by John Tristan
The Sheltered City
By John Tristan
Amon Vraja, last of the halfdead, tries to stay out of sight. His kind, twisted by the gift that grants them superhuman strength, are loathed and shunned. Under the enchanted leaves of the Last City, ruled by imperious elves whose love of beauty leaves little room for his ugliness, he’s not much more than the ghost of a dragon-haunted past.
When the young, headstrong elf-lord Caedian takes an interest in Amon, however, Amon’s days in the shadows may be over. Caedian needs Amon to find Caedian’s missing twin, and a halfdead brothel guard can’t just refuse an elf’s desires. Throughout the search, Caedian and Amon rely on each other’s strength and generosity, and Amon is struck by an impossible yearning for his elvish patron.
As they peel away layers of deceit and spiral closer to one another, they also near the horrifying truth of the elves’ protection. And when they discover it, they’ll face a choice: step outside the shelter of the world’s last city, or die where they stand.
90,000 words
Dear Reader,
When I looked at what month I was writing this letter for, the song “Kokomo” immediately popped into my head. And now, though it’s still a little cold and blustery outside my windows, in my mind, we’re all sunning ourselves on the beaches of some tropical island, reading something incredible. Since you’ll be reading this letter in July, it’s entirely possible you will be on a beach somewhere, so let me help you with the incredible reads part...
Looking for something to add even more steam to your hot summer nights? Check out Going Under by Jeffe Kennedy, the first in her contemporary erotic romance trilogy. She’s a genius computer game designer who changed her identity to escape online trolls. He’s the crack undercover reporter who’s tracking an elusive and enigmatic hacker—her. They’re a combustible combination both in and out of bed.
Jeffe isn’t the only author with a new beginning this month. We’re pleased to welcome debut author Caroline Kimberly to Carina Press with her unique historical romance trilogy. Set in the wilds of British India, and pitched as Romancing the Stone meets Regency, she’s no demure young miss and he’s no proper soldier. And what they experience is more than An Inconvenient Kiss. If you’ve been longing for something different in the historical romance genre, don’t miss this one!
Ann DeFee and Inez Kelley join us in the contemporary romance genre with their respective books, A Hot Time in Texas and Should’ve Been Home Yesterday. This wraps up Inez’s Country Roads trilogy, so be sure to pick up the first two books if you haven’t already!
Problems in Paradise by Kelsey Browning is also in our contemporary lineup this month. A small-town Texas café owner wants to bury her sordid Los Angeles past and become a part of the community, but the sexy chief deputy must uncover her secrets even if it destroys his campaign for sheriff and their chances for love.
Fans of Julie Moffett’s Lexi Carmichael series are going to fall in love all over again with No Biz Like Showbiz, in which our favorite geek girl is off to Hollywood to bring down a hacker who’s manipulating the online voting for one of America’s favorite reality television dating shows. This is a series with something for everyone: geek references, a new adult feel, mystery themes and enough romance elements to keep any romance reader happy. If you haven’t started the series yet, you can start here or pick up No One Lives Twice at any etailer.
Shirley Wells also has a mystery release for fans of detective novels, and is back with Dead End, a Dylan Scott Mystery.
Two fantastic authors bring us two incredible urban fantasy novels this month. In Steve Vera’s Blood Sworn, the enemies of two worlds reluctantly join forces to fight the armies of the Underworld. And in Summoned Chaos by Joshua Roots, if there’s one thing Warlock Marcus Shifter hates it’s the Delwinn Council. They’re not pleased that he once turned his back on his kind, and he’s convinced someone on the Council is working to undermine the twenty-year peace with the non-magical Normals.
John Tristan also shares a journey in the world of fantasy with The Sheltered City. In a land devastated by dragonfire, a man with a curse in his blood must help an elf find his missing brother in this male/male fantasy romance.
And to round out the diverse selection of novels we have for your beach-reading pleasure, in A.M. Arthur’s Maybe This Time, when serial singleton Ezra Kelley meets his match in sexy bartender Donner Davis, both men will need to let go of past hurts before they can have a future together.
Of course, if you’re spending a lot of time on the beach and need more, don’t forget to go diving into our backlist, which offers a variety of page-turning books in all genres of romance, mystery and science fiction from authors like Lauren Dane, Josh Lanyon, Marie Force and more.
Coming in August 2014: Shannon Stacey is back with the final (for now) installment in the Kowalski series, we welcome Lisa Marie Rice and her cracktastic contemporary romantic suspense to Carina Press, and I’m off to Mexico for my own lie-in on the beach!
Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
Contents
Part I: The Last City
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part II: The Dragonlands
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
About the Author
Copyright
PART I: THE LAST CITY
Chapter One
The canopy of the sky was turning transparent to the night, shifting the light from crystal green to lunar gray. For a moment, Amon could see the joins in the dome of the canopy, a network of bright veins and leaf-edges. Then they were gone, leaving their afterimages flickering on the inside of his eyelids.
