Shadow's Bane (Dorina Basarab)

by Karen Chance

  Praise for Karen Chance and the Midnight’s Daughter Novels Featuring Dorina Basarab

  “Karen Chance doesn’t disappoint. Once again we have an action-packed adventure with a strong female character that, while tough as nails and a dhampir, is also very human.”

  —SFRevu

  “Intensely hilarious dialogue, intriguing and endearing characters, and pulse-pounding action!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “In dhampir Dorina Basarab, Chance has created a sassy, tough heroine who never says die. Following these first-person adventures is going to be an adrenaline high.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Karen Chance has done it again . . . a brilliant start to a new series.”

  —Vampire Romance Books

  “Karen Chance knows how to write. Not just the action scenes, or having the butt-kicking heroine throw out pithy one-liners, but the setup is clever [and] the involvement of the various factions in the simmering war is well thought-out, as are the repercussions to various actions characters take in the book.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “Glorious fight scenes, eerily still moments of fractured memories, steamy romps that set the heart pounding; it is little wonder that Chance has caught the attention of so many fans. . . . She delivers in every way—utterly staggering.”

  —The Truth About Books

  BOOKS BY KAREN CHANCE

  THE CASSIE PALMER SERIES

  Touch the Dark

  Claimed by Shadow

  Embrace the Night

  Curse the Dawn

  Hunt the Moon

  Tempt the Stars

  Reap the Wind

  Ride the Storm

  THE MIDNIGHT’S DAUGHTER SERIES

  Midnight’s Daughter

  Death’s Mistress

  Fury’s Kiss

  Shadow’s Bane

  THE MIRCEA BASARAB SERIES

  Masks

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Karen Chance

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101616925

  First Edition: August 2018

  Cover art by Larry Rostant

  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.

  Version_1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank all the hardworking people at Penguin who helped to make this book a reality:

  Miranda Hill—Editorial Assistant

  Jessica Mangicaro—Marketing Coordinator

  Andrea Hovland—Production Manager

  Tiffany Estreicher—Interior Designer

  Alexis Nixon—Assistant Director of Publicity

  And, of course, Anne Sowards, a great editor!

  Thanks for helping me see it through to the end.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Karen Chance

  Books by Karen Chance

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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

  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

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Mircea, Venice, 1458

  It was freezing. He knew that because he could see other peoples’ breath frost the air as they passed, a crowd of shapes that should have been nothing more than dark blurs, but instead were full of light and sound and . . . life. He could close his eyes and still see them, streaks of color against the night, with bright streamers flowing out behind them like the pennants that used to fly from the ramparts at home.

  One approached the shadow where he stood; she was so vivid that she almost seemed unreal. Her eyes were blue, shimmering deep and dark, but not cold. Not the color of the ocean, but of the skies, limitless and clear, even shadowed with the knowledge that something wasn’t right. That somewhere nearby, a hunter waited.

  A strand of red hair slipped out of the hood of her cloak, curling against a cheek that others might have called pale, but which to him glowed peach and pink and warm, like a lantern against the blacks and grays of the narrow street, and the silvered thread of a canal behind her. The colors dimmed and bloomed with every heartbeat, with every sigh of breath that issued from between cold-reddened lips. The life pulsing in her veins called to him like a siren’s song, urging him to loosen the night he’d wrapped around himself and take one
step into the street.

  That was all it would take. One step, one lifted hand to call her to his side, one vague brush against her mind to overcome the fear that hastened her feet and sent those beautiful eyes darting into shadows. Just one.

  He didn’t take it.

  But someone else did.

  Mircea saw him even before he moved, not a man but a boy, barely a year out of the grave and without the hard-won restraint Mircea had learned. He must have been local; no one so far gone in bloodlust could have made it this far otherwise. Venice was an open port, where vampire territories were forbidden and everyone was permitted, but this child would have gotten himself killed long before he reached it.

