Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Other books by Debbie Cassidy
About the Author
Copyright © 2019, Debbie Cassidy
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover by JMNart
Chapter One
I punched the demon in its ugly face and yelped when its saliva stung my skin.
“Fuck!” I leaped back, kicking out with my boot but missing.
It took off. Fast.
This was a grunt, a spy, a scout. I needed to catch it.
It cut through the houses on the deserted residential street and barreled into a moonlit field—probably heading back to whatever thinning it had entered through. No visa, no stay, motherfucker.
Legs pumping, boot falls muffled by grass, breath pluming in the cold night air, I kept up the chase. The fucker was fast, six legs and total coordination. Spittle flew as its jowls shuddered with each bound. Urgh, it looked like a fucked-up uber-large version of a Saint Bernard, and that’s exactly what any human who saw us would see, a huge Saint Bernard being chased by a woman. But this thing was no dog, and I was no woman.
Ookay, so I was a woman, but I was a Nightblood, and guess what, dick face? We could run faster than the average Joe. I put on a burst of speed and caught up to the beastie. I leaped onto its back and wound my arms around its neck. It bucked, desperate to throw me off, and the growls—you’d think I’d insulted it.
Where was my backup? “Henri!”
“Heads up!”
Something silver and glinting whizzed through the air. I caught it neatly with my left hand. The metal of the collar gleamed in the moonlight as I pressed it to the demon’s neck. It elongated and encircled it. The beastie went down, taking me with him.
“Night night, big baby.” Shit, my leg was stuck under the demon’s flank.
Strong hands grasped me under the armpits and hauled me out from my position partially trapped beneath the demon.
Henri stood me up and glared at me. “We’re supposed to be a team.”
“You were too slow.”
“And yet you’d be fucked without my help.”
I tutted. “You can’t say fucked. You’re a fucking golem, golems don’t swear.”
His metallic jaw tensed, and his mercury eyes flashed. “I don’t need a reminder of what I am.”
Touchy. “Call it in.”
“You call it in.”
It was my turn to glare. “Don’t forget who’s in charge here.”
“Don’t forget who saved your ass.”
Urgh. I turned away from him and lightly kicked the demon in the ribs. “I wonder who sent it.”
“Not our problem. We just catch them and lock them up. The Nightwatch will investigate and send it back.”
True, but still. There had been several illegal scouts in the past week. Demons usually stayed in Demonica unless they had a visa to be here; border control between our realms was tight, and every thinning was monitored, but not everyone followed the rules. If they did, we’d be out of a job.
Henri finished on his comm and then stepped around me and hauled the demon into a fireman’s lift. “Pickup is busy. I said we’d bring it in.”
His metal muscles bulged beneath his long-sleeved shirt.
“Okay, Hercules, let’s go.”
We trudged toward the van.
“Tris is all packed,” he said.
My stomach flipped. “I don’t know about this.”
“You have your orders.”
Yeah… Yeah, I did. Didn’t mean I had to like them.
* * *
Four hours later, I stared at the town of Scorchwood as it passed by the passenger side window of my tiny Fiat. Moonlight highlighted the missing slates on roofs and the scuffs on what passed for picket fencing. The houses were mismatched and odd sizes, and whereas some would say it lent the coastal town its own charm, I had only one assessment.
“This place is a shit hole.” I sat back in my seat and glared out the windshield.
“Oh, come now,” Tris said from her prone position in the back seat reading the latest romance novel. “It isn’t so bad.”
She didn’t tear her tiny gargoyle eyes from the paperback she was gripping with her stone fingers as if it were the holy grail itself.
Henri snorted from the driver’s seat. “You haven’t looked out the window in over an hour, how the heck would you know?”
The steering wheel looked like a child’s toy in his huge metallic hands. In fact, how he managed to squeeze his massive frame into this tiny deathtrap the Nightwatch had assigned us was a mystery. The guy was a beast, and right now, the top of his head was flush up against the roof of the car. We had to get his clothes custom made, and the material was extra sturdy to account for the fact his body was made entirely of metal. We made a strange sight—a metal man, a pint-sized, bat-winged gargoyle, and a woman with silvery-blonde hair and violet eyes.
