Salt & Blood

By Tesla Storm

After slaying a wendigo, banishing a sub-prince of Hell, and falling in love with Adrian Graves despite her addiction to demons, Vivianna Sky is on to her next adventure: locating and destroying the monstrous entity that plagues Munkai Island. The manananggal is attacking expectant mothers in the anachronistic village, resulting in the death of at least one child and the threat of many more lives.
Vivianna initially answers the call for the bounty on the manananggal’s head, but once she lands on the island, everything changes. She feels a calling to kill the creature wreaking so much havoc, but the closer she gets to the case, the further Adrian seems to stray. Vivianna swears his eyes are drawn to Ilena Martin, the federal agent assigned to the island. And the distance between Adrian and Vivianna only widens when the Sky family curse rears its ugly head.
To kill the beast, Vivianna must give up everything—even and especially her own self-control. But will her loss of control destroy more than just the monster?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780369506221

Book preview

Published by EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ® at Smashwords

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2022 Tesla Storm

ISBN: 978-0-3695-0622-1

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Audrey Bobak

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

For Booktok—because you read without shame, I write without it.

SALT & BLOOD

Darker Desires, 2

Tesla Storm

Copyright © 2022

Chapter One

Can you part with the lethal weapons for a minute?

I pause mid-polish, one of my twin daggers resting lightly in the palm of my hand and the other safely sheathed at my side. The curved silver edge catches the sun in a sharp white gleam. They are a type of kris blade, I learned recently. It’s become an unconscious impulse to reach for the worn hilts, finger the leather straps, and run the pad of my finger along the central ridge of each blade. I’ve been meticulous about always keeping them clean and sharp since an angry wendigo came within a hair’s breadth of killing my grandmother. The elder-blessed blades saved her life, even if it was Adrian Graves who wielded them. Adrian Graves, the priest-in-training hired to kill me by the Reformed Church, following a botched attempt at convincing the sub-prince of Hell, Astaroth, to possess me. Adrian Graves, the man who couldn’t kill me, though I should have earned his disdain, demon addict that I was. Adrian Graves, the man I fell in love with despite all odds, and Adrian Graves, the man who’s currently staring at me with indecent intent.

The light spilling in from the large window glints off his eyes, and I have to fight a small whirl of butterflies that rises in me when I look at him. He is like a gilded angel—red-blond hair curling into his face, straight nose leading to a mouth that curves upward as he watches me.

Why? I ask, banishing the butterflies and the warm smile twisting my mouth.

Because—Adrian leans in, gently sheathing the dagger into its holster lying beside me—I want to touch you without losing a digit.

Oh. I unleash a grin. Well, in that case—

He cuts off any cheeky reply I might conjure by putting both hands on either side of my face and pressing his mouth firmly on mine. Spurred by the heat in his kiss, I crawl into his lap, balancing myself in a straddle over him on the narrow bench seat. His fingers caress their way up my spine to the base of my neck, blazing a trail of goosebumps in their wake. In response, I break away to gasp. Adrian seizes the opportunity to kiss my neck with agonizing, gentle touches. A nip here, a slide of his tongue there. God, that feels good.

So much—I manage between sips of air—for the old Adrian Graves. Another sigh of pleasure interrupts me. "I’ve thoroughly corrupted you."

A low growl reverberates against the soft skin at my throat, and I laugh until his hands slide lower and firmly grab my rear end. Then, there is no space for playing. He grinds me into the growing firmness in his lap, the motion birthing a curling, taut pleasure between my legs. The butterflies in my stomach have morphed into something much greedier, and I drop my mouth on his with new, deliberate ferocity. He groans, pulling back only long enough to jerk down his zipper and free himself from his black jeans while I wriggle out of my underwear and hike up the t-shirt dress I chose for travel attire. When I settle into his lap again, it’s with a stifled moan as he slips inside me, slowly arching his hips upward.

His fingers twine in the hair at the nape of my neck, and he drags me closer to him until his face nestles into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, and he whispers my name into the sensitive depression of flesh. Viv-i-ann-a. The four syllables brush across my skin with a delicious tickle. My resulting whimper is muffled immediately as his broad hand snakes between us and presses gently on my mouth.

Adrian looks up into my face, and the wicked, laughing green eyes weaken me. I collapse into him, moaning unabashedly into his palm.

Shhh, he orders softly, breath hitching a bit with his own attempts to stay quiet.

