Leona's Descent: Zodiac Assassins, #2

By Artemis Crow

What Would You Sacrifice To Rewrite A Moment In Time?


Their Rise, Her Fall

After the release of a demon army into the human world, magical power is the only currency that counts, hope is the only thing worth fighting for. Newly created Zodiac Leona is hungry to learn the dark arts from the Master, a sorcerer so dangerous that he's locked in a cage beneath Hell. The chasm created in the subterranean InBetween for the rise of a demon army, becomes the express route for her fall. 

Out of Hope

The direct passage to Hell blocked after Leona crash-lands into Hades, the Zodiac warrior must rely on three forsaken goddesses to survive the shifting realms, evade a god gone mad, and outrun the damage her corrupted soul is doing to their world. As she journeys to the closest portal to Hell, nothing is as it seems, agendas are thick with secrets, and betrayal has become the norm.

What price a soul

Only two souls can release the Master. Hope is close, but Leona must choose: ask the Key and the Lock to sacrifice their souls to open the Master's cage, making her no better than the mad god she has vowed to destroy, or risk the torture of being trapped in the world of the damned, her own soul forever lost.

 

Thirteen Zodiac Assassins. Forged in the Darkness of the InBetween, Ruled by the Shadow Side of Their Stars, The Only Hope for the Light of Humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Artemis Crow
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781393903345

Book preview

1

Carnage littered the floor. The cries of the battle-ravaged wounded ricocheted off the walls of the Great Cavern, the subterranean realm of the paranorms, as they crawled over the dead bodies to get away from a gaping hole magically bored out of the heart of their world.

Leona’s home.

The pungent scent of sulfur, blood, and the sharp tang of fear flowed over her. She ran her palm over the heavy canvas bag resting on her hip, her hand following the straight edges of the spell book written by the Master of the Dark, the most powerful sorcerer ever known—a being so evil that he’d been locked in a cage beneath Hell.

Her goal had been power, enough to rise with the demons and outthink, outplan, and outlive Circe and Asmodeus to take control of the worlds, but that plan had shifted after she found a spell that she once thought could only be used by a defunct goddess. A spell that changed...everything.

The same hole created for the demons to rise would be used for her fall—a fall that would lead her to the Master. A fall that would allow her to right a wrong in her past.

A tingle started on the back of her neck, the tiny hairs lifting. Leona looked behind her and saw Sagittarius, his dark green eyes locked on her. His grief-stricken expression morphed into relief—then hope, the longer she held his gaze.

Her throat, her heart, her groin clenched and she fought the unbidden surge of desire. His love was still heady—it had held her in thrall since she was a young woman, feeding her need to feel beautiful to someone, anyone. Even now, a small part of her ached to fall into him and let him love her pain away.

Like acid, the screams of the injured and dying echoing around the cavern etched and bubbled and burned at that ache, corrupting the radiance of his love until it grew ugly. A type of bondage. An emotional yoke she would never be able to throw off if she dared don it again.

Love had no place in this hard new world.

If she let Sagittarius have that kind of hold on her, it would prove that her father had been right about her—she was weak. Too weak to be her own woman, too weak to make her own way, too weak to protect that which had been most precious to her. He had been right about the latter; she’d be damned if he would be right about the first two.

She gripped the Master of the Dark’s silver locket tight in her hand as she backed to the ledge of the gaping hole. She teetered—her toes still connected to the violated InBetween, while her heels hung over the void.

The wounded had crawled or been pulled as far from the hole as possible, leaving her alone, singular in the vast crowd. The sun pierced the dark space, painting the chaos with a purifying light. The paranorms stopped moving, crying, dying for a brief moment, their eyes closed, their heads back, basking in the feel of the heat on their skin.

Leona’s skin rippled with goosebumps; her scalp prickled, lifting her hair at the root. She raised her arms like a supplicant and took the last step back, falling into the cold dark. The carnage disappeared, and her view narrowed until all she could make out was the fresh, sunlit hole in the cavern roof that connected the secret subterranean world of the paranorms to the human world for the first time in centuries.

She squeezed the ancient, scroll-covered piece of metal harder and concentrated, hoping that the information she had stolen from the Pondera reliquary was accurate, and not just ramblings of an addlepated witch or sorcerer.

In seconds her fears were allayed—her descent slowed, then ceased. She levitated for a moment, her heart racing, nearly choking on the adrenaline and elation before gripping the silver tighter to test its potential. Her body jerked, she gasped—the rough walls of stone and dirt flashed by as the locket’s power allowed her to rise to the edge of huge hole in the InBetween. The dark power of the locket vibrated through her hands and infiltrated her body, warming her. The familiar metallic tang of blood flooded her mouth; tears too thick to be mere water ran down her cheeks. Her sex pulsed.

The Master’s tool was exquisite.

Once called The Untouchable because of the scars splitting her face, Leona now had enough power to wrest the old title, the Beast of the InBetween, from her brother, Lyon. Her new reality as the Beast had only recently been born—a bitch of a beast that the worlds had never seen before, and it was time to take the express trip to Hell, find the Master of the Dark’s cage hidden there, and free him.

She would unlock her future, no matter how great the risk, or the cost. She would follow in her mother’s footsteps—a legacy, an apprentice learning the dark arts from the Master until she could wield his most powerful spell. And then?

Hope would be hers again.

Leona eased her grip on the locket to begin a controlled descent when she saw Sag racing to the hole in a full-out kamikaze gesture that would end with him going splat somewhere in the miles of darkness below her. Before he could take the swan dive after her, he was T-boned by Taurus, and the two Zodiacs slid several feet, bowling over the few paranorms still standing.

