I am currently querying my wild-west Romantasy – check out the details below if you want to know more!
Serena is a notorious outlaw looking for one last job. When she’s hired to escort an eccentric criminal across the desert, she’ll have to partner with the sheriff—her separated husband—to secure her ticket to freedom.
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The First Five Pages
The silence of the night stretched thin across the sky—until bullets pierced the air.
Serena bolted upright from her hiding spot on the hard, dusty ground. About damn time. She pushed onto her knees and wrapped her fingers along the shaft of her rifle, eyes cool and focused as she lowered behind the large boulder caught high up on the hill. She must have waited for the Madden Gang for close to three hours if her aching back and twitching shins had anything to say about it.
Gunshots and drunken shouts echoed through the valley, hanging in the air like the lingering of church bells. Peaches jerked upright at the onslaught of the outlaw tumult, her grazing now forgotten. Serena motioned for her steed to stay with a flap of her hand and a pointed glare. The cabalisk lowered her scaly head and flicked out a forked tongue in response.
“How much do you think is in there?” A voice ricocheted across the rocky valley of the Madden Gang’s hideout.
Serena peeked over the boulder.
“Six hundred?” One of the bandits surmised, slipping off her horse and slapping its rear away. The creature lurched forward into the abandoned barn. “Maybe seven?”
“No, no more than seven,” another interjected.
A thousand, actually.
Serena leveled her rifle on the two dozen outlaws that swarmed beneath her. Paul Edmondson himself had told her the final sum when he’d shared his suspicions of being followed. Even though Serena hardly knew the man, she knew she couldn’t refuse him when he’d appeared beside her table at Rusty’s Saloon.
The town of Licewood had always known Paul Edmondson to be a suspicious man. Constantly raging about his son trying to usurp his business; his farm falling victim to a nonexistent blight; his inexplicable habit of spouting off prophecies after consuming too much whiskey. The man was a downright nutjob, and needless to say, Serena was surprised when his suspicions turned out to be true.
The moment Paul’s wife from a very well-to-do family passed on from pneumonia, the Madden Gang swooped in to snag her portion of the family inheritance for themselves. Now they celebrated their robbery with free-flowing moonshine and a few rounds of bullets shooting off into the quiet night. And so Serena readied her shot, tilting her head just a tinge to the left as she narrowed her focus on the bandits.
Paul Edmondson knew they would take his inheritance; that’s why he’d hired her to steal it back.
“I don’t deal with the law,” the elderly man had told her when she’d asked about the job. Why steal it back if he could hire someone to prevent the theft instead? “Deputies ask too many questions. Got too much moonshine stashed away to have badges sniffin’ around my property.”
Serena huffed a small laugh at the memory. The citizens of Licewood had grown crazier with every pass of the sun, but Serena had a soft spot for social pariahs. If this job meant a decent paycheck and flipping a middle finger to the law, then so be it. She’d accepted stranger jobs for less.
Whatever it took to finance a boat ticket away from this wasteland.
Serena returned her gaze to the hideout below. The gang gathered outside the desolate barn, a dozen or so outlaws shoving one another and popping corks off stolen alcohol bottles. Their haughty leader ordered someone to smash a rock against the lock of a small, wooden chest no larger than a saddle bag.
The metal crunched beneath the bandit’s force, earning a hoot of praise once the lock broke in half. Serena rubbed her finger against her trigger as she studied the leader’s fiery red locks and impish grin—not to mention his beet-red jacket and ridiculously low-cut shirt. That was Maddox Madden, leader of the Madden Gang and the ultimate pain in Serena’s ass. Tonight, she would revel in making the man dance beneath her rain of bullets.
“Let’s pry her open and see what’s inside, shall we?” Maddox crooned, reaching out to lift the chest’s lid.
Serena’s trigger finger twitched. A bright light flashed as the gunshot echoed across the valley. The bullet ricocheted off the metal clasps and escaped into the night, narrowly missing Maddox’s fingers by the breadth of a hair. The man retracted his hand and held it to his chest. His gaze immediately swiveled to Serena propped against the sandstone boulder.
Then, chaos erupted.
The Madden Gang scattered like a hoard of angry ants when Serena’s bullets showered around them. Shouts pierced the air as her shots hit their marks. A few of them dove behind wooden crates or into the abandoned barn; others ducked and fumbled for their own guns. Serena knew she couldn’t take on an entire gang. No, not with so few bullets at her disposal. Instead, she’d have to focus on disarming the bunch by aiming for their dominant hands.
Hard to handle a gun with a bullet through the palm.
Soon enough, the gang opened fire on the hillside, their metal bullets zinging as they grazed the ground around her. Serena ducked down when one caught the edge of the boulder. The sandstone crumbled beneath its power and threw dust in its wake.
“It’s the witch,” one of Maddox’s men seethed.
Serena peeked around the corner, ducking when a bullet whizzed past her temple.
“Is that right?” Maddox’s musical voice rang out into the air. Serena closed her eyes as the lilt of his words grated against her nerves. “Is that you, Miss Serena Arlowe?”
Serena popped up from her crouch and fired a few more bullets, catching one of the bandits in the wrist. The girl cursed as she bent in half from the pain.
“That wasn’t very nice.”
Serena could hear the scowl in Maddox’s tone as she quickly reloaded her rifle. Had she needed to use so many bullets? Never. Not Serena. Her impeccable eyesight had always been a gift as well as a curse. Ever since she was a girl, Serena never strayed more than an inch from the bullseye of a target. Never squinted her eyes in the dark of the night. A gift, her mother had called it. But a gift that left her pupils slitted like the felines that haunted the mountaintops. Her wild eyes always elicited lingering stares from strangers and whispered rumors from passersby. She’d grown numb to them, truthfully. Her emotions had sharpened into armor as she took their stares in stride.
But Serena Arlowe never missed a target.
Never.
With a freshly loaded rifle, she swung back into action and fired her weapon. No sense in frightening the egotistical bastards anymore, she had a job to complete. Money to collect. And a one-way ticket away from her past right at her fingertips.
Serena eased away from the rock and began targeting the bandits one by one. Each bullet hit its mark with exact precision, opening a window of opportunity to ease closer, hopping from cover to cover.
Since Serena was such an excellent shot, she found a way to make each job more challenging than the last. Serena would pick one body part to be the focus of her gunshots, leaving every victim with mirrored wounds. Her last job had been the kneecap. The job before that, the left shoulder. It was her trademark, in a way. Where would The Witch of the Waylands strike next?
Hands. That would be her mark for this go-around. Not just to subdue her foes, but to remind them to keep their greedy fingers to themselves. Serena narrowed her focus on each available gang member and disarmed them one by one, shooting the hand that held their revolvers.
Serena smirked as each member cried out in panic. The man hiding behind the wooden crate hunched over to cradle his injury; the girl who ducked into the barn swore as Serena’s bullet hit its mark. She had no problem with killing when the time was right, but she’d prefer to avoid the nagging guilt for the next few weeks.
A bullet whizzed past Serena on her left, so she whipped to the right and pulled out the revolver at her hip. She rushed down the rest of the hill and ducked behind a wooden crate of her own.
“My, my Little Lowe,” Maddox’s deep drawl rang in the air somewhere behind her. “We would’ve shared if you’d asked nicely.”
“That’s not your money to share,” Serena called back.
He chuckled, his voice surprisingly close to Serena. She stood up and leveled her gun at the man, but he ducked behind a crate himself. One of his men fired at Serena, forcing her back into a crouch.
“Hasn’t stopped you before, now. Has it?” he said.
(Continued)