Demon Storm: Belador book 5

by Dianna Love

  “I contacted Tzader last night.”

  That narrowed her eyes. “Figures.”

  He shrugged. “My duty to protect comes first. I’m telling Tzader that you single-handedly got the Noirre spell back and once I had that in hand, your bounty took precedence.”

  Surprise brightened her exotic gaze. “Why would you...?”

  “Not bring in VIPER? Because then I’d have to tell them about your powers.” He smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Appreciation relaxed the delicate muscles in her face until she paused. “So you’re going to let me just walk away with Lambert?”

  “Not exactly.” Devon stepped closer and slipped his fingers into her hair. He gave her a chance to back off as he lowered his head, but she lifted up and met him half way with a kiss of pure torment. His mouth fit hers as if there were only two in the world that matched.

  The longer her kissed her, the more he wanted, but he had to let this one walk away. For now.

  His body wouldn’t let him forget that kiss any time soon.

  He plunged in for one last tormenting taste.

  Sinfully sweet and without a chance of satisfaction.

  She nipped his lip before stepping back, eyes sparking with challenge. “You think giving me Lambert pays off saving your hide from that demon.”

  “I know better.” He didn’t want to wipe out that debt too quickly or he might not see her again. “There’s always next time.”

  # # #

  The Beladors are part of a powerful coalition of nonhumans who protect humans across the world from supernatural predators, even though humans don’t know they exist. You’ll meet Devon again in THE CURSE (book 3) and Joleen in future books, but the series is based on the lives of Belador best friends Evalle, Tzader and Quinn.

  Currently, there are five books in this New York Times bestselling urban fantasy series with more coming in 2015. DEMON STORM (book 5) continues where we left off in RISE OF THE GRYPHON with a major step for Evalle (an Alterant) and Storm (a Skinwalker/Shaman who shifts into a jaguar) that turns out like neither expects, and the Treoir Castle reeling from a brutal attack.

  With this being an ongoing story line, it’s advisable to read the Belador urban fantasy Series in order:

  Blood Trinity

  Alterant

  The Curse

  Rise Of The Gryphon

  Demon Storm

  Witchlock (June 2015)

  For more on NYT bestseller Dianna Love and the Beladors visit www.AuthorDiannaLove.com

  Author Note

  Thank you for reading the Belador series. I hope you enjoyed DEMON STORM and you’ll see more of Evalle, Storm and the Beladors in WITCHLOCK (June 2015). If you did enjoy this book, one of the best things you can do for me and other authors is to leave a review at the online bookstore where you bought it or anywhere else you choose. I really appreciate it any review short or long!

  I’d also like to invite you to join my Dianna Love Street Team (Facebook group) where I visit with readers and please sign up for my quarterly newsletter to catch the latest news and be first to know when my next book is being released. Please sign up for my Newsletter that is sent quarterly to keep up with all my news.

  Thanks again for reading my books.

  Dianna

  More books from Dianna Love

  Belador urban fantasy Series

  Blood Trinity

  Alterant

  The Curse

  Rise Of The Gryphon

  Demon Storm

  Witchlock (June 2015)

  The Slye Temp Series

  Book 1: Last Chance To Run

  Book 2: Nowhere Safe

  Book 3: Honeymoon To Die For

  Book 4: Kiss The Enemy

  Book 5: Deceptive Treasures

  Book 6: Stolen Vengeance (February 2015)

  More Slye Temp coming soon!

  Micah Caida young adult Trilogy

  Book 1: Time Trap

  Book 2: Time Return

  Book 3: Time Lock

  To read excerpts, go to http://www.MicahCaida.com

  Acknowledgments

  This book – and series – is very special to me. Many of you know that I created the Belador urban fantasy series years ago and released the first novella called MIDNIGHT KISS GOODBYE in the anthology DEAD AFTER DARK, then I went on to co-author the first four books with #1 NYT bestseller Sherrilyn Kenyon. After taking stock of both of our schedules (Sherri is really busy with movies and television shows coming out on her series – woot!!), we decided I should continue these books on my own since I know the series inside and out, and because giving readers the stories they want is priority one both of us. So, thank you, Sherrilyn, for being an amazing friend and for always putting the readers first. Love ya!

