Blood Trade: A Jane Yellowrock Novel Read online

  Praise for the

  Jane Yellowrock Novels

  Death’s Rival

  “A wild, danger-filled adventure. The world building includes a perfect blend of seductive romance, nail-biting action, intriguing characters, and betrayal from all sides. Well-plotted and fast-paced, this book contains a satisfying arc of development for our heroine, culminating in two very different conflicts: one that threatens her life and one that threatens her soul.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Death’s Rival, the spectacular fifth installment in the superb Jane Yellowrock series, delivers on every level. . . . Each chapter in this engrossing and addictive series reveals another facet of Jane’s character as the layers of her past get peeled back. . . . Death’s Rival demonstrates once again Hunter’s grasp of what makes urban fantasy special as a genre—the effective and tactile blending of elements, which she serves up in a smoothly flowing narrative style that never misses a beat.”

  —Bitten by Books

  “Death’s Rival is a thrilling mystery with epic action scenes and a kick-ass heroine with claws and fangs.”

  —All Things Urban Fantasy

  “Hunter has done it again, delivering a thrilling combination of mystery and romance that will delight her fans.”

  —SF Site

  Raven Cursed

  “Faith Hunter has outdone herself in Raven Cursed . . . rife with snarky dialogue, vivid descriptions, and enough hairpin turns to keep a fantastic driver busy. . . . A lot of series seek to emulate Hunter’s work, but few come close to capturing the essence of urban fantasy: the perfect blend of intriguing heroine, suspense, [and] fantasy with just enough romance.”

  —SF Site

  “Hunter doesn’t disappoint. . . . Raven Cursed is the natural result of the previous three volumes while still working well as a stand-alone book. Still, I say you can’t get enough of one of my favorite kick-ass heroines, so if you are new to the series, give yourself the gift of books one through three. You won’t regret it.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A super thriller. . . . Fast-paced, Raven Cursed is an exhilarating paranormal whodunit with several thriller spins.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  Mercy Blade

  “Fans of Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock novels will gobble down Mercy Blade, the third installment in this series, which has all the complexity, twists, and surprises readers have come to expect . . . a thrill ride from start to finish. . . . Hunter has an amazing talent for capturing mood.”

  —SF Site

  “There was something about the Jane Yellowrock series that drew me in from the very beginning. That hunch was solidified with each book I read into a feeling of utter confidence in the author. . . . Mercy Blade is top-notch, a five-star book!”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “I was delighted to have the opportunity to read another Jane Yellowrock adventure. I was not disappointed, but was somewhat overwhelmed by the obvious growth in Faith Hunter’s writing skill.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  “A thrilling novel. . . . Fans of suspenseful tales filled with vampires, weres, and more will enjoy this book. Jane is a strong heroine who knows how to take charge of a situation, and kick butt if necessary.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Faith Hunter has created one of my favorite characters ever. Jane Yellowrock is full of contradictions. . . . As with the other books in the series, good and evil are far from clear-cut, with sympathetic villains and many fascinating characters with shades of gray. Highly recommended.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Blood Cross

  “Mystery and action are at the forefront here, but the romance from the first book continues to build slowly. Readers eager for the next book in Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series may want to give Faith Hunter a try.”

  —Library Journal

  “In a genre flooded with strong, sexy females, Jane Yellowrock is unique. . . . Her bold first-person narrative shows that she’s one tough cookie, but with a likable vulnerability . . . a pulse-pounding, page-turning adventure.”

  —Romantic Times

  Skinwalker

  “Seriously. Best urban fantasy I’ve read in years, possibly ever.”

  —C. E. Murphy, author of Truthseeker

  “A fantastic start to the Jane Yellowrock series. Mixing fantasy with a strong mystery story line and a touch of romance, it ticks all the right urban fantasy boxes.”

  —LoveVampires

  “Stunning . . . plot and descriptions so vivid, they might as well be pictures or videos. Hunter captures the reader’s attention from the first page and doesn’t let go.”