He watched the sky for a little while longer, waiting for the first stars to come out. Then he slid out of the shadows of his alley and stepped into the narrow street. The crowds were thin, as they often were in the gray hours between the sky’s turning and the lighting of the lamp-trees. Not that it mattered much. Even in the narrowest places, where the streets were the width of a ward
robe wedged between two teetering houses, crowds would part around him; he carried around his own modest orb of space.
Still, tonight the city seemed somehow emptier than usual, and he reached the House of Dust with time to spare. He leaned against a lamp-tree for a moment; the leaves were glowing with their night radiance now, a cool light just bright enough to turn the shadows around him a richer black.
The door to the House of Dust opened into the night. A flicker of firelight and a burst of music preceded a man in rumpled finery; his suit might have been white once, but time had turned the fabric a gentle ivory. He stumbled out, slurring some dark dissatisfaction, then shook his head hard.
The man walked with exaggerated caution, now and then stopping to lean up against the wall. It was a dance Amon had seen a hundred times before, working at the House of Dust—and before that, when stumbling drunkards made easy prey for an overgrown boy in need of coin. Amon would not even need to use his fists; the sight of his bulk looming out of the dark would make them throw their remaining money at his feet. I’m sizing him up, Amon realized, with something that was almost shame. It had been years since he’d needed to stoop to robbery for his supper.
The man looked up, blinking in Amon’s direction. The street in between them wasn’t wide, but haloed in the thin light of the night leaves the details that sent most people scurrying away from Amon—the nasty particulars of his skin, his veins, his fingernails—would be blurred, even if the man wasn’t stumbling drunk. Still, he knew how he must have looked: a broad, hulking shape, half a head taller than most other men, black eyes reflecting the tree’s anemic glow.
After a long, squinting look in Amon’s direction, the man made a quick sign against the evil eye and began to sing a fractured lullaby in a loud and falsely cheery voice.
“The elf-lords are watching over us,
the elf-lords who gave us the sky!”
He faltered a moment, then went on.
“Why do the elf-lords watch over us?
The Great Mother loves us, that’s why!”
Someone from a low window threw a filthy rag at the singer and missed, then made do with throwing curses. The man froze, then broke into a crabwise run, vanishing into the tangled warren of alleyways.
Amon shook his head and grinned down at the ground. From the look of his faded finery—not to mention the song—the man would be farmer gentry from the Verdancy, down for a few hours of illicit fun in the Rim before crawling back to his family. If he was clever, he would have something tucked away to bribe the gatekeepers at his farmhold. He had not looked clever though. Amon would wager he’d end the night delivered in shackles to his farmhouse door, addled and sheepish, then hauled before a mothers’ council in the morning to take his punishment. It could have been worse for him if he wasn’t Verdancy gentry; he might be spending a week chained in a damp cell then, rather than pulling up weeds under the canopy of the sky.
The lamp-tree was in full glow now, and the stars above stark against the sky. “Wasted enough time,” Amon muttered, and he crossed the street to the House of Dust.
Luba was waiting for him inside. “Saw you loitering under the leaves,” she said, pushing off from her customary seat—a high stool, by the stairway down to the rose rooms. “We could have used you in here to deal with that greenman. Kaspar had to go home early.”
“I come for the time I get paid for,” he said, and then he frowned. “Did he give you trouble, then?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know the sort. An hour’s worth of sin, if they can manage that much, then a day’s worth of ranting about redemption. He spooked Mara a bit, trying to talk her into coming to his temple to be ‘cleansed’.”
“I’m sure the gentlefolk of the Verdancy would love that.”
“A real fallen woman, come up from the Rim of Stone to repent?” Luba never really bothered to smile—she only showed her teeth. She was showing them now, even and yellowed, slightly too big for her compact red mouth. “It would be like a holyday come early for them. They might even have a special feast.”
“Huh,” Amon grunted. “Wonder what they’d do if I came to be cleansed.”
Luba snorted and looked him up and down. “Why, Amon Vraja, are you feeling the weight of your sins?”
Someone’s sins, he thought, but he only smiled and raised his thick shoulders in a shrug. “Perhaps I’m hoping for a miracle.”
“Aren’t we all?”
She hip-swayed her way back to the staircase and took up her seat. Amon got the message, settling himself in his customary corner under the low flicker of a hanging lamp.
All of the House of Dust was lit by candles, or oil lamps scavenged from old dragonhunter surplus. It gave the place a strange and dreamy look. In the dim light, all the flesh of Luba’s girls and boys looked darkly feverish, and all the drinks and infusions on offer took on the glow of baleful magic—but going without lightvines meant no visits from the Gardeners, and that was reckoned worth the dim.
