Book 2 of The Marked Souls
Liam Niall has led the Chicago league of immortal warriors and their repentant demons for longer than he cares to remember. Four months ago, everything he thought he understood about the war against the Darkness was blown apart. Now, with the shocking appearance of a fiery new female talya, the world he’s supposed to save is about to change again. . . .
Liam, meet your newest recruit.
From FORGED OF SHADOWS.
Available from Signet Eclipse June 1, 2010.
Prologue
Gray dust clogged the frigid air. Filthy snow lay all around, streaked with ash and blood and some odd fibrous gelatinous mess.
He put his hand to his aching head. Bone pulped under the tentative touch and he winced. His fingers came away slimed with crimson and gray matter.
That couldn’t be good.
Stones rained around him, and he choked on the acrid stink of demon-realm winds. Dimly, he remembered. He’d been trapped there, his soul bound into the Veil by that bitch talya and her lover.
But here he was, back in the human realm. His pores beaded with sulfur as his demon ascended, struggling to protect his all-too-human flesh from the stoning.
It coiled through him, the demon, and tightened its grasp.
He’d fleetingly—so fleetingly—hoped to be freed from it after all the long centuries of slavery. Now a slave again.
He tried to weep, but the acid sting of birnenston tears only burned furrows in his cheeks.
He wanted to succumb to the pounding stones, be buried forever. But the demon yanked him upright, shedding dust and ice and blood like some terrible birth cowl. He clenched his teeth, resisting the demon’s intangible grip, but his head ached all the worse and he could summon neither wit nor will. The demon awkwardly coordinated his limbs into a shambling gait.
Worse than a slave.
As the demon rode him like a dumb animal away from the collapsing building—the site of his desperate bid to free the world from the chains of helpless good and hopeless evil that bound it—Corvus Valerius could not decide whom he hated more. The malevolent djinni that had brought him back from the dead, or the bastard league of the teshuva who had the chance to kill him once and for all and failed.
