Rogue Huntress: a new adult urban fantasy novel (Rogue Huntress Chronicles Book 1)

by Thea Atkinson

  The door to the suite rattled and a thud sounded. Someone had kicked at it.

  I took one longing look down the cobwebbed stairs and dusty wall sconces that were threaded with gossamer strands and threw the key down the yawning stairwell. It cut through a web as it flew, and landed, clattering somewhere before the bend in the passage. With any luck, the key would appear to Calab as though I had dropped it in my hasty flight.

  Another thud. Another.

  I prayed the key had cut through most of the webs stretched across the stairwell and that the men would be too interested in pursuit to notice any that remained. I huffed out two breaths, preparing my lungs for a large and long expansion, then I backtracked as stealthily as I could toward the wardrobe. They were giving the door a vicious sounding beating now. I pulled at the wardrobe's knob and pushed my way in between some woolen suits and sweaters. I heard the door finally break free of its hold as one of them managed to kick it hard enough to make it crack. I muffled the harshness of my racing breath by stuffing one of Lynden's coat arms against my mouth. The heavy smell of cedar stung my nose, and I held one long draft of air in my lungs trying to let only a measured amount of air leak through my nostrils so the ragged panting wouldn't give me away.

  I hoped they would be quick about it. I didn't think I could ration my air for long without succumbing to the exhaustion pulling at me while I waited for the two of them to do the obvious and notice the open door on the other side of the room. If I was lucky, they would return to the house through the garden, expecting me to be long gone. I held my breath as I heard their muffled voices and Caleb's growl of fury as he realized where I'd gone.

  "Damn squirrelly thing," he grumbled. "I knew it. Damn."

  By the clarity of his voice I knew he was just on the other side of the wardrobe. I shrank into one of Lynden's old coats.

  "She can't get far naked," Jeb said, that infuriatingly rational tone that made me want to break through the wardrobe and throttle him.

  "She better not get far, "Caleb said. "She's a cagey bitch, naked or not."

  His threat spoke of more than the things he would do to me if he got hold of me; it veiled a promise of things he would do to my brothers, but I couldn't focus on that now.

  "So which one is it, exactly?" Jeb said and I could imagine him slouching against the secret exit's door jam, taunting Caleb. I almost wished I could see it.

  "Which one is what?"

  "Shana," Jeb said. "Is she a squirrel or a bitch? Very different animals."

  "Have you lost your mind?" Caleb said. "Get the fuck down there."

  There was a long pause in which I thought my heartbeat would sound through the wardrobe. I wanted them to just get on with it; the longer they waited the less chance I had of staying hidden. Any moment now, Caleb would scent me, the same as I did his disgusting cologne and he'd know I hadn't gone down the stairs. Just when I was beginning to load the muscles in my legs like springs about to release, I heard Jeb speak again in that low, casual drawl.

  "You blackmail me to muscle for you. I'm not a bitch whisperer or a squirrel wrangler. Go get her yourself."

  I could almost hear Caleb's teeth grind. "You want her alive?" he said to Jeb. "Or do you want her in pieces?"

  A long drawn out sigh from Jeb.

  "Where does it go?" he asked, resolute, and his voice was already more distant, but still cautious. He didn't know the place like Caleb did. For all he knew, I waited below with a flame thrower. I smiled with longing as I clutched the coat of Lynden's wool coat. There had been one in the arsenal at one time. Just the ticket to roast a couple of dogs. No doubt the two of them were peering down the stairwell. I couldn't imagine why they weren't rushing until I heard Caleb chuckle.

  "It goes several places, but she'd go for the one she thinks is still there. It is there, of course. But booby trapped."

  "Guns," Jeb said, guessing.

  "No guns," Caleb said. "Automatic sprinklers fueled with wolfsbane." He chuckled again. "She'll be yelping like a pup if she so much as steps within five feet of the armory."

  So. The bastard thought catching me was a foregone conclusion. Well, he'd just warned me, then, hadn't he?