As the hours of the night ticked by, the House of Dust began to fill, slowly but surely. Amon watched each swing of the door, tracking the arrivals and departures, making private wagers on who was most likely to end up on the wrong side of his fists. Most nights, there’d be at least one or two.
The first trickle of the night were regulars: people of the Rim, who worked and lived nearby. They would come to the House for a quick drink and a ten-minute tumble with their favorite. Then a group of Verdancy farmers in garish clothes came in flush with their harvest gift, laughing a little too loud. Half of them went straight to the staircase, pressing their fees into Luba’s waiting hands. Amon didn’t go down to the rose rooms very often—the look of him looming in the narrow hallways tended to have a shriveling effect on the patrons—but he kept half an ear open, in case he needed to pull a too-friendly patron off one of Luba’s roses.
The other half clustered into a booth and ordered drinks—nothing too strong, Amon noted, which was both good and bad. The serious devotees could suck back glass after glass before gently folding themselves into a limp pile that could easily be slid out the door at a significant glance from Luba; the amateurs got ruined on two glasses of fallingweed or love-in-darkness if they weren’t careful, becoming suddenly convinced of their own immortality.
The farmers seemed as if they were being careful, though, for now at least. Still, Amon kept a sullen eye on them, in case they decided otherwise once the first drink didn’t have them going up in flames.
The night ticked on; patrons came and went. The two groups of farmers switched places, with the other half, fortified by love-in-darkness, heading to the rose rooms while their forerunners came up rumpled and grinning. Arbin and Banu—Luba’s cousins, who helped her run the House of Dust most nights—alternated their spots serving and playing a battered harpsichord, keeping the sound just loud enough to drown out most of the theatrical moans from downstairs.
Banu was a slightly better player, able to squeeze something like actual harmonies from the ancient thing. Amon leaned back in his chair a moment, listening to Banu dance a half-discordant tune across the harpsichord’s yellowed keys. Then he rose and stretched with a bone-cracking fierceness—loud enough for one of the farmer boys to whip his head in his direction, noticing him for the first time. The boy spent a good few minutes gawking openmouthed before one of his more sober companions elbowed him sharply in the side.
Amon ignored them and sidled up to the bar, where Arbin was counting the bottles locked behind their wrought-iron grille. Arbin looked over his shoulder and grinned; he had his cousin’s teeth-baring half smile. “Mr. Vraja. I’m guessing you’ll want something to eat?”
Amon nodded. “That’d go down nice.”
Arbin grunted and walked into the back room for a moment. He returned with a bowl of cold green soup and a stack of flatbread. The soup was thick and spicy, with a bit
ter but not unpleasant vegetal undertone; the flatbread was a little gritty, but fresh and sweet. The food was part of his wages, and he’d never had cause to complain of it. Though he’d been taught to cook half-decent meals—years ago, over Zoran’s well-tended fire—his home lacked both pantry and hearth. Arbin’s cold meals were better than the limp fruit and bulging pastries he would buy from street vendors on the nights he did not work at the House of Dust.
After his dinner, a lassitude settled in his limbs. The night had proved quiet; he had to keep himself from falling asleep in his chair as the door swung back and forth. The farm boys left without making trouble, shuffling out into the graying dark oddly subdued. Apart from a wild-haired woman who tried unsuccessfully to glue herself to Banu’s cleavage, Amon barely had to get up from his spot beneath the lamp.
When the last of the serious drinkers had been eased out of the door and the harpsichord had gone silent, Luba went and snuffed out the lamps in the corners, leaving only a few pools of candlelight here and there like stepping stones in a black river.
After that the boys and girls came up from the rose rooms, yawning and chattering among themselves. A few of them waved at Amon—Tailan, whose last bad customer Amon had repaid with a few cracked ribs, gave him a crooked smile—but most of them ignored him. They’d become used to him, the way they became used to the low light.
Arbin set out bowls of soup for the ones who lived in the House; the others, who had their own narrow beds to go home to, stood in line to take their wages from Luba, their hands cupped to receive battered old coins stamped with the faded faces of long-dead kings.
“That’s it then,” Luba said, clapping her now-empty hands. “Everyone that doesn’t live here, get out. I need my beauty sleep.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Tailan said, just loud enough to be heard, raising some tired snorts of laughter from the rest. Luba ignored the laughter and kept on ushering them out, one by one.
Amon went out last, trailing Luba’s roses, a clumsy bear following a flock of chattering birds. For a moment he felt like some unlikely chaperone, escorting a gaggle of wayward youths. Then they scattered, leaving by twos or threes, with a few lone stragglers vanishing into the subways. Amon half turned toward the door, meaning to say goodbye to Luba, but it was already shut.