I don’t comply. If anything, the warm hand against my lips emboldens me further, and I nip at the calloused skin, relishing in the groan he releases in response. His pleasure could slip the leash at any moment, and somehow it makes this all the more hot.

I know he feels it too. It’s evident in the way his movements become hungrier, more urgent, his hips bucking upward until I start to tremble. He’s biting down on his lip, his gaze dissolved into jade fire. My skin dimples with waves of gooseflesh, and finally his hand frees my mouth to search for better purchase on my backside. His fingers press into my flesh, guiding me into a tortuous synchronicity with his hips. The sensation of him moving inside me is too much to bear with its sweet, aching fullness. I’m going to explode.

When I reach the pinnacle of pleasure, it’s with my face buried in his hair, muffling my whimpers to avoid the neighbors coming to investigate. Adrian is close behind, clutching me to his chest desperately as he surrenders to tremors beneath me.

Train quickie. Add that one to the list.

I allow myself to float in the bliss of physical and emotional release, sprawled across the vinyl bench seat on my side of the compartment, until Adrian finally catches his breath enough to speak, raking a hand through unruly curls in a futile attempt to keep them in order.

Now that we’ve played… Work? He gestures at the pile of dusty books at his feet, some taken from the Santo Terra library and others borrowed from the archives of Mama the All-Knowing. I had hoped Mama—the real treasure trove of knowledge—would come with us, through travel isn’t exactly her idea of fun.

My bones are too old, she griped when I asked her. "And someone needs to look after the worship center." She paired that last statement with a withering look at Adrian, which he dutifully bore. She wasn’t wrong, exactly. Ever since she and Adrian opened a multi-faith worship center between Santo Terra and the holy land, it’s gotten a lot of attention. So even though I balked at the idea of leaving her alone, since she’s survived a wendigo attack, years of my addiction, and the mystery illness plaguing her lungs, it stands to reason that she can make it through a few weeks of binge-watching soap operas in the tiny hut without me.

I frown at the books. An admittedly unsexy post-coital activity, but we should keep researching if we hope to help the village we are traveling to. All the ancient tomes were selected carefully, based on the one word hissed from the mouth of our client, Lina Calvo.

Manananggal.

She’d been trembling with fear, clutching her swollen belly—she had to be at least five months along—and who could blame her for her horror? A terrifying demonic creature that allegedly preys on fetuses was ravaging her village.

Or so she told us.

My eyes find the bag of gold coins stashed in my bag, and an unpleasant tug yanks at my guts. I agreed to hunt the beast because of that bag of cash, but Adrian? I’m not so sure he even remembers we’re being paid. He hasn’t said a word about it since. And when I scoffed at the cost it would take to book the four-hour train and ferry ride to get appreciably close to Munkai Island—when I told him the gold wouldn’t cover travel, lodging, and food—he unearthed savings without hesitation. All to find and kill a creature I’ve never laid eyes on.

"There’s no guarantee there even is a manananggal, I point out, peeling my back from the seat and rolling into a seated position. Nobody’s seen one in centuries. They don’t sound real. I wrinkle my nose, cracking open a volume and reading the description from its pages. The manananggal, or ‘self-segmenter,’ appears beautiful during daylight hours, but at night, she haunts the skies as a shrieking torso, her legs left behind. The dark spirit flies into the homes of pregnant women and siphons the life from their growing child through a long proboscis.’"

Adrian pulls a face, and I snort. That’s not the worst of it. I continue, ‘The way to defeat the creature is to find its bottom segment while the top hunts. Popular lore asserts that salt or garlic sprinkled on the bottom segment will render the creature dead.’

This one says to hide the bottom half while the top is out… She’ll get stuck in the daylight and burst into flames. Adrian frowns at the page, looking as dubious as I feel. ‘Seekers of the manananggal beware,’ he says softly, ‘the creature feeds off discord as much as she feeds off the viscera of unborn children.’

We both grimace. I snap the book closed, moving on to the next volume. It sounds like nightmare fuel. Or the imaginings of hormonal pregnant women.

It was an attempt at humor, but Adrian seems not to have heard me at all. He presses his nose firmly into the book, and we ease into comfortable silence.

****

Munkai Island is in the Northern Isles, and when we reach the coast, I discover quickly why Adrian insisted on my buying a new winter coat before we left. It is cold—much colder than Santo Terra gets, though it’s only a reasonable train ride south. Our all-time low is something like forty degrees, so the delicate snowflakes that swirl around the ferryman