Blood and Lotuses

By Teresa Noelle Roberts

When love is outlawed, only the bravest lovers can defeat an inhuman foe.
A demon in the guise of a goddess is “purifying” the great city of Dakura by killing off its stores of love, desire, and beauty. Once the city is void of color and passion, the demon can claim the city for its base to conquer the whole mortal world.
Anchali, a priestess of the goddess of love and desire, infiltrates the temple of the false goddess, along with her reluctant guardian Thanom, a soldier whose wife was murdered in a demon-inspired purge. They’re hoping to get information to pass on to a rebel general who hopes to roust the cult from Dakura. What they find, though, tells them this isn’t a job for warriors.
It’s a job for lovers, using the power of passion to enact an ancient ritual.
Anchali can perform the ritual. But first she has to convince a broken-hearted man to love again.
Compared to that, defeating a demon is child’s play.
Warning: Contains more explicit violence and less explicit sex than usual in a Teresa Noelle Roberts novel, along with all the magic and romance you’ve come to expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Teresa Noelle Roberts
• Release date: Jul 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310343094

Teresa Noelle Roberts

Teresa Noelle Roberts started writing stories in kindergarten and she hasn’t stopped yet. A prolific author of short erotica, she’s also a published poet and fantasy writer—but science fiction romance and BDSM-spiced contemporaries are her favorites.Teresa is a crunchy granola girl who enjoys belly dance, yoga, medieval re-creation, playing in the ocean, cooking, and growing more vegetables than she and her husband can possibly eat. She’d enjoy sleeping, too. She thinks. But it takes so much time!She shares her home in southern Massachusetts with her husband, a Leo in law enforcement who introduced her to action-adventure movies, comics, graphic novels and anime, and two overstuffed cats. She and her husband often plan vacations around food, history, and/or proximity to water.

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Blood and Lotuses

Teresa Noelle Roberts

Copyright © 2014 by Teresa Noelle Roberts

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either 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.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2014

Published by: Teresa Noelle Roberts, Mansfield, MA at Smashwords

Inquiries should be addressed to Teresa Noelle Roberts

mailto:[e-mail]

http://www.teresanoelleroberts.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Design © Skyla Dawn Cameron

Editing by: Dayle A. Dermatis, Soul’s Road Press

ISBN-13 9781310343094

Anchali, Thanom said, deciding bluntness might be his best weapon, you’re the last person in Benire who ought to go into Dakura now. They kill people like you on sight. No one could possibly see you and not know you were a Chosen of Pichitra, a courtesan, or both. Or just too beautiful. If her beauty puts me in awe, how much would she terrify someone who hates the flesh?

I won’t go in looking like this. She gestured, a dancer’s gesture sweeping down from her face and the damp silk of her hair past her bare breasts down to her heavy green-and-yellow-striped cotton skirt. I’ll cover myself like a farm girl until I can get some of the cult’s ugly robes. And it isn’t as if I’m going in alone.

Of course not. She was depending on his protection. That thought didn’t put him at ease, not at all. He wasn’t sure he could protect himself anymore, let alone anyone else. Wasn’t sure he wanted to. Wasn’t sure, at bottom, whether what he hoped to find in Dakura was justice or revenge or the oblivion of death.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dayle Dermatis—critique partner extraordinaire, thorough and professional copy editor, and always an inspiration. Kudos to Skyla Dawn Cameron for the cover.

And now and forever, gratitude and love to Jeff.

Chapter 1

In an almost-cool hour of the night, when the heat of one day had finally faded and the swelter of the next had not yet struck, the demon Nshlic’s first victim woke with a start in the child-brothel.

For the time it took to draw a breath, the dockworker Beyun felt about as good as a man could possibly feel, aglow with the memory of the night’s near-perfect combination of scamming money, drinking, and whoring, and the possibility, based on the warm, sticky little forms curled up next to him, of the last of the three starting all over again.

Then his dreams slammed back into him and he realized that everything in his life was wrong.

The boy and girl Beyun had rented for the night, sensing his movements, began cooing and stroking at him even before they were fully awake. He shook them roughly off.

Sinners! Beyun cried, his voice rough from drink and barbed with dreams. Then he looked down at his own naked body. As I am, too. He grabbed his knife from the bedside table. Sinners, do you repent?

The two young whores looked at one another, then nodded, wide-eyed. They had grown up in the brothels of Dakura, and placating the customers, however odd their desires, was second nature. Oh, we repent. The girl, perhaps thirteen or so with the start of a woman’s curves, subtly gestured at the somewhat younger boy, but not so subtly that Beyun didn’t pick up on it. He’d learned when he was younger than these whores to pay attention to his surroundings, because you never knew when someone might be sneaking up on you.

We’re due for some praying, I’m sure, the girl continued, her voice high and frantic. We’ll go ’round to the temple of Pichitra with you, soon as you let us grab our clothes. As she spoke, the boy slithered down between the wall and the bed and began crawling for the door to get the bouncer.

Not that whore-goddess Pichitra, Beyun said, although some part of his brain wondered why. He’d always been partial to the temples of Pichitra. Pichitra’s Chosen were sweet-smelling and pretty and brightly colored as birds, and their charity meals came with a nice hot chili sauce and even a bit of mango or green papaya, not just rice and bland vegetables like the gray-clad, quiet Chosen of Jananya dished out. Still, he said, we go to the temple of Jananya.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy had almost reached the door. Beyun wheeled around, threw his knife, aiming for the door just above the boy’s head.

Since Beyun had made the money he’d spent for the evening’s extravagant entertainment in a knife-throwing contest, using that very knife, he should have done what he intended: scare the boy into staying put while he gave the oration that was filling his soul.

The knife swerved and struck the boy through the heart.

The girl opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Soundlessly, she dropped to her knees and pressed her face against her dead friend.

Beyun started to panic. He hadn’t meant to kill anyone. He was supposed to be repenting, changing his life for the better. And now this… He’d done plenty of wicked things and he knew it was bad he liked to go to the child-brothels sometimes instead of the brothels with grown women and men, which were bad enough, but killing someone who wasn’t trying to hurt him was worse than anything he’d done before.

Then a great calm filled him, the kind he’d heard pious people saying came with meditation and jhang addicts say came with smoking just the right amount.

The boy’s death wasn’t his fault. It couldn’t have been his fault.

Beyun knew knives. Beyun knew all about knives, and how they behaved, and what could go wrong if you played with them carelessly. What had just happened was impossible.

Therefore, it was the will of Jananya—a sign, a lesson.

And he knew what he had to do to fix the child and in the process, fix his own messed-up, sinful life.

Beyun knelt down beside the two young whores, the living one and the dead. Do you repent? he asked the girl, putting his hand gently on her head. She nodded mutely, her almond eyes terrified but her young face otherwise expressionless, frozen with shock.

She probably didn’t repent, not yet. She was just scared, more scared than he’d wanted her to be.

You don’t have too much to repent, I suppose, he said, as softly as he could. "I mean, you and your