Reaper II: Neophyte by Amanda Holt Read Free Book Online Page A

enjoyed my Tae Kwon Do lessons. 
    It was definitely a challenging sport and I was passionate about learning the different patterns, strikes and kicks that could be done.  I thoroughly enjoyed the hand-to-hand one-on-one sparring that we did under the watchful eye of our Master, who was always ready with guidance of one kind or another. 
    Master Kim pushed us hard, but I pushed myself even harder. 
    I think he recognized my dedication to the sport and I believe that I was one of his favorite students, because of it. My dedication and enthusiasm didn’t matter to my mother because I’d often come home with bruises from sparring against someone more skilled than I, which would also upset her.
    She was oft to say, “Samantha Lian Bennet, I fear for you – really, I do.”
    Despite her many fears, I left Master Kim’s two years later with a black belt and graduated from high school at the top of my class, still intent on becoming a police officer. 
    I applied to the City’s police academy immediately after graduation, but they rejected me because of my young age and lack of what they referred to as life experience .
    Their career counselor told me not to be surprised, since applicants under twenty had to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously, due to their lack of life experience. I was told that those who actually made it past the testing and interviews were put on a waiting list until they were twenty-one, anyway.
    It seemed like sheer ageism to me. 
    If they only knew how well I could fight tooth and nail – or talon and blade, for that matter – I was certain that they would have felt differently about their decision…
    So, I went to college, which had been my back up plan anyway, taking Criminology, much to my mother’s disdain. 
    She had been hoping that I would give up on my law enforcement goals.  Paul still had hoped that I would go into law school if I wanted to be part of the justice system, but a lifetime perusing thick legal texts wasn’t really for me and the idea of spending day after day in court bored me. 
    While I excelled at school, I was not passionate about it. 
    My true passion remained elsewhere, in my excursions with the Dark Thing…
    How many nights had I snuck out of my bedroom and hit the shadows of the City, answering the call of the Dark Thing?
    Its hunger for evil blood seemed insatiable.
    Together, we made quite the team…
    We punished, we avenged, we retaliated against the malevolent denizens of society.
    Together, we were unstoppable.
    At twenty-one, I finally moved out of home upon securing a job as a bartender. 
    Three years of college had been enough of a post-secondary education for me, for the moment.
    I was out to get that life experience that the police academy had been so intent on and I figured that bartending was a great place to begin.
    Surely I’d find my share of low lifes there, connections to the underworld that I sought to exploit for blood to feed the Dark Thing.
    Surely bartending could help me learn of ways to liberate our fine City from the criminals who plagued it, tainted it. 
    When I told my parents that I was ready to move out of home, my mother had quite the fit. 
    “You’re leaving me, just like your birth father did,” she sobbed to me one night, after perhaps one too many glasses of red wine.
    I didn’t know what to say.
    My mother hadn’t brought up the topic of my birth father since I was a child, since before she met and married Paul Bennet, the man to whom I could attribute my last name and sound upbringing. 
    Before Paul, Mom had spoken of my birth father often, frequently reminding me that he had left her all alone in the world as a single parent to raise me.
    A single parent who had the support of a great family who helped her in every way that they could with the raising of little Samantha, but a single mother all the same. 
    “He told me that he loved me,” she reminded me. “But you don’t leave the ones you love.  You