Kindling The Darkness. Jane Kindred

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Kindling The Darkness - Jane Kindred Mills & Boon Supernatural

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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

       Extract

       About the Publisher

       Chapter 1

      A timeless monument to spiritual devotion—and a 1950s architectural marvel that somehow managed not to insult the majesty of the burnished sandstone buttes into which it was wedged but to grace them—Sedona’s Chapel of the Holy Cross wasn’t where you might expect the gates of hell to open. But open they did, for a few brief moments on one gorgeous midnight last spring. On Lucy Smok’s twenty-fifth birthday, to be exact. Funny thing, though, about opening the gates of hell to let something in: stuff got out. And it was Lucy’s responsibility to round up the wayward “stuff” that escaped and put it back in. Cleaning up after Lucien. As usual.

      Not that it was really his fault this time. It was their father who’d traded her twin’s soul to the devil. And when Edgar Smok died, the bill had come due. Lucien’s transformation into an infernal being had opened the gates until his descent to rule the nether realm closed them. In that brief interim, the path between the nether realm and this one had been a two-way street.

      Dozens of hell beasts were now running amok.

      The one she’d tracked this evening—or rather, early this morning—wore a female skin suit: a haggard-looking twentysomething waitress at a greasy spoon, dishwater-blond hair slipping out of a limp ponytail and into her eyes as she took Lucy’s order. She was such a cliché that she had to be infernal.

      Lucy had tracked the fugitive with a little help from the thousand-year-old Viking who happened to be dating Lucien’s sister-in-law. Leo Ström was the chieftain of the Wild Hunt, and the instincts of the Hunt wraiths under his command functioned like a metaphysical GPS, homing in on any vicious killers in the area. As much as Lucy hated the idea of them, connections among the not-quite-human came in handy for her present mission. And Theia Dawn, Lucien’s wife, had an entire family of not-quite-human connections. The Carlisle sisters, who claimed the demoness Lilith as their ancestor, seemed to attract it.

      Lucy had other means of finding infernal fugitives, of course. As the CFO of Smok International and its subsidiaries, Smok Biotech and Smok Consulting—as well as its acting CEO in Lucien’s absence—she had access to the world’s most sophisticated database for tracking and logging unnatural creatures. But the fugitives from hell weren’t in any database, and those that hadn’t made themselves obvious through their sheer audacity in attacking humans right out of the gate, so to speak, were extremely good at blending in with the human population and keeping a low profile.

      The stop at the coffeehouse had been serendipitous. After losing the trail, Lucy had taken a break to refuel, and the little downstairs café was the only thing open this early in the morning. She hadn’t been sure until the waitress brought her order. A telltale flick of the woman’s tongue at the corner of her mouth accompanying a rapid eye blink had given her away as a reptilian demon. Anyone else would have missed it. The demon saw Lucy’s recognition in the same instant, eyes widening with alarm.

      Before it could make its escape, Lucy grabbed it by the wrist and pinned its hand to the cool wooden tabletop.

      “Let go of me.” The eyes narrowed to reptilian slits with an unnerving clicking sound, like a muted camera shutter.

      “You’re out of your element.”

      The demon bristled, a reptilian reflex beneath the borrowed skin. “And you’re about to discover how far you are out of yours.”

      Lucy smiled darkly. “You’d be surprised how far my element extends.” She’d been banking on the fact that the demon wouldn’t want to make a scene in the middle of a brightly lit coffeehouse with a small but decidedly human audience. She hadn’t counted on the demon’s desperation.

      A hissing sound provided an instant’s warning before the demon spat, giving Lucy the chance to duck and dodge, narrowly missing a face full of demonic acid. Unfortunately, the evasive action also loosened her grip, and her quarry was off in a flash.

      Lucy

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