The Blood Gift, page 1
Dedication
To my wonderful readers who’ve shown so much enthusiasm for Ikenna’s journey and who’ve connected with our favorite Murder Girl; to anybody and everybody who needs to rightfully rage at injustices; and to those who dare to dream big when the world tells us we shouldn’t
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Epilogue
Dramatis Personae
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by N. E. Davenport
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
1
I sit in a mountainside cafe, sipping a godsawful microstate whiskey, and watch my targets across the room. There’s twelve in total—eight women and four men. They’re in a reserved section roped off from the public, having a party. An ebony-skinned woman in her mid-fifties with flawless, gene-manipulated beauty and striking gray eyes that remind me ruthlessly of a certain other bitch I’ve been trying not to think about raises her glass and starts the speech for a toast. I mark the subtle elegance about Edryssa Cyphir—my desired target—and also the gruffness that makes it clear she could handle herself in most fights. Probably any fight.
Just not a fight with me.
Lady Edryssa keeps her oration short and sweet. I thank the Pantheon for the boon because it means less time I have to sit in a far corner of the cafe, imbibing disgusting liquor, and waiting to make my move. The speech ends; glasses clink; sparkling wine is guzzled.
Drink more, I urge everyone, and make this a cherry walk.
There’s a moment where I swear I see emptiness in one of the partygoer’s eyes, and I get excited. Did that really just pseudo-work?
But the tan-skinned man that’s built like an armored transport places his empty flute on a table nearby and turns to the spread of food beside it.
I guess not. Damn! What’s the use of having a stockpile of power if you don’t know how to make it work every time you want it to? Whatever extra boost the goddess gave me in Khanai only worked unerringly long enough to get my team out. Almost immediately after it fizzled, though, and now it’s wholly erratic. Sometimes it barrels into me with enough force that it literally knocks me on my butt, and other times it’s lukewarm, stubbornly remaining at its old, usual—and unuseful—levels. Right now, it’s the latter. I shake my head.
Guess things are getting done the tougher way.
I remain at my cramped table, continuing to drink whiskey that had no business being barreled in the first place and looking as if I’d been simply people-watching—as one often does when they’re dining alone—until the fanfare of the party stole my attention and now I’m ensnared with watching them have a good time.
I could make my move right in the eatery. I could stand up, walk over to the group’s private section, and do what needs to be done. But the cafe is full of people, and it probably wouldn’t be a good look to commit a slaughter, in a foreign nation, in front of a slew of witnesses. And while I don’t give a shit about how it looks, I have others around me who insist we at least try to do things right.
So I gotta wait.
And wait.
And fucking wait some more.
Irked, I slip out of character for a second and allow myself a quick, cathartic scowl.
I stay out of character longer than I should when low laughter floats into my ear.
“Go to hell,” I mutter to Caiman through my nanomic.
“Patience is a virtue, Amari.” He chuckles.
“This cafe is propped on a cliff,” I remind the jackass. “I technically still owe you a push.”
That shuts him up. For now. I swear the gods specifically crafted Caiman to get under my skin—even when we’re in a truce and aligned to the same side.
“Focus. Everyone. This is serious.” The new voice that hisses into my ear is, of course, Reed’s.
I roll my eyes. “I can multitask.”
“Amari.” My name is a reprimand. A censure handed down from a commanding officer. I bristle, and if the op at hand wasn’t so important, I’d blow it. “Fuck you,” I snarl quietly into the mic. “I’m not your subordinate anymore so get your tone together when you talk to me.”
“This isn’t the place for your ego,” Reed snaps back. A beat passes then he curses. “Your point is valid, however. I guess. So, my apologies.”
I try to remain irritated, but my mouth twitches, a thing I know the bastard can see because he hacked the establishment’s vidcams and routed their live feed to his and the rest of our rogue cohort’s Comm Units. “It is your bad,” I say, keeping my voice hard. Lots of things are your bad. Darius Reed and I still have offenses to air out after what happened in Khanai, and until we do, it’s actually him I want to shove off a cliff, not Caiman.
“Party’s ending,” Dannica chirps in her forever-present, supremely unnatural, peppy tone.
“Time for our bash to begin.” I can practically hear the eager grin on Haynes’s face as he says it.
I refocus on the party and watch good-byes breeze off lips and air kisses be passed in Lusian fashion. Gray-eyed Edryssa Cyphir, who gave the toast, leaves first. I track her as she slips out a narrow door along a wall inside the private section. Like I said, she’s the person I’m after, but to get to Lady Edryssa, I’ve gotta go through her cronies first.
Those cronies, the other seven women and four men in the room, begin leaving via the back entrance precisely five minutes after Edryssa departs.
I swipe my Comm Unit over the mini monitor embedded in a corner of my table to pay for my subpar whiskey, stand, and head out the front entrance of the cafe.
“Let’s see if they leave together or all go separate ways,” I say into my mic.
“Let’s hope it’s the former so this’ll be a piece of pie,” Greysen says.
“From your lips to the cosmos’s ears,” I mutter. Otherwise, my crew will have to break off into teams and go after the dons of the Cyphir Syndicate separately. Which we can do, but confronting all of them at once will make more of a statement that Edryssa won’t be able to ignore.
