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The Shadows and Sorcery Collection
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The Shadows and Sorcery Collection
Heather Marie Adkins
Contents
SHADOW TOUCHED
Shadow Touched
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
DEMON’S ENVY
Demon’s Envy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
FORGOTTEN
Forgotten
About Othala
1. Dajia
2. Dajia
3. Dajia
4. Eli
5. Eli
6. Eli
7. Dajia
8. Dajia
9. Dajia
10. Eli
11. Eli
12. Eli
13. Eli
14. Dajia
15. Dajia
16. Eli
17. Eli
18. Dajia
19. Dajia
20. Dajia
21. Eli
22. Dajia
23. Dajia
24. Dajia
25. Eli
26. Dajia
27. Dajia
28. Eli
29. Eli
30. Dajia
Epilogue
Shadows & Sorcery
About the Author
SHADOW TOUCHED
Shadow Touched
One by one, Senka Hollow residents are falling to the shadows.
Agent Maurelle Nez was hand-picked by the Reina to track down the worst of the shadow touched and bring them in - dead or alive - and she's good at her job. So good the shadow touched call her "Reaper." Relle isn't afraid to get her hands dirty in the name of the Hollow and the sleeping princess she adores.
But all is not well in Senka Hollow - Senka's power is fading. When someone close to Relle is murdered, an underground infection is exposed: the council is failing, and more than one person in charge has been shadow-touched.
Then Senka rises and death comes to the Hollow.
Seemingly unaffected by the darkness embodied in Senka, Relle must find a way to restore the princess before she destroys the entire population. Her journey will take her deep into her Navajo heritage and make her question everything she knows about being shadow touched.
Fans of Kim Harrison and Divergent won't want to miss this harsh dystopian with faeries and magick that barrels into a breathless, beautiful conclusion.
SHADOW TOUCHED
Copyright © 2017 by Heather Marie Adkins
Published by CyberWitch Press, LLC
Paoli, IN
cyberwitchpress.com
[email protected]
Published November 2017
All rights reserved.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
In layman’s terms: Don’t be a jerk. Writing and publishing is the author’s career. Support their art by buying their books at their very affordable prices. Don’t steal the author’s blood, sweat, and tears for free from a pirate site. If you did, then go back and buy a book from this author. Legally.
Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional. The author humbly begs your pardon. This is fiction, people.
Author Photograph © 2011 Meagan White | White Photography
Cover art by Bewitching Book Covers by Rebecca Frank
Interior Book Design by CyberWitch Press
Created with Vellum
For Shana R.
The woman behind the legend, who embodies perseverance and honesty like nobody else.
1
Robert Frost once wrote something about two roads and taking the one less traveled. Pretty words and a pretty idea, but not a good choice for most people nowadays.
In Senka Hollow, the road less traveled usually ended in death.
On my Ducati, winding through the city with the engine alive between my legs, I traveled my own throughways. There were so many safe roads through the Hollow; roads beaten and worn by those who chose the easy route. The protected route. They stayed on the highways picked for them by the people in charge. Approved highways maintained the well-being of the Hollow, of course.
Approved. Fuck the rules.
I turned down Mackie and coasted south toward the old reservation, my long black hair a flowing mass behind me. I drifted beneath the overpass and imagined the echoing thrum of cars overhead to be the heartbeat of the city. All those good people of Senka Hollow, traveling only the roads of which the Rein and Reina approved. The aged asphalt so lovingly maintained this close to city center fell into wreck and ruin the further one drifted from the Core.
The interstate ramp passed like a ghost. I ignored it and whipped onto Old Reservation Road, kicking my speed up a notch with a heavy black boot as I headed away from ‘safe’ and into the wild.
The road less traveled, I thought, but this road was well traveled.
By me.
I knew every pothole. I knew where the road cracked and buckled and faded into the weeds like a memory of itself. I maneuvered my bike around obstacles as if none existed. Other fae considered this road dangerous—a highway to the outskirts, where the darkest of humanity dwelled, planning to destroy us. Maybe I had a hard time correlating the Old Reservation with danger—it’s where I grew up, after all. And where my tribe still resided: a part of the Hollow, but barely, where my people attempted to maintain a lifestyle I’d given up on long ago.