Not that any human awake at this ungodly hour would notice. All they’d see when they peered in the car was a blond, blue-eyed, muscular dude, a petite blonde female in the passenger side, and a portly grandma in the backseat reading a trashy novel. It’s what the universe wanted them to see, all courtesy of the glamour that the Nightwatch protected. That we protected.
Keeping the supernatural world from being discovered was harder than people realized, especially because there were so many twats out there eager to expose themselves, and not just in the lame flasher way, not to mention the illegal visitors from Demonica or the passersby from the sub-realms who thought it would be fun to do a little feasting on human flesh or light maiming of mortals.
It was my job to stop these idiots by any means necessary. I usually just thrust Tris on them; she’d read aloud to them, and after several chapters of heaving bosoms and rippling abdominals most monsters were eager to call a truce and be on their way, although there had been that one werewolf who’d stuck it out till the end of the novel. I swear he’d been totally into it.
“You’re too quiet,” Henri said. “Do you need to feed?” He had on his serious I-will-hunt-and-forage-for-you tone.
What I wanted to say was, I needed not to be sneaking off in the middle of the night, leaving a perfectly good Nightwatch position at a prestigious supernatural prison, to join some never-heard-of, obscure Watch at the ends of the earth. But instead, I dropped into an imitation of his tone.
“Do you need to feed? Are you hungry would suffice. Do you need to feed sounds so … yuck.”<
br />
“You drink blood to survive,” Henri reminded me. “That is yuck.”
“And you’re made of metal and clay.”
“Ouch. Oh, wait, I’m a golem, I don’t have feelings.”
And yet he did sarcasm so well.
“Children, children,” Tris chided. “Please. It’s just getting to the good bit. He’s unlaced her bodice and—”
“NO!” we both cried from the front seat, and then exchanged glances. Okay, so there were some things we could agree on.
Tris huffed and settled back into her book, but my attention was on the streets again because damn, something had changed. There was a haze over the houses, a residue of ethereal quality unlike anything I’d seen before. My skin broke out in gooseflesh, and the hair on the back of my neck stood to attention just before we rounded a corner and they came into view.
Ghosts.
Not one or two but a whole bunch of them. They walked down the moonlit streets, they held hands, they stopped to look in shop windows, but most of them were headed in and out of a building nestled between a hardware store and a bookstore. What should have been a wide access path was, in fact, a bar. A transparent sign flashed above it. Good Spirits, it said.
I grabbed Henri’s upper thigh. “Stop the car!”
“Watch the goods.” Henri slammed on the breaks.
“Wait, do you even have goods?”
He stared at me levelly.
“Ooh, a cock of steel,” Tris said.
Henri smiled. “You’ll never know.” My brain short-circuited, but he was peering out the window, already in investigative mode. “Show me what you see.”
This time of night, there were no other cars on the road, no actual people, just the ghosts.
I touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Look.”
His silver eyes gleamed as he shared my sight. It was a little perk I wasn’t supposed to have, because Nightbloods weren’t supposed to see or hear the dead, let alone be able to share what they saw and heard with a companion using a mere touch.
Henri sucked in a breath, even though as far as I was aware, he didn’t have any lungs. “Damn,” he said in a hushed tone. “I guess this explains why your grandfather sent us here.”
It didn’t explain why my gramps’s letter had instructed us to sneak out without saying goodbye.
“Well, look at that,” Tris said from the back seat. “Spirit central. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Eh? So, she was interested now, was she? Unlike my golem companion, Tris didn’t need my touch to see the dead; she was one of the breeds of supernatural who could see them just fine. But as far as we knew, I was the only supe who could see, hear, and communicate directly with them.
