by Everly Frost
Assassin’s Magic 3
Assassin’s Maze
Everly Frost
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Coming Soon - The Monster Ball Year 2
Coming Soon - Bright Wicked
Also by Everly Frost
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 by Everly Frost
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead are purely coincidental.
Frost, Everly
Assassin’s Maze
Cover Design: Atelier Droeven
For information on reproducing sections of this book or sales of this book, go to
www.EverlyFrost.com
[email protected]
Foreword
Please note the events in this book run parallel to the events in Assassin’s Menace. The recommended reading order for the Assassin’s Magic series is:
1. Assassin’s Magic
2. Assassin’s Mask
2.5 Assassin’s Menace
3. Assassin’s Maze
If you haven’t read Assassin’s Menace, it is available in the Shadows and Sorcery collection here.
For the warrior in all of us, the days we battle through, the new hope we find, the persistence that keeps us going, and the friendships we form along the way.
Chapter One
I creep along the alleyway, stepping silently around the trash, my blurred body imperceptible to the human eye. The moon sits high above me, its light as cold as my heart.
I step out of its rays and into the shadows where I belong.
My fist tightens around my dagger. I didn’t bring a gun for this mission and I won’t use my killing power. I need information first.
My target leans against the dirty brick wall ahead, his breath frosting in the chill air, sleeves rolled up as if he doesn’t care about the cold. I guess shifters run hot like me. Or rather, like I used to.
He picks his teeth before he ruffles through the wad of cash he just stole from the woman lying bleeding on the pavement at his feet. He targets business women, captures and drugs them before leaving them in a semi-public place to die. Their deaths look random, drug-related, but they aren’t. They are bloody messages for anyone who defies Lady Tirelli.
Half an hour ago, at midnight, his victim’s daughter beat down the bookshop door begging me to save her mother. She wrote in my ledger in the middle of the night, mere hours after I fought Lady Tirelli herself—a woman whose true name is Amalia Avery, the last Valkyrie Queen.
Amalia told me that I’m dying and left me with a threat: bring the last Keres woman to her or she will rip Slade’s soul from his body.
I intend to bring more than the Ker.
I intend to bring war.
My fist closes around the shifter’s throat a moment before I press my blade against his ribs, angling the weapon so it will slide neatly between them when I want it to. He doesn’t react. He can’t feel my hand or the blade while I’m blurred.
I grip his throat tighter, firm enough to break his windpipe and snap his neck if he moves. Then I materialize beside him.
He jolts, drops the money, and curses. He tries to wrench out of my hold, but I press harder, forcing his head back against the brick wall.
He winces, curses, and whisper-shouts, “Assassin!”
I say, “You will tell me the time and location of Lady Tirelli’s next weapons delivery.”
The shifter’s eyes boggle wide. His animal tries to take over, his human pupils constricting into fine points, his jaw partially shifting. His leopard shines from his yellowing eyes, but I shove a knee against his stomach, pinning him with my body as well as my fist. “If you shift, I won’t wait for an answer before I kill you.”
The animal halts, the shifter’s face reverting back into human form. “I don’t know when it’s happening.”
He is Lady Tirelli’s top henchman, next in line after the brothers I killed yesterday. I narrow my eyes at him, digging a fingernail into his neck as emphasis. “You do.”
He tries to shake his head but he can’t move within my grasp. Without mercy, I pierce his side with the blade, cutting skin but not too deep. He shouts, hits out with his free hand, but I absorb the blow and hold on.
I command him, “Tell me where it is!”
He hits me again. Pain bursts across my cheek, but I don’t let go. Hissing beneath his teeth, he stops beating at me, his breathing erratic, panicked now that his blows have had no impact. “You’ll kill me anyway.”
It’s true. I will.
“But I will do it quickly,” I say.
He searches my eyes, snarling, “She’s dying. The longer you take with me, the closer she is to death.”
He means the woman he attacked. He isn’t lying. She only has minutes unless I bind her wounds and get her to a hospital. But the mask I wear now is complete, cold, and unyielding.
“What makes you think I care? I want to destroy Lady Tirelli. Tell me about the weapons delivery or I will cut you to pieces slowly, starting with your…”
The blade slides down his thigh, slicing through his jeans.
He twitches. “I’ll tell you… if you let me live.”
I smile. “That sounds fair enough.”
“It’s tonight. A white van due into Boston at one a.m. traveling on the Northern Expressway.”
