A Darker Crimson

by Carolyn Jewel

Mika reined in her temper. She made a counterproposal, offering a fraction of what he’d suggested.

  “Is that a joke?” He shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t know why we’re discussing money anyway. I don’t want the work.” He started to walk away.

  “You thought if you threw out that ridiculous figure that I’d tell you to forget it? Well, think again, McCabe.” She closed the distance until she was toe-to-toe with him. “I want you.” When he tensed, she realized her wording. “I mean, I want your skills as a hunter,” she amended.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Would you really trust my life to someone else?” she asked.

  “What do I care about your life? You’re a demon.”

  “Half demon,” she corrected. “And half human.” The flash of anger she felt seeped away and humor returned as she realized he was grumbling more for appearances sake than for any other reason. She upped her offer.

  He countered, tacitly admitting he was taking the job. They went back and forth until they agreed to a figure that was about midway between their opening proposals. It wasn’t that the cost was important—her dad had plenty of money and was extravagantly generous—but if she didn’t dicker over such an exorbitant amount, he’d become even more suspicious.

  Their next argument was over what, precisely, his job would entail. She couldn’t give in on this; he had to put her up in his home. Mika needed access to his things in order to find and retrieve the incantation the Council believed he had. That was the plan. Reaching an accord was easier than she expected, once she agreed to obey his orders without discussion. Unless what she had to say was critical; she tacked that on.

  “Deal.” McCabe held out a hand.

  “Take off your glasses,” she ordered.

  “Why?”

  “Two rules. First, when I make an agreement, I always know exactly what I’m giving and what I’m getting in exchange. We took care of that. Second, I never seal a bargain if I can’t see the eyes. My mother told me if I followed both these principles, I’d never be rooked when dealing with a demon. And, Conor? You have as much demon blood as I do. I’ll see your eyes before I shake.”

  Reluctantly, he pulled the sunglasses off his face. His irises were the color of celery, a pale green shade that wasn’t human. Demon eyes.

  Read Through a Crimson Veil

  Seduced by Crimson by Jade Lee

  PROLOGUE

  A man can get tunnel vision during battle. He fixates on the sight of blood spurting from a white throat or the smell of charred flesh. If he’s trained, he can still fight the demons, the blackhearted Bak-Faru he’s likely seen only in a book, but a large part of his mind still fixates on one hideous thing. For Patrick Lewis, it was the taste in the air: blood and bile. Metallic and bitter, it made his throat close and his chest heave. But he had enough training to fight even if he was coming late to the battle.

  The screams reached him first. He was in the San Bernardino Botanical Garden, so the sound could travel far, especially at night. He was running full-tilt for the grove when the smell hit him, the smell and that taste in the air.

  He didn’t even stumble: that was how well trained he was. But his mind was so caught up in not retching that he almost missed the sight of his first live Bak-Faru. The thing was humanlike. Large and dark haired, it had eyes that glowed bright lavender in the night. Patrick’s mother had told him the demon gate was being used, and indeed, attuned as he was to nature, he’d felt each and every tremor as something passed through. Still, he hadn’t actually believed such disaster was possible until now, seeing one, two…no, make that four of the creatures walking away. Two sported wounds—jagged flesh that bled dark down their naked torsos. But the demons didn’t seem to be slowed.

  Patrick didn’t think. He had seven ceremonial knives with him and began throwing. Score. The closest demon clutched his neck and stumbled, but didn’t fall. The monster’s companions barely glanced around, even when Patrick’s second knife lodged in one of their shoulder blades. They were intent on escape.

  Patrick wanted to pursue. He even took a step forward, but the need to find his parents burned hotter. He had to get to the grove. Especially since his mother’s screams were growing weaker. Yet he had to go slowly. Much though it burned his gut, Patrick shifted from battle mode to stealth; it wouldn’t help his parents if he stumbled blindly into more of these creatures.

  He slipped around a redwood and peered into the grove, where his tunnel vision returned with full force. His mind registered each sensation as a disparate element: the taste of bile in the air, the smell of death, and the clenching of his gut. He refused to look for long, searching the bodies on the ground with as much speed as he could manage.

  He found his father first, with only one shoulder and half a chest; the rest was burned to oblivion, as if a rocket had burst through him. Numbness seeped into Patrick’s spirit. At least his dad hadn’t felt any pain.

  Patrick stumbled, scanning the rest of the bodies. He found his mother. She wasn’t as lucky as his father. She’d been gutted by a short blade, or more likely, by long claws. Blood and bile poured relentlessly from her into the ground where she lay. She was still alive.

