Deliverance Excerpt and Giveaway!

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A month from today, Deliverance: Mortal Path Book 3 will be released! I'm so excited, and I want to share an early review and an EXCLUSIVE sample from Chapter 1 just for Supernatural Underground readers. 

Don't miss the end of this post, because I have a great giveaway.

RT Book Reviews has this to say about the book:

"Readers might not know this is the third title in a series, so subtle Banks is at providing comprehensive background information. The story is wonderfully unpredictable, full of breathlessly exciting action scenes. With a little bit of mystery, a troupe of interesting characters not lacking for depth and a very satisfying ending, readers will be hooked till the very last page, and then will rush to pick up the others in the Mortal Path series."

Now straight to the excerpt, appearing here for the first time. (A few teensy words have been omitted to keep this from being an R-rated post.)

CHAPTER 1

 Maliha Crayne placed her feet carefully on the old clay-tiled roof. Freezing rain made the passage treacherous. Xietai, the man she was chasing, seemed as sure-footed as a gazelle. She had already sent a tile sliding to the street three stories below.

It was three in the morning, and although New York never sleeps, the residents of this neighborhood did. Most of them, anyway. As another tile clattered to the sidewalk, a window was flung open and a woman’s head appeared, her neck twisted to look up at the roof.

“What’s goin’ on up there? Think yer Santa Claus or somethin’? Get off my roof!”

             With flat roofs all around, he has to choose one with tiles. Should have gone around and picked up his trail on the other side. Maliha 0, Xietai 1.

Xietai had been in her sights twice before, and he’d eluded her. He ran a human trafficking ring, bringing Asian girls to America, and then sending American girls to Asia. Round-trip profits. Complicating matters was that Xietai was the son of one of Maliha’s dearest friends, Xia Yanmeng. Maliha planned to bring Xietai to justice, but with his record of confrontation, it was possible she’d have to kill him.

Kill Yanmeng’s son. Not sure how he’d feel about that, even though the two of them are estranged. If my daughter Constanta had survived her birth and grown up evil, would I be hunting her?

Maliha came to the end of the tiled roof and paused briefly. Xietai’s footprints led her on into the moonless night. Using her ability to view auras, she could see the outline of his footsteps and the tendrils of red and black twining together, rising from them. Normally she used her aura vision for a few seconds at a time, a quick check to see if someone was lying or to make sure she faced a truly evil person before plunging her sword into him. Constant viewing, as she was doing now to track Xietai, was draining. His aura footprints were clear, but her surroundings were a little out of focus. As long as Xietai kept out of her normal sight, he had an advantage.

Maliha felt a touch on her shoulder, as soft as if she’d been brushed by a bird’s wing. Yanmeng was a remote viewer, and he was signaling her that he was viewing her now. He’d been trying to increase his remote presence to the point that he could move objects. He’d made some progress but it was erratic. She could extend her arm and make an L-shape with her fingers, the sign they’d agreed upon for him to withdraw, and he would immediately stop remote viewing her. At least, she trusted that he would.

She didn’t make the withdrawal sign.

It’s his son. Yanmeng’s not going to like this, but it’s not right to hide it from him.

She swung over the edge of the roof, hung briefly by one hand, and dropped down to an adjacent flat roof. Landing with a forward roll to break the momentum of the fall, she put out a hand to avoid sliding on the patchy ice. She scraped the side of her hand raw on the rough roofing material. She wasn’t an accomplished traceuse—tracer—so her hands weren’t calloused. The man ahead of her was a highly skilled practitioner of parkour, a method of crossing obstacles in the most efficient way and the shortest time.

She ran barefoot, with loose black shorts, a black t-shirt, a belly bag with a few throwing stars secured inside so they couldn’t shift and hurt her, knives strapped to her thighs, with her thick black hair flowing behind her. It was late November, and an icy rain pelted her face and other exposed skin. Maliha wasn’t prepared for this pursuit, but when Xietai crossed her path, she had to try it.

Maliha jumped to a building a dozen feet away. She rolled, then ran and dropped to the fire escape.

Could he be Ageless?

Her bare feet landed lightly on the fire escape’s icy stairs, and at each landing, she vaulted the railing to the next run of stairs. She dropped the last ten feet to the ground. Thin red wisps spiraled eerily up from slushy puddle he’d passed through. She cleared the puddle in a small hop. Ahead a wall loomed. He’d taken her down a dead-end alley. Using the momentum of her run, she stepped up the brick wall to a balcony, used a spring from the rail to power another couple of steps, and then muscled up to the roof.

