Demon Marked: Book 1 of the Venandi Chronicles ( An Urban Paranormal Romance Series) Read online

  Demon Marked

  Book 1 of the Venandi Chronicles

  Sara Snow

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 Sara Snow

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of the trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Contents

  1. Georgia

  2. Georgia

  3. Georgia

  4. Carter

  5. Georgia

  6. Carter

  7. Georgia

  8. Georgia

  9. Carter

  10. Georgia

  11. Carter

  12. Georgia

  13. Carter

  14. Georgia

  15. Georgia

  16. Carter

  17. Georgia

  18. Carter

  19. Georgia

  20. Georgia

  21. Georgia

  22. Carter

  23. Georgia

  24. Georgia

  25. Carter

  26. Georgia

  27. Georgia

  28. Carter

  The Venandi Chronicles Continue…

  Also By Sara Snow

  Have you read the Luna Rising Prequel?

  Enjoy This Book? I would love to hear from you…

  About the Author

  1

  Georgia

  My heart raced as I rushed around the bedroom, pulling my company-issued polo shirt over my head even as my eyes scanned the floor for my shoes. I was running late for work again, and I was already in hot water with my boss for that very same thing. I was on my last warning, and I could not afford to lose this job.

  Being on time was not my strong suit, but I was a hard worker. Not that running a cash register at a gas station was the most complicated job in the world. But it paid the bills—for the most part.

  Spotting one of my black tennis shoes sticking out from under my bed, I dropped to my hands and knees and lifted the bed skirt. Sure enough, they were both there, and I made a mental note to do a better job of putting them in my closet at the end of my shift next time.

  Organization wasn’t my strength, either.

  Focusing on the task at hand, I shoved my feet into my shoes and grabbed my purse. When I checked the time, I let out a low curse. My shift started in twelve minutes, and it was a ten-minute drive to get there.

  Talk about cutting it close.

  My sense of urgency was increasing as I left the bedroom. Time felt like it was flying by. I went into the kitchen, slipping past my roommate, Olivia, who was making herself dinner at the stove. I grabbed a granola bar from the pantry. It wasn’t much, but I needed something to eat during my break.

  “I’m heading out,” I told Olivia as I passed back through the kitchen. “See you later.”

  “I’ll leave the light on,” she said, without looking up from the wok she was using to make a stir-fry. Olivia and I had been living together for the past three months, but we weren’t exactly best friends. Between going to school full-time and working evenings at the gas station five nights a week, I didn’t have a lot of room in my life for quality girl-time. I barely even got to see my boyfriend.

  I was digging through my purse, looking for my keys, as I took the stairs to the first floor. I didn’t want to waste time waiting for the elevator. But as I stepped into the lobby of my apartment building, I lost my grip on the purse’s strap, dropping it and sending the contents inside scattering across the tiled floor.

  “Shit,” I muttered, bending down to quickly scoop everything up.

  At least I found my keys…

  I gathered up everything except a tampon that had rolled across the lobby floor. Scrambling after it, I hadn’t even realized that a man had walked through the door until he reached down and picked it up for me. My face flushed with embarrassment as he held it out to me.

  “I think you dropped something,” he said with a small smirk. He was handsome in a classic way that made me think of old movie stars, with their clean-shaven jaws and piercing blue eyes. This guy would have fit right in with them.

  “T-thanks,” I stammered, shoving it into my purse. I really didn’t have time to talk, but I didn’t want to be rude. “I haven’t seen you before. You just move in?”

  “Yeah. I’m Victor, and I’m new to this whole area. Maybe you could show me around sometime?”

  “I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I have a boyfriend.”

  “All the best ones do,” he said easily, winking at me. “It’s a shame. I think I could look into those eyes of yours all night long.”

  I just gave him a small smile. I was used to people commenting on my unusual eye color. It had been happening my whole life. Not many people had purple irises. Most of the time, people assumed that I wore contact lenses to alter my eye color, but I was born this way.

  “I better get going,” I said. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “I guess I’ll see you around, then.”

  He sauntered off, and I resumed my mad dash to work. There was a moment, as I was starting the car, when I felt my heart skip a beat. My old Dodge Neon had been taking longer and longer to start lately, cranking for a few seconds before finally firing to life. I was sure that one of these days, it would fail to start altogether, and I would be screwed. I didn’t exactly have room in my budget to fix whatever was wrong with it.

  The thing was a piece of crap that I’d only paid five hundred dollars for, so I knew that it wasn’t going to last me forever, but I depended on it as a way to get to work and school. For right now, I just kept holding my breath and saying a little prayer every time I turned the key in the ignition.

