do everything else around here, Kingston.”

  “Well, it just so happens that I did bring you a drink.” Kingston handed Carter a goblet of red wine, much darker and more viscous than the wine I was drinking. After Carter took a sip, a thick crimson residue remained on the glass.

  “Ahh,” Carter sighed. “You certainly know my taste. I think I recognize this vintage.”

  “Vintage? It couldn’t be more than forty-eight hours old. It was almost warm when I poured it.”

  “Perfect.” Carter took another sip, then turned his attention back to me. “You seem to be enjoying your food. I’ve never seen a woman eat with such relish.”

  “He’s a fabulous cook.” I pointed my fork at Kingston.

  Kingston gave me a mock bow. “My pleasure, mademoiselle. Would you care for anything else?”

  “Got any dessert?” I sounded crass even to my own ears, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a meal that didn’t come from a box and wasn’t reconstituted with water boiled in the microwave. Adam had certainly never cooked for me, although in his mind, take-out pizza probably counted as a home-cooked meal if he paid for it.

  “We’ll hold off on dessert,” Carter said. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later, after our training.”

  Kingston frowned. “I didn’t know you were planning to start her training tonight. Are you sure that’s wise?”

  Carter and Kingston looked at each other for a moment. Their stare down reminded me of two lions facing off over a carcass.

  “Georgia was almost killed by a soul-eater last night,” Carter said. “It may not be wise to start training her so quickly, but at this point, we don’t have a choice. They’ve already started to come for her. This is the best time for them to strike, when her powers are identifiable but not fully developed.”

  “I understand,” Kingston said after a long moment. Although he was the one who surrendered, Carter was the first one to look away. As soon as the two of them broke their staring contest, the tension in the room disappeared.

  “I really want dessert,” I pouted. I wasn’t above pouting to get dessert, especially if it was as good as the pasta I’d just devoured.

  “Later,” Carter repeated sternly. “You can have all the dessert you want as soon as you learn the basics of saving your own soul.”

  With my belly full of wine and pasta, I wasn’t sure it was the best time to learn how to fight. But I let Carter take me downstairs to the training room where I’d first been introduced to the world of the Venandi.

  Had it really been only last night that Carter had slammed his way into my life? I still had no idea who or what he was, but he had pretty much turned my whole existence upside-down. Tonight, surrounded by the Venandi, I felt a little less like a freak. I still had no idea what my powers meant or where they would lead me, but I wasn’t alone.

  My info search on the word “cambion” hadn’t been very reassuring. I shared their telekinetic powers, but so did the chick in that old Carrie movie, who killed all her enemies in a bloodbath at the high-school prom. Carrie wasn’t a supernatural monster, was she? She was just a weird girl with a crazy mom who found a way to deal with the rich kids who tormented her.

  “Do you still feel like a freak now that you’ve met us?” Carter asked. I could have sworn the Venandi were all mind-readers—I didn’t know why I bothered to say anything aloud.

  “Not necessarily. But I feel like a freak who belongs somewhere.”

  Carter smiled. “That’s what I like to hear. Because you do belong here. And we can teach you to hone your gifts until you realize how strong you are. Now, let’s get started.”

  We were standing in the middle of the circular floor like two gladiators in a ring. Carter had me take off my shoes and my hoodie, supposedly so I could move around more freely. But I caught him sneaking a look at my boobs as I pulled the hoodie over my head.

  Under that baggie garment, I was wearing only a white tank top. The room was kept at a cooler temperature than the rest of the warehouse, and I could feel my nipples harden under the thin white fabric. I crossed my arms over my chest. High beams or no, I felt tougher with my arms crossed.

  Carter cleared his throat and made a point of looking away. “First, let’s go over a few basics,” he began. “Most of the demons you’ll encounter will have a human, or humanoid, form. So, their weak points are the same as yours or mine: eyes, throat, crotch.” He made a jabbing motion at his own eyes and Adam’s apple, then bent his leg sharply to demonstrate kneeing someone in the balls. “When you need to destabilize a demon, go for those areas first.”

  “Kingston said that the only way to kill a demon is with iron through the heart,” I objected. “What good will those moves do on a creature with superhuman powers?”

  “Good question. How do you think you’ll be able to stab a demon in the heart if you can’t get him on the ground first?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could speak, Carter seized my forearm and twisted it behind my back. With his other arm across my voice box, I couldn’t even squeal in protest. The shock of being grabbed like that triggered my new-found superpower. Before I knew what I was doing, a mace flew off the wall. The spiked ball at the end of the ancient weapon was sailing straight for Carter’s head.

  I dug my nails into his arm and yanked it away from my throat. “Watch out! That thing is going to brain you!”

  I pulled us both to the ground as the mace flew over our heads. It smashed into a ladder with a deafening clang, then fell to the floor.

  Whoa. That was no paring knife.

  Panting, Carter and I both stared at the weapon that had come so close to crushing him. Not even a supernatural being, or a human who healed unnaturally fast like me, could recover quickly from a collision with that thing.

