Paladin (Graven Gods Book 1)

by Angela Knight

  Paladin (Graven Gods 1)

  Angela Knight

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ©2016 Angela Knight

  First Edition

  Available Electronic File Formats:

  Amazon Kindle, Mobi/PRC, Adobe PDF, Epub

  Publisher:

  Angela Knight

  195 Independence Drive

  Roebuck, SC 29376

  www.angelasknights.com

  Editor: Margaret Riley

  Copy Editor: Pat Sager

  Line Editor: Emilie Pitt

  Cover Artist: Fiona Jayde

  This ebook file contains adult language and sexually explicit love scenes which some may find offensive and which is not appropriate for a young audience. Angela Knight’s e-books are for sale to adults, only, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this or any copyrighted work is illegal. File sharing is an international crime, prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice, Division of Cyber Crimes, in partnership with Interpol. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is punishable by seizure of computers, up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 per reported instance.

  Paladin (Graven Gods 1)

  Dedication

  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

  Angela Knight

  Paladin (Graven Gods 1)

  Struggling novelist Summer St. Clare can’t remember her murdered mother’s face, or most of her childhood before the age of twelve. The only constant in her life is Paladin, once her imaginary childhood friend, now the handsome detective of her urban fantasy series.

  There’s nothing imaginary about Paladin now. Hot, seductive and dangerous, Paladin blurs the line between fantasy and reality. The passion Summer experiences in his arms makes her question what’s real -- or whether she cares.

  Someone else believes in Paladin, and he wants Summer dead. Her confusion mounts when she fights off five attackers with a display of dazzling martial arts skills she doesn’t remember acquiring. As she searches for answers and runs for her life, her dream lover becomes more real with every kiss.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my critique partner Joey Hill and editor Shelby Morgen. It’s a lot of work to check a 70,000 word book for errors, characterization, and plot problems. If this book is at all readable, Margaret and Joey get a lot of credit. Any errors are mine.

  I’d also like to thank my artist buddy, Fiona Jayde, for her hard work on the cover.

  Last but definitely not least, I’d like to thank you, my readers, for picking up my first foray into self-publishing. I’ve written a lot of books, but this is the first I’ve done solo (though with a little help from my friends). I hope you enjoy it!

  Chapter One

  Paladin kissed me, deep and desperate, as he often did when he returned. It poisoned him, the job he’d taken on because some subconscious need of humanity demanded justice. Demanded balance against the vicious and the murderous and the uncaring.

  Demanded light.

  I slid out of sleep as his lips teased mine. Moaning, I tasted his magic, a current rushing from his mouth to mine. Light flowed into me on the thrust of his tongue.

  His kiss tasted of ozone, an electric glitter that lit the darkness behind my closed lids as he spilled power into me. Power and the copper penny tang of blood.

  They’ve bled him, I thought, with a stab of pain. They’ve hurt him. And if they hurt him, he could have died. I’d rather die myself.

  “Shhhh.” He soothed me, fingers seeking nipples drawn tight by his kiss. Light spilled from his hands, pouring from his skin into mine, turning my fear into need. His fingers traced over my ribs, trailing sweet neural sparks that built need into desire. Pleasure rushed in with the magic, flowing along my nerves, flushing out the last of the fear with the warm tidal rise of delight.

  My pussy grew slick as I arched into his hard strength. He pinched my nipple harder, making me suck in a desperate breath. “Did he hurt you?” I gasped. “I can taste the blood.”

  “Hardly. The blood is his. It would take more than Gerald Moss to lay so much as a spark on me.”

  “What happened?”

  “The usual. He was just another acolyte of Valak’s. Not particularly challenging to track down, or to eliminate once I found him. I don’t want to talk about it. You’ll remember it later anyway, whether I want you to or not. The spell won’t hold much longer.” His voice dropped to the soft growl that made my pussy even wetter. “And we have more interesting things to do now.”

  “Yes. God, yes!”

