Sanctuary
ROMAN’S NOVELLA
AVAILABLE ON JULY 30, 2024
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ilona Andrews comes a novella featuring Roman, our favorite Volhv wizard in the always intriguing, colorful, volatile Kate Daniels world.
It’s not easy serving Chernobog, the God of Destruction, Darkness and Death… especially during the holidays; and especially when you’re out of eggnog and one of your pesky, freeloading mythic creatures has eaten your last cookie.
Roman would like nothing more than to be left alone, but when a wounded boy stumbles into his yard and begs for sanctuary, Roman takes him in. Now, elite mercenaries are camped out on his property, combat mages are dousing the house with fire, and strange priests are unleashing arcane magic. They thought Roman was easy pickings, just a hermit in the woods, but they chose the wrong dark priest to annoy. For while Roman might be patient, he is the Black Volhv, filled with the love of his terrible god. For his adversaries, it’s a fight to the death, but for him, it’s just another day in the neighborhood.
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Sanctuary will be available in ebook, print, and audio on July 30th, 2024.
The excerpt below is unedited and will be slightly different in the published book.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Snow crunched under his feet. It spread in front of him like a glittering blanket, a foot deep, sheathing the vast plain he was crossing, and he sank a little with every step. Above, a night sky gaped like a hole in existence, a spray of stars floating in its black depths.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking. It felt like forever. He didn’t know his destination either. He only felt it, pulling him like a magnet toward the dark wall of colossal fir trees at the edge of the plain.
Step. Another step.
Bitter cold bit at his face. His nose had gone numb, and he could barely feel his fingers in the thick red mittens as he clutched the rope pulled tight over his shoulder.
He was holding a rope. Why?
It felt strange somehow.
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. An enormous fir tree lay on the snow behind him. The rope was wrapped around its trunk. Behind it, a long trail of rough snow marked his wake and rolled off into the horizon. He had dragged the tree for miles.
The field tore like a paper screen.
Roman opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom. His back ached. Things snapped into focus. The tree, the harness, the destination, everything made sense.
Fucking hell.
He sat up slowly, fighting the soreness. His whole body protested, whining against the movement. Tomorrow was December 24th. The thought turned his stomach.
Being the priest of a dark god came with certain obligations. Obligations, he, Roman, honored with dedication and discipline. But a man had his limits. This was his. His god knew it. Roman was available any other time of the year, but December 23rd to December 25th he was to be left alone. Such was their unspoken agreement for the last seven years.
Roman didn’t expect kindness. Chernobog was the god of Destruction, Darkness, and Death, the Black Flame, the Final Cold, the End of Everything. Hoping for kindness would be foolish, and he wasn’t a foolish man. No, he had expected fairness. For Chernobog, for all his many faults and temper tantrums, was fair.
Roman stared at the rumpled covers. He had this vague but disturbing anxiety, as if he either forgot to do something important or something vital went missing and he couldn’t figure out what. It irritated him to no end.
The foul mood was nothing new. He detested the end of December. Koliada, Christmas, Saturnalia, he hated every iteration of the Winter Rites, with all of their corresponding rituals. The entire season was a wash. He didn’t decorate, he tried his damnedest not to celebrate, and the only thing he did like about it was the food.
Roman threw the covers aside, wincing against the cold air. Naked as a newborn. Ugh. His crumpled pajama pants and his T-shirt lay on the floor. He must’ve stripped in his sleep, because why the hell not? Not like it was the middle of winter and his house felt like an icebox.
He growled under his breath, got up, picked up his clothes – predictably soaked in sweat – and headed to the bathroom. He tossed them into the hamper, relieved himself, and went to brush his teeth. A big red welt crossed his chest, the souvenir from the rope. Great. Just great.
His reflection was looking leaner, too. Years ago, as he trudged through the wilderness half-starved, with one hundred extra pounds of gear on his back, next to other young fools in the same pixelated Army camo, he promised himself that when he got out of the service, he would eat more and move less. Old, fat, and happy. That was the goal.
