Demon Marked
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
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
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
Praise for the Novels of Anna J. Evans
“A wonderful read full of sexual heat and a potent tale.”
—Coffee Time Romance
“Evans pens a tale that is hot, scary, and sweet all at the same time. The protagonists ... will keep you turning the pages long into the night, and the happy ending is emotional enough to please any romance fan.” —Romantic Times (4½ stars)
“Anna J. Evans weaves a tale full of passion, intrigue, betrayal, and friendship that will leave readers in awe of the raw power behind the words.”—Romance Junkies
“Enough sexual heat to create an avalanche.”—Fallen Angel Reviews
“Arousing, amorous ... pulled me right into their sexual encounters.... Ms. Evans’s storytelling ability was amazing, without a single flaw.”—The Romance Studio
“A powerful story about the deep and undeniable connection between soul mates.... The love scenes were so primal and raw that you’re going to want to keep a spare pair of dry panties, a bucket of ice, and extra batteries nearby.”—TwoLips Reviews
“Extraordinary. ... I didn’t put this down until it was read all the way through.”—Romance Divas
ALSO BY ANNA J. EVANS
Shadow Marked
SIGNET ECLIPSE
Published by New American Library,
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First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January 2011
Copyright © Stacey Iglesias Fedele, 2011
All rights reserved
SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Evans, Anna J.
Demon marked: a demon bound novel/Anna J. Evans.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47824-0
1. Demons—Fiction. 2. Lawyers—Fiction. 3. Gangs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.V363S53 2010
813’.6—dc22 2010034843
Set in Albertina
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
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http://us.penguingroup.com
To Kerry, who was absolutely right
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the production team at Signet Eclipse, to my agent, Caren, and to my amazing readers. Thank you, readers, for every e-mail and every book you pick up off the shelf. I appreciate you so much. Also a big thank-you to my family, my husband, my writer and nonwriter friends, and my children for love and support. I am lucky to have you all.
CHAPTER ONE
Emma Quinn took a pull on her beer and scanned the crowded bar—Death Ministry gang members, some frat boys from Columbia looking for danger they couldn’t handle, and a couple of prostitutes trying to masquerade as party girls. The real party girls never wore dresses or heels. They stuck with jeans and sensible shoes, even in the soupy humidity of August in New York. When you lived on the wrong side of the barricade, you never knew when you might need to make a run for your life. Heels weren’t suited for a jog through the rubble of the demon ruins.
No, the real party girls had left hours ago, the frat boys were well on their way to being too drunk to stand—let alone make their way to one of the all-night diners where they could get a coffee and sober up while waiting for the barricade to open at five a.m.—and the gang members ... well, they just stank of trouble.
Death Ministry thugs had never come into the bar before. They usually preferred to haunt the abandoned docks near what had once been East River Park, plotting their drug runs, planning who to kill, and taking care of whatever other assorted business Very Bad Guys had on their nightly to-do list. But tonight ... they were here shooting tequila—and interested looks in the prostitutes’ direction.
It was three a.m. at the Demon’s Breath Pub, and all was not well.
But it never was at this time of night; Emma had learned that much in her first few weeks as manager.
Most of the tourists had left hours ago—trundled across the barricade that ran along Fourteenth Street in their tour buses—and demon-infested New York City had dropped its civilized veneer. Gone were the shiny-faced men and women offering guided tours and the food trailers selling demon-inspired snacks—ice cream cones painted gold to look like Hamma demon claws, funnel cakes dusted with silver sugar to mimic the Squat demon nests.
In their place were hard men and women tough enough to party in the urban jungle, addicts looking for their fix of demon drugs, and nocturnal predators waiting for humans foolish enough to wander too close to the ruins. The demons—ancient monsters descended from dinosaurs—were amazingly well adapted to the habitat they’d created when they’d surged from caves deep in the earth during the earthquakes of the previous century.
They lurked in wait for easy prey, killed, ate, a
nd disappeared back into the rubble. The bounty hunters and gang members who earned their livings killing and harvesting demon parts were their only predators—aside from one another. The demon ecosystem was as well balanced as any other on earth. Large demons fed on smaller ones, and smaller ones fed on rats and mice. New York City hadn’t had a vermin problem for years.