  She came closer, the boy trailing her in shadow. Mircea could smell her now, a scent as bright as the daylight she seemed to carry within her, a strange, exotic perfume: bitter orange, honey musk, ambergris, and vanilla, set against the sweet smell of female sweat. His gut twisted, yet he gave no sign.

  Because she wasn’t alone.

  He couldn’t see the one who trailed her, like the fisherman following the bobbing of his lure. The light he gave off was dim, almost indistinguishable from the glimmer of moonlight on the water below. So dark, in fact, that even with vision many times sharper than a human’s, Mircea could barely discern him, and only because he had known he would be there.

  The boy didn’t see him. The boy couldn’t see anything but her. Mircea remembered those days, not so far in his own past. When the bloodlust took you, it was a terrible thing, like being possessed, to the point that he understood why humans called them demons and thrust crosses in their faces.

  Crosses didn’t help. Or holy water, or garlic, or wedging bricks into the mouths of the dead, as the locals had taken to doing in a vain attempt to keep them from feeding if they rose. When the demon rode you, only blood would satisfy him and return you to something like sanity.

  It was a state the boy had not seen in some time.

  The young one slipped closer, in and out of shadow now, visible in glimpses even to human eyes. And audible, too: a strange, low keening issued from between his lips. This was not the savage predator of legend, capable and cruel, but a half-starved child with no master to tend him, no family to help him, no one to lean on for information or even succor.

  Stumbling through the night, all alone.

  Mircea knew that feeling.

  He’d entered this strange life through an old woman’s curse, and hadn’t understood what was happening when his skin started to burn in sunlight, when his food became oddly flavorless, when his eyes seemed to acquire a cat’s vision, suddenly able to see clearly even in the dead of night. Not until his enemies caught up with him, tortured and buried him, leaving him to gasp his last breath in that tiny coffin underground, had he understood. And clawed his way back to the surface in a rebirth of sorts, as terrified and disoriented as a babe, and as ignorant of the new world he found himself in.

  Yes, he understood.

  He didn’t know this one’s story, only that he wouldn’t be on his own, crying in need, if he had a family to look after him. So he was one of the thousands who washed up on these shores every year, unwanted, abandoned, lost. Made by mistake, on a whim or as punishment for an infraction, and then cast aside to die alone.

  Because vampire death was something of a Venice specialty.

  But before they died, they hunted. And ones like these hunted wildly, so driven by hunger that they no longer cared for their own safety, much less that of their prey. And while the Vampire Senate allowed them the right to feed here, on the massive festival crowds too drunk to know the difference, mangled corpses were treated seriously.

  Members of the city watch, the special ones with the Medusa-head armor and the Senate’s backing, had a hunt of their own, rounding up those who killed when they fed and carrying them away to tiny prison cells. Where they could scream themselves hoarse, or shred their hands battering warded walls that would never yield, and slowly starve surrounded by silence. As if they, too, had been buried alive.

  But that wouldn’t happen here.

  Because something else hunted tonight.

  When the trap sprang, it took place in an instant, almost too fast even for Mircea’s eyes to follow. The boy leapt, with a strangled cry of defeat and desperation, as if he’d been holding himself back but could bear it no longer; the girl turned with a cry of her own, lips parted, eyes wide and frightened; the darkness surged around them.

  And the next thing Mircea knew, the girl was alone once more, her breathing rapid, her lips trembling slightly, one pale hand gripping her throat.

  Until the darkness whispered something that even Mircea couldn’t hear, and she turned and stumbled away. Walking hurriedly, almost drunkenly, down the street, not a woman but a trap. One that had been sprung and was now being deployed once more.

  Mircea waited, unmoving, unbreathing, as the girl and the strange, dark shadow that followed her passed him by.

  And then he slipped out into the street, quiet as a breath of wind, and cloaked in a shadow of his own.

  And followed.

  Chapter One

  The truck was old army issue, built back when even regular cars resembled tanks, and it could easily eat a Hummer for lunch and spit out the bolts. At least, it could have in its prime. But the years had not been kind, resulting in it landing at Stan’s Auto Emporium, a junkyard/car dealership in which it was often hard to tell the difference between the two types of merchandise.