  Patrick skidded to a halt in the dirt beside her, but there was nothing for him to do; too much of her was spilled across the ground. His hands hovered uselessly above her torn belly. What could he do? He dialed 911 and stammered out details. The operator was speaking to him, but he didn’t hear her because his mother opened her eyes. The phone left his ear as he leaned forward. He opened his mouth to reassure her. He was going to lie, to say that she’d be just fine, but all that came out was a single word:

  “Mom?”

  She focused on him and her expression softened. She struggled to speak, her voice a bare whisper, and Patrick lowered his head as close to her mouth as he dared.

  “Run,” she said.

  He straightened enough to look into her eyes. “They’re gone. The…” He couldn’t bring himself to name the monsters, the creatures of nightmare that had at last returned to his world. “They’ve left.”

  His mother swallowed, and he was sure he saw relief in her gaze. He grabbed her hands, his mind scrambling for something to do. “Hang on,” he said.

  “Find her,” she replied. “Close…the gate.” She was fading; he could see it. Her eyes were growing more distant, and her hands were like ice. He wanted to strip off his shirt to cover her, but he would have missed her next words.

  “Draig-Uisge,” she said. It shocked him to hear his druidic title spoken with such command. “Find her…the Phoenix Tear. Close the gate. Permanently.” Then his mother shut her eyes and was gone forever.

  Read Seduced by Crimson

  Crimson Rogue by Liz Maverick

  CHAPTER 1

  Someone was definitely following him, but Finn made a point not to look over his shoulder. He didn’t have to; he could tell. Picking up the pace, he pulled his jacket closer around him and cut across the street.

  It happened no more than once a month, but it wasn’t something a guy really wanted to get used to: Someone would figure him out… or at least think they had figured him out. And it wasn’t just the B-Ops teams. They were the least of Finn’s worries. He could track them on his black-market scanner, even tap into their comms and listen to them talk on the job.

  It was the rest of them—the bounty hunters. And every time he found himself in this position, there were only two questions he had to ask himself. Whoever was after him, did they work for the humans, the vampires, the werewolves or the demons? And the second question was: Do they know what I am? Being robbed was one thing. Being revealed, something else entirely.

  The longer Finn lived in the heart of Crimson City, the more experience dulled his once razor-sharp instincts. There were so many sensations and emotions competing for his attention. When he’d first hit the streets and slipped the Grid, he could hardly think for himself.

  The Grid was the network that served as th
e technological backbone of Crimson City’s enforcement matrix; it was how the Ops teams communicated. Ops—Crimson City’s human government’s intelligence agency. Part FBI, part CIA, part Special Forces, they were the ones who handled everything. The Grid was how their Battlefield division out on the streets connected to the intelligence division behind the walls of the base. It was how they supported their comm devices, how they linked up the computer systems … and how they controlled their mechs. Having escaped the Grid, Finn might be a wanted man, but he wasn’t traceable and no one could tell him what to do.

  Everything had been instinct, programming, training. Everything he was supposed to know had been drilled into his head and body so many times that he’d never thought he could escape. But then he’d found himself in the middle of a veritable war zone instead of the antiseptic calm of the Ops barracks. It had been an assault on the senses … and then he’d grown to appreciate it.

  He’d spent most of his first free days rotating through the city’s bookstores, attracting little notice as just another member of the city’s large homeless population; then, rather quickly, he’d begun to assimilate to the new world. He wasn’t living any longer on the few fragments of thought that some faceless organization allowed. Maybe that made him a weaker soldier, but it made him a better man.

  “Drop your bag, put your hands on top of your head, walk into the alley, turn around and face the wall.”

  Finn froze in his tracks. Hell. He let the strap of his bag slip off his shoulder and slide down his arm. His satchel hit the sidewalk with a dull thud. He could just whip around and have done with it, or he could give the man a chance to be mistaken. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. Move it.”

  Finn stayed where he was. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he repeated more forcefully. “Understand?”

  Something blunt jabbed between his shoulder blades. Finn stumbled forward into the alley, pulling his hood up around his head more securely while raising his gloved hands. He heard the clink of the brass links on his bag’s strap as the man picked it up and moved behind him into the alley.