  Cassondra M is with me every step of the way on all my books. She’s the first and last read, with other editors and beta readers in between. She also keeps me sane and on track as both my assistant and is my intrepid traveling companion. She has an incredibly sharp eye when it comes to story and continuity. Joyce Ann McLaughlin is always ready to be an early reader, which is so valuable, but it means she sees the book while it still has a few bumps to smooth out. She catches things that help me hand over the best book I can. Sharon Griffiths is another beta reader who brings an enthusiastic approach to the stories, giving me valuable feedback and supporting me in many ways. Thank you, Steve Doyle, for reading in the middle of whatever is happening and catching little things that mean so much. There is no perfect book, but due to the diligence of these early readers and editing, I’m able to catch errors large and small before the book gets to you. Any mistakes are on me, because at the end of the day, it’s my job to hand you the best story I can.

  I want to give a shout out to Barb Liebman of TheReadingCafé.com and Amelia Richards of Singletitles.com who give their time to read manuscript copies in advance of the release and share reviews that readers have come to trust. Kim Killion worked her magic with the cover once again (really love this one Kim!) and Jennifer Jakes takes my pile of pages and hands them back all perfectly formatted and ready to roll - thank you both! USA Today bestseller Mary Buckham is not just a dear friend, but she's always ready to kick around ideas when I'm brainstorming a new story - much appreciation. Also, thank you to my amazing STREET TEAM!! It has been such a joy to have you in my life and to share my days with you. Thank you for all the wonderful messages and the endless ways you support me. My goal is to meet you all in person at some point (any reader who’d like to join my street team is welcome – Dianna Love Street Team)

  This special thank you is for Lauren M. I’m a better writer because of my years with you. I hope you enjoy this book, because as you know – my goal is to make every book better than the last and the last one with you was a bit epic. Thank you for your constant support of my writing and your continued friendship.

  Last, but never least, thank you to my incredible husband, Karl, who does so much to allow me the ability to write these stories. My journey would mean nothing without you by my side.

  Since you’re an urban fantasy fan, you might enjoy USA Today bestseller Mary Buckham’s

  INVISIBLE MAGIC.

  Chapter 1

  First demon you summon, it’s kind of scary. After a few hundred, it becomes just another job. Unfortunately I hadn’t reached that point.

  My name’s Alex Noziak and I’m one of the five sorry-assed members of a team called the Invisible Recruits that are supposed to stand between the world’s humans and the rising population of non-human bad guys. One of the team was here voluntarily, and it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t my biggest problem right this minute.

  Wrestling with an echo-demon that looked mostly like green slime and a smattering of the living dead was.

  I’m part shaman, part witch, not a card-carrying Wiccan but a blood-born witch, and one of my abilities was to summon others to me, both human and non-human, but only within a limited range. Sounds useful, but how
many times do you really want to invite a Were, or vamp, or foul-mouthed dark angel to a party? Exactly, which was why that particular summoning spell was a little rusty. Okay, a truck that sits on the back forty for twenty years is rusty. I was in the what-the-hell-am-I-doing category.

  Embracing magic was not a piece of cake, because it came at a cost. Always. My last summoning here at the IR (I for Invisible and R for Recruits) compound was coming back to bite me now. Sort of like an athlete who was a star performer one day but a dud the next. So now I was more witch-wanna-be who had to produce something, and fast, to keep my spot on the team.

  A thought one of my team members actually voiced just about then. “You going to make this demon appear sometime in this millennium, Noziak?” Mandy Reyes snapped, standing kitty-corner from me across the training gym at our Maryland facility.

