Dark Time: Mortal Path by Dakota Banks

setting to rest any secret doubts during pregnancy, of finally being able to say my baby is fine .
    She gently laid the baby across her lap.
    Toes…check.
    Fingers…
    She gently tried to unfold her daughter’s little fist. Under Susannah’s fingers, she felt the girl’s flesh rapidly losing warmth. In the space of two breaths, the baby’s hands were cold. Memories swept into her mind of the night she spent in the village jail, lying next to the pitiful body of her stillborn baby.
    The smell of blood in the darkness. Constanta’s soul fleeing the place of its miserable birth, the heat leaving the small body and the soft and perfect arms and legs taking on the stiffness of death.
    It was happening again. Constanta was dying, and this time she could see it, by the light of the lamp.
    She could see every detail of her daughter’s slide toward death, and was helpless to stop it.
    When Constanta was dead—again—Susannah was holding Candy, the true occupant of this room.
    She put the baby back in her crib and picked the knife up from the floor.
    She saw her life stretching out ahead of her, the endless years of an Ageless human.
    How many times will I hold Constanta only to have her die in my arms?
    Bitterness boiled up from inside her as she remembered how she had thanked Rabishu for his gift.
    He must have enjoyed that.
    She swayed, nearly bursting with the strength of emotion coursing through her. When she was able to walk, she left the home of Ellen and Glenn Morgan and their daughter Candice, who would grow up to be a healer.
    Out in the moonlight, she swore that not one more innocent would die by her hand, and she knew exactly what she was going to do to put a stop to it.

    T here were technical difficulties. She couldn’t just phone someone and say, “Would you mind severing my head?”
    Susannah lived in a Montana house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909. It was on a ranch of about 250 acres, small by Montana standards but perfect for the privacy she needed. Susannah was the original owner, having worked with the architect, and had “sold” the place twice to herself, as she assumed a new identity every twenty or thirty years.
    Rabishu hadn’t responded to her refusal to carry out her last assignment. She hoped he would delay even further, because she was on a mission of her own.
    Two of the home’s bedrooms were devoted to her weapons cache, a third to her collection of antiquities she’d accumulated during her world travels. Among the rare items was a blade salvaged from a guillotine at the end of France’s Reign of Terror, a bloody year in which thousands of people were executed. Already 120 years old at the time, Susannah had been busy elsewhere in the world. The French didn’t need any assistance in slaughtering one another during the Terror.
    Half a day to get the lumber and supplies delivered, half a day to build the fourteen-foot frame in a clearing behind the house. The blade in her collection weighed almost ninety pounds and was difficult to mount to the crossbeam, but she managed it. She tested the drop by freeing the rope that held the angled blade aloft. It worked.
    It was sunset, a fitting time. She sat on her expansive porch and watched the mountains grow darker as shadows climbed their sides. Clad in her killing outfit, she gathered her strength for her last assassination.
    Get on with it, before you chicken out.
    She crossed the clearing, settled her neck in the hollow of the bottom brace, and yanked the rope.

Chapter Eight
23 z 138
    2009-08-25 02:50

    S he closed her eyes to greet death, but instead Rabishu pulled her into the Midworld.
    “No! Let me go!”
    His voice thundered in her head, so loud it was a roar without words. That voice, so intimate inside her, was more of a violation than the blade on her neck would have been. The circle between her breasts throbbed wildly. She put her hand to her chest and felt the warmth of blood seeping into her clothing.
    Rabishu’s mark. Once