Excerpt from The Pact

The Pact
By Brantwijn Serrah
Fantasy/Western Fantasy
$3.99
Amazon: https://goo.gl/9dt1Xz
Kobo: https://goo.gl/cn5QTL
Champagne Books: https://goo.gl/8lX2cW

She's walked a hundred thousand miles of old roads and forgotten country to catch her prey. But she has never walked alone.

Excerpt

The monk stood in wait for her, halfway up the aisle—appeared out of nowhere again, quick and quiet as a scavenging rat. He glared at her with eyes brimming with mean shock and disgust.

“Witch,” he spat. “I knew it as soon as I saw you. Devil! Bride of—”

Serenity threw the sigh of fehu at him, the sign of the cattle’s horns, and it caught him high in the chest to send him stumbling backward. The power issued forth a bit weaker than usual. D’aej wormed about in her head, suffocated in the holy place, sapped by the wards against demons and hollowed out by the ravaging curses she’d twisted back in the tavern. But the spell cast the insufferable priest to the stone, striking him down with a callous resentment, and she stalked across the aisle at him.

“How dare you come into this place of worship!” he sputtered, crawling backward on his behind as she came closer. “How dare you—”

“How dare I?” she snarled.

“Murderer!”

“All I wanted was a place to rest for the night,” she snapped. “A room and a bed, and to be left alone. I didn’t come here to harm anyone. But somehow I get you, chastising me in the street, thinking to tell me what I can and can’t wear even while you sit there ogling, and I get your servants breaking into my room and burning years and years’ worth of study, and then I get a mob of your people screaming for my blood, planning on hanging me in the middle of the night. And you, padre, you have the gall to call me a murderer?”

“The Lord will repay you in kind!” the priest shrieked. “When you come here, doing the devil’s work! Wearing his symbol upon your breast! Whore! Devil’s whore!”

She leaned down and grabbed him by the front of his robes, pulling him up to meet her eyes. “You’re right,” she hissed. “I do the devil’s work. I wear his mark. I traffic with demons, and I command their power. So it might have been wise of you and your people not to piss me off.”