  —SF Site

  “A fabulous tale with a heroine who clearly has the strength to stand on her own . . . a wonderfully detailed and fast-moving adventure that fills the pages with murder, mystery, and fascinating characters.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “A promising new series with a strong heroine. . . . Jane is smart, quick, witty, and I look forward to reading more about her as she discovers more about herself.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  More Praise for the Novels of Faith Hunter

  “With fast-paced action and the possibility of more romance, this is an enjoyable read with an alluring magical touch.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “The world [Hunter] has created is unique and bleak . . . [an] exciting science fiction thriller.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Entertaining . . . outstanding supporting characters. . . . The strong cliff-hanger of an ending bodes well for future adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Hunter’s distinctive future vision offers a fresh though dark glimpse into a newly made postapocalyptic world. Bold and imaginative in approach, with appealing characters and a suspense-filled story, this belongs in most fantasy collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “It’s a pleasure to read this engaging tale about characters connected by strong bonds of friendship and family. Mixes romance, high fantasy, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic adventure to good effect.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Hunter’s very professionally executed, tasty blend of dark fantasy, mystery, and romance should please fans of all three genres.”

  —Booklist

  ALSO BY FAITH HUNTER

  The Jane Yellowrock Novels

  Skinwalker

  Blood Cross

  Mercy Blade

  Cat Tales (a short-story compilation)

  Raven Cursed

  Have Stakes Will Travel (a short-story compilation)

  Death’s Rival

  The Rogue Mage Novels

  Bloodring

  Seraphs

  Host

  BLOOD TRADE

  A Jane Yellowrock Novel

  Faith Hunter

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Faith Hunter, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN 978-1-101-60762-6

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Faith Hunter

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments and Note

  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

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Bloodring

  About the Author

  To the Hubby, my Renaissance Man,

  for all the everyday declarations of love. And for the new shelves and cabinets in my writing room. Squeee!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTE

  I want to thank my fans. You have made this series a success. I adore each and every one of you! Next time you eat a piece of really good chocolate, think of me!

  A huge thank-you to Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency for her comments and suggestions. Blood Trade is much better because of her. And my fantasy career—well . . . I wouldn’t have one but for her.

  A huge, HUGE thank-you to Jessica Wade, my editor at Roc. This book survived only because of her magical hand, amazing talents, and inexhaustible patience. I need to buy you a tiara.

  And a special thanks to Mike Prater for helping me with weapons info. Fewer errors took place in this novel because of you. (And all errors are mine!)

  Note to readers:

  I often change places, things, and people in my books from the reality, and I am not just talking about making magic or skinwalkers real. Sometimes it’s more subtle, like changing street names for my convenience or the layout of a police station to protect our men in blue. And sometimes I change history.

  In Blood Trade I changed Under the Hill. If you go to Natchez today, Under the Hill looks nothing like the place I have imagined. It’s Under the Hill as I want it to be, if the witches had been able to hold the earth secure during the huge earthquake of 1811–1812. But hey—it’s fiction.

  The church I described on Jefferson Street is wholly from my imagination.

  Enjoy reading.

  Faith

  CHAPTER 1

  Been There, Shot the Place Up

  I threw my leg over Bitsa and slammed my weight down on the kick start. The engine fired up with the rumble only a Harley can boast. It should have made me feel better, that lovely roar, but it didn’t. I was too ticked off. Or something. I wasn’t big on introspection or self-analysis; I just knew I wasn’t happy and hadn’t been in weeks. It had started back at Christmas and New Year’s, which I’d spent alone. Well, as alone as a girl can be living with two men.

  Previously, my new roommates—the Younger brothers—and I had spent days training, learning how to work together, wisecracking, and picking on one another. More recently, they had proven themselves good about giving me space and letting me hide in my room. My black mood had started when the Kid, the younger Younger, demanded a Christmas tree and gift giving. I have no idea why. But I’d been impossible to live with for weeks and I knew it.

  Stretching back, I locked the gate blocking the narrow drive of my freebie house in New Orleans and took off into the dawn. It was chilly and damp, gray and miserable. Winter, Deep South style, suited my mood. I’d never been the emotional type—no weepy Wilma, not whiny, teary-eyed, depressed . . .

  My inner self stilled, the wind buffeting me as I leaned over Bitsa and gunned the engine, heading out of the French Quarter. Smelling the now-familiar scents of Cajun food and water-water-everywhere. Thinking about that word—depressed.

  Crap. I’d never been depressed before, but I was now. Classic case of it. Lack of interest in much of anything, sleeping too much or unable to sleep at all. Not eating enough or binging on protein. Staying in my room with the door closed, lying on the bed, staring at the overhead fan. Not shifting into my Beast-form to hunt in months had to be contributing to it. Not dealing with Beast’s little problem.