I exit the cafe to a bright midafternoon sun and swiftly hook a left to walk around back. Like I knew she would be, Edryssa is long gone when I get to the secluded transport lot. All the intelligence we’ve gathered on the Lady of Lusian says she never lingers in a place long enough for enemies to put a bullet between her eyes. Her dons aren’t so paranoid, fortunately for us. The eleven fucks loiter in a holding lot that’s paved with the same aquamarine flagstone that lends a shine to most of the city’s streets, chatting casually beside a row of gleaming, top-of-the-line luxury transports, the best their blood money can buy.
I step behind a mass-carry rig that looms over me and keeps me completely concealed.
“Everyone in position?” Reed asks through the mic.
Each of us returns a quiet affirmative.
I’m the first one to move into view of the dons. They all turn to me, looking murderous at my intrusion. One of them, a short, stocky man with black hair, growls a curse in Lusian. “Who the fuck are you?” he barks in the same language. “Do yourself a favor, sweetheart, and turn around.”
“Nah. I think I’ll pass.” I take a step closer to the dons.
That’s when the others join the fun. Reed, Dannica, Haynes, Caiman, Greysen, Liim, and Dane (the last two are the other Alphas who were convinced by Caiman’s little speech in Khanai) appear in the lot. Together, we’ve got the Cyphir pricks boxed in.
I’ll award them points for not bothering to ask further questions or sling further threats. Their blasters are out and pointed at us half a heartbeat after we train ours on them.
“Why don’t you do yourself a favor and put those away. We’ll be quicker on the draw,” I promise the dons.
The idiots don’t listen. They start shooting, and every last one of them crumples. Lucky for them, we’re shooting stun bullets instead of UVs. Unluckily for them, stuns still leave you in agony while twitching on the ground.
I stand over the head of the man who shouted at me. “Edryssa. I’d like to speak with her?” I make my demand politely in flawless Lusian to give him and his people added assurances that I’m serious and not fucking around. The insistence that foreigners do business with them in their native tongue is a weird summit to die on, but when in Lusian, as the saying goes, you bow to how the Cyphirs—who hold the City of Thugs in an iron grip—do business if you want to accomplish anything with the sons of bitches who run it.
Maybe not the snappiest phrasing.
The don glares up at me as he twitches. I’m almost impressed. It speaks to one hell of a fighting spirit that he isn’t howling in pain—or pissing himself—by this point. I blow him a kiss as a reward.
“Edryssa will have your head and the heads of all your fam
I shrug. “Every one of my kin is already dead, so that threat lands nowhere. And there’s no way in hell the Lady of the City could have my head. Your boss isn’t that good.” I trade my stun blaster for a gun housing UV bullets. I stoop and press the barrel to his temple. “I’ll ask again, but then there won’t be a third time. Edryssa? I want a meet?”
He’s either supremely loyal, supremely moronic, or supremely just doesn’t give a crap about dying because he turns his head to the side and spits on my boots. “Trash doesn’t get to meet with Edryssa, and I at least know the trash around here. Who are you? Nobody, I bet. Kill me. If you don’t, Edryssa will for wasting her time with you when I take you to her.”
I ram the barrel of the blaster into his temple. Then I brandish a second one loaded with UV bullets and shoot him in the thigh. “I don’t like being insulted. I think too highly of myself to put up with it.” I jerk my head toward the Mareenians, who have his counterparts restrained. “Ask my friends. Also, I can promise you Edryssa definitely wants to hear what I have to say. If you agree to take us to her right now, I’ll spare every miserable life in this lot, make it worth your and Edryssa’s while. I hear you can make any deal with the Cyphir Syndicate if you can wrangle their respect and you’ve got enough credits.” I shoot him in his already blown apart thigh. This time, the bravado deflates out of him, and he wails. Smiling my best homicidal smile, I wave one of my guns at his restrained peers. “Clearly, I’ve proven you need to respect me. Let’s take the fact that I’m rich enough to make your boss forgive this incident on good faith, shall we?” I spear him with one of Dannica’s saccharine-sweet smiles.
“You whoreofabitch,” he growls up at me.
Haven’t heard that as one word before—I’ll need to tuck that one away. I shoot him a third time in the injured leg. He wails louder. “Every time you insult me, my trigger finger acts on its own accord. When I run out of bullets . . . well, I quite get off on stabbing people who aggravate me over shooting them. I’m simply trying to exercise some restraint here while showing a little courtesy, you dick.” I aim the blaster back at the shredded mess of a hole in his thigh gushing blood. “How much damage do you think one leg can take before you permanently can’t use it anymore? Hell—before you bleed out? Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you because I need you alive. But I can mangle you very, very, very badly, patch you up, and then do it again until you say yes.”
“Why don’t you go fuck with somebody else?”
“Real classy, throwing your people under the transport there.” I kneel beside him again, and poke him in the center of his mushy wound. He hollers in pain. “That was for them. We both know I’d be wasting my time with one of the other dons because they aren’t Edryssa’s number two. They don’t know how to contact her directly. They’d all have to go through you to get to her anyhow.”
