Deceptions: A Collection

by Shiloh Walker

  Get Hunted

  HUNTERS DECLAN & TORI

  HUNTERS ELI & SAREL

  HUNTERS BYRON & KIT

  HUNTERS JONATHAN & LORI

  HUNTERS RAFE & SHEILA

  HUNTER’S MERCY

  HUNTER’S PRIDE

  THE HUNTRESS

  MALACHI

  HUNTING THE HUNTER

  HUNTER’S SALVATION

  HUNTERS HEART AND SOUL

  HUNTER’S NEED

  HUNTER’S FALL

  HUNTER’S RISE

  THE BOXED SET BOOKS 1-5

  READ MORE ABOUT THE HUNTERS…

  Blade Song

  BOOK 1 OF THE COLBANA FILES

  URBAN FANTASY

  BY

  J.C. DANIELS

  AKA

  SHILOH WALKER

  aneira [a-nir-a] derived from Antianeirai, found in the Illiad, warrior women, meaning ‘those who war like men’. Also known as Amazons.

  Chapter One

  My sword arm is mighty.

  I will not falter.

  I will not fail.

  My aim is true.

  My heart is strong.

  I’m the descendant of some legendary badasses and I’ll damn well make myself wake up—

  “You are so lovely…”

  The silken voice whispered to me in the depth of my dreams, wrapping around me and pulling me under. It was a seductive thing, full of promise. Full of warmth and wonder and lies.

  Jude. The bastard had never been able to keep to himself.

  It had been six years since I’d met him and in those six years, he’d done his damnedest to infiltrate my life. I’d trusted him, sort of. Once. But in the years since I’d made his acquaintance, I’d learned to place my trust elsewhere…and keep my distance.

  So far, we were at a stalemate, but when it came to dreams, he usually had the upper hand. I’d always had surreal, vivid dreams anyway, and here, he reigned supreme.

  Lost in the dark, velvety grasp of sleep, I wasn’t able to do much more than grumble and groan when he first appeared. It always took me a few minutes to get my bearings when he shoved his way into my dreams. Jude, the bastard, took great advantage of it.

  He stretched out beside me on the bed and I could even feel it giving way under his weight, under that long, lean, powerful body. His hand rested on my belly and I could feel the way my muscles reacted, the way I reacted.

  “Are you going to come to me, little aneira?” he whispered, dipping his head and nuzzling my neck.

  I found my voice at the brush of his teeth on my neck.

  Figures it would take that.

  Yeah, having a vampire pressing his teeth to your throat, even in dreams, is enough to get the adrenaline going.

  Full-fledged vampires aren’t the hot and sexy things of books. They are deadly. Cold. Soulless, powerful and yes, they can be sexy as hell—Jude is proof of that, but I suspected it might be safer to share my bed with a pit viper.

  Summoning that image to mind gave me the strength I needed to move.

  My sword arm is mighty.

  I will not falter…

  Rolling out of bed and away from him, I grabbed the T-shirt from the foot of the bed and jerked it on. “Jude, seriously. How often are you going to do this?” I asked.

  “You had to get dressed, didn’t you?”

  I shot him a dirty look and immediately wished I hadn’t. Moonlight gilded him with its pale light, turning his blond hair to silver, casting that carved face into angelic lines as his eyes glowed.

  They were green. When he was angry, they glowed red with blood hunger, but right now, they were alight with an emerald luminescence that raked over my skin like a caress.

  It had been too long since I’d gotten laid. The last boyfriend I’d had ended up leaving town after he’d been offered a very lucrative job. He was around off and on now, but it was more off than on and we’d drifted apart. Still, there were times when I missed him. A lot. And not just because of the sex.

  But if I’d gotten laid anytime in the past couple of years, Jude wouldn’t seem so damned appealing right now. That look in his eyes was enough to drive me mad, but I wasn’t going to let him get to me.

  Not any more than I already had.

  “What do you want, Jude?”