He was thirty-four years old now, and if he skipped a few meals, flesh melted off him, leaving behind muscle and gristle, as if being in service to Chernobog burned him from inside out. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up like his father, a gaunt old man with a perpetual frown stuck on his face.
He put on sweatpants, a T-shirt, and an old sweatshirt so soft and worn, it was threadbare. It felt familiar and right now familiar was good.
It was a bad idea to be alone around this time. He’d planned on spending the holiday with Ashley, a lawyer with long legs and a fondness for light spanking, but Ashley was no longer around. He couldn’t really blame her. Sooner or later, they all ran.
His only other option was family. The thought made Roman shudder. They would be celebrating Koliada, the Winter Festival. The entire clan would be at his uncle’s house right now, getting ready for the monster parade and putting finishing touches on the tree. The tree had been borrowed from Christians, who in turn stole it from other pagans, but nobody cared anymore where it came from. Tomorrow night a noisy, happy crowd of Slavic neopagans would pummel each other in the ritual brawl, sing songs, then eat, get roaring drunk, and exchange gifts, while he’d sit there like a dark icicle, alone, wrapped in a swirl of human warmth but untouched by it.
Family would only make it worse. He would have to make an appearance tomorrow, and he would need to look upbeat and unbothered, because if he let what he was feeling show on his face, they would smother him trying to make him feel better. He didn’t want the attention. He didn’t want to think about it or talk about it. No, he had to look like he had his shit together, and that meant taking care of himself now and covering his bases: building a fire to get warm, making some coffee, eating some good food, and sinking into a book to live in someone else’s head for a change. He still had eggnog in the fridge and cookies he’d baked two nights ago.
Gods, eggnog sounded good right now.
Roman shoveled his feet into the Eeyore slippers his sister bought him last year and headed to the living room. He’d gone to sleep with a well-stocked fire that should’ve lasted until the morning. Instead, a pile of ashes greeted him. If he were lucky, there would be some coals under all that.
Had he been born several decades ago, he would’ve just turned on the central heating. He would’ve lived in a subdivision, his lawn ornaments would not be human skulls set on sticks, and he would have a comfortable, prosaic job, something like insurance adjuster. But the world had suffered a magic apocalypse. Now magic waves battered the planet, coming and going as they pleased, the skyscrapers lay in ruins, and continuing his family business meant lifetime servitude as the priest of a dark god…
He caught himself. That way lay dragons and not the fun kind. He needed eggnog. Eggnog would make everything better.
Roman went into the kitchen. The long window above the sink presented him with a dreary view: a chunk of gray sky above the stretch of lawn, dusted with snow and edged by dark woods. His kingdom in all of its glory.
There would be more snow before spring. The magic waves had been getting stronger lately, and this year they brought unseasonable cold. The temperature had dropped into mid-twenties last week and stayed there. Even in the mildest Atlanta winters, his house always got a little snow – it came with the territory. But now, with the frigid temperatures, a snowpocalypse was almost guaranteed. He had no doubt of it.
Eggnog, cookies, and then he would brave the outside and bring more wood in.
Roman swung the fridge door open. An empty jug of eggnog greeted him. He was sure it had been half-full yesterday. Did he drink it all and forget? He stared at it for a hot minute, but the eggnog jug refused to refill itself.
Fine. He would have coffee with cookies.
He shut the fridge and turned to the island. Last night he’d left a plate of cookies under a glass hood. The hood was still there. So was the plate. The cookies were gone. Only crumbs remained.
“What the actual fuck?”
The house didn’t answer.
He lifted the hood and stared at the crumbs. A little sparkle caught his eye. He leaned closer.
Glitter. A little smudge of silver glitter on the rim of the plate.
Magic gave thoughts power. Faith was a form of thought, so if a group of people believed in a specific being with all their heart, it could manifest into existence. The more believers, the higher were the chances of manifestation, and the more power the being would have. Faith endowed the Pope with his miraculous healing powers and spawned region-specific monsters based on urban legends and folklore.