  Mandy had hot Latin blood, a mouth like a stevedore, the patience of a gnat, and was one of the four non-voluntary members of the team. I wasn’t sure what was being held over her head to work this gig, but I knew it couldn’t be pleasant. I also knew her talent-she was a spirit walker. Which meant she could walk between the spirit world and the real world. Again, sounds cool, but the price for that specific ability was to be soulless. Which meant when you were on the spirit side, or when spirits crossed over or remained on our side, you were an empty vessel with a neon For Rent sign flashing. Any spirit looking for a new home, she was the perfect candidate.

  Right now though roving spirits weren’t our issue; a missing echo-demon was as four of us maneuvered in a gym that looked like an average high school holding cell. Nothing fancy for our group. Mandy and fellow team members Jaylene Smart and Kelly McAllister formed a triangle around an X-marked-the-spot circle. A circle that was outlined in salt for protection once I called forth the demon as training for taking one down in real life.

  Our instructor, M.T. Stone, and our team leader, Vaughn Monroe, the only one of us not coerced into being an IR agent as far as we could tell, were watching this exercise from a room near the rafters. Smart people.

  Not that an echo-demon was all that threatening; they were nuisances more than deadly as they had earned their names based on their willingness to make a lot of high-volume screams that could scare the willies out of people and echo in a person’s mind long after the demon had departed. At least when the demons traveled alone they were manageable. In packs, they could turn really nasty, really quick.

  The intention of this little training session was to make sure I knew what the hell I was doing, which I didn’t. Get some practice in whipping demon butt before we left the safety of the compound. And learn to work as a team.

  That last was the biggest challenge. None of the five IR members were even trained to fight human bad guys yet. We were just humans who had a little extra-extra to our genetic make-up which would make us freaks among humans, if the humans knew what we were. The four of us had spent most of our twenty-some years hiding our talents unless we really needed them, like I had when a rogue Were was about to kill my brother.

  I had used a summoning spell. That was my first mistake. Second was summoning a death demon who made such a mess of the Were that I faced life in prison for murder. Try telling a lawyer or judge there were extenuating circumstances, like the victim was a Were and my brother was a shifter who was caught turning, which meant he was too vulnerable to defend himself. I was damned lucky I hadn’t killed my brother along with the Were.

  Yeah, so that’s why I was here, sweat pouring down my face, my arms shaking from holding them straight before me for the last thirty minutes and my throat getting hoarse from repeating a summoning spell that wasn’t working.

  Instead of telling can’t-you-do-more Mandy where to shove her comment, I was saved by Kelly. “Leave her be, Mandy. You can tell she’s trying.”

  That was Kelly all over. Raised in the flat farm country of Iowa and a former kindergarten teacher, Kelly could make muggers melt with kindness. She was our team placater, the rah-rah cheerleader and the let’s-all-play-nice playground monitor. She’d never said what had landed her here, but it was probably because she had sweet-talked someone to death. Nothing else made sense.

  Kelly’s ability was to disappear. Which sounds uber cool, but that too came with a price. She could remain truly invisible for only a few minutes at a time and when she reappeared she was blind for twice as long for every minute of invisibility. Which made her really vulnerable to attack if all the bad things were not vanquished. Another downside to her ability was that she wasn’t very good with it, so that when she was frightened she could wink out of sight unintentionally.

  But then who was I to talk about being proficient?

  Kelly stood braced just to my right, and though I couldn’t see her except out of the corner of my eye, I could feel her gripping a sword with a white-knuckle death grip. Echo-demons hated metal, as did a lot of the non-humans, so this late afternoon’s session was steel vs. demon blood.

  If I ever called the freaking monster forth.

  I glanced at the observation room window and caught M.T. Stone eyeing his watch. But what did he expect? We were barely three weeks into our regular training and only just started flexing our other abilities earlier this week. That was after one of our fellow recruits tried to kill me and wasn’t too picky who else she took out at the same time. About the time, I wondered if prison might not have been the safer option.