  He smiled at my eagerness, the expression lightening the darkness in his eyes as I squirmed under his hands. He seemed to know every synapse in my body and how to stir each one to pleasure, taking a wicked delight in the process. I loved his touch, loved surrendering to him and climbing the heights he could drive me to.

  The thought that I could’ve lost him tonight…

  “Shhhh,” he repeated. “It didn’t happen. It won’t happen.”

  And I believed him as he stroked me with tender brushes of his fingertips over the curve of my waist and hips and breasts. He kissed me in the path of those caresses, slowly, as if savoring the taste of my skin.

  Hypnotized, I watched him, panting and dizzied. My hands tangled in the cool silk of his hair, threading among the curls, sliding down to the warm strength of his shoulder, thick and smooth under my fingers.

  His hand slipped between my legs, finding me already slick and tight. He slid a teasing finger deep, thrusting as his thumb danced over the erect nub of my clit. With a groan, I spread my thighs, giving myself up to him. Pleasure floated up in long spirals like sparks from a candle flame, swirling with the smoky delight as strong fingers tugged with delicate care.

  “That’s it,” he breathed. “You know what I want. Come for me.”

  His thumb strummed with the perfect pressure at just the right spot. My hand curled into a fist as I rolled my hips to meet his clever fingers. The orgasm took me, grabbed me hard and dragged me up as I cried out with the intensity of it, burning so sweet and merciless.

  Something else rose from the depths of my brain, a wash of hot power that bowed my spine, making me scream, building to a roiling geyser of magic surging down my shoulders to burst from my fingers in stinging sparks.

  Above me, Paladin’s eyes widened in alarm. “No, Summer, not yet! He’ll sense…”

  But he was too late. I had no control at all as the magic exploded through the barriers I hadn’t even known were there. It burst from my very pores like steam under pressure, lighting up the darkness…

  * * *

  Light woke me, color shimmering beyond my closed eyelids.

  I opened my eyes to find sparks dancing in the dark. Flashes of cobalt blue, cyan and turquoise orbited my fingertips as my right hand curled, palm up on the quilt. I smiled in muzzy wonder at the floating fireworks as I lay on my side, sleep drunk. Dreaming. Gotta be dreaming.

  Yeah, that’s right. I’d been dreaming about making love to Paladin.

  It was a hell of an improvement over the clawed, furry hand I’d once seen grope its way over the edge of the mattress. I
’d woken from that particular nightmare standing all the way out in the hall, heart thundering so hard my ears pulsed with sheer animal terror.

  My dreams could be fanged, nasty bitches. Even Paladin couldn’t keep them away.

  But this time the sparks didn’t vanish when the fog of sleep lifted. I raised my hand, watching dancing light trailing after my fingers. What the hell is that, I thought, charmed and bewildered. Static electricity?

  No, you might get a lone spark from scuffing your feet across the carpet, not this flashing comet tail in the dark.

  I rolled out of bed, watching my hand trail glitter. As I straightened, a roil of energy poured from the base of my brain, making gooseflesh rise on the back of my neck with the power rolling across my shoulders and down my arms. I spread fizzing fingers, and the sparks spun out of my hand into a ball that floated weightlessly above my palm. It felt as warm as summer sunlight. The blue tattoo on my palm glowed, sparks floating lazily upward toward the ball of light.

  Weirdest dream ever.

  Because that’s what it had to be. There’s no such thing as magic. Yeah, all the armchair physics I’d read insisted that when you got to the quantum level -- even deeper than neutrons, electrons and protons, down among the quarks and elemental forces -- weird shit happened. But out here where we humans live, magic was impossible.

  Yet that globe of sparks still orbited over my palm, stubbornly existing.

  I glanced around the bedroom. Nope, no Tinkerbell. No Paladin either, since he was just as fictional as Tink. Nothing more than the voice of my writer’s subconscious.

