Deliverance

Deliverance

Mortal Path Book Three

Dakota Banks

Dedication

To someone who’s always there

for me, through joy and heartache:

my husband Dennis.

Love you, sweetie.

Epigraph

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

Death in the Afternoon

Contents

Author’s Note

Deliverance
, the third adventure of Maliha Crayne and her friends, is an intensely personal book, digging into Maliha’s mind and her relationships with her friends and lovers (past and present). She realizes she’s not an independent force anymore, and has to open the door further to allow for her friends’ participation in her life. You’ll find that this book offers the same rich experience of action, paranormal elements, and drama as the previous two books, in addition to Maliha’s growth in relationships and personal understanding. Maliha’s caught in moral dilemmas at nearly every turn as she is forced to challenge long-standing ways in which she thinks and operates. She must adapt or die. Writing the book was an emotionally draining experience for both Maliha and for me.

Visit me at www.dakota-banks.com for more information about the Mortal Path series, including its mythological background. Send me an email via the website, and you’ll get a prompt, personal reply. I’d love to hear from you!

D. B.

Chapter One

M
aliha 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 six 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 goddamn Santa Claus or somethin’? Get the fuck 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 aural 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 aural 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 where 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 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, and 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 handful of steps, and reached the next balcony. Eight balconies later, she 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 streetlamp.

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, facedown 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 weapon, 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 shit.

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.

She felt her knife strike in his gut, twisted it, and shoved it upward as far as she could.

She caught a glimpse of metal as his knife descended, aimed to slip between two vertebrae in her neck and sever her spinal cord. With the power of his evil and anger behind it, she knew she would suffer a mortal wound.

Instead of striking her neck, the blade’s angle changed a little.

Yanmeng!

He must have exerted all of the new force he’d been working on to give the knife a shove and save her from a fatal blow. She managed to slip away from the continuing path of the blade, but not before it ripped across her back, dragging its cutting edge, and peeling back her shirt, skin, and flesh.

Xietai slumped to his knees, and she saw him wide-eyed and slack-jawed, surprised at being stabbed. She yanked her knife from just below his sternum and gave him a shove. He fell heavily to the rooftop. Immediately she straddled him and severed his spinal cord for a quick death.

Maliha took a deep breath and savored her victory. She picked up Xietai’s sword, which was unresponsive in her hands. She couldn’t get it to collapse to the way she’d seen it hugging his back. Satisfied that the weapon died with its owner, she left the hilt cradled in his hand. She did take his knife, though, the one that had inflicted the painful tear on her back. Handling it reminded her that Yanmeng had faced a terrible decision—loyalty to her or to his own flesh and blood.

Maliha used her ragged T-shirt and torn bra to bind her back wound. It left her in only a band of cloth across her breasts, black shorts and an empty belly bag, but that would have to do. The chase had taken her far away from her hotel, into an area where cabs weren’t swarming the streets, especially in the middle of the night. She would have to make it back on foot, keeping out of sight.

She took a few steps experimentally. With her wound bound, she wasn’t losing much blood. Her back hurt like hell, but her feet were steady enough. She could do it, especially knowing that her wound would cease to bleed along the way.

She thought about calling her editor, Jefferson Leewood, who knew her only as the fabulously successful novelist named Marsha Winters. She’d stopped in New York for a meeting with him yesterday, a meeting that now seemed far away in time and place.

Jeff’s nice, but he’d insist on picking me up himself, and then he’d freak out when he got a look at me. He’s better off with his last view of me leaving his office, looking like a bankable author.

On the sidewalk in front of the theater, Maliha gasped and staggered back against the brick wall. She slid down the wall, scraping her already torn back against the bricks, but barely noticed the pain.