Prince of Demons 1-3
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
EPILOGUE
Prince of Demons 1-3
The Order of the Black Swan
Victoria Danann
Copyright 2015 Victoria Danann
Published by dba 7th House Publishing,
Imprint of Andromeda LLC
ISBN 978-1-93-332078-6
WEBSITE/BLOG: VictoriaDanann.com
FACEBOOK FAN PAGE: www.facebook.com/vdanann
FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE: www.facebook.com/victoria.danann.9
TWITTER: @vdanann
MAIL LIST: http://victoriadanann.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb2798a919a34babde63b75c&id=770fe2082f
OTHER TITLES BY VICTORIA DANANN
Prince of Demons 2 and 3
My Familiar Stranger, Knights of Black Swan 1
The Witch’s Dream, Knights of Black Swan 2
A Summoner’s Tale, Knights of Black Swan 3
Moonlight, Knights of Black Swan 4
Gathering Storm, Knights of Black Swan 5
A Tale of Two Kingdoms, Knights of Black Swan 6
Solomon’s Sieve, Knights of Black Swan 7
Liulf, Alpha of the Mahdrah Ahlee, New Scotia Pack 1
Connuchur, Wolf Lover, New Scotia Pack 2 (June 2015)
Cenead, Young Wolf, New Scotia Pack 3 (Fall 2015)
The Beast Who Loved Me, EXILED 1 (Summer 2015)
A Season in Gemini, Sanctuary’s Sons MC 1 (June 2015)
Two Princes, Sanctuary’s Sons MC 2 (June 2015)
Best Paranormal Romance Series Two Years in a Row
PROLOGUE
This book is part of The Order of the Black Swan series and contains a few minor references to books from the Knights of Black Swan series.
There is a very old and secret society of paranormal investigators and protectors known as The Order of the Black Swan. The organization was founded as a reaction to the need to protect humanity from those unfortunate enough to have contracted the vampire virus, but over the centuries branched out to include interest in anything outside the range of normal experience.
Prince of Demons 1
Be careful what you wish for.
CHAPTER 1
When she was left standing at the highly polished altar of Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in a four thousand dollar dress facing everyone who had ever meant anything to her, she decided Stuart Pruitt was easily the biggest asshole in the universe. Atalanta Ravin spent the next three weeks sitting in ice-cream-stained yoga pants and a holey tee shirt, staring straight ahead while two sisters and her best friend tried to convince her that, even if he was easily the biggest asshole in the known universe, life wasn’t over. Not really.
For weeks, she’d been riding a sugar overdose that left her unable to sleep at the time she needed the escape of sleep more than ever before in her life. And it was showing.
“You look like shit, Lana.” Dizzy summed it up unapologetically.
“And why would I care?”
Dizzy had been her friend since they’d been college freshmen and learned that they had both been assigned to dorm rooms with certifiably sociopathic roommates. At the end of the first semester, they scored a room they could share together and had pretty much shared everything but boyfriends since then.
Dizzy was loyal to a fault, a trait highly prized in a best friend. Unfortunately, at least in that case it seemed unfortunate, she was also persistent to a fault.
“Lana, come out with us. You can’t just sit here in a puddle of Starcream and look like shit forever.”
“I can, Desdemona.” She used Dizzy’s birth certificate name knowing it would make her wince, hoping it might also make her give up and go. “Don’t you have something else to do? Go pester Robert. He’s got to be resenting the hell out of the time you’re spending over here trying to get me to do something I don’t want to do.”
“Exasperating, Lana. We can’t help you if you won’t let us.”
“I appreciate the effort, Dizzy, but I’m not going out. I need to spend some time processing. You know. On my own.”
Dizzy, the almost maid of honor, pulled back and stared at her for a full minute. It took even longer to push Dizzy away than it had to get rid of her younger sisters, twins who, like her, were named after figures from Greek mythology. They were responsible for the nickname, Lana, because they couldn’t quite manage Atalanta when they were babies.
They were fiery, freckled redheads named Nike and Nemesis. They’d tried sympathy as far as patience would carry, then turned to threats, vowing to abandon her to her Triple Pecan Crusted Rocky Java Chip Starcream until all that she would require from them was a selection of muumuus.
With a sigh of resignation, Dizzy rose, saying, “Okay. I actually get that. Call me when you want to talk. If I don’t hear from you by Tuesday…” She let that hang in the air and seemed to be mulling it over. “You know I never liked him. I always knew he was a prick.”
Lana spluttered. “Liar. You were crazy about him.”
“On the inside.” Dizzy looked indignant. “I hated him on the inside.”
“Whatever.” She waved a hand in the air and blew a half-hearted kiss, but Dizzy proceeded to prove that it would take more than a wave of dismissal and an air kiss to get rid of her. Lana had doubts that a fully militarized SWAT team could deter Get ‘er Done Desdemona, when she was on a mission.