However, sometimes the very nature of the imagined being precluded the manifestation from occurring because fulfilling it would require infinite power. For example, it didn’t matter how many people believed that a white-bearded man in a jolly red suit delivered presents on Christmas. For that manifestation to occur, a single being would have to be aware of every single child, assess their conduct throughout an entire year, create a toy out of thin air, and then deliver it simultaneously to every household with a child. The scale was too large, and the very faith that kept the legend alive ensured it would never become reality.
This was his bread and butter. His father and uncle, in a rare feat of cooperation, had literally written a book on it and called it the Santa Claus Paradox.
The chances of Santa Claus manifesting in his kitchen and stealing his cookies were absolutely zero. Also, it wasn’t even Christmas Eve.
Roman tilted his head to the side. The second sprinkling of glitter sparkled at him from the edge of the island. This one had a dark brown smudge by it.
He skirted the island and studied the smudge. Blood. Roman passed his hand over it. Magic nipped at his skin. Human.
A human covered in glitter had crossed the minefield of magic defenses surrounding his house, broke in without tripping any of the alarms, drank his eggnog, ate his cookies, bled on his kitchen island, and then disappeared.
Honestly, Santa Claus was more likely.
Roman squinted at the smudge and bent down, putting himself on the same level. Another spark of glitter, on the other counter. A little swipe across the gas stove, a shiny trace across the counter, and a small shiny pawprint on the left pane of the window. The locks on the window had been disengaged.
Damn it.
He growled, stomped through the house to the back door, yanked it open, and strode out onto the back porch. It was bitterly cold. A thin layer of snow covered the lawn. He had thought it was morning, but it had to be late afternoon judging by the shadows. He must’ve lost time dragging that damn tree across the field.
Roman scanned the grounds.
Thirty yards away, a pack of small creepy creatures crowded a tall fir tree, decorated with random ornaments, pieces of tin foil, pinecones, red berries, moss, feathers, and assorted forest trash.
Roman’s left eye twitched. For a second, he simply stared.
Slavic pagan tradition was filled with small nasties, traditionally seen as evil or at least a nuisance. Little critters that ranged from annoying to sinister. They stared from the darkness with glowing eyes, made weird scuttling noises on the roof, stole things, spooked the livestock and scared children, spread trash when it was swept into a pile, bit people’s ankles, served as sorcerer minions, and generally created havoc. Collectively known as nechist – unclean things – they loved him with undying devotion. He’d given up on shooing them ages ago and now fed them kitchen scraps and chicken feed.
All of the usual suspects were here. His tame anchutka, covered in squirrel fur, with the body of a lemur, the tail of a possum, leathery wings, and the face of a nightmarish bush baby, stood on her hind legs, trying to hang a big red ball onto a branch. The melalo, a plump two-headed bird, with one head dead and drooping to the side, clutched a bright blue feather in its beak and kept shoving it at the anchutka.
An assortment of kolovershi, ranging in size from a cardinal to a barn owl, flittered from branch to branch, tucking things in. Furry, with long ears that stood straight up, scaly limbs, and dexterous paws armed with small but sharp talons, they looked like some mutated versions of the Furby toys he remembered from his childhood, equipped with shining eyes and fuzzy wings. They had just shown up on his porch one night. Kolovershi served witches, and these were clearly orphaned, so he had taken them to his mother. She’d tried to place them, but they just kept coming back.
The auka, a Russian-hamster-looking mouse the size of a possum with tan fur, tiny antlers, and a skunk’s fluffy tan tail, dashed through the branches, trying to wrap a long glittering garland around the tree. Kor, the one pet nechist he did not mind, was holding the garland up in his cat paws. A korgorusha, he resembled a black cat with an abnormally long, prehensile tail and trailed smoke wherever he went.
And finally Roro. Nobody knew what the fuck Roro was. She was fourteen inches tall, weighed about twenty-five pounds and stood on four sturdy legs armed with sharp, retractable claws. Her squished face looked almost cute in an ugly but adorable way, but her wide mouth was filled with razor-sharp fangs, and her body with its bunny tail was solid muscle. When she got going, she was like a bowling ball, wrecking everything in her path. Currently, she was dashing back and forth around the tree for no apparent reason. Reason, in general, wasn’t Roro’s strong suit.