  “This hand-to-hand combat stuff,” I said, “is it necessary? I mean, if I can make something that big and heavy fly through the air like a Frisbee, why do I need to learn how to fight?”

  Carter brushed off his trench coat. “Until you’re absolutely sure you can control your power, you need to know how to defend yourself against demons. Right now, you only move things with your mind when your brain tells you that your life is in danger. By then, it could be too late.”

  “I didn’t do too badly dragging you to the ground,” I pointed out.

  “That’s because your adrenaline kicked in. When I first grabbed you, you were totally unprepared—in other words, defenseless.”

  I could still feel the warm imprint that Carter’s arm had left in the soft space below my breasts when he’d held me against his body. I’d been scared shitless when he first took hold of me, but my memory of that rough embrace now made me shiver.

  “Your turn,” he said. “Let’s try it again, but slowly. You’ll be the aggressor this time.”

  “I’m on top, you mean?” I was starting to enjoy this.

  He grinned. “If you want to put it that way, yes. I’ll let you be on top just this once. I’ll show you how you should react if some humanoid demon comes up behind you and grabs you.”

  He turned his back and began walking away. I crept up behind him and took hold of his right arm, turning it at the elbow and bending it back with one hand, while wrapping my other arm around his waist and pinning his left arm against his side.

  “You’re mine, bitch,” I growled into his back.

  Carter whirled around in my arms and pressed his knee into my crotch. Now, it was his turn to push me to the floor. I tried to squirm out of his grip, but he pinned me to the ground. I wrestled my right hand free and poked him in both eyes.

  “Yeow!” He backed away from me.

  I struggled into a sitting position. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be.” He cupped his eyes in his hand. “As soon as I recover
my sight. That move was a little too effective.”

  “Well, you said you wanted me to learn to fight.”

  I didn’t tell Carter that I had learned that move when I was twelve from an older, much tougher girl in a group home, where we were staying between foster placements. Like Carter, she had seen me as someone who needed protection, and she had taught me everything she knew about incapacitating an attacker. I had used those moves on more than one occasion in the years that followed.

  “I did say that, didn’t I?” Carter wiped tears from his eyes and sat back on his heels. I had liked it better when he was lying on top of me, his weight bearing down on my thighs. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. He didn’t need to have an ego boost at my expense.

  “If I was a demon and you were on top of me like that, would you pull out your iron blade and stab me in the heart?”

  I had posed the question as a joke, but Carter’s face was dead serious. “Absolutely. As soon as I possibly could. Those self-defense moves are just a ploy to catch them off guard. The second you have them down, you bury that iron in their chest. No matter how pathetic they look or how sweet and defenseless, you have to finish them off before they engulf you. Once you’re in service to their kind, you’ll have a hell of a time getting out.”

  His haunted eyes made me think that Carter must have been engulfed by a demon himself.

  “You know, you never answered my question last night,” I said.

  “Which question?” Carter rose to his feet. “I’m sure you had more than one.”

  “I did, but only one of them mattered. What are you?”

  “I’m not ready to tell you.” He walked over to the wall of weapons where the flying mace had once been displayed, and began to look them over.

  “Why not?” I brushed off my jeans. “I’ve been playing your game. You invited me here, and I drove to this warehouse in the backend of nowhere. Kingston asked me to learn about demons, and I read a book about the size of a dictionary. I met the Venandi. I took your martial arts class. But you won’t answer one simple question.”

  “That’s because it isn’t simple.”

  Carter lifted a heavy blade about twelve inches long off the wall. It was a crude weapon, blunt at one end, spiked at the other. Its brutal simplicity made it all the more frightening. Whoever used that blade wasn’t messing around.

  Carter held the blade out to me. “Time for lesson two.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest again. “Not yet. You have to answer my question first.”

  He towered over me, scowling. “You don’t take no for an answer, do you?”

  “I haven’t heard you say no. You just said the answer wasn’t simple. Why can’t you tell me what you are?”

  “Because it’s too soon. We’re trying to give you time to accept your own powers.”

  Carter took hold of my hand and pulled me closer to him. I smelled that spicy, exotic scent again, a fragrance I couldn’t name. It was kind of like sandalwood, only sweeter. His fingers were cool, much cooler than any human touch I’d ever felt, and his grip was amazingly strong. I realized that he hadn’t even begun to show me how strong he really was. That pseudo-wrestling on the floor had been child’s play.

  “This blade was forged from iron over a thousand years ago. It was crafted to do one thing: slay demons. If you were a demon and I had you in my arms,” he said, “I’d stab you right here.”

  He held up the blade and dragged its spiked tip gently across the top of my left breast. The pointed tip, amazingly sharp for such a crude weapon, sliced my flesh open easily.

  “Yeow! What the hell did you do that for?”

  I watched my blood stream from the gash, staining my white tank top. Carter wiped the blood away with his fingertip. Even as he touched the wound, the gash was already sealing itself shut.

  Carter licked the blood off his finger. So much for the universal precautions I’d learned in nursing school. He grinned, and I noticed that his teeth were awfully sharp.

