shaede assassin 05 - shadows at midnight

• COPYRIGHT
  
• CHAPTER ONE
  
• CHAPTER TWO
  
• CHAPTER THREE
  
• CHAPTER FOUR
  
• CHAPTER FIVE
  
• CHAPTER SIX
  
• CHAPTER SEVEN
  
• CHAPTER EIGHT
  
• CHAPTER NINE
  
• CHAPTER TEN
  
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
  
• CHAPTER TWELVE
  
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  
• CHAPTER NINETEEN
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
• DISCOVER AMANDA BONILLA
  
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  

Shadows at Midnight

A Shaede Assassin Novel (#5)

Amanda Bonilla

COPYRIGHT

This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Shadows at Midnight

Copyright © 2015 by Amanda Bonilla

Ebook ISBN: 9781943772070

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

350 7
^th
Avenue, Suite 2003, NY 10001, New York.

http://www.nyliterary.com

CHAPTER ONE

“What do you think happens when you die?”

“What do the immortal care about death, Darian?” Tyler asked in a teasing tone. “Don’t tell me you’re developing a conscience?”

We waited in the cover of darkness for the mark to appear. I usually worked alone but Tyler had tagged along tonight. This job had to be done by the book and Tyler was twitchier than usual. Maybe it was the morbid turn of conversation that got to him. More and more I’d begun to think of myself apart from humanity. Midnight coursed through my veins. I was made of shadow and smoke. Beyond human. Above human.

Shaede.

Humans were fragile. Not meant to withstand the passage and ravages of time. Easy to break as I well knew. I’d broken enough of them over the past several decades. Tyler was one of them. Fallible. Breakable. Finite. His life would be a blink in comparison to mine. Which was why I couldn’t allow myself to feel anything for him. Whether he knew my secrets or not, any further intimacy between us was a bad,
bad
idea.

“What if I told you I knew all of the answers? What if could lay the heavens and earth out for your inspection? Would you go out with me then? If I gave the universe and all of its mysteries to you, would you have dinner with me?”

A corner of my mouth quirked but I refused to give in to my amusement. Tyler could make me smile with such ease. The simplicity of it scared the shit out of me. He said something witty or flirty, and I lit up like a goddamned tree at Christmas.
Pathetic.

I supposed there were parts of my humanity that remained. Some of those parts tingled in a very annoying—though not unpleasant—way every time Tyler was near. My body seemed to be fine-tuned to him and it perked up like a chipper little puppy whenever I was within a few feet of him. Too bad I didn’t mix business with pleasure.

“You didn’t say no,” Ty remarked with a wry quirk of his lips. “Does that mean you’re considering my offer?”

“Sure,” I replied as dry as he was charming. “Lay the universe bare, show me all of its secrets, and I’ll go do dinner with you.”

His answering smile didn’t reach his beautiful hazel eyes. “Will you wear a dress?”

I leveled my gaze. “Absolutely not.”

“Damn.” He gave a sad shake of his head. “I almost thought I had you. Guess I’ll have to keep the mysteries of the universe to myself for a while longer.”

He
almost
thought he had me? I was beginning to think he’d had me from the moment we met.

“He’s coming.”

One thing about Tyler, he knew when to cut the charm and get down to business. He brought the sniper rifle up so that he could look through the [night-vision] scope. “And he’s not alone.
Shit.”

I’m not sure what he expected. A human trafficker with the sort of ruthless reputation that Julio DeSilva had wasn’t about to go anywhere without an armed entourage. Hell, I would’ve been surprised if the sonofabitch didn’t visit the toilet without at least one armed guard.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Ty in the same teasing tone he’d used with me. “Scared?”

He lowered the rifle and gave me a sidelong glance. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” I scoffed. “Like you said, I’m immortal. A piece of shit flesh peddler doesn’t scare me.”

His lips thinned and he let out a slow breath. More and more I got the impression that my cocky attitude got on Ty’s nerves. Or more to the point, it worried him. I didn’t expect him to understand. Not DeSilva or any of his tattooed goons could hurt me.

“I wish you were scared of something,” he said after a moment. “Anything. My life would be a hell of a lot easier if you were.”

Ty was always saying cryptic shit that never made much sense. He groused because I didn’t share in his worry over this particular job. DeSilva had been selling young girls on the black market for years. No one, not even a covert military op, had been able to stop him. Ty said he couldn’t tell me who’d hired him to take DeSilva out, but I suspected it was one government agency or another. The dude was bad news and the word was that he was thinking of expanding his business to the arms trade.

