Witch King 1 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  Shadow Alley Press Mailing List

  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 Ninteen

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

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  Books by Shadow Alley Press

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  Copyright

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Summary

  Heal the world, or die trying.

  ALL KYR EVER WANTED was to become a peaceful shaman in service to the Sevenfold Empire. But when his vision quest binds his core to the ferocious crimson bear, the young shaman discovers that he must face a much more dangerous challenge than a few sick villagers. A vile corruption is spreading through the world, threatening to utterly consume it.

  With only his trusty war club and his wits to guide him, Kyr must contend with the Emperor's elite headhunters, treacherous outlaws, and seductive spirits to purge the infection that threatens the land.

  Witch King 1 is a cultivation harem novel featuring a headstrong protagonist, deadly enemies, explicit scenes of steamy good times, and buckets of crazy action.

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  Chapter One

  TEN THOUSAND STEPS was a hell of a long way to climb on an empty stomach. By the time I’d reached Mount Shiki’s peak, the gnawing hunger in my gut left me wrung out and exhausted. The site of my shamanic vision quest was near at hand, but the ache in my belly made me want to head back down the mountain for a bowl of my mother’s winter root stew.

  Instead, I took a deep breath and leaned on my iron war club like a cane to catch my breath. My fur-lined boots had long since given up trying to keep the cold off my feet, and my toes were now as numb as wooden pegs. The traditional loincloth that was the only other item of clothing I was allowed to bring on my vision quest did nothing to protect my nether regions from the mountain’s biting chill. My balls wanted to crawl up into my belly to escape the hellish cold.

  My foundation core, which I’d strengthened with powerful herbal teas and tinctures during the week leading up to this journey, felt raw and ragged after the long climb up the rugged steps to the holy mountain’s peak. Its twin nodes, twice as many as most men had at my age, had been filled with rin when I’d started this climb. That power had kept me alive during my climb, and both nodes were now almost empty. If I couldn’t find a place to meditate and restore my reserves of sacred energy, my vision quest would come to a frozen halt.

  “A man lives in the world of his choosing.” My grandfather, long since dead, had whispered those words to me during one of our many walks in the forests beyond our village. The words had stuck with me ever since, and I felt like I finally understood them.

  This was the world I’d chosen.

  It was time to stop bitching and live in it, no matter how much it hurt, or how badly I wanted to call it quits. I dragged my sorry ass forward, between a pair of snow-speckled boulders, and into an impossible new world.

  The mountain’s top unfolded into a vast expanse of snow studded with copses of towering pine trees, stone outcroppings that jutted dozens of feet into the air, and hidden streams that burbled beneath the thick blanket of flawless snow. Birds flitted through the trees, the wind from their wings dislodging flurries of snow from the pine boughs. A fox perked up its ears at my arrival, a white-furred lynx stared at me from the top of a spiny stone, and something much larger shook the forest’s branches with its unseen passage.

  If I’d had any doubts about becoming a shaman, that was the moment in which they vanished. This was the world I’d always dreamed about. A place of pristine beauty untouched by the hands of mortals.

  It was fucking gorgeous.

  And it was exactly where I belonged.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I called out, hoping my spirit animal would take mercy on my exhausted state and prance out to wrap up my quest with a tidy bow.

  Every animal in sight fled from the sound of my voice, and the birds in the trees took flight as if they’d just gotten word a flock of hungry hawks had been spotted nearby.

  I hadn’t really thought the call would convince my spirit animal to bound out of the wilderness and leap into my arms, but I would have always wondered how much easier I could have made my life if I hadn’t given it a shot.

  Fortunately, there was plenty of rin energy on top of Mount Shiki to sustain me while I searched for just the right critter to complete my quest. I hoped for something wise, maybe a snowy owl, or clever, like a white ferret. I’d have even settled for a noble stag, or an industrious mole.

  As the sun set on my search and a cloak of purple velvet twilight spread across the snow, I drew in the sacred energy that was so plentiful on top of Mount Shiki. The nourishing power helped me to endure the cold and quelled my body’s fierce hunger and thirst. With so much free power for me to cycle through my core, I could survive for a very long time without food or water.

  Which turned out to be a good thing, because no blessed animals stepped out from the forest to greet me. Time stood still as I searched high and low for some spirit beast who would bond with me. Though I caught glimpses of my quarry through the trees, faint golden glows that flashed through my spirit sight, I never came close enough to make a connection with them. The sacred rin kept me on my feet, but it couldn’t totally erase the exhaustion that crept into my muscles and the cramps that knotted my stomach. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been on top of the mountain, but it felt like a long, long time.

  And then, hiking through a dense forest with my war club over my shoulders and my spirit as low as it had ever been, I almost fucking died.