It was something Emma had been grateful for during the months she’d spent locked in her sister’s psycho ex-boyfriend’s basement. It was cold and dark down there, but at least there hadn’t been any rats.
Always looking on the fucking bright side, Quinn.
Emma grimaced and downed the rest of her beer. She did look on the bright side, in her own jaded fashion. Growing up where she had, the way she had, she’d been forced to create her own happiness. Even Father Paul had only so much time, so much energy, and most of it was used up by the time he got back to the halfway house at the end of the day. He’d saved her life, but Father Paul was too busy to worry about her contentment.
Her long-lost sister and brother had been able to lean on each other, but Emma had only ever had herself. Even now—months after she had helped save her sister, Sam, from her ex-boyfriend and the nasty aura demons he’d been trying to summon onto the earthly plane—she still hadn’t learned to depend on anyone else. Even her new family. Sam and her husband, Jace, were good people, but they were just so ... grossly in love—and lust—with each other.
Emma didn’t do love. Or lust. She’d never been able to afford the luxury of either.
“Dude, do you think we should call demon patrol? Or ... somebody?” Ginger, the bartender on duty, asked, pouring a shot of whiskey as she closed out one of the frat boys’ tabs.
Ginger cast a pointed look toward the corner of the room, where several Death Ministry members—easily identified by the scars marking their faces, one long slash for each life they’d taken in the name of gang business—sat sharing a bottle of tequila.
“Nope.” Emma placed her empty beer glass in the dishwasher under the bar. “Demon patrol doesn’t deal with gang stuff.”
“What about the police?”
“They haven’t done anything illegal.” She shrugged and started up the machine, holding it closed as hot water blasted the glasses. It wasn’t staying shut on its own anymore, the dishwasher just one of the things that was falling apart around the pub since her brother’s “disappearance” five months before.
Since her brother’s death. But most people didn’t know Stephen Quinn was dead. No one but Emma, Sam, Jace, and a handful of Italian mobsters—Jace’s family—knew the truth, and they meant to keep it that way. The last thing Emma needed was police sniffing around, wondering why the former owner of the Demon’s Breath was still missing in action.
“They’re just drinking,” she said.
“So far. But who knows what they’ll do after they’ve had a few.” Ginger slammed back the whiskey shot and took a deep breath. “Why couldn’t they come in when Jace was here?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” Emma watched Ginger pour herself another shot without saying a word.
According to rules, Ginger wasn’t supposed to be drinking while she was bartending, but Emma wasn’t going to tell. Hell, she wasn’t supposed to be drinking, either. She was still a year away from the legal drinking age of twenty-one, but no one questioned her right to imbibe.
Emma didn’t look underage. Despite her shoulder-length blond bob and soft brown eyes, she looked hard, edgy, and far older than her years. Sam said it was because she was too skinny for a woman who was five-eight. Emma knew it was because she was too messed up for a girl who was still a teenager.
But then, when you spent the first couple of years of your life in a hospital after nearly being killed by your own parents, you sort of got a head start on the messed-up thing. Emma, Sam, and Stephen had all been scarred by what their parents had done when they were kids—using them as human sacrifices for their cult’s aura-demon summoning ritual—but Emma wondered whether she wasn’t the most twisted of the three.
The aura demons—invisible demons most people believed were an urban legend—had been banished from the earth last March, but their mark on the Quinn family remained. Sam, though legally blind, had prophetic dreams, as well as moments when her eyes changed colors and she was literally able to see men and women who were on the verge of major psychic shifts in their lives. It was creepy to watch Sam’s brown eyes turn blue, but nothing compared to Emma’s own demon mark.
Sam’s mark hadn’t mutated something at the very heart of her. It didn’t drive her to steal in the name of survival. It didn’t make her feel aged and rotten on the inside—a wine gone bad that no one would ever want to drink.
“I’m going to have another shot. You want one?” Ginger asked.
Emma’s stomach cramped. No, a shot wasn’t a good idea. It was time for her to get something real to eat, something more than beer and stale pretzels. “No, I’m good. But you go ahead.” She couldn’t care less if Ginger was trashed on the job.
