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  “Marrin is my wife,” said Keane without changing his tone.

  If the woman’s face could have blushed any more crimson, Marrin didn’t see how. Arlene Simpson stammered and stuttered and backed away like Keane had somehow insulted her when really, she was the one who’d put her foot in her mouth.

  It made Marrin feel no better to watch the other woman’s distress. Much of the time she could forget her husband was of a different race that didn’t age the same way Earthers did. She aged every day. Keane did not.

  Sworn virgin, instrument of the god’s vengeance—helpless in her target’s arms.

  Blood of the Volcano

  © 2011 Imogen Howson

  Maya, leader of the temple maenads, has learned nothing but contempt for the weakness of her human body. She lives for the ritual that transforms her into maenad form, ready to administer the vengeance of the volcano god.

  Killing a fugitive shifter is not just her duty, but her delight—until, against all odds, he captures her, trapping her in her worst nightmare. Her vulnerable, easily controlled human form.

  Marked for destruction by his forbidden gifts, empath and shifter Philos fled the city years ago to become a warrior for persecuted people like him. Now he has the enemy at his mercy—a maenad desperate to regain her power. But when they touch, he finds his empathic power not so much a gift as a terrible danger. To his people, and his heart.

  Gradually, Maya realizes Philos is not a monster deserving of death. Yet even as she hesitantly offers to help in the war against the priests, she can risk no more than the bare beginnings of friendship with the man she was supposed to kill. Anything more, and she will forever lose access to the power she cannot bear to live without…

  Warning: Contains violence, deadly spider-venom, sex that gets interrupted at the last minute, sex that doesn’t get interrupted at the last minute, and plenty of not-your-usual shape-shifters.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Blood of the Volcano:

  Maya watched him drink, cup water in his hands and splash it over his face, run wet fingers through the long strands of black hair. Longer than mine…but then he was not born to be a fighter.

  The shame ate at her, that he, a runaway, a condemned criminal, had kept her prisoner this long. It had been only luck and a spider bite that had reversed their positions, nothing to do with her god-given powers or her years of experience running with the maenad pack.

  She watched him, an ordinary man, maybe five years older than she. Prettier than most, with the sweep of glossy hair and the dark eyes she remembered staring, terrified, into hers, but nothing that should have made him able to beat her, nothing that should have allowed him to keep her prisoner for a whole night and day.

  Except he’s not ordinary. The thought held her still with sudden surprise. I’d forgotten that—forgotten why we were chasing him in the first place. There’s something wrong with him, some unholy power, demon- not god-begotten.

  She didn’t need to know. It was nothing to her. In a short while she’d pack up supplies and leave, and if she ever saw him again it would be because he’d been stupid enough to try returning, and she—or another of her pack—would tear him to pieces. There was no reason to want to understand more about him, how he’d been able to overpower her.

  There was even less reason to want to make him look at her, now that she was no longer helpless, pathetic and bound. No reason to want to make him remember her as in control, sitting here with the knife ready to her hand, on the spot where she’d successfully saved his life.

  And it’s stupid. I’ve already saved him when I should have let him die, am already letting him go when I should march him in chains back to my people. I do not need to talk to him, let him pretend to be a person.

  She said it anyway, as she’d known she was going to, and her warring thoughts came through into her voice, making the words shiver and run together so she sounded uncertain and almost afraid. “What is your power?”

  He turned. She was looking straight at him, so his eyes met hers. Her question must have taken him off guard, because for a moment his eyes held no wariness, nor fear, only an amusement that warmed his face. It reminded her suddenly of the laughter she’d heard in his voice yesterday, when they were fighting and she’d thought he meant to rape her, then he’d said something silly, too outlandish to take seriously, and she’d known that whatever else he might do, she would never need to fear that from him.

  “Did you not wonder before?” he said.

  She shrugged, not liking the feeling that his eyes could see into her. “No. I was busy being marched across the desert.”

  He smiled, just a little bit, one side of his mouth curling upwards. “I mean before, in the ravine. Did you not wonder why you could not find me when you first came there?”

  She blinked. She hadn’t wondered. She’d forgotten those strange minutes in the ravine, when she—in the full flood of the madness, all her senses enhanced—had neither been able to see nor hear nor smell him.

  He came over towards her, moving slowly, awkwardly—he would not be setting out today—then put his hand out, resting it on the rock face near where she sat. “Here. This is how. This is my gift.”

  She frowned at him. There was nothing, he was doing nothing. Whatever he was, it was not a shifter…

  “No.” He smiled again, a little bit more. “Don’t look at my face. Look at my hand.”

  She did so. The wide span of his fingers was pressed against the rock, leaving a wet handprint, black on grey. An edge of morning sunlight caught the fine hairs on the back of his hand, making them shine faint gold against the brown of his skin. Calluses showed on the inside of his thumb and forefinger. It might not be a fighter’s hand, but it was not a nobleman’s hand either—it knew hard work.

  She was still looking at it, wondering what she was supposed to be seeing, when it disappeared.

  She blinked, instinctively shook her head, thinking her eyes must have blurred, but his hand—no, his whole arm—did not reappear. And now the rest of his body, his face, his tunic seemed to dissolve, like a mirage dissolves when you get close to it.

  Then all at once her perception shifted. He wasn’t disappearing, he was changing. His skin and hair were taking on the colour and texture of the cliff face, matching each ridge and crack and tiny variation so exactly that if she hadn’t known he was there she’d have sworn she was looking at nothing but rock. The change—and that was stranger than all the rest—even crept out into his clothes, so there was nothing to show that a man stood there, silently, secretly watching.

  Only his eyes. They alone did not change, so she had the skin-crawling sensation that something—a demon, something not just half-human but not human at all—peered out of the cliff at her.

  She opened her mouth. “That—that’s your gift?”

  He nodded—she could see where the bit of the seeming-cliff that was really his head moved.

  “And is it just rock? Or can it be…” she made a vague gesture, unable to drag her gaze away, “…other things? Anything?”

  “Anything, more or less. Nothing moving—not water or sliding sand. I can’t match it quick enough for it to work. But anything that stays still long enough…yes.”

  He shut his eyes for a moment, and it was as if he’d vanished entirely. Almost doubting her own senses, she caught herself from reaching out to touch where he’d been. Then he swam back into visibility, his body seeming to coalesce from the air in front of her, changing to his normal self.

  His eyes opened. “It’s not the only part of it. You maenads—you’d have found me if that were my only gift—”

  “Not your only gift? You have…more than one?” She’d never heard of anyone having more than one gift…and black envy caught at her throat. If I had more than one, I would not feel so bereft. And why him? Why does he deserve—

  She got hold of herself. His gifts were unholy, unsanctioned—not something to be envied, no matter how many of them he had.