Blood Magic
Page 1
BLOOD MAGIC
WIZARD’S CREED BOOK 1
N. P. MARTIN
MARTIN PUBLICATIONS
Contents
Rights
The Wizard’s Creed Series
1. Spell Blasted
2. Badass
3. Specter
4. Forgotten
5. A Friendly Call
6. A Welcome Distraction
7. Pyromancer
8. A Visitor
9. Bad News
10. Do Or Die
11. The Mccreedy Family Massacre
12. Quick Drink
13. Darkness Calling
14. Playing With Fire
15. The Library Of Dark Magic
16. Black Magic
17. The Morgue
18. John Doe
19. The Summoning
20. Baal
21. Fight
22. Sanaka's Sanctum
23. Bitchcraft
24. Apparition
25. Mr. Black
26. Synchronized Swimming
27. Partners
28. Gearing Up
29. The Leap
30. The Devil’s Playground
31. Pit Bulls On Steroids
32. A Soul With Itchy Feet
33. Frank And John
34. Soul Ripper
35. Ghoul Status
36. Return Of The Demon
37. Mindfuck
38. The Roundhouse
39. Green Fire
40. Unleash The Magic
41. Revelations
42. Growing Up
43. Fatherly Love
44. Scorpion
45. Bad Coffee Blues
46. Standing Tall
47. Abandon All Hope
48. Dealing With The Devil
49. Final Goodbye
50. The Lair Of Mr. Black
51. Grasping Hands
52. Dark Magic Rising
53. Suffering Defeat
54. Sometimes They Come Back
55. Consumed
56. Light Against Dark
57. Resurrection
58. Aftermath
59. Happy Hour
60. No Rest For The Wicked
Mailing List
Before You Go…
Corvin Chance Series
Nephilim Rising Series
Books By N. P. Martin
About The Author
Copyright © 2016 by N.P. Martin
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All rights reserved.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Neal Martin
Visit my website at www.npmartin.com
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Character art: Pavel Tomashevskii
Cover: Natalie Narbonne
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Editing: Damian Southam
The Wizard’s Creed Series
CRIMSON CROW (PREQUEL)
BLOOD MAGIC
BLOOD DEBT
BLOOD CULT
BLOOD DEMON
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*MORE TO COME*
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Be sure to sign up to my Reader Group and be the first to hear about new releases, cover reveals and special promos. Plus get access to my private fans only Facebook group.
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http://www.npmartin.com/n-p-martin-reader-group/
1
Spell Blasted
When the magic hit, I was knocked to the floor like I'd just taken a hard right hook to the jaw. The spell was so powerful, it blew through my every defense. For all of my wards and the good they did me, I might as well have been a sleepwalker with no protection at all.
The faint smell of decayed flesh mixed with sulfur hung thick in the air, a sure sign that dark magic had just been used, which in my experience, is never good. Coming across dark magic is a bit like turning up at a children's party to find Beelzebub in attendance, a shit-eating grin on his face as he manically tied balloon animals for the terrified kids. It’s worrying, not to mention highly disturbing.
I sat dazed on the floor, blinking around me for a moment. My mind was fuzzy and partially frozen, as though I’d just awakened from a nightmare. It appeared I was inside an abandoned office space, the expansive rectangular room lined with grimy, broken windows that let cold air in to draw me out of my daze somewhat. It was night, so darkness coated the room, the only real light coming from the moon outside as it beamed its pale, silvery light through the smashed skylights.
Confused and more than a little uneasy, I struggled back to my feet and blindly reached for the pistol inside my dark green trench coat, frowning when I realized the gun wasn’t there. Then I remembered it had gone flying out of my hand when the spell had hit. Looking around for a moment, I soon located the pistol lying on the floor several feet away, and I lurched over and grabbed it, slightly more secure now that the gun’s reassuring weight was back in my hand.
There were disturbing holes in my memory. I vaguely recalled confronting someone after tracking them to where I was. But who? Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear image. The person was no more than a shadow figure in my mind. I had no clue as to why I was following this person unknown in the first place. Obviously, they had done something to get on my radar. The question was what, though?
The answer came a few seconds later when my eyes fell upon the dark shape in the middle of the room, and a deep sense of dread filled me immediately; a dread that was both familiar and sickening at the same time, for I knew what I was about to find. Swallowing, I stared hard through the gloom at the human shape lying lifelessly on the debris-covered floor. Over the sharp scent of rats piss and pigeon shit, the heavy, festering stench of blood hit my nostrils without mercy.