No good. Blind corner...

Anticipating a trap, Maliha threw one of her knives, then ducked and rolled as a sword swung powerfully where her neck should have been. She lashed out with her second knife, scored a deep gash in Xietai’s calf, and felt the splash of hot blood on her hand.

That should slow him down a little.

Xietai took off into the night, running away before she’d come fully out of her roll. She retrieved her thrown knife from where it had landed. Her opponent took them down to street level. She was gratified to see a blood trail in the pale cone of light from a street lamp.

He bleeds too much to be Ageless.

Then she spotted Xietai on the roof of a run-down theater, standing next to the marquee with its hundreds of broken bulbs. His aura was blacker than the night sky washed by city lights, and the spidery electric red web of his anger had intensified since she’d wounded him.

This is it.

One of them was going to die.

She sped toward an alley a few buildings away on the theater’s left, using a burst of superhuman speed, a remnant of the time she spent as an Ageless assassin beholden to the Sumerian demon Rabishu. When she was a demon’s slave, she could maintain that pace effortlessly. Now she would grow weaker as she used it and have to rest before speeding again.

Melting into the alley’s entrance, Maliha hoped that Xietai hadn’t seen her. At roof level, she paused to make sure her target hadn’t joined her there, and then found a secure observation point on the roof. Xietai was still there, with impatience starting to work on him. The pursuit had changed from a fast traverse to stealthy tracking, and she didn’t have to use her aura vision.

Finally, advantage: Maliha.

Maliha checked the rooftops for possible launching points. The only thing that caught her eye was a dilapidated billboard sign on the roof where he waited. She did the gap jump followed by a drop, her bare feet moving as silently as a sigh, taking her right to the base of the billboard. She climbed a few feet up the cross timbers of rotten wood.

Xietai had moved out onto the metal frame of the marquee, face down on one of the supports, peering around at the ground. He must have thought she was down there on the street. There was a sword fastened tightly across one shoulder blade, slanting toward the small of his bare, muscular back. From where she was, the scabbard looked bent, as though it conformed to his skin, something that would allow him flexibility for parkour.

Maliha had two throwing knives and three stars. She could plant five bladed weapons in his back before he had a chance to rise. She had her throwing knives in one hand and stars in the other when Xietai suddenly rotated onto his back.

Their eyes met. He pulled the sword from its scabbard and it came out in loose sections. A flick of his wrist brought the sections into alignment as a formidable sword, longer than its scabbard.

I want one of those.

He strode onto the roof. Maliha threw her three stars to distract him as she got down to roof level. She saw with dismay that he swatted away the stars with his sword, and had to remind herself that he wasn’t Ageless, just superbly trained. The cloth dripping with blood wrapped around his calf was proof he was mortal. If he was Ageless, blood would have stopped flowing from his wound and it would have healed by now, leaving no trace. She ran toward him faster than his human eyes could follow. Veering away just out of reach of his sword, she swung around him and slashed behind his knees, going for crippling blows. Neither knife connected.

He’d spun around and blocked them.

He heard the rush of the wind when I used Ageless speed. Can’t sneak up on him. I’m in deep trouble.

He began fighting with both the sword and a knife he’d pulled from somewhere. Soon Maliha’s bare legs and arms ran with blood.

Retreat? Master Liu says that humility is the best way to handle being overmatched. But not yet...

On her knees, Maliha saw a way for one of her knives to weave in close to the core of his body. Feinting with the other knife, she closed in. If he didn’t go for the feint, her head would be too close to his knife to think about.

*****

Poor Maliha! Caught up in a deadly fight with the son of one of her best friends, seriously underdressed, running barefoot on icy tiles and stairs, and suffering from sword envy too. There are plenty of dilemmas for Maliha to face in the rest of this book; this is only the start of a story that tests her friendships, her love, and her deeply held morals.

I'm giving away a Swag Bag consisting of a zippered tote bag, three signed books, pens, bookmarks, magnets, and a calculator. Don't ask me why; I just love calculators. All my giveaways are international.

To enter, please leave a comment below that includes your disguised email such as "dakota" -at- "dakota-banks" dot "com" so I can get in touch with you if you are the winner. You can double your chance of winning by following my blog.
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The last day to enter is Monday, March 5th. Go for it!