  And yet…

  As I gazed at the globe in hypnotized wonder, something happened. My awareness seemed to expand beyond the limits of my body, and I could feel the big Victorian house around me -- the creaking floorboards covered by worn Persian carpets, the circling sweep of narrow stairs, the elderly kitchen and stately dining room, the bedrooms with all their antiques. At the very top of the house lay the long, high-ceilinged dojo that made up the third floor. Must have been a ballroom or attic once, a hundred and fifty years ago when the house was new.

  What had it been like when my family lived here, before tragedy took them and stole my memory?

  I shook off the pain, blinking dry, open eyes and frowned at the sparks tumbling over my palm as if caught in an invisible snow globe. I felt awake, not that that meant a damned thing, given my dreams. So why were sparks fizzing above my hand?

  “Summer, what are you doing?” The female voice had a purring growl vibrating in its psychic depths. Definitely not Paladin’s rumble. “You’re going to draw his attention!”

  Hair rose on the back of my neck as an icy exhalation of terror blew away my wonder. My hands started to shake, my mouth flooding with the brassy taste of adrenaline as I scanned for the source of the fear.

  Evil. I could feel it out there in the city somewhere. Impossibly old, swollen like a tick with stolen magic and other people’s blood. It wanted to kill me. Rip my soul apart like cotton candy. The way it killed my mother.

  I blinked, and it wasn’t sparks floating over my right hand, but an acetylene blue fireball. My palm felt singed as if I held my fingers over a griddle. My left hand burned too, violet and hot.

  Something ran up the stairs in thumping bounds. I whirled toward the sound, instinctively backing away.

  The bedroom door slammed open so hard it bounced against the wall. I screamed as glowing eyes shot across the floor toward me. I tried to dodge, but the thing slammed into my shins. I staggered and almost fell on my ass. Pain slashed my ankles. The fireball winked out.

  The room flooded with illumination as both bedside lamps and the ceiling light flashed on, though I hadn’t touched the switches. The ink-black shape yowled, sounding panicked, and pain raked my skin again.

  “Oh Jesus, cat!”

  She had both forepaws wrapped around my ankle, needle claws dug deep as she howled a cycling wail of terror. “Calliope! Get off!” I hopped, glad I hadn’t obeyed my first impulse and kicked her across the room. The furry little psycho refused to let go. She lifted her head, clinging to my leg stubbornly as she stared into the distance, her clutch going oddly protective. Her wail dropped into a deep basso growl that sounded like something a hell of a lot bigger than a house cat.

  “Damn it, beast!” I reached down and peeled her off my ankle as she spat kitty curses. Writhing in my hold, she hissed at me, ears flattened to her skull, blue eyes crazed. Every long black hair on her body bushed, making her look twice her normal size. “Calliope, calm down!”

  She quit yowling to hook her claws in my sleep shirt. Clinging, she began to shake in racking quivers, a pitiful ball of feline panic. I forgot about my own scare and hugged her, stroking her silky ears and murmuring the sort of nonsense people say to terrified cats. My ankle stung; she’d probably clawed me bloody. I’d tend it later. The important thing was to convince Cal she was safe from cat-eating monsters.

  Thoroughly awake now, I limped around, Calliope in the crook of one arm as I used my free hand to turn off lamps and the overhead light. I got back in bed, her lashing tail beating softly against my ribs. “I guess I’m not the only one who had a nightmare, huh, baby?”

  With me curled protectively around her, Calliope finally calmed down. Running a hand down her ebony fur, so did I.

  I must have dreamed those sparks, just as I’d dreamed Paladin’s kiss.

  I’d grown up sleepwalking. Every couple of weeks I’d wake shaking, convinced I’d almost died. My dreams were intense: the smell of burning skin, flashes of agony and desperate effort against tattooed men in robes and armor.

  I used the dreams as inspiration for scenes in my books: Richard Paladin battling demons, his big body launching punches and spinning kicks, his sword an arc of light as magic flashed in his pale eyes. Night after night I dreamed, until repetition rendered the horrific almost routine.