  “I’m sorry about your top,” he said, pointing to the crimson stain. “A little hydrogen peroxide will take care of that. Why don’t you take it off, and I’ll have it washed for you?”

  “No, thanks,” I snapped. “That was a shitty thing to do.”

  He shrugged. “I needed to prove a point. And test something. You have an incredible power to heal from injury. That wound closed almost instantaneously.”

  “I could have told you that!”

  “Yes, but I wanted to see it for myself.”

  My blood. Carter’s finger. Those teeth. A suspicion was starting to form in my mind. I remembered the wine that Kingston had served Carter in the library, how thick and viscous it had been. That wasn’t just any full-bodied red.

  “Hey, guys.” A soft male voice broke the tension between Carter and me.

  Jose padded up behind us in his bare feet. He rubbed his eyes and gave us a sleepy smile. His glossy black curls were tousled, and his eyelids were heavy.

  “I thought you were upstairs playing pool.” Carter’s voice was gruff.

  “I was, for a while. Then I got sleepy and went to take a nap. I just had the strangest dream.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Carter said. He turned to me. “Jose records all his dreams in notebooks. He has an entire bookshelf full of his visions, and most of them come true. He’s quite the prophet.”

  “What was your dream about?” I asked. Jose’s heavy eyelids and soft mouth struck at my heart. He reminded me of some of the kids I’d grown up with in foster care, the sweet, unwanted ones who were looking for someone to care about them. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and let him know he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

  “There was this yellow balloon in my dream. It hung over my head, and I reached up and tried to pull it down. It kept popping back up into the sky, like it wanted to tell me something.”

  “What do you think the balloon was trying to tell you?”

  Jose shrugged. “I don’t know, but it insisted on flying over my head until I got the message. I think I’ll see it again soon.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Carter said. “The objects in your dreams always mean something.”

  “So do the colors. The colors in my dreams are always brighter than in the real world. Except for Georgia’s eyes.” Jose smiled at me. “Your eyes in my dream were purple, like amethysts. And when I saw you upstairs, they were the same color, only prettier.”

  If I were a few years younger, I could have fallen in love with this kid. As it was, he had my heart melting like butter.

  “I’ve had enough fighting for one night,” I said. I reached for my discarded hoodie and pulled it over my head. The bloodstain on my top didn’t bother me—I could deal with that later. For now, all I cared about was getting that dessert Carter had promised me.

  “I don’t like the sound of that dream,” Carter said. “I don’t like it at all. We need to get you ready, Georgia. Something’s coming for you, and it’s not going to be good.”

  The dark look on Carter’s face told me that he wasn’t going to indulge me anytime soon. His words made gooseflesh break out on my skin, even under the warm, baggy hoodie.

  Would I ever get to the point where I felt safe? Or would I be a freak for the rest of my life, struggling to survive in this new world of demons and monsters?

  11

  Carter

  The training session with Georgia had drained me, body and soul. I wasn’t exhausted from wrestling with a twenty-one-year-old female—I was exhausted from trying to resist her. The softness of her creamy skin under my hands, the resiliency of the muscles underneath, and the thrum of her blood had almost driven me out of my mind.

  The glass of blood that Kingston served me had taken the edge off my hunger, but it hadn’t sated it completely. It had been too long since I’d fed. I should have known better than to cut Georgia with the iron blade. The pop of that spike as it broke through the surface of her breast was too much to be
ar. I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a taste of her blood.

  Not that I had much of an opportunity. I had barely gotten a lick in before her skin closed up like a virgin’s thighs. It was all I could do to keep my fangs in place. And those eyes of hers, flashing like purple lightning when the blade sliced her skin! She had wanted to slap me. I’m glad she didn’t. I don’t know if I could have stopped myself from ravaging her.

  Then, she would have known exactly what I am.

  I could have told her that I’m half-vampire—Kingston expected me to be honest with the girl. But I wanted to take it slowly. She was trying to play it cool, but I could tell that every new piece of knowledge we fed her was testing the limits of her understanding.

  Georgia was just starting to make her way in the human world. Now, she was finding out that the world she had seen and touched and smelled for the past twenty-one years was only a veil covering a universe of beings who wanted to devour her.

  Kingston invited Georgia to stay in one of the guest bedrooms that night, and Georgia accepted as eagerly as a puppy. I could tell that she already had a crush on Kingston, and I had to admit I envied the adoring light in those violet eyes when she gazed up at the fallen angel. Whenever she looked at me, on the other hand, those eyes narrowed as her bullshit detector went into red alert.

  I went to my room, stripped off my clothes, and fell naked on my bed. I couldn’t shake the images of the night from my mind, or the fears that went along with them. I thought of Georgia wrapped in her ragged hoodie, hunched over that book in the library as she tried to learn about what was happening to her. I saw her wolfing down the meal that Kingston had served her. Georgia had guarded her plate with her arm while she ate, an instinctive gesture that tore at my half-human heart. I thought of the way she had grappled with me in the training center, like a feral cat who was too set on survival to appreciate how strong she was.