Black Widow Demon (2 page)

Raven watched her stepfather lift a heavy black key from a hook on the wall behind the desk, then move to insert it in the lock on the cell door. She held her breath, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Justice drew his hand back without unlocking the cell door and regarded her thoughtfully. He turned to the battered desk, then rooted around in a drawer. He hauled out a shining pair of handcuffs crafted from a silver metal that had been mined in the nearby mountains and hardened with a special alloy. “Hold out your hands.”

She did not want to be bound. “No.”

“If you do not”—his tone was harsh and deliberate, his eyes hard—“I will burn the jail down around you.”

She felt the truth in him. He would do it. Stunned into obedience, she held out her hands, and he snapped the cuffs in place. Then, he opened the cell door.

Undertaker reached in to capture her arm.

“Don’t touch her!” Justice snapped, slapping the other man’s hand aside. Undertaker turned to him, his bushy black eyebrows raised in silent surprise. “She’s a spawn. If you touch her, she can claim you.”

The lie came so easily to him.

And yet, it was not quite a lie. Raven could not claim a man, but she could cloud his thoughts long enough to defend herself from him. Justice had the knife wound in his leg to prove it.

“Ask him how he knows that,” she said to Undertaker, her gaze never leaving her stepfather. “Ask him how he touched me and for what purpose.”

Justice slapped her hard across the face, and her head snapped back. Pain blossomed as the world darkened.

“You disrespect your mother’s memory when you speak like this. Columbine was an innocent, lured by a demon—just as you tried to lure me. She raised you to be better.”

Raven’s eyes watered, the pain now more than physical, but she refused to shed tears. He had not married her mother out of love or respect for her innocence. She had been a beautiful woman, a master artisan, and an asset for him to own, nothing more. And he had destroyed her.

Raven touched the back of one shackled wrist to the corner of her mouth and wiped away a trickle of blood. It left a dark smear on her skin in the fading light. Undertaker had given her candy when she’d been a child, yet now he’d neither made a move to protect her from Justice’s blow nor uttered one word of protest against it. Pity for him displaced the hurt in her heart. He was simpleminded and easily led. She read no malice toward her on his part.

Her chin went up, and she gazed steadily at both men. “There is no need for either of you to touch me. I will walk on my own.” She displayed all the dignity she possessed as she crossed the small jailhouse and stepped into the cool embrace of the night.

Inside, she was shaking with anger. She did not want to die. But living would come at a heavy price she had no wish to pay.

…

He had been wrong. No celebration was planned in Goldrush.

With his angular face freshly shaven, his shoulder-grazing black hair damp and tied back with a worn leather thong, Blade noticed the increased activity in the dusty, darkening street the instant he stepped from the bathhouse.

He’d bought a change of clothes to wear, leaving what he already owned to be laundered at the rooming house where he’d rented the night’s lodgings. A wool-lined coat of soft, supple leather fell to his hips, allowing for easy access to his knives. It was his one major investment against the cold that ruled the mountains.

While he was happy to be clean again, he disliked the feel of his knives in their new and unfamiliar hiding places. He especially disliked it now, when night was falling and people had gathered in tight little groups, their hushed voices filled with unmistakable tension.

Years of training—received long ago but never forgotten—had him react to it out of instinct. He inched the knife in his sleeve closer to his palm as he pressed deeper into the shadows. Invisibility was an assassin’s greatest weapon.

He eavesdropped on the conversation of three men who were standing around the corner of the building from him, on the street.

“She’s always been strange.”

“Perhaps,” a second conceded. “But being strange does not make her spawn.”

Blade’s interest spiked. The goddesses had disappeared from the world nearly thirty years before. More recently, demons had been scoured from the earth. During the years in between, the shape-shifting demons had ruled the desert, luring mortal women to them for pleasure. Half-demon spawn, like their fathers, were male—monsters born in demon form to mortal mothers who had not survived their delivery. Demons, in turn, killed spawn at birth. Blade knew of only one true, living female spawn in existence—and her mother had been a goddess, not a mortal woman.

And Airie, who was half demon and half goddess, was hardly a monster. Filled with compassion, she had healed his crippled leg and given him his life back. He owed her a debt he could never repay.

“She bewitched my son,” the first man complained, defending his stance. “If not for Creed’s interference, he’d be her slave now. But with Creed gone, I don’t know what will happen to him. He has started to follow her again.”

“Creed thrashed your son to within an inch of his life for following her around like a pup in the first place,” a third man said. “He claimed your son tried to touch her against her will.”

“Creed spread that lie because he is already bewitched by her.”

“If he is bewitched, how could he leave her for training?”

“Who says no to assassin trainers when they are recruiting?”

No one could deny the truth of that observation, Blade thought. Most of those who declined recruitment as a Godseeker assassin ended up dead.

The second man spoke up again. “I’m not certain luring a man for pleasure warrants burning a woman at the stake.”

The third man murmured an uneasy agreement.

“It’s not the pleasure part that warrants it,” the first one insisted. “It’s the bewitching. Raven enslaves men. You’ve seen how the young ones look at her, how she pretends not to notice. People always said her mother slept with a demon,” he added. “But when it was a girl that was born and the birth didn’t kill her, everyone thought they were wrong.” A note of worry crept into his tone. “Who knows how many more spawn there might be, born in mortal form instead of as monsters? What if there are more like her?”

Blade, from his hiding place in the shadows, propped his broad shoulders against the wooden wall of a building and tipped his head back to stare at the emerging stars, lost in thought.

Women had only the protection of men in this world. Some men were better protectors than others. Many were no protection at all. But who was he to judge? He had once been an assassin himself, although he had never worked in the service of the Godseekers. He had been strictly for hire, killing men, women, and children alike, without the luxury and freedom of choice. Once he had reached a level of skill that let him name his own price, he had become more selective in the work he accepted.