  I got lucky during the drive to work, avoiding red lights the whole way. As I swung into the parking lot, the clock on my dashboard told me that I had two minutes to get inside to the time clock.

  I parked in one of the designated employee spots, which were on the far side of the parking lot. My backpack was in my backseat, so I grabbed it, planning to use any downtime I might have to study for an upcoming test in my anatomy class. The seconds were counting down in my head as I jogged across the asphalt, and I was out of breath by the time I got inside. As I went by, I wordlessly waved to Lisa, the woman who was working behind the register, while she rang up a regular buying his weekly carton of cigarettes.

  I felt like I was holding my breath until I got to the time clock just in time. It looked like I was holding onto this job for at least another day—who knew, maybe two.

  I’ve got to get my act together…

  I wasn’t usually the type to make excuses, but I had been under a lot of pressure lately. College was turning out to be a lot more difficult than I had realized. I was studying nursing, mostly because I didn’t know what to do with my life and nursing seemed like a good option for steady employment. All I wanted was a decent-paying job after I graduated.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have taken a year off between high school and college. Things migh
t have been easier if I had continued my education right away. At the age of eighteen, I had aged out of the foster system and found myself on my own for the first time in my life. With all that sudden freedom, the last thing I’d wanted to do was go straight to college.

  Besides, after growing up in foster care, I felt like I didn’t even know who I was. I had spent so much time trying to fit into one home after the other, never quite managing to pull it off for some reason or another. No matter what I did, I always felt different from everyone around me, like a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit no matter which way you turned it.

  All I’d ever wanted was to feel like I belonged somewhere, but I suppose that’s what everyone wants, really.

  So, I tried to embrace my first year of adulthood, taking it as an opportunity to explore various lifestyles. I was a vegetarian for about two days before I gave that up for some bacon. I got into yoga for a while, and I worked for a temp agency so that I could try my hand at various jobs. When I didn’t find any of that fulfilling, I turned to hard partying. I became friends with a rough crowd, drank almost every night, and looked in the wrong places for some kind of deeper meaning to life.

  Luckily, I’d quickly realized that I wasn’t doing myself any favors. So, I finally enrolled in college. I was now a couple of months into my second semester, and it was proving to be overwhelming. Maybe if I was passionate about what I was studying, I would feel differently, but that was part of my problem. I wasn’t really passionate about anything in my life.

  “Cutting it close, aren’t you? You were almost late again,” Lisa commented when I reached the register. I shoved my backpack and purse under the counter, then shrugged.

  “Almost only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades,” I said, and Lisa’s forehead wrinkled as her eyebrows drew together in confusion.

  “What’s that mean?”

  I smiled. “I don’t actually know. It’s just something one of my foster moms used to say.”

  The atmosphere between us immediately shifted into awkwardness, and I suppressed a sigh. I tried not to bring my past up too often, because that always seemed to happen when I did. It made people uncomfortable to hear that my childhood wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows.

  “Well, I’m heading out. See you tomorrow.”

  Lisa left, and I was the only person in the small gas station. It wasn’t in the best neighborhood, so things were usually a little slow once the sun went down, and I liked it that way. It gave me more time to focus on my schoolwork.

  The gas station was small, with only three gas pumps. The inside was full of candy and junk food, as well as a wall of coolers with cold drinks and a fountain drink machine. It was a basic corner stop, and I usually spent most of my shift behind the register unless more coffee needed to be made.

  I had been at work for half an hour and served one customer—a trucker who came inside for coffee and a few minutes of small talk before getting back on the road—when a familiar blue Jeep pulled up outside. I smiled as three guys got out, and I caught sight of my boyfriend, Adam, coming around from the driver’s side.

  Tall with an athletic build, Adam had a cleft chin and blonde hair that he kept trimmed close to his scalp. He had an all-American look that worked really well for him, and he looked every bit the college football quarterback that he was.

  I recognized the other two guys as his teammates, even though I wasn’t a big football fan. I had only gone to two games so far this season, just to show Adam some support. I knew that some people thought we were a strange pairing because I didn’t sit in the bleachers with the other girlfriends and wear his jersey, but he didn’t seem to care about that kind of thing. That was good, because I was too busy to go most of the time, anyway.

  “Hey, baby,” Adam said as he walked through the door. His friends split up, one of them going back to the cooler to grab the biggest can of Monster we carried, while the other headed straight to the candy aisle and loaded up on all the KitKats we had in stock. It always surprised me how much these guys could eat.

  I leaned across the counter so Adam could plant a kiss on my lips. It was a quick peck, but I felt a wide smile stretch across my face.