As he watched, Roro hopped over something sticking out from behind the tree. A leg. A human leg in a boot.
Roman sucked in a deep breath. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The motley crew froze. The anchutka dropped the ball on the snow. Kor vanished in a puff of dark smoke. Roro slid to stop and backed away, tall, layered ears flat against her head. The auka raised a small hand-paw and waved.
He marched off the porch toward the tree. The kolovershi squeaked and hid in the fir branches. The anchutka scuttled aside.
“What the hell is going on here?”
The melalo looked left, looked right, not sure what was the best route to escape, and stared at him, terrified. Roman gave him a look.
“How many times do I have to tell you, you’re a Romani demon. Go be with your people!”
The melalo squawked and ran across the snow, diving under the tree.
“And you!”
The auka blinked at him.
“You’re not even a nechist. You’re a forest spirit. Why are you here? Why are any of you here?”
The auka waved at him again.
“At least have the decency to act contrite.”
He finally rounded the tree. An unconscious teenage kid hugged the trunk, curved into a fetal ball. Judging by the dusting of snow on his jacket, he had been there a while. A dark red stain spread over his jeans – something had either bitten or stabbed his thigh. Someone had jabbed a Christmas wreath, no doubt stolen off some door, onto his head and shoved a little artificial Christmas twig with glitter and bright plastic berries into his exposed left ear. Tinsel wrapped his jacket, binding him to the tree. A small chunk of cookie stuck out from between his lips, smudged with glitter.
“Where did you get this human?”
Nobody answered.
He slapped his hand over his twitching eye, pulled the shiny twig out of the boy’s ear, plucked the cookie out, tossed the wreath aside, grabbed him by the shoulder, and shook him.
“Hey kid?”
The boy’s eyelashes fluttered. He uncurled a little and Roman glimpsed a small black puppy in the curve of his body.
“You can’t stay here,” Roman told him. “It’s dangerous here for you.”
The kid’s lips moved. A little blood dripped onto his chin. He struggled to say something.
Roman crouched by him.
“Sanctuary,” the kid whispered.
“What?”
“Sanctuary…”
“Where do you think you are? Does this look like a Christian church to you? Do you see a collar on my neck?”
The kid’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he went limp.
Damn it.
#
Logs crackled in the fire, sending an occasional burst of orange sparks into the air. Warmth permeated the house.
Roman set the squirt bottle with saline solution aside and gulped his coffee. It was bitter and hot. He’d gotten used to drinking it black while in the service, because cream and sugar had been scarce, and never lost the habit.
The kid lay on a pad of blankets in front of the fireplace with a towel under his injured leg. Roman had cut his jeans to expose the wound, and the laceration glistened with red, like an angry mouth. Something had slashed the kid’s thigh, cutting a four-inch gap through the muscle. A pretty deep cut, too. A couple of inches to the left, and he would’ve bled out. His face wasn’t too bad. Someone had punched him in the mouth, but all of his teeth were still there.
Roman slipped the latex gloves on – worth their weight in gold, literally, since rubber was pricy post-Shift – pulled the suture needle from its boiling water bath with the needle drivers and set about threading it.
The kid looked about fifteen, dark hair, pale skin, about five foot ten or so. Slight build. Not from starvation, but from that typical thinness adolescents get when they grow six inches in one summer. He hadn’t had enough time to fill out.
His clothes said someone took good care of him. His jeans didn’t show much wear, his sweatshirt was relatively clean, and he wore Mahrous boots. Most boots were now custom made by small shops, but in Atlanta, Mahrous Bootmakers stood above the rest. A good pair of their boots would last years, and they came with a hefty price tag. Only a loving parent would invest that much money in something an adolescent might outgrow in the next few months.
All in all, nothing stood out. Just your regular, typical kid, probably from a better part of the city. Didn’t look familiar.
The little black puppy curled tightly against the boy’s body, looking like an oversized doughnut of black fur. The puppy was female, probably a black German Shepherd, and checking her over didn’t reveal any obvious injuries. As soon as he’d set the puppy down, the dog scrambled back to the boy and huddled against him.