“Good,” I say. “Now tell me something else: where does she live?”
He rattles off the address, saying, “You’ll know it by the rose bushes out the front. It’s winter but they bloom anyway.”
I wrinkle my nose. Roses. It’s the scent Amalia wears to hide the stench of decay that exudes from every part of her body. She, too, is dying and has been for much longer than me. She has kept herself alive by assimilating stolen Keres feathers into her wings, using them to force her soul—her life—to remain in her body.
Without another word, I flip the dagger and drive it into his throat, all the way through his spinal cord. He doesn’t have time to register shock. Removing my dagger and allowing his body to hit the pavement, I rip off his shirt and hurry to the woman lying on the ground, quickly locating her worst wound. The cut to her left wrist is life-threatening.
Wow, he actually tried to make it look like a suicide—right down to the needle jabbed into her other arm, as if she couldn’t live with herself
because of her supposed drug habit.
Wrapping the wound and tying it off tightly, I pick her up and stride to the end of the alleyway, preparing to blur and release my wings.
“That was cold, Hunter.”
Lutz Logan’s amber eyes are bright in the moonlight. He chose to stand right where the light shines, making himself fully visible. I guess he knows better than to take me by surprise. More than he already has, that is.
He is hours away from killing Briar. Yesterday, she broke the assassin’s code when she killed Fallon. She stopped me from ending Fallon and now she will take the punishment that I would have willingly taken to have seen him die.
Lutz volunteered to carry out Briar’s assassination when nobody else would do it. He will accept all of my hatred… and he knows it.
I have to keep moving so I don’t think about it. Only violence can numb my mind to the pain of losing her.
“What are you doing here, Lutz?”
He shrugs, rolling his shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my life before the Legion. What was so bad about it that I wanted to leave it behind…?”
I don’t know anything about him. Not his past or his family—if he has any.
He doesn’t give me time to ask, lifting himself off the wall as he says, “I will bring Briar’s body to you so you can bury her.”
I stiffen. “Damn you, Lutz Logan.”
“I’m already damned, Hunter. There’s no absolution for me.”
He blurs on the spot, disappearing into the moonlight like a ghost.
Pulling the wounded woman close to my chest, I hold her tightly so I can blur and spread my wings, my silver feathers gleaming when I beat them and rise into the air, speeding across Boston.
I land outside the hospital where I told her daughter to wait. The young woman huddles against the wall of the building near the brightly-lit sliding doors, her head in her hands, her shoulders hunched. She cries quietly as she prays. “Please… please…”
I freeze, hearing my own voice begging my mother not to die while she bled out, her fists like iron around my hands, stopping me from plucking out one of my feathers to heal her. She didn’t know that removing a feather would kill me. She just knew I shouldn’t do it.
I force myself out of the memory, tucking away my wings and crossing the distance before I make myself visible to the human eye again.
“Annabeth?”
Her tear-stained face flies upward, her gaze shooting from me to her mother. “Mom!”
“Your mother is alive, but she needs medical attention right away.”
“Thank you!” Annabeth doesn’t waste time, spinning on her heel and tugging me toward the door, crying for help as soon as we step inside. “My mom needs help!”
It’s risky for me to walk inside carrying the woman. At least I’m dressed in regular clothing—jeans and a cropped leather jacket—so I won’t draw attention like I would if I were in a protective suit. Luckily, a couple of medics race toward us without much more than a glance at me.
I tell them: “She has cuts to her wrists and body. The damage to her left wrist is life-threatening. It’s not attempted suicide. She was attacked.”
Her weight lifts from my arms as they hurry her onto a medical stretcher. One of them says, “Wait here. The police will want to talk to you.”
No chance of that. I grab Annabeth’s arm before she can follow them. “Tell anyone who needs help defending themselves against Lady Tirelli that my ledger is wide open.”
She gives me a nod before she hurries away. By the time she looks back, I’m blurred again. She misses a step, searches the corridor for me, but quickly continues after her mother. I wish my heart was as cold as I pretend it is. I wish I only helped Annabeth for information—to find out about the weapons delivery and where Amalia lives.
I take to the sky and head straight to Amalia’s address, circling above the brownstone. The shifter was telling the truth about the roses. Bright red ones bloom on the bushes out the front, their scent heavy and defiant in the midnight air.