Eventually Lana had stood in a warm shower not particularly caring about the water temperature, reluctantly pulled on clean clothes and let Dizzy comb out and blow her hair like she was a doll. When Dizzy was satisfied with the cleanup, she marched her prisoner out to Nike’s car where the twins waited, and deposited Lana in the backseat.
“Where are we going?”
“The Four Sixes.”
It was a chic urban bar on Turtle Creek in the heart of Dallas urban posh, named after one of the famous ranches of Texas. Dizzy’s rescue party never made it inside though.
Nem had started to reach for the big brass handle that was an eclectic cross between Southwest and art deco. The door opened before she touched it, letting the muted sounds of thumping bass escape and touch everyone nearby with the vibration. Lana saw out of the corner of her eye that the people who emerged were a couple. He had his arm over her shoulder. They were laughing, nudging and leaning into each other.
What she didn’t notice, until she realized her companions had gone stone still, was that the male half of the happy couple was none other than Stuart. The other half was Lana’s very own goddamn administrative assistant, Stephanie. When the soon-to-be-former employee registered that she’d come face to face with the ex, who was also her boss, she was suddenly much more interested in her shoes than in meeting Lana’s gaze.
Stuart nodded to the group in general then added a curt, “Excuse us,” as he placed a hand to the small of Stephanie’s back and gave her a little push to get her started in the right direction. The two of them had almost made it all the way to Stuart’s precious royal blue Audi before Lana’s brain reengaged. A red hot curtain of fury descended in front of her vision as all the missing pieces fell into place and her body took on an agenda of its own as surely as if it was possessed by a devil.
With a quickness that would have made a superhero proud, she whirled and began sprinting after them.
Stuart and his date had just reached the car, which he had parked himself because Stuart didn’t trust valet parkers. He’d already pointed his key fob and been greeted by the car’s answering tweets. Stephanie’s face froze in silent horror when she looked up and saw the rundown coming, but Stuart had no warning and was caught completely off guard. Feeling a vengeance-laden spike of adrenaline, Lana didn’t slow her charge as she approached. The only adjustment she made was to put her hands out in front of her at the last second. The result was slamming Stuart into the side of his vehicle from behind. The impact came with such force that his head kept going after his body stopped. His face bounced off the roof of his car. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood.
When he turned around and looked at Lana with the glazed eyes of someone who literally didn’t know what hit him, the devil, who had possessed her, whooped with satisfaction. The part of her that craved justice reveled in seeing reddened eyes and blood dripping down the front of a prissy custom-made shirt. With cuff links.
“What the fuck, Lana? I think you broke my nose.” He looked at the blood on his hand as he brought it away from his face and spat onto the parking lot. “I should press charges.” He said it thickly, as if he’d bitten his tongue.
She gaped, but not for long. Stuart’s apparent disconnect with the trail of damage he’d left behind caused Lana’s fury to flash freeze into a cold anger and even colder laughter.
“Press charges, Stuey? Unless you want a lawsuit to pay my father back for a wedding that cost as much as your average-priced house, I’d rethink that threat. A hundred pounds of fucking shrimp, Stuey! That’s a lot of fucking shrimp. Fifty cases of Dom Perignon. And I’m not even getting warmed up. Shall I go on? Or maybe I’ll just turn my cousins loose and let them get creative about taking it out of your hide.”
She hoped her smile looked every bit as menacing as the images of revenge that were chilling her blood. Even in the darkness the women could see that Stuart paled at the thought of the triplets who were Lana’s cousins. Yes. Multiple births ran in the family on her mother’s side.
Those boys, the McKesson triplets, were privileged, but that was just disposable package wrapping. They were descended from wildcatters who were, well, wild. Probably carrying the genetic ancestry of horse thieves. Or worse.
The family joked that attempts to reconstruct genealogy met a quick dead end because their forbears had been one step ahead of the law when they’d come to America. They may have changed names again when they left some landing point on the Eastern seaboard and pushed west. One thing was sure. They weren’t carrying the genes of farmers.
Everybody in Dallas knew the McKesson name by reputation. Among other things, it was rumored that they preferred to settle disputes out of court. So to speak.
Atalanta always laughed it off when she heard those whisperings and said that people love to believe bigger than life stories. From her perspective, her cousins weren’t people to be feared. In her mind they were boys, ripe for teasing, who fumed if you tricked them at blind man’s bluff and ate ungodly amounts of Bananas Foster if given half a chance. That didn’t stop her from using those rumors to her advantage when it was convenient though. And it was deliciously convenient to mention the McKesson boys at that moment.
Stuart had no reply. He was silent as a corpse.
“What got your tongue, baby?” The sweetness with which she said it couldn’t have sounded more wicked or more threatening.
Lana turned her attention to the soon-to-be-pink-slipped admin. Only then did she recognize that the expression she’d become accustomed to seeing on Stephanie’s face was guilt. Lana had thought Stephie was having some kind of trouble. Maybe money. Maybe a boyfriend. As her boss it would be out of line to broach personal subjects. So long as Stephanie did her job adequately, her feelings were her business.