  "And if she doesn't go that way?" Jeb asked.

  "Like you said, she's naked," Caleb said matter-of-factly. "And if I know Shana, she feels even more so without a weapon."

  "You don't want to clean that up first?" Jeb asked him with a note of taunt. "You know, before you go barreling down a filthy stairwell."

  "It'll heal." Came the snappish reply. "Now move."

  A loud, almost forlorn sigh.

  "I fucking hate spiders," was the phrase Jeb muttered. Ah. So there was the true reason he was being so chatty. I would have found pleasure in the moment if I wasn't so anxious to get them moving.

  Seconds dragged by like scallop dragger's net, picking up a staticy silence that finally convinced me they'd begun the journey down the passageway. I didn't hear them pull the door closed behind them, but I was too tired to wait any longer to be sure. My heart slapped out a bass rhythm that would put a funky monk to shame and fight or flight had taken hold of my adrenal glands and all but squeezed every bit of juice from them. My body was trembling from it. Even so, I had to step out and take the risk. At most, I had bought myself a few moments. If I was lucky, I had bought myself an hour.

  I eased the door of the wardrobe open and peered through the crack in the door. The room was empty as I'd left it. The exit beside the tapestry yawned open as well. I took a deep, bracing breath and stepped from the wardrobe the way I would have done if I had been a child peering beneath a bandage. Trepidation made my heart skip and I felt one more drop of adrenaline get squeezed into my tissues. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  I crept out from the wardrobe, with my ear vigilant, and I searched Lynden's room for anything that could help me manhandle the cuffs from my wrists. It was only when I realized I had been in the perfect place to find my release that I groaned out loud. My mother's suites would have had plenty of bobby pins. Her vanity stuffed with bric a brac a plenty.

  I had to give up after a thorough search revealed nothing that I could use to unlock myself. I had very little options. I could risk facing my two captors head-on as I stole my way down the secret exit behind them or I could go back to my mother's rooms and risk being recaptured. But I couldn't go back that way. That way lay madness.

  I couldn't go back there. I wouldn't, no matter how badly I needed the cuffs off. Better to follow them down the stairwell and hope they didn't decide to backtrack toward me then to return to the prison. I'd fight if they came at me. I'd die trying to dig their eyes out if I couldn't transform, or I'd make one of them kill me. Either way, it was the stairwell for me. Three different routes. Three warriors. I was willing to bet that Caleb and Jeb had split off when they had reached the triad of exits in the stairwell. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes to focus and think better. There had been cobwebs down the stairs when I'd thrown the key. I hadn't heard any exclamation or point made of the fact that some still lingered. Either the two of them had not noticed, or hadn't thought about it as they'd pummelled down the stairs after me. It might be possible that even if they had split up, one of those routes was open to me. I would have to recognize it by the spanning of those webs from one side to the other.

  Please God, just don't be the one back to my mother's room be the one left unentered.

  For good measure, I probed two fingers into my wound, grimacing in pain, but determined to coat them with as much fresh and running blood as I could. It had a sharper tang than clotted and dried blood, and no doubt Caleb would have scented me if the wound hadn't already begun to heal from Jeb's ministrations. When I extracted my fingers they were bloody and the wound ran fluid down my shoulder and between my breasts.

  I marked the edge of the wardrobe door with the blood on my fingers and smeared the door frame, pushing the mirrored closed. If they did come back up this way, they would think I was hiding in t
here. It might not buy me much time, but I had discovered in my tenure as a killer, that one or two seconds often made the difference between my death and someone else's.

  Sweating and shuddering, I shook out my hands to get my circulation moving. The silver cuffs, ground against my skin as I did so, reminding me exactly why I couldn't dally any longer. I gave one long look at the home I had known for so many years, and then I made my way with death's stealth over to the secret exit. I spun around, pressing my back to the wall next to the door, listening hard, my hands held close to my hips.