I alight on the roof, crouching and expanding my senses. The space inside the home is empty of life. In fact, I sense nothing more than bare walls. Then… my senses tingle. Valkyrie energy reaches out to me—Realm energy. It’s a sense of being swallowed into a space I don’t control.
I quickly lift off the roof and take to the sky before it hurts me. It must be a security mechanism. The brownstone may be Amalia’s visible home but she has created a Realm inside it, which is where she actually lives. I can’t get inside unless she chooses to let me. Nobody can. As long as she remains inside, she is untouchable.
Never mind. She has to come out eventually. And she will. Especially after tonight. My days of avoiding the hornet’s nest are over. I’m going to tear that nest open, one stab at a time.
I fly north, heading along the Northern Expressway, scanning the horizon and keeping my eyes peeled for the white van. I calculate that if it’s due into Boston at one a.m. then it should be right around…
There.
The vehicle speeds along the highway, a white blob clearly identifiable in the dark. I’ll need to fly fast to keep up with it but I want to make sure it’s the right one. Still blurred, I dive toward it, keeping up with it for long enough to identify the driver. He is heavily armed and a manifest with a red rose printed on the front rests on the passenger side seat.
More roses. Subtle.
It’s all I need to see.
The road is clear in front and behind the vehicle. The van is about to pass through a forest area so there’s nothing on either side for it to crash into except a ditch and trees.
I wait another moment for a vehicle coming in the other direction to pass. Then I spear toward the driver’s door, harnessing my strength to wrench it open and rip it right off, metal screaming into the night. The driver shouts and lurches away from me, but I grab hold of him and pull him out. He hangs onto the steering wheel long enough to veer the vehicle off the road, saving me the trouble of diverting it.
A tranquilizer is all it takes to knock him out.
He slumps in my arms as the vehicle hits the nearest tree, its front busting up with an ear-splitting crunch.
I deposit the driver safely off the road where he will be easily found before I soar to the vehicle and grab the manifest from the seat, tucking it into my jacket. Then I race to the back of the vehicle and pull open the doors.
It is filled with wooden crates, each one containing semi-automatic machine guns just like the ones Amalia’s thugs used to attack Saber Lane. I continue searching through them…
C’mon, give me something explosive.
I crank open the final crate and smile at its contents: a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. It’s the sort of thing used to take down low-flying aircraft.
Or Valkyrie like Slade and me.
Not today.
I prepare the weapon, step back from the vehicle, adjust my balance to accommodate the missile’s weight across my shoulder, and take aim at the weapons inside the van. As soon as I fire this thing, the authorities will rain all hell down on me—not to mention Amalia’s wrath.
A smile breaks across my face as I pull the trigger.
The van bucks, the missile tears through weapons, crates, and the van itself. The explosion is deafening, the heat an intense burn across my skin.
I welcome it.
It might be the last time I feel warm.
Chapter Two
I steal inside the bookshop on Saber Lane, hauling the missile crate with me. I remain blurred so I don’t wake the people on the street. Vlad is still at Tansy’s, along with the Guardian. The Legion assassins are staying on Saber Lane too, sleeping on couches and in any available spare beds.
Yesterday, Amalia decimated the Legion, killing half of the assassins who lived in the Realm, and then she sent Gareth and Fallon to attack my home. The fight ended when Tansy used her instinctive magic to create an unbreakable shield over Sa
ber Lane that stops anyone from entering who has ill intentions.
It feels a little ironic that nearly every Master Assassin, including myself, is sheltering on Saber Lane tonight. The only one who isn’t is Cain. I warned him to get his sister out of the city immediately. I couldn’t tell him that Amalia is Valkyrie, but I made sure he knew she is more powerful than we expected. Collateral damage means nothing to her. Cain promised he was having breakfast with his sister this morning and he would prepare her to leave.
My ledger is open on the shop counter where Annabeth wrote in it, the Guardian’s sanction glowing softly golden in the dim light.
I already recorded yesterday’s missions in it, closing out the Tirelli brothers as complete. Against the entry for Lady Tirelli, I had to write: Failed. That single word carries so much weight, like a burden on my shoulders.
Slade is waiting for me in front of the counter, his focus homing in on me as soon as I step foot inside—even though I’m invisible. We’re slowly working out what his bond with me means and how it will affect him. It didn’t hurt him when I left an hour ago like bonding hurt me, but it seems to allow him to sense my presence even though my blur is complete.
His presence is powerful to me, the slow smile he gives me making my stomach flip-flop, heat rising to my cheeks.