  One minute I’d been squeezing between a pair of scrubby pine trees, closing my eyes and turning my head to keep from getting my face scratched off by their branches, and the next I was confronted by the gleaming white bones of a few hundred animal skeletons.

  The entrance to an enormous cave lay fifty feet ahead of me. The snow in front of it was stained with streaks of red, and the half-eaten carcass of a dead buck steamed in the cave’s mouth. A deep, challenging rumble echoed from the darkness. The creature’s aura—big, red, and hungry—oozed from the cavern like the shadow of death itself.

  “Oh. Shit.” Every instinct in my body told me to drop my war club and run like hell back the way I’d come. Far better to starve to death than to get ripped apart by whatever was about to come charging out of that cave.

  But another part of me had moved beyond fear. I was too cold, too hungry, and just too motherfucking tired to spend another day tramping around the wilderness with an empty belly. That part of me w
anted to stand its ground. It wanted to see what came out of that cave. And, more than anything, it wanted to see if it could best whatever I was about to face.

  To my surprise, that possibly insane part of my mind won the coin toss.

  “Maybe this is it. Let’s see what you’ve got, motherfucker, because I’m too worn the hell out to back down now,” I whispered and hoped I hadn’t just made a terrible, terrible mistake. “If you’re supposed to be my spirit animal, let’s do this thing.”

  A bear out of my nightmares charged from the cave’s mouth. Its fur was the color of fresh blood, and its teeth gleamed like ivory daggers in a mouth big enough to snap my head off my shoulders with a single bite. The bone-white scythes of its claws churned up chunks of blood-soaked earth and hurled them into the sky behind it as it raced across the ground toward me. Whatever else the creature might have been, one thing was obvious.

  It was seriously pissed.

  The crimson bear was on top of me in the blink of an eye. It lunged forward and snapped its jaws through the space where my head had before I’d jerked it out of the way. The beast rose to its full height with a mighty roar, and its shadow blotted out the sun above me. My spirit sight snapped into focus on the creature’s core, and what I saw there filled me with raw terror.

  The bear held a moonbound core in the center of its body.

  In all my life up to that point, the most powerful core I’d ever seen belonged to one of the Moonsilver Bat’s visiting priests, and he’d only had a skybound core. The bear’s core was two full levels above that, five levels above my foundation core, and it held a staggering twenty-five nodes filled to the brim with pure senjin. To top the other scary shit, the killer grizzly had three techniques at its disposal: one for attack, one for defense, and a third for healing or recovery of some sort.

  If I didn’t do something real clever, real fast, I was a goddamned dead man.

  A spike of adrenaline spurred my survival instincts into overdrive. I threw myself back and to the right a split second before the bear’s clawed paw could disembowel me.

  I scrambled back into the cover of the pine trees. Their boles would keep the bear from charging straight into me, while giving me enough space to swing my club down between them. I did just that, smashing my weapon into one of the bear’s paws, and hoped the blow would convince it to go look for easier prey somewhere else.

  The crimson bear had other ideas.

  It slammed its right shoulder into a tree in front of me, splintering the thick trunk with its massive impact. The beast tore the top half of the damaged tree loose with a single smash from its paw and pushed deeper into the forest after me.

  I wisely retreated to a position where the trees were older and sturdier. My gaze stayed locked on the beast’s burning-ember eyes, searching for some sign that the creature recognized me and wasn’t really trying to tear me limb from limb. It was just my luck to find my spirit animal only to get eaten by it.

  The bear tried to bowl over another tree, but the sturdy trunk resisted the attack and the tree remained upright. Enraged, the crimson beast shredded the trunk with its claws, flinging bark and pulp in every direction. It stared at me the whole time it was taking the tree apart, and something passed between us. Yes, this was my spirit animal. And, yes, it was going to kill me if it could.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, honestly. A cool and wise spirit would have been an ideal guide into the world of shamans. An owl, maybe. Or a raven. Those were supposed to be pretty smart. I’d have even accepted one of the meeker animals, like a swift stag or a cunning ferret. Instead, I’d gotten the most homicidal spirit in the forest. Except maybe a wolverine.

  “Can’t we talk about this?” I shouted to be heard over the bear’s demolition of the pine tree.

  The bear stopped, tilted its head to one side, and then squinted at me with an all-too-human expression on its enormous face.

  “No weaklings,” it snarled. Then it went right back to eating the tree.

  That was an insult I wasn’t used to hearing. At a little over six feet tall I’d never been the runt of my village. And, while I was no swordmaster like my father, the lessons of my martial arts instructor, Misha, had kept my body plenty strong. If this bear thought I was a weakling, I’d show it the error of its ways. It might kill me, but not without a fight it would remember.

  With a roar of my own, I charged forward and slammed my war club down in an overhead smash. The spiked iron’s five-foot length gave me plenty of leverage to bring the pain, and that’s exactly what I did. The weapon smashed into the bear’s left shoulder with a crushing force that sent shock waves rippling through my hands and into my arms. That attack should have shattered even a big bear’s bones.