When I crossed to the center of the room, my initial fears were confirmed when I saw that it was a dead body lying on the floor. A young woman with her throat slit. Glyphs were carved into the naked flesh of her spreadeagled body, with ropes leading from her wrists and ankles to rusty metal spikes hammered into the floor. I marveled at the force required to drive the nails into the concrete, knowing full well that a hammer had nothing to do with it.
Along the circumference of a magic circle painted around the victim was what looked like blood-drawn glyphs. The sheer detail of them unnerved me as I observed in them a certain quality that could only have come from a well-practiced hand. The tingling in my spine from all these factors combined with a vague recognition, one inhibited by whatever spell I’d absorbed.
I breathed out slowly as I reluctantly took in the callous butchery on display. The dead woman looked to be in her early thirties, though it was difficult to tell because both her eyes were missing; cut out with the knife used to slice her throat, no doubt. I shook my head as I looked around for a few seconds in a vain effort to locate the dead woman’s eyeballs, knowing they were gone along with the person who killed her.
The woman looked underweight for her size. She was around the same height as me at six feet, but there was very little meat on her bones, as if she was a stranger to regular meals. I also noted the needle marks on her feet, and the bruises around her thighs. This, coupled with how she had been dressed—in a leather mini skirt and short top, both items discarded on the floor nearby—made me almost certain the woman had been a prostitute. A convenient, easy victim for whoever had killed her.
If the symbols carved into her pale flesh were anything to go by, it would seem the woman wasn't so much murdered as ritually sacrificed. At a guess, I would have said she was an offering to one of the Dimension Lords, which the glyphs se
emed to point to. The glyphs themselves were not only complex, but also carved with surgical precision. The clarity of the symbols against the woman’s pale flesh made it possible for me to make out certain ones that I recognized as being signifiers to alternate dimensions, though which dimension exactly, I couldn’t be sure, at least not until I had studied the glyphs further. Glyphs such as the ones I was looking at were always uniquely different in some way. No two people drew glyphs the same, with each person etching their own personality into every one, which can often make it hard to work out their precise meanings. One thing I could be certain of, however, was that the glyphs carved into the woman’s body resonated only evil intent; an intent so strong, I felt it in my gut, gnawing at me like a parasite seeking access to my insides, as if drawn to my magic power. Not a pleasant feeling, but I was used to it, having been exposed to enough dark magic in my time.
After taking in the scene as a whole, I soon came to the conclusion that the woman wasn't the killer’s first victim; not by a long stretch, given the precision and clear competency of the work on display.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, annoyed now that I couldn’t recall any details about the case I had so obviously been working on. It was no coincidence that I had ended up where I was, a place that happened to reek of dark magic, and which housed a murder that had occult written all over it…quite literally, in the victim’s case. I had been on the hunt, and I had gotten close to the killer, which was the likeliest reason for the dark magic booby trap I happened to carelessly spring like some bloody rookie.
Whoever the killer was, they wielded profoundly powerful magic. A spell that managed to wipe all my memories of the person in question wouldn't have been an easy one to create. And given the depth of power to their magic, it also felt to me like they had channeled it from some other source, most likely from whatever Dimension Lord they were sacrificing people to.
Whatever the case, the killer’s spell had worked. Getting back the memories they had stolen from me wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s if I could get them back at all, which depressingly, I feared might just be the case.
After shaking my head at how messed up the situation was, I suddenly froze upon hearing a commanding voice booming in the room like thunder.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
2
Badass
I JUMPED AT the sound of the deep, but unmistakably feminine, voice coming from behind me. The reason I jumped wasn't so much out of fear or fright, as it was out of sudden recognition. The voice projected an effortless authority, containing a husky quality that would have been sexy if the woman’s blatant aggression wasn’t so overpowering.
I stood slowly whilst turning around, all the while assuming the woman would recognize me, as I did her. A booming echo and chipped concrete flooring just inches from my feet quickly put a hole in that reasoning. The volume of sound and the chips of concrete kicked high enough for random pieces to sting my eyes, which made it seem as though a grenade instead of a bullet had gone off. “Jesus!” I shouted as I jumped back in shock, my ears ringing from the gunshot. “What the fuck are you doing? It’s me, for Christ’s sake!”
“Drop that pistol…or the next one goes in your chest!”
“What?” What was she playing at? Didn’t she know who I was? “Leona, it’s me. It’s Creed.”
Leona Lawson cut a dark, imposing figure as she stepped out of the shadows. She was tall and athletically lean, her black hair short and brushed over to one side of her forehead. I couldn’t see her eyes very well in the gloom, but I knew they would look like focused blue chips of ice set into that delectable porcelain skin of hers. She was dressed as she usually was, in tight fitting black leather trousers and a top that clung to the mounds of her perfectly sized breasts. A long, black leather coat that hung down almost level with the top of her heavy combat boots made her look streamlined and dominant, which I already knew her to be.