  Then we’d gone on one official mission, but that was mostly a babysitting session when Vaughn went up against the son of a Russian mob lord-a guy she had known in her previous life as a debutante. It wasn’t a picnic, but it wasn’t demon baiting either.

  Talk about neophytes. Most of us rarely, if ever, voluntarily used our gifts in the world we came from and some, like Jaylene and Mandy, had skills that didn’t directly translate into taking down anyone. Jaylene was a psychic, or had visions. A fat lot of good it did to hang out with visions when monsters were out for blood. Human blood. Even I could guess at what the future held in that situation.

  M.T. Stone’s voice broke over the loudspeaker making all of us jump. “This is a no show. We’ll call it a night. Try again tomorrow.”

  “No,” I shouted back. I’d been raised with four older brothers; I could hear M.T.’s tone if not his thoughts. Wimp. Lightweight. Poser. No one called a Noziak a loser and got away with it, even if it was my own inner voice. “Give me one more minute. Let me take this up a notch.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Jaylene asked.

  “Yeah.” Though I wasn’t really.

  I heard Mandy and Jaylene groan, which only helped me go deeper. I could do this. I would do this.

  Here in this place and before the eyes of the unbelievers, come forth.

  I call the creatures of the elements. The seekers of release who wish to walk amongst the humans.

  I bid you to destroy the binds holding you in thrall.

  Come. Prove yourselves.

  Salty sweat seeped into my eyes. I bit my lip till I could taste blood.

  Of course! There was no human blood. What an idiot I was. That was the missing piece.

  “Jaylene, cut your finger and squeeze a few blood drops into the inner circle,” I shouted, holding my pose. This was blood magic, second cousin to black magic, but just a smidge might help. White magic sure wasn’t doing squat.

  “No way am I cutting myself,” came the bullet-fired retort. Jaylene might be six feet tall and built like an Amazon, with looks that could earn her a fortune as a model, but growing up alone on Chicago’s south side had made her very wary of sticking her neck or a bloody finger out for anybody.

  “I’ll do it,” Kelly offered and stepped forward.

  “No.” She’d probably cut a vein with her sword and then disappear on us before we could stop the bleeding. “I’ll do it myself.”

  I dropped my arms, swiping one bare arm across my forehead to wipe the sweat as I reached with the other toward Kelly. “Put your sword out here.
”

  She did as I asked even though the blade shook. It was wicked sharp, the better for demon killing, but instead of a paper cut I dug a pretty deep slash into my right finger. “Ouch.”

  I swear I could hear Mandy snicker so I shot her a glare, cupping my right hand with my left to make sure I didn’t leave a trail of blood for the demon to escape the inner containment circle. Just in case my teammates were not quick enough, or skilled enough to kill him.

  That was one of the sucky parts of being the one doing the summoning. I couldn’t be holding a weapon of any kind, no matter how deadly the non-human being called. If this echo-demon found a way past the containment area, I was sorry out of luck. Except for my anathema dagger I had stashed against the nearest wall. Noziaks came to a rumble prepared to fight, but witches couldn’t carry other weapons when using magic. Which made us very vulnerable.

  Using magic with a physical weapon in hand—a gun, knife, staff—meant the magic was not being honored and it could back fire on the user.

  It took a few steps to reach the crudely salted circle where the demon should appear, and only seconds to have a nice snack of fresh human blood drops scattered on the floor.

  Man, a sliced finger could hurt. Sucking it as I returned to my spot I realized I was focusing on the minor pain to avoid the bigger issue. If the blood did its thing then I was about to break a promise made to my father years ago. He was a full-blooded shaman, a shifter, and a wise man in his own right. Plus he loved me to the depths of his soul. He rarely punished his children, especially me, the baby, but when he did it was serious.

  “Great gifts are not given lightly, Alex,” he’d said. “They come with great responsibility and consequences. Do you understand?”

  I nodded my head like any fifteen-year-old who wanted to get out of immediate trouble for doing something wrong.

  “Then you must promise never to use your abilities for harm of anyone or anything.”