  I’m a skinwalker, a shape-changer, sharing my physical form—and physical forms—with the soul of a mountain lion I’d accidently pulled into myself when I was five years old and fighting for my life. And Beast’s current little problem was a good reason not to shift, though it left her feeling ticked off, and a ticked-off big-cat isn’t a pretty thing.

  The only thing I had been doing was riding my bike through bayou country all alone, sightseeing, trying to see how far away from New Orleans I could get before that Beastly problem made distance difficult. Or impossible. And I’d been working out, lifting weights. A lot of weights. I had put on twenty pounds of pure muscle. When I finally shifted into Beast again, she was going to have to accommodate the extra poundage. Somehow.

  “I’m depressed,” I murmured into the wind, trying the words on for size. Yeah. Depressed. I felt a shadow lift off me just admitting it to myself.

  I knew why I was depressed. I’d screwed up so bad, so often, in the past year that I’d lost friends, lovers, and, well, that was enough. Wasn’t it? Now that I knew what was wrong, I could do something about it. If I could figure out what to do. This moodiness was uncharted territory.

  Letting that thought simmer on the back burner of my mind, I wended my way through the city, heading uptown, which meant upriver, as everything in New Orleans was about the Mississippi River—uptown was upstream; downtown was downstream (something new I’d learned about the city that was my temporary home). I needed to cross the river, and though I could have taken the newer Crescent City Connection, part of I-90, I took the older, narrow, dangerous, two-lane hell of the Huey P. Long Bridge. I liked the old bridge, maybe because it was so dangerous; it had character, like an old noir film, a bridge leading out of the Land of Shangri-la.

  On the other side of the Mississippi, I headed through Westwego and then vaguely west, like the town’s name suggested. Unsurprisingly, I found myself headed to Aggie One Feather’s place, adjacent to the John Lafitte Preserve, a wilderness area where the Cherokee elder who was my personal shaman—and probably my personal counselor too, now that I knew my emotional state—lived. But I could tell that she was still out of town. No car in the drive, shades pulled, no smell on the still air of coffee or bacon cooking, and the sweathouse out back had no smoke seeping from the chimney.

  I slowed to a stop and set my boot soles on the shell-based asphalt, thinking about going into the sweathouse by myself, but I’d had some difficult experiences going it alone in there and wasn’t ready to try that again, even with the depression to motivate me. Even though I had some really heavy stuff to deal with. And so did my Beast.

  I thought about the mountain lion soul who lived inside me, but she was still asleep, curled into a tight ball, her nose under her long, thick tail. She had been sleeping a lot lately, angry because I wasn’t letting her out to hunt—be
cause I was afraid she’d do something stupid, like track down the vampire Master of the City, roll over and show him her belly, and then lick his feet. My fear was caused by a silver chain that no one but Beast and I could see. It was in the place in my mind that Aggie One Feather called my soul home, and the chain was some kind of binding that curled from Beast’s leg across the floor to a shadow in the corner of my mind, a shadow that was Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans and the entire Southeast USA, with the exception of Florida. Leo was the biggest, baddest fanghead I’d ever met. He was also my boss, for now, because I couldn’t actually get away, or not for long, and Leo knew nothing about the magical binding that kept me in New Orleans, because it had been accidental. I was not about to let the MOC discover how deeply I was tied to him. The vamp was like the left hand of the devil and would use and abuse the binding to get his way in everything. Ev-ery-thing. Like me in his bed and as his dinner, and I’d stake him before I let that happen—and suffer the consequences. Heck, I’d stake myself before I let that happen. Yeah. I had lots to be depressed about. Beast’s little problem was at the top of my list.

  My cell jangled out a reggae dance number and buzzed in my pocket, and I jerked my attention out of my own mind and back into reality. I unzipped my leather jacket to pull out the phone. It was snugged right next to my shoulder-holstered Walther PK380, loaded with standard rounds. The .380 had less stopping power than a nine millimeter, but it was perfect when collateral damage—hitting humans—was possible. That one single-action semiautomatic and the short-bladed knife strapped to my thigh were my only weapons, which was really stupid. I was a target to some of the blood-servants and blood-slaves in the area, and while vamps needed nighttime to roam free, their minions could attack me anywhere, anytime. Or maybe being depressed made you unknowingly lax about self-preservation. Yeah. That.