Not if I had anything to do with it. The bastard was going to die before he had the opportunity to hurt one more person. I reached behind me and caressed the hilt of the saber sheathed at my back before resting my palms on the grips of the daggers at my hips. I never used guns, and though Ty thought the sniper rifle would get the job done quickly and effectively, I knew better. This was going to get up close and personal. DeSilva wasn’t going to die from a bullet to his forehead. The bastard was going to fall under my blade. I took a step forward and Ty’s arm shot out in front of me.

“Darian, wait.”

Wait?
“Shouldn’t you be pulling the trigger right about now?” He could easily take out DeSilva’s security while I moved in on our mark. This was exactly why I preferred working alone. I didn’t fuck around. I got the job done.

“Wait.”

Ty’s tone brooked no argument. And since he was the one who signed my paychecks, I supposed I should do what he asked me to. I kept my eyes glued to DeSilva, watching for any signs of what gave Ty pause. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him. He looked like every other evil bastard I’d killed over the years. Maybe a little better looking with his midnight hair, bronze skin, and equally dark eyes.

He’d brought along plenty of muscle. Four tattooed guys flanked him and another two took up positions at his front and back. Ty could easily take three out on his own. The rest of them would be easy for me to handle with the distraction.

Nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at me as DeSilva and his crew stepped into the alley at the back of the club. I glanced at Ty from the corner of my eye only to find that he wasn’t watching DeSilva at all. His attention seemed to be focused solely on me. What in the hell was up with him tonight?

“I can’t watch your back all the time.” I would have laughed if not for the seriousness of his tone. Tyler was human after all and I think we’d established that my immortal state made me pretty hard to kill. “There might be a time when you need me and I won’t be there.” DeSilva headed toward his Escalade and I gripped my daggers tighter. If Ty didn’t spit it out, we’d lose him. “If you need me—for anything—I need you to know that I’m with you even when I’m not.”

Um, cryptic much? What did any of this have to do with DeSilva? “Okay, sure. Thanks, Ty.” I took another step forward and this time Tyler grabbed my wrist.

“Darian, look at me.” I let out a huff of breath and turned to face him. A rush of adrenaline shot through my system as his gaze drilled straight into me. “I need to know that you understand me.”

“Yeah. Okay. I understand.” Seriously, what had gotten into him? “If I need you, I’ll use the force to reach out to you.”

He let out a frustrated breath and his expression fell. His gaze dropped to my left and settled on my hand. “Immortal doesn’t mean unkillable,” he said, low. “Supernatural doesn’t equal untouchable. Don’t let your ego get the better of you.”

I killed people for a living. My cocky attitude and ninety-nine percent success rate was what my reputation had been built on. As for my immortality…Tyler’s human brain had a hard time wrapping itself around my infallibility. I was the last of my kind and indestructible. That kind of loneliness and disconnect bred some pretty goddamned reckless behavior. He worried about me in the way that one human worried about another. I hadn’t felt those sorts of tender emotions for too many years to count.

“Don’t worry Ty,” I said with a wink. “I’ll be a pain in your ass for a few more years to come.”

He gave me a sad smile. “Probably for more years than even you think, Darian.”

Something indecipherable passed over his expression, too quickly for me to get a grasp of his emotions. His smile broadened until it reached his eyes. He brought the sniper rifle up and looked through the scope. “Get ready.”

My body melted into shadow and one of DeSilva’s guys felt the steel of my blade before Ty’s first bullet struck. Maybe we weren’t such a bad team after all.

#

Ice cold water splashed over me and I woke with a start. Darkness surrounded me. The smell of musty earth penetrated my nostrils and the grit of dirt and gravel clung to my skin. Heat enveloped me as I tried to leave my corporeal form behind, only to find that I’d been trapped within my own skin. Even with my supernatural sight, I couldn’t see through the inky black but my ears worked just fine. The sound of someone breathing a few feet away put me on alert and I scrambled away until my back met a cold, hard wall. Stone.

“I really am sorry, Darian. We could’ve torn up the town.”

“Lorik.” God, I was so groggy I could barely speak. My tongue felt like it was ten times its normal size. I rubbed at one wrist, and then the other. They burned like a sonofabitch. “You lying, cheating, betraying piece of shit. Where am I? What did you do to me?”

The Rakshasa Queen wants you, Darian. You have to pay for murdering her son
. Lorik’s last words to me in my apartment came rushing back and realization dawned.

“They don’t forgive, Darian,” Lorik said darkly. “And they never forget. She would have hunted you over the course of millennia and to the ends of the earth if she had to. By owning my soul, she only managed to bump the time table up.”

Padma. Anyone who knew how to push Xander’s buttons was usually all right in my book but I knew enough about Azriel’s mother to infuse me with a healthy dose of fear. I wasn’t even surprised that Lorik had screwed me over in order to save his own skin. I’d turned a blind eye to his self-serving nature and let him slide when I should have been more on my toes. That fell on me, though. I guess I had no one to blame for my current predicament but myself.