Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass)

Praise for Jenna Black’s “exciting new series”
(
RT Book Reviews
)
featuring Nikki Glass, a kick-ass heroine with “a sarcastic wit to die for!”
(
Black Lagoon Reviews
)

DEADLY DESCENDANT

“Builds on the world established in
Dark Descendant,
and creates something even more satisfying and thrilling.”

—Tynga’s Reviews

“More heat, action, and emotion! The perfect sequel. . . . Leaves readers excited, awed, and aching for more.”

—Lovey Dovey Books

“Black has a gift for making her worlds seem eminently realistic, her characters at once nuanced and believable.”

—Fantasy Works

DARK DESCENDANT

“All the pace, energy, and intensity of a lightning bolt thrown from the hand of Zeus himself!”

—Kelly Gay

“Innovatively original. . . . Mesmerizing urban fantasy.”

—Single Titles

“I was hooked. . . . Alpha males like you haven’t seen before.”

—Night Owl Paranormal

“A marvelously dense, utterly unique world . . . lots of action, and just plain fun.”

—New York Times
bestselling author Lilith Saintcrow

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

About Jenna Black

The
Liberi Deorum

A long time ago, when the ancient gods were still around, they sired children with mortals. Before the gods left Earth, they gave each of their children a seed from the Tree of Life. This seed made them immortal, and the
Liberi
thought they were gods themselves as a result. The only limitation they had—as far as they knew—was that they couldn’t make their own children immortal, because the gods took the Tree of Life with them when they left. What the first
Liberi
didn’t know until too late was that anyone with even a drop of divine blood—in other words, all of their children and descendants—could steal their immortality by killing them.

“It’s time, Nikki,” Anderson
said.

I made a very undignified squealing sound and almost dropped my towel.

“Goddammit, Anderson!” I snapped, my heart pounding. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and I was still bleary-eyed even after my shower. I certainly had
not
been expecting to find anyone waiting for me in my bedroom at this hour, especially when I was pretty certain I’d locked the door to my suite. The adrenaline coursing through my veins did more to wake me up than ten cups of coffee.

“Sorry to startle you,” he said with an unrepentant smile.

“Like hell you are,” I grumbled, clutching my towel a little more securely around me. I knew Anderson well enough by now to know a deliberate intimidation attempt when I saw one. He was at his rumpled, harmless-looking best, in a wrinkled shirt,
wash-faded cords, and tattered sneakers, but he was anything but harmless. He was a real, bona fide
god,
the son of Thanatos, the Greek god of death, and Alecto, one of the Furies.

“If you hadn’t been so determined to play hard to get,” Anderson said mildly, “we could have done this differently.”

I’d have preferred not to do this at all, which was why I’d spent the last two weeks making myself scarce, finding any excuse I could to avoid the confrontation I knew was coming. Gods are notoriously bad at taking no for an answer, but it was the only answer I could give to the request he was going to make.

“This wasn’t going to go well no matter
how
we did it,” I said. He had to know what my avoidance strategy meant, and I knew he’d come prepared for a fight despite his so-far mild manner.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied, a slight edge creeping into his voice. “I would have thought you’d be eager to rid the world of a predator like Konstantin.”

Ridding the world of Konstantin, the deposed leader of the Olympians, sounded like a great idea, in theory. He was vulnerable now that he no longer had the might of the Olympians behind him, and with my skills as a descendant of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, I was the perfect candidate to find him in whatever hole he was hiding in. It was what would happen when I found him that gave me problems.

“This isn’t something I want to talk about while wearing a towel,” I said.

Anderson’s eyes strayed downward as he took a visual tour of my body. I wasn’t much to look at with my knobby knees and winter-white skin, but guys don’t seem to care about aesthetics much when a woman is wearing nothing but a towel. I gritted my teeth and kept my mouth shut, knowing he was only looking at me like that to unsettle me. I wasn’t about to let him do it. At least, that’s what I told myself.

“Why don’t you go wait in the sitting room while I get some clothes on,” I suggested. “Then we can talk.”

“All right,” he agreed. “You aren’t going to try climbing out the window to avoid me, are you?”