  But that thing just now had been another order of magnitude worse than the worst of those. Distilled evil, looking at me. And hungering.

  More terrifying than any dream I’d ever had.

  “Summer, go to sleep. You had a nightmare,” Paladin murmured from the depths of my mind, his rich voice lulling.

  I let my head drop back on the pillow with a sigh. He might be nothing more than my subconscious given voice, but he seemed like so much more. He’d always been there for me, even during my lonely childhood.

  It’s no wonder I can’t keep a lover, I thought sleepily.

  “I can’t compete with your imaginary fuck buddy,” my ex-boyfriend snarled on his way out, wrapped in wounded vanity.

  Paladin was more than a fuck buddy. Hell, sometimes I thought he was more than imaginary…

  “Summer,” Paladin rumbled, “Go to sleep.”

  The room filled with the thrum of Calliope’s purr. She’d quit shaking, though her blue eyes glowed in the dark, worried and watchful.

  Sleep gulped me down.

  When I woke the next morning Calliope was gone. There wasn’t so much as a black cat hair on the embroidered white wedding ring quilt I’d inherited from… someone. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother? I had no idea, thanks to the amnesia that kept me from remembering the first twelve years of my childhood.

  I wondered if the cat had really been there last night. For once, I knew how to find out. Rolling out of bed, I examined my ankles. If it had been real, there should be claw marks, maybe a puncture or two from Calliope’s efficient teeth. But my skin was unbroken.

  Guess I dreamed the whole thing after all. Too bad, I thought, remembering the dancing sparks that had looked like one of Paladin’s spells. It would be cool to be able to work magic, to summon energies science had never discovered.

  I eyed the bed. A gauzy white lace canopy hung suspended above it from a brass ring in the middle of the ceiling. Strings of fairy lights wound amid its folds, shedding lacy shadows over the room, a DIY project I’d seen on Pinterest. If I ever found a potential lover, I’d
have to sneak in and take it all down. Otherwise he’d think I was the kind of overly romantic bimbo who’d expect a proposal for breakfast.

  He’d be gone so fast, he’d leave a contrail.

  Could I have seen those fairy lights and mistaken them for magical sparks? Yeah, that made sense. More sense than the idea I’d started working magic in my sleep, anyway.

  As for the Lovecraftian horror that had contemplated me in the dark, that was just your typical Summer St. Clare bad dream. I’ve had people gush about how lucky I am to be creative. Yeah, right. Let’s swap nightmares. See what you say the morning after.

  I dressed for the day in my usual blend of styles -- hipster with a dash of neo-Goth, covered in nutty Cosplay goodness. Today I wore black jeans, a pair of Wonder Woman Converse All Stars, and one of my favorite snarky T-shirts -- Darth Vader on a star field background intoning, “The NERD is strong in this one!”

  Next came the makeup; smoky blue, blending into green toward the center, then a sweep of black liquid eyeliner and a coat of mascara. The dramatic color made my blue eyes pop, accented by shoulder-length black hair, the bottom third of it dyed peacock blue, shading into violet at the tips. That, in turn, matched the swirling tattoos on my forearms, blue on one, violet on the other, matching sigils inked on each palm. The tatts were so cool, I’d given them to Paladin in the urban fantasies I wrote.

  Basically I looked like a character from one of my own novels. Which was the whole idea. Fantasy writers are expected to be a little weird.

  Almost as weird as the fact I didn’t actually remember getting those tatts. I just woke up with them one day eight years ago, when I was seventeen. Judging from the psychic fog that surrounded the event, I blame beer. Shit like that is why I don’t drink anymore.

  My aunt, Mary Reynolds, who’d raised me after my mother died, had given the ink a long, worried look. To my surprise, she didn’t jump me about it, though her then-husband Bob wanted to ground me until the next ice age. She’d coolly informed him I had her permission, a lie which resulted in a ferocious fight.