Smoke swirled on the couch and congealed into Kor. The korgorusha twitched his long, tufted ears, and shifted his weight, resting his big body on his favorite blue pillow. His golden eyes shone with soft light, half-magic, half-glow borrowed from the fire.
“Are we about to have visitors?”
The korgorusha purred. Vicious claws slid out of his soft black paws, pierced the pillow, and withdrew.
Figured.
Roman pulled the edges of the wound closed and made his first stitch. He’d have to wait until the rest of his misfit squad made it in for a detailed report.
At least the cut was nice and even. No ragged edges to trim.
The kid hadn’t asked for shelter. He didn’t say, “Help!” or “I’m hurt.” No, he’d said, “Sanctuary.” That meant two things. First, the kid knew who Roman was and what he did for a living, and second, he was being chased.
Roman rolled his wrist, taking care to pierce the skin carefully. The fact that he didn’t recognize the kid meant nothing. There were roughly 10,000 Slavic neopagans in Atlanta and four times that number of other pagan religion practitioners, and that wasn’t counting people of Slavic descent and their friends and relatives who didn’t actively worship but would look for magic solutions when trouble came clawing at their door. He couldn’t possibly know everyone.
However, the fact that the kid showed up at his house at all was odd. Roman lived on fifteen acres in the woods, and the driveway to his property was a quarter of a mile long. His nearest neighbor was about half a mile away, a druid who wanted to nurture birds in solitude.
Very few people knew where he lived or how to get to his house. Most of the time the petitioners came looking for his father or his uncle, sometimes his mother or sisters, and got passed down the chain to him. He was the last resort, called in either when everything else had failed or when things had obviously gone so wrong from the start that nobody else wanted to touch the problem with a ten-foot pole.
How did the kid know where to find him? How did he get here? He’d had the nechist search the property and they didn’t find a vehicle, a bicycle, or a horse. They didn’t find a backpack or any bags either and the boy didn’t have a wallet.
Last night the tech was up, and Roman had walked the inner perimeter of his wards the same as he always did before he went to bed. Which meant the kid had entered the property sometime after Roman had gone to bed, but before the magic hit. The boy had run through the woods, bleeding all over, with nothing except his dog and the clothes on his back. The tree where he’d collapsed was only thirty yards from the house. The boy had to have seen the house, but hadn’t managed to get to it, which meant he’d been at his limit. The tree was as far as his body could go.
All of that added up to desperation.
Roman frowned. Two months ago, a family had come to his father begging and crying that their fourteen-year-old daughter had disappeared, and they were sure some unclean monstrosity had carried their Masha off because there was blood in her bedroom, a broken window, and claw marks on her windowsill. Roman had taken that mess on as a favor, and he’d found the kid in two hours at a trap house. She had an older boyfriend the family disapproved off and a severe drug habit, and she faked the whole thing so her parents would think she died and wouldn’t look for her.
The boy on his blankets could be a runaway. In that case, he didn’t want to get involved. He could barely resolve his own family disputes, let alone someone else’s. Before that fourteen-year-old, he would’ve said that a long trek across the woods while wounded was too drastic for a runaway. But Masha had ran two miles in freezing rain, wearing only her night gown and slippers, before her scumbag boyfriend picked her up – and she’d done it in the middle of the night during a magic wave, when anyone with a crumb of common sense stayed behind sturdy doors and solid walls. Teenagers thought they were immortal, and they could be both remarkably naïve and single-minded.
In the kitchen a window creaked, swinging open. The pack of kolovershi slipped into the room, arranged themselves on the floor in a ragged semicircle around him and the fire, and stared at him with glowing eyes.
He finished the last stitch, snipped the suture thread, set his tools down, and wrapped a fresh bandage over the wound. The kid didn’t even stir. Roman checked his forehead. No fever. No cold sweat. He tossed a blanket over him and the puppy and peeled off his gloves.
“Let’s see it.”