The hugely intimidating gun she held looked almost too big for her hand, but she didn't struggle even slightly with the gun’s heft, and looked entirely comfortable holding it. It was one of two custom Berettas with laser sights that she carried in leg holsters, each fully loaded with 9mm hollow-point rounds that would put a hole in just about anything. A case in point being the sheer damage done to the cement flooring.
“I said drop the pistol.” There was no doubting her seriousness.
I shook my head and concealed my frown by looking down to obey her command. I could now also take in the laser's red dot on my chest as I placed my old custom made Smith and Wesson on the floor. I'd known her long enough to know that Leona's words were more than bravado. Her word was her bond. I'd also been present when perps made the mistake of believing her incapable of pulling the trigger.
Maybe it was because of the pressure of having to look down the barrel of her gun, but it now dawned on me that I'd called her and asked her to meet me at this very location. Why else would she be standing in front of me now?
Yet she was treating me like a stranger; like she didn’t know who I was, which was bullshit, because she knew me better than almost anyone. We slept together, for Christ’s sake! She was, although she would never freely admit it, my girlfriend. And yet there she was, pointing one of her cannons at me, ready to put a hole in my chest big enough to fit her fist through. There could only be one explanation for her lack of recognition. The goddamn spell. “Are you saying you don’t...know me?” I shook my head, then smiled. "Wait, is this some new kinky sex game you’ve devised? Are you going to make me strip all my clothes off right now, so you can have your way with me…at the scene of a murder…"
Her face said I was all wrong about that as she came forward, her boots thudding loudly on the floor, her leather coat swishing against her legs. “Firstly, you’re sick. Secondly, I don’t know you from Adam, motherfucker. As far as I can tell you're the lunatic who killed that woman right there, and for that crime I'm going to put a bullet in your skull. That way you won't be able to ever kill anyone else.”
My heart missed several beats when she pulled back the hammer on the Beretta. “Wait!” I said. “Jesus…how would I know your name is Leona Lawson, and that you work for a secret government division that investigates occult affairs, huh? I called you, for Christ’s sake, told you to meet me here.” I thought of something. “Check the call records on your phone. You have me listed as Creed. Do it.”
Leona shook her head as she said, “There’s no one named Creed in my contacts, and neither did anyone call and tell me to come to this shithole."
“Then how did you know to come in the first place?”
Her stare turned a frown. “I…”
“You don’t remember, do you? That’s because your memory has been wiped, along with my name off your phone it seems. Does it not seem strange that you don’t know why you came here?”
She stepped closer, frighteningly imposing, her face an impassive mask as always, though I still sensed the confusion underneath. “You think I don’t know you’re trying to trick me like the dirty hedge witch you are?”
“Wait, hedge witch? That’s a bit low, even for you, Le—”
She stepped forward and stuck the gun in my face, the barrel looming large and dangerous in my sight line. “Why’d you kill the woman? Some fucked up ritual is it? A sacrifice to one of your messed up gods?”
My hands were up as I leaned my head back slightly away from the huge gun. “Look, Leona, I called you, remember?”
“Stop using my name. How the hell do you even know my name?”
Oh Christ, this was worse than I thought. She didn’t seem to know me at all, even after more than three years of friendship; if you could call what we had a friendship. Leona didn’t do friends particularly, or relationships for that matter. Not normal ones, anyway. If you asked her to describe our relationship she probably would have said, “Working.”
“Listen,” I told her, knowing I was wasting my breath, but stumbling ahead anyway. “My
name is August Creed. We’re friends. We work together sometimes. We even, you know…”
“What?”
“Sleep together.”
A snort of derision burst through her thin lips. “First of all, I would never sleep with someone like you—”
“What? That’s just—”
“—And second of all…I have no idea who the fuck you are, except that you’re a killer and I’m taking you in. Although I’d prefer just to shoot you in the head right now, since that’s what you obviously deserve. My boss, however, will want to talk to you, to see what kind of psycho you really are first.”
This wasn’t good. I was only now starting to understand the full extent of the spell that I was under; or curse, rather, which is more like how it felt. It had been designed by the killer to make people forget that he (assuming it was a he) ever existed. But in the process, I got caught in the blast; though by accident or design, I still wasn’t sure. In any case, I had arrived at the sickening conclusion that no one remembered me anymore either. All memory of me had been wiped from people’s minds, and I was now a stranger to my closest friend in the world. To my goddamn girlfriend!