But I wasn’t headed to the Res. I said a silent hello as I flew past the turn-off; if I stopped, I’d lose even more daylight than I had already. Plus, my mother would spend fifteen minutes lecturing me on my ch
oice of career, and I didn’t have time for her opinions. I’d promised my brother I’d bring home dinner.
The further I traveled from the Hollow, the drier the air became. The asphalt crumbled to dust and my tires thumped onto cracked, dry dirt. We weren’t much for plants in the desert, but even the cacti died out here, this far from Rasha’s daughter and the protection she offered us.
Faltering protection. Thirty years ago, the Hollow had stretched this far and then some. Now, Acura's negative energy felt way too close to home. Senka’s good energy was fading, allowing the darkness in. The Reins, our leaders, had no answers.
I cut the engine and coasted to a stop. The familiar rock cliff jutted from the landscape ahead: a rusty, broken mesa that rose from the desert floor as if from the gaping maw of a giant. The shadow-touched made camp near the mesa, using the abandoned cliff dwellings as lodging. For the most part, they caused little problem for the Hollow. Most of them never ventured even a mile within the city in the short time it took for the darkness to swallow them. So the Rein and Reina left them alone.
Sometimes, however, the shadow-touched did come too close. One wrong move, and they were marked for a visit by someone like me.
I dismounted and checked my gun. The Taurus lived in a thigh holster within easy reach of my left hand. My machete rested in a sleek sheath along my back, though I rarely had need of the knife when I had the firepower.
Hopefully, neither would have reason to be un-holstered during this apprehension.
My track record suggested otherwise, however. The downside of being the Reina’s most trusted hunter—unafraid to get her hands dirty in the name of the Hollow.
The late-October sun had already begun to set. I was hell on timing; it was gonna get real cold, real quick now. Already, I could see the fires being stoked near the mesa. The shadow-touched would be lighting joints and taking pulls from aged bottles of Jack Daniels to prepare for another chilly night in the desert.
Other than smoke a lot, drink a lot, and fuck everybody around, I had no idea what these losers did with their time. They were lucky the Reina’s compassion extended this far.
I keyed up the screen on my Comwatch and glanced over the picture of Georgina Lewis one more time. Petite, pretty, honey-blonde hair, and sapphire eyes. She was light to my dark; funny, considering she was the one shadow-touched.
I killed the screen and approached the mesa.
It didn’t take me long to spot Georgie, her golden hair glowing by the fire inside an open barrel. She clutched a bottle of clear liquid in one hand, her eyes closed as she swayed to someone’s gentle guitar melody. She sat with two other equally pretty girls, and it baffled me to see them there: so clean, so healthy, so vibrant. They’d only just arrived, I’d bet. The shadows hadn’t had a chance yet to take them completely.
They would, though. The darkness always won.
Lucky for me, the crowd was thin—maybe due to the cold, maybe due to the influx of misbehaving shadow-touched and an equal influx of apprehensions from my team. I tried to not think of the people I’d handed over for execution, or the people I’d willingly executed with my own weapons.
Life is different on this side of time in the Hollow, I reminded myself.
I stepped into the warmth coming from the fire and remained silent for a long moment, watching Georgie sway. When she finally opened her bloodshot eyes, I stood less than two feet away, a hand resting benignly on my gun.
“Georgina Lewis?” I asked in the voice my twin brother had dubbed Executioner. “My name is Maurelle Nez. I’m an agent with the Senka Enforcement Bureau. Can we speak privately?”
Georgie’s two companions went still beside her, their eyes wide as saucers.
For a brief moment, I thought Georgie would relent. I thought I saw resignation in her pretty gaze. Thank Senka, no fight this time. No fleeing. No unnecessary bloodshed.
And then the bitch threw the bottle at my face.