  He laughed. It stroked over my skin, begged me to laugh with him. Nope. Not doing that. Definitely not. “You know what I want, little warrior. When are you going to stop avoiding me? I haven’t seen you in months. You’re not taking my calls and you won’t take the work I send your way…foolish, that. Your silly little business is hurting for work and we both know it.”

  Silly.

  Running my tongue along my teeth, I returned to my bed.

  I could let the anger I felt at the insult get to me. Or I could use it.

  I’d rather use it.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Jude’s eyes widen as I drew closer. His hand snaked toward me as I reached out with my own.

  But I wasn’t reaching for him.

  I was reaching for the sword I kept under my pillow.

  No, I couldn’t wield it in dreams…but I could use the strength I found in it.

  The hilt settled in my hand, like an extension of my arm. Just touching it made me feel like I’d…come home.

  Touching a sword. Yes. I’m more than a little messed up.

  Smiling at him, I said, “I’m waking up now.”

  My sword arm is mighty.

  I will not falter.

  I will not fail.

  My aim is true.

  My heart is strong.

  The mantra of the aneira—the people I’d descended from. My mother had been full-blooded. My father had been human. Still, that had been drilled into my head and I’d shouted it out on the practice fields of Aneris Hall, the hell where I’d lived for the first fifteen years of my life.

  The entire thing would take several minutes to recite, but the first few lines were enough to get me through the worst things. Sometimes, I had to say it several times a day.

  My name is Kit Colbana.

  In a world filled with shapeshifters, vampires and witches who can turn your insides into your outsides, I’m next to nothing; a peon.

  I’ve got a knack for killing and tracking things down. I’m a talented thief, although I try to avoid that line of work, if I can. Luck tends to swing in my favor, although sometimes it’s in a very odd manner. I can land on my feet when I ought to be landing in a grave or worse. And I have the ability to fade out…I can go invisible. A handy skill for an assassin, I guess.

  But that’s it. That’s pretty much all I can do.

  The magic in my blood is weak. I’m a half-breed, and while that term might bother some people, it’s just a fact of life.

  My human father? I don’t know anything about him, other than he was human. I don’t know why my mom decided to shack up with him, and I don’t know why he was never in our lives.

  He’s just a non-entity.

  My mother was aneira…think of Amazons, and imagine something more. Something magical. We were once a well-known race, assassins sent out to do the jobs no other could. Sometimes we were thieves, sent out to track down priceless treasures. We’d even been bounty hunters, if legend tells it right.

  A proud, noble race.

  Now we’re not much more than a memory and only a few hundred of us remain. My mother had died when I was young, leaving me in the care of my not-so-loving family.

  The aneira didn’t smile on the half-bloods and I was worse than most, because I was half human. They’d rather kill me than care for me. Sometimes, I think the only reason they didn’t is because they figured they’d have more fun tormenting me for years. If they killed me, it would be over too soon.

  So they kept me, raised me. And they made sure I never forgot that although I had aneira blood, I wasn’t one of them. I was just a mongrel. A useless waste.

  My mother’s fucked-up mistake…that’s what they liked to tell me.


  That was the heritage they decided to share with me. Her mistake.

  But I had a few scattered memories of her…I could remember her singing. The faint echo of her voice.

  Maybe I was her mistake, but I shared her heritage. I had the memory of her singing to me.

  And her sword.

  Alone in my gym, I practiced. Strike. Block. Downward cut.

  I practiced alone. But in my mind, I saw Jude. The bastard.

  Sneaking into my dreams again.

  Bleed him out. If I did anything at close range, that was what I’d have to do. Nick the arteries. I was fast. He’d be faster. But vampires needed blood just as much as we did. If I injured him enough, maybe I could slow him enough to really hurt him.

  It was a fun fantasy, anyway.

  Not that I’d really have a chance.

  Six years ago, I’d made the mistake of calling him when I tried to help a friend. I hadn’t known him, he hadn’t really known me, but he’d offered help just the same.