  “I didn’t know you were stopping by,” I said, straightening.

  “I had to stop by and see my girl,” he said, flashing me his most charming smile. “You wanna come to my place tonight when you get off work?”

  “You sure? I’m working until midnight.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll wait up for you.”

  One of his friends, the guy with the energy drink, came up to the counter at that moment, making obnoxious kissing noises in our direction. Adam chuckled and punched him in the shoulder while I rolled my eyes. Adam was a good guy, but his friends could be so immature. Sometimes, I worried that they brought out a bad side of him.

  His other friend came up to us, already eating a candy bar.

  “You’re planning to pay for all that, right?”

  I could tell by the look on his face that the answer was no, but he dug his wallet out anyway. I counted the candy bars and plugged the amount into the cash register, adding the energy drink to the total.

  “You can’t even give us a discount?” Mr. KitKat asked with a pouty face, but he resignedly handed over his debit card.

  I gestured to the camera mounted on the ceiling, pointed at the cash register. “Not worth my job. Believe it or not, I chose this minimum-wage paradise over you.”

  “My Georgia isn’t a big risk-taker,” Adam said. I pinned him with a glare, so he hastened to add, “Not that that’s a bad thing.”

  Somehow, it didn’t sound like a good thing, either.

  “Come on,” his other friend said as he popped the tab on his drink. “Let’s get out of here before you dig an even deeper hole for yourself.”

  “See you tonight,” Adam said, rapping his knuckles on the surface of the counter twice before they all left, and I was alone again.

  Over the next two hours, I had four people come to get gas, but they paid at the pump, so I didn’t have to interact with anyone. It was shaping up to be a typical, boring night, which was fine with me.

  Then, around ten o’clock, an old car pulled up outside, parking in one of the spots that lined the front of the building instead of going to a pump. The strange thing about the gold-colored Buick—the reason it had caught my attention—was that the driver parked in the last space at the end of the row instead of trying to get as close to the door as possible, the way most customers would.

  The two men that got out of the car could have been brothers; they looked so much alike with their pale white skin, brown hair, and lanky bodies. They were even dressed alike, with baggy jeans and zip-up hoodies. For some reason that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I got a bad feeling. Dread was pooling in my belly, making me feel nauseous.

  It felt irrational, but I couldn’t shake it, and I had the crazy urge to rush to the door before the pair reached it, flip the sign to ‘Closed,’ and turn the lock.

  But I didn’t do that. It would be crazy, and I would probably get into big trouble if the customers complained to management about me locking them out for absolutely no reason. So, I just stood there, watching them come closer. I had never given much thought to being here alone all night before, and that suddenly felt foolish.

  What was I thinking?

  My palms were slick as I clenched my fists reactively. My throat went dry. The air seemed to be getting sucked out of the small, grimy room. My heart beat like a jackhammer, so hard that I thought it would pound its way through my ribs. I was overcome by fear that felt over the top, considering that nothing had even happened yet, but I somehow knew that my boring night was about to turn dark.

  Time seemed to grind to a halt as one of the men turned to me, pulling a gun out of the pocket of his hoodie while his friend made quick work striding the length of the store, making sure there was no one else hidden in the aisles.

  I had never seen a gun in
person before, and I was unprepared for the rush of vulnerability and terror that swept through me. I trembled as I stared down the barrel, unable to focus my attention on anything else. Blood rushed in my ears, and I actually missed the man’s demands the first time he spoke.

  “Did you hear me, bitch?” he shouted. “Open the register!”

  His friend came to stand in front of me as well, holding his own handgun down at his side. Even though he wasn’t pointing it at me, I felt my fear crank up a few more notches from his proximity. This guy was twitchy, shifting his weight from one foot to the other over and over as he scratched at his neck. It was as if he couldn’t hold still. That combined with the small, red sores around his mouth told me all I needed to know about this guy. He was an addict. Probably meth.

  His friend was probably one, too, even though his physical signs were less obvious. He still had his gun shoved in my face, and he jabbed it further in my direction, impatience clear on his face.

  I opened the register, my hands shaking, and gathered the cash to hand over. It was probably less than three hundred dollars, since the owner didn’t like to have too much money available for this very reason. Personally, I didn’t care if they took every dime. It wasn’t worth my life.

  “That’s it?” the twitchy gunman asked, while his friend shoved the money into his pockets. “Give me your purse!”

  He was going to be disappointed if he was hoping to find more cash in there, but I wasn’t going to argue. I just wanted them to leave. I reached under the counter for it, but this just seemed to freak the guy out, and now I had two guns pointed at me. My heart pounded against my ribcage.