  Read Crimson Rogue

  Crimson & Steam by Liz Maverick

  CHAPTER 1

  The four leaders of Crimson City’s glittering vampire world looked rather out of place, dressed half in battle armor and crowded into a ramshackle safe house located on the border between the vampire and human strata. The windowless room barely had space for chairs and the table that held two bottles of red wine, a water pitcher, a tray of glasses and a rather unremarkable bowl of mixed nuts.

  “Well, certainly no one will think to look for us here,” Kata Marakova sniffed. She abandoned the idea of removing the elbow-length gloves she wore under her gauntlets; there was too much dirt around. “Really, St. Giles. Lovely of you to step up and find us a place with some privacy, but is this your idea of a joke?” She puffed away at an exotic cigarillo, ignoring the bits of ash floating off the end into the dusty air.

  Next to her, Rafe Giannini slumped in his chair and poked through the bowl of nuts now resting on his chest. Elegantly rumpled, he looked as though he’d rather be playing lawn tennis and quaffing cocktails than worrying about affairs of state. But if he sometimes appeared disengaged, he was always listening. After a moment, he selected a macadamia nut and devoured it.

  On Marius’s right sat Dominick St. Giles. Neat, precise, and perfectly attired in one of his bespoke European suits, the patrician vampire just barely concealed the fire inside that always kept him near the boiling point. He was holding court with the other two, pushing his agenda: the likelihood of a full-scale war breaking out in Crimson City, this time between the humans and the werewolves.

  So far, so good, Marius thought. At least he’d managed to force the heads of the three other vampire houses here to powwow, rather than being forced to discuss things in a public forum where paranoia and fear would make sure nothing ever got done.

  Marius Dumont was the leader of the Vampire Assembly—his cousin Fleur had stepped out of the spotlight due to her health—and consequently he was the ranking member of this meeting. As head of state he had the power to negotiate with the leaderships of the humans, werewolves and mechs that also populated the city. He had a mind to use that power before it was too late. In the past, an uneasy peace between Crimson City’s denizens was the most any vampire leader had managed to achieve. Marius knew his people could do better. He could do better. For them.

  Kata turned away from her debate with St. Giles. “Are you sure looking out of town is the answer, Marius? Should we take another look at Crimson City’s werewolves? Where do you personally stand with the Maddox clan?”

  “The Maddox werewolves have always been our—”

  Marius, it’s me.

  Marius paused midsentence, blinking against the smoke that clogged the cramped meeting room air. Jillian? Oh, god—let her be safe.

  “What?” St. Giles narrowed his eyes at Marius across the table. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Marius replied.

  Marius?

  Kata frowned. “It would be helpful, darling, if you could try to pay attention at your own meeting.”

  Marius shook his head as if it might clear away Jillian’s voice. Three pairs of eyes glittered curiously at him from around the table. “It’s nothing. I thought I … heard something.”

  “I made sure the room was secure,” St. Giles snapped.

  Marius gave a curt nod. Jillian was fine. He needed to focus. If he didn’t get the three other houses to fall into line, any alliance with werewolves would never survive.

  “As I was saying, the Maddox werewolves here in Crimson City have always been our best allies.”

  “Then why aren’t you marrying one of them?” St. Giles asked. “Why House Royale? Their interests are in New York, not Crimson City. I guarantee trouble if you set your sights on one of those Asprey bitches.”

  Kata leaned over, wicked humor flashing in her eyes. “You know how it is. All of Crimson City’s good bitches are probably taken. But perhaps Marius is on to something—Tajo Maddox also ran off with an Asprey.” Her lush mouth curled into a smile, white fangs exposed and gleaming hungrily. “I saw Maddox without a shirt once, and for a werewolf he was quite—”

  St. Giles glared her into silence even as Rafe started laughing. “At least they were both werewolves,” the former grumbled.

  “If you think about it,” Rafe suggested, still chuckling, “if Marius marries this Asprey dog, their alliance will make the Crimson City vampires and werewolves practically family.”

  St. Giles looked ill.

  “Let’s not bait him,” Marius said.

  “Too late,” growled St. Giles.

  Read Crimson & Steam

  Change Log

  Alas, I am not perfect. From time to time I make mistakes. The great thing about eBooks is I can upload fixes pretty quickly. If you find a typo, by all means let me know!

  Here’s a list of updates so far:

  • 2016.05.31: All new formatting and spiffy graphics.

  • 2015.02.19 ePub version 1.2. New cover, fancy graphical elements. Updated stylesheet, book list, bio, and excerpts.

  • 2013.07.25 ePub version 1.1. Added this change log. Updated stylesheet for better formatting.

  Thank you, eagle-eyed readers!