  In response, the crimson bear knocked aside the tree it had been eating and lunged at me again. Its head shot through the space it had just cleared and its jaws clamped around my war club before I could yank the weapon out of the monster’s reach. The beast reared, dragging me off my feet, but I wasn’t about to release my weapon without a fight. I clung to the spiked club like my life depended on it, because it probably did.

  The crimson bear whipped its head over its shoulder and sent my club and me sailing through the trees into the clearing in front of its cave. The unexpected maneuver caught me off guard, and I landed awkwardly, then tumbled onto my back in the snow.

  That was a very bad place to be with a giant red bear trying to eat me.

  I rolled away as the bear charged me again and kicked up to my feet before it could kill me where I lay on the ground. The beast was stronger than I was, and faster in a straight-line dash. My only advantages were desperate cunning and years of combat training every boy and girl in my village had undergone as part of the Junior Guard. I wasn’t sure those were enough to turn this fight in my favor.

  When the savage animal tried to tear me apart with its claws, I dodged back, counterattacked with a slam from my club, then circled around the fucker to hit it in the back before it could chew my face off. When it charged, I dodged to one side and slammed my spiked weapon into its flank as it passed. No single attack I made was enough to drop the beast on its own, but the dozens of small wounds I opened bled the strength from its body and drained its core of the senjin that fueled its rage.

  If the crimson bear wanted a fight, then I’d give it a goddamned fight.

  Our battle rocked the top of the mountain until we were both half-fucking dead. I fought my murderous spirit animal until its flanks were foamy with sweat and its head sagged against its blood-soaked paws. The spirit animal’s left eye was swollen closed courtesy of a powerful blow from my war club, and its mouth was lopsided with missing teeth. The crimson bear looked like it had fought half a battalion of the Emperor’s own guards.

  My foe’s wounds made me look like the most badass brawler this side of the Iron Arena. Unfortunately, my injuries were just as bad, if not worse.

  My torso was covered in deep gouges and brutal bites. A flap of meat hung off my left shoulder, and my right thigh was torn open to the bone. I’d lost so much blood I had to lean on my war club to keep from pitching over onto my face. My hit-and-run tactics had worn the beast down and kept it from killing me, sure, but it had taken its toll in blood and meat from my carcass in the process.

  We’d stained the snow red with our blood for as far as I could see in every direction. Hell, from the color of the sun as it set on us, we might have painted the sky with our gore. The seemingly endless battle had knocked over trees and ripped deep furrows in the earth. The fight had left scars on the mountain that would take generations to heal.

  And still the crimson bear eyeballed me like it wanted to cut out my heart and eat it. To my credit, I stared right back at it, though my vision was a blurred fog and the last of my blood was scant minutes away from pumping onto the ground beneath my feet.

  “Not a fucking weakling.” My words stumbled all over themselves on their way out of my mouth. I was punch-drunk and more dead t
han alive by that point. I thought I deserved extra credit for forming a sentence, proper diction be damned. My core was empty, and I was too weak and too worn out to even try filling it back up.

  The crimson bear glared at me from less than a yard away. It could have killed me with a single blow, though the effort would have likely killed it, too. The embers of its eyes had burned low, and its aura guttered like a candle in a stiff breeze. The creature’s core was as hollow as mine, all of its sacred energy burned as fuel for our fight. Finally, the bear shuddered, raised its head, and leaned forward until our noses touched.

  “Not a weakling,” it managed to grunt out, before we both pitched onto our sides in the snow.

  Chapter Two

  I WOKE IN DARKNESS with the taste of blood in my mouth and something warm and smooth pressed up against my naked body. I lifted my eyelids with my fingertips just to be sure I’d actually opened them. That didn’t banish the darkness, so either I was blind or I was someplace where not even a glimmer of light could find me. My first instinct was to panic, kick whatever I was under off me, and then try to find a way to get the fuck out of there with all due haste.

  Part one of my plan went swimmingly, and my heart and mind raced together toward a stroke and some very bad thoughts about my situation. I wondered if the crimson bear and I had died after coming to our agreement that I was, in fact, a badass. If I was in some sort of hell, that would explain the darkness that surrounded me.

  It would not, however, explain the warm, slender body lying on my chest and against my left side. Whatever, or whoever, that was didn’t seem threatening, so I decided to investigate that part of the puzzle first.

  My hand landed gingerly on a smooth shoulder that, thankfully, felt humanoid. Doing my best not to wake up what could easily be a homicidal spirit who’d dragged me off to its lair to feast on my core, I traced the outline of my cuddle buddy’s body. The arm connected to the shoulder was slender and slight, the smooth skin broken only by a random hatchwork of what felt like raised scars along the bicep and forearm.