He seems surprised I know all this. But what good would we be if we couldn’t run a little reconnaissance and do it well? It didn’t take us long to figure out Edryssa Cyphir steers a tight operation. She has to when she’s a wanted woman in every territory on the Minor and Principal Continents except the city we stand in, which technically isn’t a recognized, formal municipality at all. Yes, a tight operation and one hell of an arsenal: Edryssa has some serious nukes and a sizable enough merc army guarding Lusian and herself inside its borders that no power on the Minor Continent, at least, wants the headache of really quarreling with her about it either. Further affording protection is the fact that the Cyphir Syndicate is the largest, longest-lived underground crime organization across Iludu, so its web and its power run deep.
Incidentally, these are also the exhaustive reasons why she’s a woman who I need to, regrettably, sorely have a chat with.
Speeding up that end because my patience is blackfrost-thin on a good day, I poise my finger above the don’s injury. He shudders. I take that as my cue that his resolve is breaking. Fantastic. I drop my hand to my side and slide my blue-steel dagger from its concealed spot at my hip. I let the tip of the Khanaian blade hover a centimeter above the open wound. The don throws his hands into the air. “All right. All right. All right! I’ll send a Comm to Edryssa. Tell her you want a meet. See if she’ll accept.”
I lower my knife a fraction toward his thigh. I let its tip graze the exposed pink, bloody, shredded muscle with splinters of bone stabbing through. He hollers again. “Make her accept.”
He breathes heavy, having gone ashen, and breaks out in a sweat. “Okay.”
He drags his wrist up to his face, punches a message into the screen, and then drops his arms. “It’s done,” he says, heaving.
Less than a minute later, his Comm Unit beeps.
“What does it say?” I ask, on edge, as he reads Edryssa’s response.
“She says to have my transport take you to a meet. She also says to start picking out homegoing lilies for your funeral.” He spits the words, regaining some of his former courage. “Edryssa may kill you before one word is spoken, you know. I hope she does.”
At that, he gets my special smile, and I can practically feel the blood coming from his wound run cold.
“That won’t end well,” I advise savagely. “Tell her I said if she tries anything foul, she’ll need the lilies. You too. So will every single one of her people with the misfortune of being in the vicinity when she angers me. Afterward, I’ll level her whole, precious organization. I guarantee it’s a job I and my squad here can easily get done. So, make sure you impress on Edryssa it’s wisest to play nice.”
2
According to our intelligence-gathering, Lady Edryssa’s second goes by the name Bastien, he’s a close cousin, and he’s stood at Edryssa’s side for the eighteen years she’s steered the Cyphir Syndicate. Loyal Bastien sits across from me in his spacious, private transport, seething. I can tell he wants to murder me in the worst way, but at this point, who doesn’t? Half of Iludu is gunning for my head. Guess it’s a special charm I have.
I nod where Bastien’s applying pressure to his thigh with a square of medgauze. “The shots were clean. They missed your femoral artery and the gauze has regeneration salve. You can get over them now.”
He glowers at me more intensely. He doesn’t have time to say whatever insult he’s about to hurl my way because, finally, the transport is pulling up to our destination. He turns his full attention to the elegant townhouse I glimpse from the window. About three dozen armed guards are positioned outside its entrance. The transport comes to a stop in the circular driveway they’re fanned out around. The transport’s doors shoot up, and Bastien gingerly steps out first. He barks to the guards in Lusian that the arrived visitors are unfriendly. Then he moves out of the doorway and tells us unfriendly types that we can emerge.
The thirty-six guards line up on both sides of my team and march us single file to the townhome’s entrance.
“This seems like overkill.” Dannica, who is directly behind me, snorts.
Bastien, limping alongside us, shakes his head, not the least bit amused. “We both know it isn’t. In fact, it might be underkill given the info dispatched to my Comm Unit during our ride on exactly who you lot are.” He jerks said device her way. “Edryssa never agrees to a meeting blind. She’s done her homework, and you all are pain-in-the-ass Mareenians. Worse, you’re scumshit Praetorians. Well, ex-Praetorians, right?” The bastard winks at Dannica and me, a smug smile curving his lips, which he’s a nanosecond away from having carved off his face.
“Careful,” I warn him, soft and deadly. “Unless you want two maimed legs.”
Brave on the side of stupid now that he’s surrounded by a slew of hired guns at his beck and call, he shrugs and ignores the threat.
“The eight of you are currently wanted by your government for desertion and treason,” he blabbers on, telling us shit we already know. “That second crime relates to harboring her.” He stabs a finger at me, and now that he’s revealed he knows who I am, rakes me with a look that’s pure repugnance. But amid all the surge in bravado, he can’t quite conceal the terror that washes over him.
I serve him a third helping of my winning homicidal-bitch grin to keep him on his toes. In case there are vidcams transmitting live feed of the grounds to the Lady Edryssa, I flick the same unleashed look toward the house. I need this asshole and his boss to truly, deeply, intensely understand that I was dead serious before. If they try to fuck us over, or murder us, for our assault on Bastien and his fellow dons, they’re the ones who won’t be walking away from the scuffle.