  I could hear no voices echoing back up the stairs, so they must have made it at least to the bottom. With my heart pounding in my throat, it was all I could do to breathe. Although I had felt vulnerable in front of Caleb without my clothes on, I gave a short breath of thanks that I was barefoot now. I would make no sound is I padded down the stairs, but just for good measure, I hugged the wall as I descended, my ears pricked, my nostrils flaring to let in any smell any wayward smell drifting up drifting up the stairwell. The lingering scent of licorice intertwined with that of cheap cologne, and I knew the two of them had gone down the passage, maybe waited there still at the foot of it. I wondered if Caleb would have taken the time to scent me out as he run barreling down the exit would he have descended anyway, or was it a ploy to smoke me out? I told myself he was too eager to sniff each escape route carefully for my telltale scent and had aimed directly for the arsenal. I had to convince myself of it, because otherwise, I'd never make it down the stairs. Each step was a risk. Each breath could have given me away.

  It was awkward going, but I finally came to the end with a sense of relief. It was all or nothing now, and whether or not they would be at the end waiting for me, or if I'd meet them in one of the escape routes, I welcomed the notion that this would be over. I'd either be fully escaped or I would be caught, and I relished the thought that in either case, I could embrace the finish. Even though the descent had taken me six or seven minutes, I was exhausted. Caleb had been cunning to allow me to succumb to infection. It made me weak, and more likely to be complacent. It gave me more reason to hate him.

  When at last the passage ended in its three escape routes, I paused in front of each and inhaled deeply, moving from one to the other stealthily and breathing in the scent of each one carefully. The crypt passage, as expected, smelled of Caleb, and no cobwebs stretched across its entry. Of the other two: the route to my mother's rooms, and the route to the garden in the woods both smelled faintly of licorice. I wrinkled my nose. Which one had Jeb taken, and would he be friend or foe if I met up with him along the way?

  I supposed in the end it didn't matter. I would not be returning to my mother's rooms alive, and so I had to take the route that led out into the garden. If I found Jeb there, I would deal with him then.

  I hyperventilated much like a swimmer would before diving and then I plunged into the tunnel. I didn't take my time. I was quickly losing my nerve and my energy. I stumbled along the tunnel, knowing it would be in the dark for several moments before it broke out into the more flowered part of the garden close to the house and a dozen yards from to the periphery of the yard. Beyond that would be ordered azalea and magnolia trees lovingly planted and tended to by my deceased trainer turned gardener, Galen. Past that, the rhodo and on into the strongly scented lure of lush pine and spruce forest.

  I didn't know what I expected on exiting. Perhaps it was daylight, a platoon of mercenaries, maybe even just Jeb standing there with a mournful look in his eye and a gleaming pistol in his hand. Whatever I had expected, it wasn't twilight and it certainly wasn't full dark. If it weren't for the fact that I was still naked and already shivering, I'd think my luck of greeting the night to be gifted to me by Prometheus himself.

  I let my nose guide me more than my eyes until I got my nightsight. Those spare moments delivered up the scent of flowers in the distance. I could tell from the sky over the treeline that the night had lost the full moon and that it had been days since they had gathered together. The air smelled cold and the magnetic pull that usually existed around the full moon was already waning.

  It wasn't until the smell of flowers enveloped me in heady fragrance, that I almost staggered from relief. I was free. I hadn't met either of them. All I had to do was make my way through the strangling limbs of a weeping cherry to the thickest part of the rhododendrons and magnolias and I could be well on my way into the forest of pine. I'd walk as far as I could or until I could find a place where I could hunker down for a few hours rest. If I had to bury myself in a pile of leaves, I'd do so. My core was already feeling the brunt of the chill air. I had to find sufficient shelter and soon. August made for heady days and nights when the air stifled all but the best of night breezes, but a woman so recently wrapped in the warmth of Death's cloak was far too susceptible to chill.

