*** Swag Bag Giveaway ***
Giveaway Closed - Sharon is the Winner!
Thanks to all who left comments.
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.
+1 Comment
+1 Follow my blog
The last day to enter is
Monday, March 5th. Go for it!
It's baaack! The Mortal Path Swag Bag is making an appearance to let you know that the fourth book in the Mortal Path series is underway.
Mortal Path #4, Bloodletting, divides naturally into three parts. I'm thinking of serializing the e-book. My question is this: What do you readers think of it? Like it? Hate the idea? Let me know in a comment below. A random commenter will win the Mortal Path Swag Bag (tote bag, 3 signed Mortal Path paperbacks, pens, bookmarks, magnets, and a calculator - excluding Snickers). International entries welcome, but will receive a $35 Amazon Gift Card instead of the mailed bag. The last day to enter is Wednesday, March 5th.