Leona exhaled.

She was going to a place he could never follow—one that she couldn’t turn back from even had she desired it. If there were any vestiges of the loving young woman she had once been, they would be destroyed once she finished molding herself into a creature with the power to destroy anyone who dared stand in her way.

She shifted her body until she was prone and released the locket. She dropped, stomach lurching as gravity took hold, jerking her hard—the rush of air whipped her hair back and pulled on the damaged, peeling skin on her face. She struggled to breathe but she was falling too fast. Free-fall drowning—if there was such a term—hurt like a bitch, the pain incinerating her exhilaration and replacing it with terror.

The heavy locket slapped her in the face. She fumbled for it, gripped it, and squeezed. The metal warmed to her touch, vibrating faster and faster until her body slowed enough that she could breathe again. She filled her lungs and tried to relax but within seconds the metal pressed against her palm—once warm, shifted to hot. Leona switched hands and shook the throbbing one.

What the hell?

She changed hands again, but the pain was growing unbearable. The air rushing past her increased—she was falling faster. She wanted to slow down but she was forced to alternate hands so often she couldn’t keep the tight grip needed to stay in control.

The smell of cooking flesh filled her nose—the locket was burning her hands, and she couldn’t hang on without risking permanent damage. The thick, black tar of frustration oozed through her. She was supposed to get to Hell and find the Master within hours, maybe less. Instead, her plan had been foiled in minutes. Could nothing be simple?

She fought through the pain in her hands and looked for any sign of a place to stop. Stars exploded behind her eyes—a deadly faint was close. She looked down and blinked. A tiny ring of light had penetrated the solid black under her.

She blinked again, hard, to see through the tears, and released the locket. The cold air soothed and burned her palms at the same time but Leona reveled in the pain—at least she could still feel her hands. The lightheadedness had gone, but not the ring of light. It was real and coming fast.

She waited until the glow filled her sight and she could see the arid terrain of what had to be Hades before she palmed the locket again. Her injured hand jerked against the consuming fire, every instinct screaming for her to let it go. She bit the inside of her cheek to stay conscious—she only had one shot and she couldn’t miss.

On the right, huge white boulders were strewn around the rim. On her left, a small ledge jutted out into the darkness of the hole. She shifted her shoulders. Her body drifted closer to the wall, the ledge under her.

Wait for it, she muttered, trying to judge her speed and the distance. Now. She squeezed the locket, ignoring the agony working its way up her wrist, her forearm.

Her body slowed, but still the ledge rushed up far faster than she could survive. She had to slow down even more if she wanted to prevent multiple broken bones or even death. She clasped both fried hands around the locket and screamed through the fiery pain before she slammed into the ledge.

The shelf cracked under her impact. Leona rolled over the widening crack to solid ground as it broke free and fell. The tight aggregate of bone-white dirt and pebbles, infiltrated by dead roots so dark red that they looked like veins running through the white, tumbled through the darkness, taking the journey to Hell she had planned to make.

She tried to open her hands to release the locket, but the metal was stuck to her burned flesh. Gripping the chain between her teeth, she counted to three and ripped the locket from her hands. Stars flashed, a cold sweat coated her skin, and she welcomed the deep black of the faint.

2

Leona woke to her head slamming against something hard. She opened her eyes and saw a figure in a hooded robe dragging her by one foot. Male or female—there was no telling. She kicked at the person’s legs with her free foot but got no reaction. Hey, asshat. Release me.

Still no reaction.

Leona reached for her knives, but the holster was empty. Her heart leapt in her chest, pounding against her ribs until she found the messenger bag still strapped across her body. She looked around for a potential weapon, but the hard ground was barren; few rocks, no trees, only dirt and what passed for sky, in shades of white—silver, alabaster, bone—unlike anything she’d seen before. Innocent, unsullied, free of the messy stains found in the living.

She’d fallen into a monstrous bag of flour.

She crossed her arms behind her head to protect it from another bounce and waited for her captor to stop or relax or switch hands—any moment that Leona could use to her advantage. Before she could find that moment, a shack appeared in the distance.

At least there was an end to this journey. Leona forced her body to relax, readying herself for the worst.

Her captor opened the door to the shelter built of bleached wood, white stones, and pale mud, and jerked Leona inside with alarming strength, sending her tumbling across the floor until she slammed into the wall.

What the hell do you want? Leona ground out.

Long, slender fingers pushed back the figure’s hood, revealing a beautiful young woman—fresh, chaste, a maid right out of fairytales, whose face and form would have rivaled Leona even before Lyon ripped her face open. But it was the soft, innocent look in the maid’s huge silver eyes coupled with her long, thick, blue-black hair that pissed Leona off to the core. The stranger was a virgin walking, and Leona hated the maid for the purity enveloping her. She was the innocence to Leona’s corruption.

The maid removed her robe, placing Leona’s triple-bladed knives on top of the fine, shimmering white cloth before bowing. Welcome to Hades.

Who are you? Why did you bring me here?

The woman smiled softly and offered Leona an arm. Let me help you.

Leona ignored the courtesy and scrambled to her feet while keeping her hands clenched into fists to protect her throbbing palms. She stood toe to toe with the woman. Answer my question.

The maid lifted Leona off the floor by the collar of her leather jacket and carried her to the lone chair, then pushed her down.

Leona landed hard on the solid white, gnarled wood seat and remained there, newly cautious. Whoever this woman was, she had mad strength—the kind Leona respected. Snotty and aggressive wasn’t working—perhaps she should call up her rusty manners to get