  “It’s as dependable as they come, Dory,” Stan said, patting its rusty hood. He was a tiny man, four foot something, with the something being mostly chutzpah. “This truck is rugged.”

  I crossed my arms. “This truck passed ‘rugged’ a long time ago. This truck couldn’t find ‘rugged’ with a map. This truck is—what’s the phrase I’m looking for? A hunk of junk.”

  “A hunk of junk you can afford, sweetheart.”

  He had a point.

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Two hundred? I could practically get a limo for that!”

  “But you don’t need a limo.”

  “I don’t need a hole in my wallet, either.”

  Stan crossed his arms and silently chewed tobacco at me.

  “I just need it for the night,” I told him. “I can have it back in the morning.”

  “Fine. That’ll be two hundred bucks.” Something hit the concrete below the cab with an ominous rattle. Stan didn’t bat an eye. “Okay, return her in good condition and I’ll take ten off the price.”

  “Good condition? You mean something other than the way it is now?” But I forked over the cash. Normally, I’d have driven a harder bargain, but I’d promised to help a friend and I was running late. And nowhere else was going to have the kind of steel-gauge construction I needed. This thing might be a hunk of junk, but it was solid.

  Yet, fifteen minutes later, as my team filed in, it was also sagging and groaning, to the point that I feared for the tires—all six of them. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. I peered into the cavernous interior, and found it alarmingly full of troll.

  “Here’s the thing,” I told the nearest four-hundred-pound slab of muscle. “We’re going to need room to transport the illegals, assuming we find any, not to mention the slavers. And I don’t think they’re gonna fit.”

  Nothing. I might as well have been talking to the brick wall the guy closely resembled.

  “I’m not saying that everybody needs to stay behind,” I offered, trying again. “Just, you know, two or three of you.”

  Nada.

  I waited another moment, because troll reasoning faculties can be a little slower than some and I thought maybe he was thinking it over. But no. The small, pebble-like eyes just looked at me, flat and uninterested in the yammering of the tiny human. I sighed and went to find O
lga.

  The leader of the posse currently straining the hell out of my truck was in her headquarters, which consisted of a combo beauty salon and what looked like the back room at Soldier of Fortune. It would have been an odd marriage in the human world, even in Brooklyn, but there weren’t many humans shopping at Olga’s. And the local community of Dark Fey seemed to like buying their ammo and getting their nails done all in one place.

  I found the lady herself pawing through a cardboard box of suspicious items in the storeroom. Like her squad of volunteers, she was of the troll persuasion, weighing in at something less than a quarter ton—but not a lot less. Not that she was fat; like most trolls, she was built of muscle and sinew and was hard as a rock, all eight-plus feet of her. I don’t know how she found clothes, but she usually managed to be more stylish than me.

  That had never been truer than tonight.

  For the evening’s sortie into New York’s magical underbelly, I had selected jeans, a black T-shirt, a black leather jacket, and a pair of ass-kicking boots. It didn’t make me look tough—when you’re five foot two, dimpled and female, not a lot does—but it hid a lot of weaponry and didn’t attract attention.

  Olga did not appear to be worried about attention.

  Instead of well-worn denim, she was strutting her considerable stuff in pink satin clamdiggers, a matching sequined butterfly top—cut low to show an impressive amount of cleavage—and glossy four-inch heels. The heels were nude patent leather, possibly so they didn’t clash with the toenails poking out the end, which were the same fire-engine red as her hair.

  I regarded it enviously for a moment. It made the paltry blue streaks in my own short brown locks seem dull and lifeless by comparison. I needed a new color. Of course, for that, I also needed to get paid, which meant getting a move on.

  “You’re coming, right?” I asked, as she flipped over the OPEN sign.

  “Moment,” she said placidly.

  “I just wondered because, you know.” I gestured at the acre of sequins.

  Olga continued sorting through the box.

  “Not that you don’t look good.”