I might have been tempted if my rooms weren’t on the third floor of the mansion that was home base for all of Anderson’s
Liberi
. “I’m not in the mood for a broken leg, so no.” Of course, breaking a leg might be more fun than whatever was going to come next.

“Don’t take too long,” Anderson ordered. He strode out my bedroom door and didn’t even bother to close it all the way behind him.

I gave the door the kind of glare I really wanted to give to Anderson himself, then stalked to my closet to get some clothes. I didn’t want to do this
ever,
much less at the literal crack of dawn and with no coffee in my system. I usually don’t have any qualms about defying authority, but Anderson was a different story. Most of the time he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I knew what lay under the surface, and I didn’t want him angry with me if I could avoid it.

Knowing Anderson’s patience had more than reached its limit, I pulled my clothes on hastily and toweled my hair dry. I had to at least run a brush through it a few times to smooth out the tangles before they dried that way, and I swear I could
feel
Anderson’s impatience from the other room. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink and saw a delicate, anxious woman with bedraggled hair and a faded T-shirt.

Don’t you dare let him browbeat you,
I told myself as I tried to wipe that anxious look off my face. I stood a much better chance of holding my ground if I at least
looked
strong and confident.

“Hurry up, Nikki,” Anderson called, and I knew I couldn’t afford to stand there and make faces at myself in the mirror any longer.

“Well, here goes nothing,” I muttered, and left the relative safety of my bedroom to join Anderson in my sitting room.

I gave him a few mental brownie points for having brewed a pot of coffee while he waited. I’d gotten tired of having to go all the way down to the first floor whenever the craving hit me, so I’d brought my own coffeemaker from my condo, which I hadn’t relinquished, despite having taken up residence in the mansion. Anderson was sitting on the armchair beside the couch, and there were two steaming mugs on the coffee table.

“Thanks for making coffee,” I said, picking up my mug and inhaling the steam. I didn’t look at him as I reluctantly lowered myself onto the couch. I harbored a brief hope that he would let me get
some coffee into my system before the fun and games began, but I knew better.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him lean forward in his chair. I realized I was holding my breath, and forced myself to let it out and take a sip of coffee. I’d dawdled long enough that it didn’t burn my tongue.

“I would have thought you’d be chomping at the bit to hunt down Konstantin the moment he was forced to step down,” Anderson said. “I don’t understand why you’ve been avoiding it.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for someone whose mother was a goddess of vengeance to understand,” I said, though I knew there were plenty of others who wouldn’t have my moral qualms, either.

“How can you not want his blood after what he did to your sister?”

That made me flinch. Konstantin hadn’t hurt Steph himself, but there was no doubt his late second-in-command had acted with his blessing, if not on his direct orders. If you’d asked me when I first found Steph if I wanted Konstantin dead, I’d have answered with a resounding yes. Even now, I would be happy to dance on his grave. But there was a difference between wanting a man dead and taking it upon yourself to make him that way. If I hunted Konstantin and found him, then Anderson, who had even more of a score to settle than I did, would kill him. I’d seen Anderson kill before, and the screams still echoed in my dreams sometimes. Death at Anderson’s hand was neither quick nor painless.

I fidgeted with my coffee cup and avoided Anderson’s gaze. “I’ve told you before I’m a bleeding heart. I’m not the kind of person who can cold-bloodedly hunt someone down so you can murder him.”

“You had no qualms about hunting Justin Kerner,” he retorted.

But he was wrong about that. I’d had plenty of qualms. Kerner was a serial killer, but he was a victim before that. An ordinary man with an ordinary life who’d been captured by the Olympians and used as a lab rat, forced to take on a seed of immortality that the Olympians suspected might be infected with madness. When Kerner had gone mad, they’d buried him, meaning to leave him in the ground, constantly dying and reviving, till the end of time. He’d been killing civilians. But I’d felt sympathy for him the whole time.

“I hunted Kerner because he had to be stopped before he killed more innocent people,” I said, then again met Anderson’s eyes. “You want me to hunt Konstantin for revenge. That’s an altogether different beast.”