In fact, it worked in her favor if her roommate and coworker was too smashed to pay much attention to Emma as she prepped for closing at three thirty. It would make it easier for Emma to sneak away and find something to sustain her. Or maybe she wouldn’t have to go out to find food. ... Maybe she had something suitable right in the bar.
Emma’s eyes drifted back to the Death Ministry thugs. There were five of them, each one scarier than the last. Still, they were paying customers, customers who looked like they were running low on tequila.
“Check on the frat boys again, will you? I think they need another pitcher,” Emma said, waiting until Ginger turned away before grabbing a bottle of Jose Cuervo and slipping out from behind the bar.
She let a little wiggle creep into her walk as she crossed to the darkened corner. Her low-heeled biker boots thumped on the bare floorboards, catching the rhythm of whatever angsty, techno-pop tune the frat boys had selected from the jukebox. She’d never been dancing at a club, but she imagined this was the kind of crap they played at the places where young men and women went to grind against complete strangers for a few hours every Friday and Saturday night.
It was painful listening, and for the hundredth time Emma was glad she had no urge to grind against another person ... at least not in a public place, and not for the reasons the average twenty-year-old girl would press her body up against someone else’s in the dark.
“Looked like you guys were running low.” Emma plunked the fresh tequila bottle in the middle of the Death Ministry table.
A shiver raced along her skin as five pairs of flat, cruel eyes tracked up her body—taking in her tight black jeans and black tank top on the way up to her face—but it wasn’t fear that made the blond hairs on her arms stand on end. It was excitement ... anticipation.... Oh, yeah, these men were bad. Plenty bad for her purposes.
She’d bet one of their lives on it.
“We didn’t order another bottle.” The man who spoke had bright blue eyes and seemed a little younger than the rest, but his face was still heavily lined with kill scars.
He’d taken a dozen lives, if those ruined cheeks were anything to judge by. Surely not all of those people had deserved a grisly death. Odds were at least a few had been innocents. The Death Ministry was notorious for taking out an addict’s entire family when drug tabs weren’t paid in a timely manner—using moms and dads and sisters and brothers to get the message across that unpaid debt to the DM was a bad idea. It was one of the major reasons for the occasional violent clash between the gang and the Conti family. The Contis didn’t make a habit of killing innocent people. They also didn’t like losing money. For every demon killed or mutilated by the Death Ministry in the name of acquiring more drugs to sell, the Contis had one less demon body to turn in to the city. The demon-control agencies wanted their specimens taken alive or not at all.
“Yeah, I know,” Emma said, cocking her head in Blue Eyes’ direction. “Consider it a
gesture of good faith. This bottle is on the house, provided you guys don’t make trouble while you’re here tonight.”
“Make trouble? What kind of trouble would we make, blondie?” guy number one asked.
“Vanish, chica. Leave the bottle.” The speaker was a brown-skinned man with a Mohawk and a low opinion of women. He didn’t bother to look at her when he spoke but kept his dark eyes trained on the tiny dance floor, where one of the prostitutes writhed to the pounding beat.
Most of the other men had shifted their eyes elsewhere as well—unimpressed by the skinny blonde with the crooked nose and mud brown eyes—except for the young guy. The blue-eyed dude with the crew cut and a sprinkling of acne across his wide forehead was still looking—and he would do just fine. More than fine.
God, Emma could already feel how good it would be, how much stronger she’d be afterward.
Her heart raced as if she’d downed a triple shot of espresso instead of a couple of light beers, pounding so hard her ribs ached. Her pulse thudded unhealthily in her ears. It had been too long. She should have taken care of this sooner, before she needed it so badly. But she always tried to put it off, to find a way to keep from committing the same, necessary sin.
That was the thing about necessary sin. ... It was just so ... necessary.
“Exactly.” Emma stared at her victim through lowered lashes. “I’m sure you boys aren’t anything to worry about. I’m just going to take out the trash. Be good while I’m gone. Or ... not.”
Emma turned slowly, maintaining eye contact with Blue Eyes until the last second before sauntering away. On her way back across the room, she did one last sweep of the bar, making sure Ginger was occupied and none of the other patrons were paying attention as she slipped through the thick plastic strips separating the pub from the storage room. All eyes were elsewhere. She was clear. No one would notice the thug slipping out behind her and think about playing hero.