Looked like Lana had guessed right. It was boyfriend trouble after all.
The devil in Lana was roused to dancing in triumphant circles when she startled Stephie into taking a fearful stumble backward by doing nothing more than waving an arm toward her and saying, “Boo!”
Lana felt her sisters on either side of her, trying to pull her away. Nemesis said, “Come on, sis. Everybody here knows who’s boss.” Lana glanced at her sisters just in time to see them throwing identical pointed glares at both Stuart and Stephanie.
Before Lana could be pulled away, she threw a glare at Stephanie that should have turned her to salt and said in a flat tone that belied high emotion, “By the way. You’re fired.”
No one uttered a sound on the drive back to Lana’s house. Her girls were sensitive enough to know that there wasn’t a single word in the English language that would be better than the silence. She kept her head turned toward the passenger side window. An hour earlier she wouldn’t have thought it was possible to sustain layered humiliation on top of the left-at-the-altar incident.
She refused to let any of them into the house and none of them could muster a reason to argue with her since they were responsible for leading her into a disaster. When the front door closed, she leaned her back against it and thought with a measure of bitterness that alone was what she’d wanted to be in the first place. She dropped her purse from her shoulder and let it fall to the floor, then walked numbly through the house to her bed. As soon as she felt one knee depress the mattress the emotions overtook her. Tears pooled then gushed onto the pillow where she’d pressed her face before turning on her side and curling into the tightest ball she could manage. She cried freely for the first time, not so much because of two humiliations, a very public jilting and an excruciatingly embarrassing confrontation. Certainly not because of the high price tag of a wedding that was a nonstarter.
She cried because she hated herself for missing the fucker. He may not have been a great lay and he may not have had any character to speak of, but he’d been company for three years. Long enough for her to build every aspect of her life around him as if she’d gradually become remnants of personality circling his sun.
She reminded herself that, being perfectly honest, she needed to amend that. He’d been good company until the past six months, when his job had become so demanding that he was either away or out late more often than not. He’d been too busy to take part in any of the wedding planning. “Whatever you want will be fine with me, Lana. You have good taste,” he’d said. She hadn’t thought much of the distancing at the time.
She woke up early the next day, still in her clothes. After fighting to disentangle herself from bed covers, she made her way to the toilet. The reflection in the mirror over the sink seemed to be a graphic portrait of wretchedness. Her eyes were almost swollen shut from going to sleep crying. She might have considered breaking the glass if she wasn’t superstitious, the remnants of a heritage that couldn’t be documented, but could be substantiated as Scots-Irish. So instead of shattering the mirror, she looked until she came to a conclusion. She wasn’t that girl. Or if she was at the moment, she wasn’t meant to be.
Sometime during all the hours of staring straight ahead, not really hearing what people were saying, she’d arrived at a point of absolute clarity. She needed a change. Not a small change. Not even a big change. A change of such monumental proportions it would effectively be hitting the reset button on her life.
She changed into plain pajama pants and a comfy well-worn tee, turned the ringer off on her phone then sat down in front of the TV with a pile of tissues and a grease-stained box of cold day-old extra pepperoni pizza. She chomped into one of the stiff slices, thinking that one of the finer privileges of relationship mourning was punishing the body with bad food, alcohol and no exercise, while ignoring the domestic hallmarks of civilized living such as laundry, dishes, garbage control and personal hygiene.
Punching the remote she began going through channels one by one. Stuart had taken control of the remote when their relationship
was still new and had never considered relinquishing it, not even on special occasions. He always went straight to the guide and picked out something he already knew he liked and wanted to see. Predetermined choice. Stuart liked what he called “tried and true”. He had his favorite restaurants and stuck with the same menu items. He had a morning routine, an evening routine, and a weekend routine that involved the same people, places, and things. No sense of adventure whatsoever.
Lana no longer needed to be concerned with Stuart and his damnable preferences. She was her own person. On her own. She would reject Stuart’s lack of adventure. She would channel surf all night if she felt like it! She punched the air with every flick of the remote button as if to say, “Take that, Stuart! I will yield the remote to no man ever again.”
Wielding the remote like a weapon, she moved past a cooking show, a rerun of a seventies sitcom, something about criminal midgets who loved pit bulldogs, a home show, a black and white movie starring Tyrone Power, another cooking show, a thing with a boat, and a band of ferret-like creatures standing on their hind legs in a field of brown grass. Then she stopped and backed up two channels thinking she might have passed something worth a second look. It was the home show.
They were doing a series on alternate lifestyles and that particular installment featured a handsome bachelor who lived on his boat. She washed the mouthful of pizza back with a swig of tequila straight from the bottle and turned the volume up.
Prince of Demons 1-3, Box Set Page 1