  Then there were the cuffs. I needed them off, but I'd never be free of them if I didn't rest. I simply didn't have the energy to go searching for something heavy to beat them off or the strength to dig them off. I'd been hardened to silver by my mother, surely, but not impermeable. It hurt. It had always hurt and it took a tremendous amount of focus to work through that pain. My thigh muscles were already strained from the tension and exhaustion of sickness and escape. My stomach was growling, and I yearned for the thought of that juicy apple I had dropped to the floor. I wondered as I crept from bush to bush exactly what kind of damage I had done to Caleb. No doubt he had taken a few moments to transform and heal those cuts, but I hoped he would carry the scars of the assault at least until the day I could kill him.

  I shivered as I crept across the grass, images of revenge dancing blissfully through my mind like a frolicking group of Pans. It was only when I imagined the god squeezing out Caleb's lungs like a wineskin into my upended mouth that I realized how addled and rambling my thoughts were becoming, how revenge saturated they were, and I understood that it meant that everything else: my autonomic system, my central nervous system, vascular system, they were all starting to shut down from the stress and exhaustion. Even if I did manage to get the cuffs off, I doubted I would have the energy to transform. I needed sleep. Good unconscious totally comatose sleep. Days of it. The kind that could regenerate a person better than chicken soup or medication ever could. I needed to find a bed immediately.

  I'd made it to the treeline and was peering through the branches, trying to assess which direction would be the best to go in. I smelled the air, trying to scent for either human life or animal, wanting to avoid both, and it's when I caught scent of him.

  The smell of licorice wafted on the air.

  "You," I said, finding the support of a sturdy oak and leaning against it. I knew he couldn't see me clearly in the darkness, but I knew exactly where he stood. Three feet to my left. The trunk wouldn't hide my whole width, but it would make me less of a target should he decide to shoot that pistol I also smelled. It was muffled, as though it was beneath his jacket, but it was there just the same.

  "Me," he said.

  Now that I'd stopped moving, I felt the full weight of my exhaustion. Whatever had been pushing me through abandoned me, and I staggered.

  "You're not well," he said.

  "No shit." I tried to remain erect, but I ended up catching myself on a branch as I fell, and then discovered my legs and knees far too wobbly to do anything more than tuck up beneath my chin. I wrapped my arms around my knees, hugging myself. If he wanted to take me, he would have to do it quickly or lose me to unconsciousness.

  He inched closer the way a man might a rabid dog. His hands were uplifted and extended toward me. Supplicating. Trying to keep me calm. He needn't worry. I'd exhausted everything I had to get here and all for not.

  It wasn't fair. Here I was, naked and vulnerable barely into the woods behind my father's mansion, the only real home I'd had in my lifetime. So many decades of roaming Europe, roaming the Americas with my pack, never quite finding the right place until we had made it here and father had se
t up community. I had left my brothers to be murdered, my pack to be decimated, and the legacy my father had created to be torn down like a statue of Lenin in the streets. All because of Caleb. I remembered the year he came to us, and I could remember how frightened he'd been as a young boy. My father had simply said he was ours. And we'd accepted him into the pack. We brought him up. He and I had played together, trained together, and now he betrayed me. He betrayed us all. I couldn't stop thinking about the way my father's head had looked hanging from Caleb's fingers, and I swore that if I ever saw the man again, I would tear him from his own skin in a thousand minuscule bites. I'd take my time killing him. I'd savour it.

  It was only the blur of tears that kept me from seeing the form that eased itself from the bushes and extracted from one shadow into another. The shadows all around me, forming into unfamiliar things, kept me from realizing the danger until it was too late.

  Jeb stood in front of me as though he'd simply been transported there.

  "I can't transform," I said, and I heard the heaviness in my voice.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "Not as sorry as I am," I said. I let my head hang over my knees. I didn't care anymore if my beast could peek through my pain.

  "I have to take you back," he said, and I heard the whispering sound of him pulling his jacket off. For a moment, I longed to feel the warmth in it. Then I remembered what that warmth would mean.

  "I won't let you do that," I said. If he heard the weariness in my voice, he ignored it. Bless him, he acted as though I was still a she-wolf to be reckoned with.

  "I have no choice," he said. "I have to do it."