  The daughter of a friend had gotten mixed up with a bad group. The worst kind—wererats. A werecreature, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad thing, but the rats in East Orlando had been notoriously bad. Criminally bad, even. I found out a few weeks after my little adventure the rats had been slated for extermination by the council, anyway.

  And said friend’s daughter had gotten involved with one of them. She was sick, diagnosed with leukemia, and she’d gotten in her head that the bite would cure her. In all likelihood, it would just hasten her death. A were’s bite is a hard, brutal thing and less than twenty percent survive it, anyway. If you’re not healthy, you don’t stand a chance. She hadn’t been healthy.

  If living was her only goal, she’d have been better off going to the vampires. Not that they were likely to have touched a sick, underage girl. Vamps were careful about that, for the most part.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered. She died less than a year after I brought her back to her mom.

  She died hating me, too.

  It was a weight I’d carry the rest of my life.

  But I couldn’t let the rats keep her. They wouldn’t have saved her life and they wouldn’t have been kind about how they tried to mark her, either.

  Too bad she had been too young to understand that.

  Sometimes I felt like it was all for nothing.

  All for nothing, and I still had an albatross by the name of Jude around my neck.

  Bleed him. Dozens of nicks across that very fine body, preferably when he hadn’t fed for a while. That would be best. And then—

  I whirled, bringing my sword across right where the level of his neck would be if he had actually been standing in the room with me.

  Vamps couldn’t die of blood loss. It would slow him. Weaken him. But it wouldn’t kill him. The older ones could even handle a bit of sun. But if I took his damned head, he was dead.

  And if he didn’t quit trying to snake his way into my business, into my dreams, into my life, I just might try.

  Although he was right about one thing. I really, really did need to get some business, and soon. I’d rather start flipping burgers, though, or hacking trees down with my sword than accept a job from him.

  Anything would be better than taking work from Jude Whittier.

  Chapter Two

  My sword arm is mighty.

  I will not falter.

  I will not fail.

  Yeah, I really do have to go through those few lines sometimes, just to level out. It keeps me focused.

  I will not falter.

  I will not fail.

  Nor will I show any sign of fear to the guy in my office. I don’t know who he is. He hasn’t given me a name and I didn’t plan on asking for it until I know if I’m doing business with him. I’m thinking I’d rather not do business with him, truth be told. I had a bad feeling about this already and we hadn’t even started talking about the job yet.

  How do I get myself into these messes? Oh, right. I’d been praying, hoping—pretty much anything except standing out on the street corner holding up signs that read: I need work! I should be more careful about what I wish for. That streak of luck that was part of my heritage was probably what had landed him here. I’d needed work. Now I had work. I also had a lesson in be careful what you wish for.

  I’d been doing this a few years and I’d learned to recognize the shit jobs from the good ones. This could be very profitable.

  Profit is good. I like profit. I like money. I don’t get to see enough of it.

  But I was kind of concerned about the warning in my gut.

  Profitable, yes. This guy was bad, bad news, though. And every last instinct inside me was screaming, bad, bad, bad…get away from him, get away now now now now!

  All the more reason I had to stay calm. All the more reason not to show that I was afraid. No showing any sign of fear—things like a racing heartbeat, increased respiration, sweaty palms, fidgeting. No. Forget the fidgeting. Plenty of people were the squirming sort and it had nothing to do with fear.

  I fidgeted all the time, even when I wasn’t afraid.

  I’m not afraid—damn it, I am aneira. I’ve got fricking noble blood and this shifter can stand there sneering at me all he wants. What do I care?

  “You know, we had a bet.” Mr. Badass sat in the chair across from my battered desk, slumped in a boneless sprawl not many humans over the age of three could manage.

  I didn’t think he was a wolf. Wolves were very…rigid. Anally so.