Even at his lowest and most desperate, however, he had never deliberately made anyone suffer. Whether the woman named Raven was spawn or not, he wanted no part of this.

What was happening here was not his problem.

But to burn a woman at the stake over something so natural as sex?

Blade thought of Ruby and the other two women who had worked independently as whores in the saloon he’d once owned, and his gut knotted. Ruby’s face in particular haunted him. In his own way, he had loved her. He did still, and a part of him most likely always would.

He rubbed at his thigh, where a demon in its monster form had once torn and eaten his flesh, then left him in the desert for dead. He hated demons. He had not yet made up his mind about spawn, if more of them did exist, because while he was grateful to Ruby and his friend Hunter for saving his life, it was Hunter’s wife Airie who had given it back to him.

The men’s voices drifted off, and Blade mentally ran through the position and feel of his pocketed knives before pushing away from the wall and moving silently through the shadows. He followed the crowd, knowing that he could not let this unknown woman suffer when he had the means to end it quickly for her.

He was careful not to hurry or look overly interested in what was going on around him. Strangers came and went in places like this, seeking work in the newer mines when the old ones tapped out, but he did not want to be memorable to the locals. He particularly did not want to draw the attention of the Godseeker responsible for this judgment. His relationship with the Godseekers as a whole was precarious. Some of them would consider him a deserter.

He should mind his own business and be on his way.

The night air blowing off the ice-tipped mountains carried the first hints of winter, and Blade was grateful he had purchased the warm leather coat. At least he had money and his knives on him because he doubted if he’d be able to collect the remainder of his belongings after what he was planning to do tonight. While the knives were his weapon of choice, he would feel the loss of his rifle and crossbow equally as much, perhaps more.

The town’s single, very long main street followed the gentle curve of the land. As the crowd surged toward what passed for a jail—at least according to the creaking sign swinging by cast-iron hooks from a roof extension over the steps—a slight figure stepped lightly through its open door. She held her shackled hands at her neat waist, keeping them partially hidden in the folds of her dress. Short, tousled black ringlets streaked with red glinted in the torchlight, the curls framing high cheekbones and a delicate face. Her gaze scanned the top of the crowd. Blade, near the back, felt a sharp jolt of awareness as her eyes drifted over him, then came back for a second before moving on again when she did not recognize him.

He could scarcely believe that this tiny, lost waif of a woman-child, trying so hard to hide her fright from the crowd, had been labeled an evil, demon seductress.

Her ankle turned over on the first step and she wobbled, unable to maintain her balance with her hands bound. Her shoulder struck one of the sturdy beams supporting the roof extension as someone in the small crowd thrust out a hand to steady her. Blade, too, took an involuntary step forward.

“Don’t touch her! If you do, she’ll own you,” barked a man as he emerged from the doorway behind her. He had a slight stiffness in his stance and the trace of a limp. His hard eyes sparked with arrogance and authority.

This, Blade decided, was the Godseeker responsible for judgment in this town. He remembered the type well and despised them to this day.

A taller, thinner man followed the Godseeker, ducking his head as he, too, passed through the door. Both men dwarfed the woman, making her appear even smaller and more fragile in comparison.

The crowd swarmed onward, leaving a small amount of open space where the trio could walk. People fell silent as the enormity of what was about to happen finally settled in. Yet still, no one protested.

Blade studied the scattered rooftops, fewer now and too far apart for his purpose, then the surrounding area for some sort of shelter that might hide what he was about to do. He needed to be close to her but not too close. He intended to escape afterward.

The woman made no sound as she was led to the carefully constructed weave of shredded kindling and splits of knotted pine. Crude stairs ran to a platform built on top of the weave. From the platform rose a thick stake of sturdy desert ironwood. The platform was too high for him to have a good target. He would need to stand too far back in order to gain enough throwing leverage. He might be able to manage it, but he couldn’t guarantee his aim from such a great distance.

Blade looked around. Crumbled rocks and crushed boulders had been piled near the side of a road that was little more than a trail, as if a site were being cleared for new construction. Blade inched his way around the back of the crowd, sliding into the shadows to reemerge near the rock pile. It was far from stable, and as he clambered to the top bits of loose gravel and dirt trickled in tiny landslides behind him, but the larger stones held firm beneath his weight.

He had a far better view from this height and proximity. From a distance she had been an attractive woman. Up close, she was stunning. She had beautifully shaped eyes, lined liberally with long lashes that swept her cheeks when she closed them. Gold-toned skin and full, curving lips distracted him further. He could see why she had been accused of being a spawn. Demons in mortal form were considered irresistible to mortals. And demons had pursued mortal women for their remarkable and unusual beauty, so their offspring would be astonishing.

Blade was not easily impressed by the physical appearance of a woman, however, regardless of the attraction that seared through him. It was her dignity and refusal to plead for her life or appeal to the crowd that truly arrested him.

Someone lit the torches that had been strapped to long poles embedded in the earth around the platform. Blade spotted a coil of rope near the woman’s feet. She had not yet been strapped to the stake, yet she stood ramrod straight and without support. He silently applauded her for refusing to give in to the fear she no doubt was feeling. He slid one of his knives into his palm and waited for his opportunity. He couldn’t save her, but he could at least allow her to keep her dignity intact. No one deserved a death such as this.

The Godseeker stood at the front of the platform and lifted his hands for silence. The light from the torches danced in his eyes. When he spoke, the effect of his words mesmerized the audience.

“For a long time I’ve been receiving warnings about my daughter’s behavior. Mothers and fathers alike have told me that she’s tempted their sons. They expressed concern for how she dresses and that she doesn’t show enough respect for the way her own mother raised her. She’s too free with her smiles, provoking jealousy and competition among our men.”