The kolovershi flittered to him, dropping things into his palm: a chunk of bloody snow, weird metal-looking hairs, some dirt, thread, and a clump of chewed up tobacco dip. Ugh. The glamor of the job. So much glamor.
Roman tossed the lot into the fire and spat into the flames, sending a punch of magic through the logs. The fire turned a translucent cold blue. Within it, twelve people trudged through the snowy forest, making their way up the old, half-overgrown road. In the front, a short, beefy guy gripped the leads of two oversized dogs. They stood about thirty inches at the shoulder, barrel-chested, front-heavy, like overbred pit bulls, and covered with odd bluish fur. A row of metallic spikes ran along their spines. Both dogs had noses to the ground. Trackers out of the Honeycomb.
Nothing good ever came out of the Honeycomb.
He studied the procession. The two guys in front – the dog handler and a thinner man with lime-green hair who stuck close to him – had to be hired hands. Their clothes were shoddier. The ten people behind them were a different story. They wore gray three-season duty jackets, matching gray pants tucked into boots, winter caps, and assault vests. Three had chest rigs with deep pockets, fully loaded. Probably magic users of some kind. Everyone carried a crossbow and a rifle.
They didn’t seem nervous. They weren’t in a hurry. They moved methodically through the snow, following the dogs.
Ten professionals and two trackers. Overkill for a runaway kid.
The group passed a tall hickory singed on one side. It had gotten struck by lightning three years ago, but magic had kept it alive. Unless the kid’s trail led them in circles, they would reach the house in fifteen minutes.
Roman got up, washed his hands, and dried them with a kitchen towel. The little nasties watched him, ready to spring into action.
He went to the bedroom. The kolovershi followed him, sneaking in, peeking at him from around the corners. He entered his walk-in closet and opened a narrow cabinet. A six-foot tall staff waited inside, topped by the carved head of a monster bird.
Roman reached for it. His fingers touched the beech wood, polished and smooth. Magic nipped him. The bird’s beak opened, and Klyuv let out a piercing screech.
The kolovershi froze.
“Shhh,” Roman told it. “Not yet.”
Klyuv clicked its beak, its cruel bird eyes turning in their orbits and fell silent.
Roman went to the front door and swung it open. The snow was inches deep now. The world had turned black and white – black tress on white snow, and against that monochromatic backdrop, the nechist’s Christmas tree with its red and silver ornaments stood out like a challenge. Three sets of tracks led under it.
“Come here,” Roman ordered.
The anchutka, the melalo, and Roro slipped out from under the tree and ran over to the porch. Roro bounded up the steps, stood on her hind legs, and clawed at his pants. Her mouth opened. “Roro.”
“Sit.”
Roro’s butt landed on the floorboards.
The anchutka leaped, flew a little, and landed on Roman’s shoulder. The melalo scooted by him, waddling anxiously from foot to foot. That was all of them. The kolovershi were already inside, and the auka had retreated to Chernobog’s kumir in the backyard. Chernobog’s idol, carved from a sacred beech tree, stood ten feet tall, and the auka had dug a long network of burrows beneath it. She would be safe there.
Roman raised his staff.
A bottomless darkness opened inside him, a void churning with power and ice, straining to flow into him like a shadowy flood spilling into an empty vessel. He reached for it, grasped a thin current, and fed it into his staff.
Klyuv’s beak gaped.
Roman brought the staff down, striking a sound from the porch boards. Magic the color of soot pulsed from the shaft, rushing through his property like a blast wave.
He owned fifteen acres, and two of them formed his back yard. The thorn fence that encircled it awoke, the branches sliding against each other. Ice daggers formed over the thorns.
Deep within the ground, under the top, frozen layer of soil, bones stirred.
The STOP sign in the front yard shook, flinging snow off itself. The old, brown blood on it turned viscous. The words KEEP OUT, scrawled in a jagged script, bled anew. The striga skull on top of it opened its thick jaw, snapping its inhuman fangs. The rune carved in its forehead turned bright blue and twin blue flames ignited in its empty orbits.
Roman surveyed the front yard. He’d rolled the unwelcome mat out. Now all he had to do was wait.