  If he was a wolf, he’d be in a three piece suit, pressed within an inch of its suitly life, and he’d probably have a duo of backup lawyers to witness everything. And he wouldn’t have sat in my chair with that boneless sprawl, either. Hard to do with a stick up the ass, really. The members of the wolf pack always had a stick up their collective asses.

  I had no problem working with the local wolf pack. Don’t get me wrong. Most of them are big on courtesy, and all about order and rules, and as long as I didn’t cross them, they left me alone. The problem was when the job involved some of their assholes; their assholes tried to rip off body parts and eat innards and it got messy sometimes.

  But they paid well. I could use a nice-paying job.

  We had two main were factions down here. Cat and wolf. But he didn’t have to be local, and I didn’t like to assume.

  I’d figure it out in a minute. If I had the nose of a shapeshifter, I’d have him pegged already, but I’d get there. I was good at it, unusually so. I could see the energy hovering about them and I could usually see some echo of their animal hovering about them, a skill I knew I could trace back to my aneira roots.

  We were good assassins because we could understand our marks, learn them, know them and figure out the best way to kill them.

  Still, anybody who knew what to look for could peg a shifter from a mile away and this guy was no different. Most of them didn’t bother to batten down the hatches and they let all that raw power hang out there for the entire world to see.

  They were all caged energy and strength and they emanated…something. Just…something. You meet a shapeshifter and find out what he is, and you realize what the something is once you’ve seen it.

  He had the something. I could sense it hovering above him, power coiled and lying in wait. There was a lot of it, too. But he kept it chained in too tightly for me to read it as easily I’d like.

  His jeans had rips at the knees. His T-shirt was clean, but faded and wrinkled and over it, he wore a flannel button down. I don’t think any of the wolves I knew even had an inkling what flannel was.

  “Don’t you want to know what the bet was?” he asked, watching me with an odd little smile on his face.

  “Bet?” I said, echoing his words.

  “Yeah.”

  Unable to stay still, I took a pen from my desk and twirled it around on my fingers, watching him, waiting for him to elaborate. The silence stretched out for over a minute. It wasn’t wasted time. He watched me. I watche
d him. A wide grin curled his lips, his teeth flashing white against the darkness of his skin. I started thinking about the Cheshire cat.

  Bingo. A cat. Even as I thought it, I could almost see that lazy energy around him flex its claws and stretch, giving me a feline smile. There were a handful of creatures to pick from in the were pool and it varied from country to country. Here in the States, the dominant creatures were cat, wolf and rat, with a few bears thrown in for fun.

  Narrowing my eyes, I asked softly, “Is this a local job?”

  “Local?” He studied me curiously.

  “Local. As in are you local?”

  A faint smiled curled his lips. “Yeah. I’m local.”

  Shit. This was wonderful. Just wonderful. I had some sort of cat shifter in my office. And you can’t outwait a cat. Even I knew that. Since he was here on business, and since I was running a business—sort of—I figured I needed to get this over with, because I needed him out of my office. I wasn’t working for a damn cat, not if he was from the Orlando clan. This wasn’t courier work—I could already tell. If it was, he would have already dumped whatever and left. So that meant it was something bigger, and I wasn’t interested.

  I preferred to keep my investigative work to something a little steadier than the local cat pack.

  They were insane.

  I’d do busy work for non-humans and I didn’t mind working for the wolves. I didn’t mind courier work between any of the local factions, really. That was actually ideal, because it was quick, it was easy and it paid pretty damn well. But if I had my way, I’d never work for the cats. They were dangerous.

  Unlike the wolves, they weren’t quite so keen on following rules and since my office was incorporated in East Orlando—an area that had recently been recognized as ANH territory, if I accepted a job from the cat pack, it was pretty much CYA: cover your ass.

  Bring your own back-up, make up your will, just in case, and be ready to die if you don’t have sufficient back-up. I don’t.

  The damn cats were likely to try to rip my arms off if I screwed up. Or just to avoid paying me. Yes. Attempts had been made. It’s a good thing I’m handy with all sorts of sharp, shiny objects.