Half a Huntress: Rogue Huntress, #0

By Thea Atkinson

She let a mortal man live. Now it might be the death of her.

When a human man catches Shana neutralizing yet another threat to her pack in a dark alley, she decides to let him go. It's an act of mercy that will cost her dearly.

She finds her father murdered, and her brothers missing, and the property swarmed by hired mercenaries. Led by that same man from the back alley. She's ready to exact vengeance, but quickly discovers there's more to the stranger than merely hired muscle.

The real threat is the person who hired him in the first place, and while it's too late to save her alpha, it's not too late to save her young brothers. If she wants to keep them safe, she'll need to submit to the new ruthless new, ruthless alpha.

The trouble is, she's not the submissive type…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thea Atkinson
• Release date: Dec 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519908858

Thea Atkinson

Thea Atkinson writes character driven fiction to the left of mainstream; call it what you will: she prefers to describe her work as psychological dramas with a distinct literary flavour. Her characters often find themselves in the darker edges of their own spirits but manage to find the light they seek. She has been an editor, a freelancer, and a teacher, but fiction is her passion. She now blogs and writes and twitters. Not necessarily in that order. Please visit her blog for ramblings, guest posts, giveaways, and more http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com or follow her on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/theaatkinson or like her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theas-Writing-Page/122231651163413 a special thanks to Tiffany Atkinson for taking my author photo.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THERE ARE A DOZEN GRISLY ways to kill a man, hundreds if the assassin is creative.  I'd like to think of myself as a practical assassin. Creativity can get in the way of getting the job done. 

My mentor. Now, he was creative. I'd seen him track a hunter for a year, waiting for the moment to take him out so that no other one of his ilk would suspect it was the werewolf pack the man was hunting who had been the instrument of his demise. Slipped a few shards of glass into his beer at a bar that belonged to a sorcerer just as well known to the hunter's crew as the pack he wanted to annihilate. When the man died, and his family of no-good creature killers mourned him with a wake the likes of which no modern funeral had ever seen, they went off in search of said sorcerer for vengeance.

I hear they made toast of the poor man and our pack continued on as though nothing had threatened us at all.

That was creative. That was patient. It was also necessary. We lived because we kept a seasoned assassin for each generation to keep us safe from the likes of mortal men who hunted us for sport or out of fear.

My mentor had long since retired, and he passed on that torch to serve and protect to me.—the alpha's daughter.

I never measured up to that sort of patience or creativity. I didn't want to, really. Killing wasn't something I relished. I hated taking a life, mortal or otherwise. It was something I did because I had to. I reserved the full-on assassination route for times when I couldn't protect us in any other way. But make no mistake. I would kill if I had to. If it meant death for the pack or death for a mortal, the mortal didn't live to see another day.

Or night like this one. A moment like this one.

I heaved the blade of my haladie with a right thrust toward the neck of the man in front of me. All that ran through my mind was that I needed to take him down as quickly as possible.

Creativity be damned.

He avoided the blade as deftly as any trained hunter. His neat sidestep out of range made my thrust in the darkness nothing better than an awkward stab at shadows. He spun around so languidly he might have been a dancer avoiding his partner's outstretched arms as though it was a tease. Part of the show.

There was a faint scuffle of shoe sole on cobblestone as he moved, an almost imperceptible brush of leather against denim. I knew he had reached beneath his jacket for a blade. Maybe even a pistol.

Attack always; never give offer time for defense. Keep them moving. Keep them unsettled. Keep them afraid. It was a mantra I'd repeated to myself from the age of five. It was so ingrained in my muscle memory that I didn't need to encourage myself to attack. It came like breath or like a heartbeat.

I always attacked.

You won't get away that easily, I said.

I lunged for his legs before he could extract whatever weapon he had hidden beneath his coat. I needed to get

Reviews for Half a Huntress

[Camilla Patzelt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great evil prequel, just right... Beware of the ultimate betrayal