Senka-damned preternatural reflexes, and the heavy glass still swiped me. Sharp pain exploded in my temple as the bottle flew past; sour-smelling alcohol splashed over my shirt and jeans.
Even as the pain registered, I reached for my gun again.
Georgie took off.
“Georgie, no!” one of her companions screamed, her slurred voice an inhuman cry in the night.
“Interfere and sign your own death warrants,” I snarled, then followed after my fugitive.
For all her bravery—or her foolishness—in attempting to get away, Georgie turned out to be dumb as a box of rocks. Instead of sprinting for the desert and a wide-open space to run, she darted into an open door in the cliff dwellings.
I’d already concluded she was new to the camp, and my gut didn’t usually steer me wrong. Which meant inside the pueblo, I’d have the advantage: I’d explored this system of interlocking cave dwellings throughout my childhood, before the range of Senka’s protection began to fail and it became off-limits. The place dead-ended. I supposed if she knew she couldn’t outrun a cop, maybe she thought she could hide, instead.
Please. I’m not saying I was perfect, but I wasn’t human, either.
I followed her into the caves. My boots thudded heavily on the packed-dirt floors, punctuated by the stumbling-scuffle of her half-drunk sneakers ahead of me.
We bolted through rooms lit by candles, and then through rooms so dark I couldn’t see my hands in front of me. The passage of light followed by dark was disorienting—and if it faltered my steps, it would cause Georgie to slip up eventually.
She dashed into a long, rectangular hut of cavernous black doors, and I knew the jig was up. This was the longhouse at the back of the caves; the old meeting room of an ancient tribe that had died off long before my own arrived. And it backed up to the mesa wall.
Dead end.
She couldn’t go any further. And she couldn’t get out without going around me.
Never gonna happen.
Nobody resided in this cavern. If there were an area most likely to be haunted, my bet would be on this one. Even beyond ghosts, emotions could seep into the rock and give a place an eerie feeling.
I couldn’t feel anything amiss, but magick coursed through my veins, as sure as my Navajo blood.
The darkness hung thick here, away from the candles illuminating the lived-in areas of the pueblo.
So I called up my fae sight.
Light spilled from the walls around me, casting a bluish tinge over the longhouse. Fae sight could pull ambient energy from any material to create a dim light that allowed me to see in the dark. It was a handy trick, though it had its faults—namely that the smallest amount of manufactured light could fuck it up.
Georgie flared to view ahead of me, her skin overlaid by the same blue hue. Beneath the veil of light, shadows roamed like viscous oil over her skin. Acura’s shadows.
Georgie didn’t have my capabilities. She stood with her hands against the back wall, her shoulders heaving.
Blind and defeated.
“You’re under arrest for the assault of an untouched fae,” I said. “Come willingly, and you’ll live another day.”
When she spoke, her voice was sweet, girlish, and laced with tears. “I’ll live one more day only to die tomorrow.”
“You chose this life by spending time in the Rim. You could have been having bake sales at the teen center or some shit.”
“I didn’t choose to be shadow touched!” Her shriek echoed off the stone walls.
I shrugged. “Actions speak louder than words. If you'd stayed safe in the Core where good little girls belong, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You won't find sympathy with me.”
“Of course I won’t. You’re a goddamned hound of the Reina!” she snapped.
I battled my temper. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to kill this girl. I didn’t want another human’s blood on my hands. But I didn’t take kindly to being compared to a dog doing its master’s bidding.
I strode forward and gripped her arm, ready
to manhandle her if necessary. I’d promised my favorite twin brother dinner, and Georgie Lewis was wasting my fucking time.
She lashed out with an almost comical battle-cry. Her nails raked my face and neck, trailing fire over my skin. Her bulk—what little there was of her—rammed me in a feeble attempt to take me down.
Muscle is a tough thing to bring down, unfortunately, and my body wasn’t short on that. I used her own momentum against her and whirled her face-first onto the floor. I knelt on her lower back and wrenched her arms behind her body, securing her wrists with the flexi-cuffs that would transport her to Headquarters.