Paperback temporarily abandoned, Tris studied the ghosts, and to answer her question, no, I hadn’t seen anything like this. I’d seen ghosts aplenty ever since I could remember, but, as schooled by Gramps, I’d ignored them, pretended not to see or hear, and I’d gotten damn good at it because if the Nightbloods found out what I could do, they’d kill me.
I should have been executed years ago, and probably would have if my grandfather wasn’t the head of the House of Justice. He’d had the power to hide my affliction. It helped that I was a Nightblood in every other way. Now, if only we knew where my other genes came from, but the only person that could answer that was in a coma, and I’d given up hope of her waking up.
“Why would he send me here?” I turned in my seat to face Henri. “It’s not like I can do anything overt about this. Not without risking exposure.”
“Well, maybe if you called him like he asked you to in his letter …”
I’d been so mad at him for pulling me from my long-term assignment and sending me to this unknown place, I’d held off on ringing him like he’d asked in his correspondence. In fact, I may have burned the offensive letter as soon as I’d been done reading it.
I pulled my mobile out now and dialed but got a busy tone. “I’ll have to ring him later, but for now, let’s check this place out.”
Tris hopped between the seats and was in my lap in an instant, her gray body vibrating with indignation. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not until we know for sure that’s why you were sent here.”
I arched a brow. “Logic dictates this is exactly the reason, and even if it isn’t, do you see or sense any other supers about?”
She closed her eyes as she scanned the area with her extrasensory abilities. “No.” She sniffed. “But someone could come along at any moment. You could get caught.”
My smile was sickly-sweet. “And you could pick up a horror novel now and then, but you don’t.” She opened her mouth to retort, but I forged on. “And if any supes do show up, you can distract them and send out the bat signal.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
Shit. She was sensitive about her wings. They really didn’t go with her svelte, serpentine body and angelic face. “You know what I mean, the Batman signal.” Oh, God. Please, stop looking at me with the gorgon stare. Lighten the mood quick. “Ha. Haha.”
Her face softened, and her batwings twitched. “Yes, well. I can do that. But I still advise against this course of action.”
But I was already unlocking my door. There was a ghost bar across the street from me, and I was damned if I was going to walk away without checking it out.
* * *
It was only when we were walking across the street that Henri pointed out the obvious, which I had somehow, in my excitement, neglected to think of.
“You do realize that if we do this, the ghostly population of Scorchwood will know you can see them.” His tone was even and calm as usual because golems never got rattled. “You’ll have no peace. They’ll hound you for every little thing, all those little elements of their unfinished business …”
Oh, fuck. “Aw, stop, you’re beginning to sound like you care.”
But it was too late now because they were looking at me looking at them, and the whispers began, but strangely enough, no one spoke to me directly. In fact, if I wasn’t mistaken, it looked like they were attempting to avoid eye contact.
“Well, this is new,” Henri said.
He was right, most ghosts were chatty, whether you could see them or not. They liked to talk, to watch, to follow, and if they sensed a supe they’d trail you until they got bored. Most supernaturals could see ghosts, but I didn’t know of any but myself who could hear them and effectively communicate with them.
As we walked past a group of spirits, they turned their backs on us, almost as if they were trying to blend into the hedgerow behind them.
“They see the bar,” one of them said.
“What do we do?” another replied.
“Hush,” a female said. “Maybe they’re just using the alley. If they don’t see, they’ll pass straight—Oh, shit.”
I took the steps to the door and pushed it open. Weird, because it was ethereal but solid at the same time. Damn, this was so out of my comfort zone. We stepped over the threshold, and the world spun and solidified.
“Unexpected,” Henri said. His hand shot out to grip my arm and stop me from falling, because yeah, my head was spinning.
I’d have done a full Exorcist 360 if my neck could handle it because this place, wow. It was full-on Moulin Rouge with sparkles and glitter, and wait, was that a headless can-can dancer on the stage?
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Henri said. “Nice legs.”
“Since when do you appreciate the feminine form?”
“It was merely an aesthetic observation.”
Of course it was, and now we were the focus of every eye in the room even though all those eyes were doing their best to pretend they weren’t doing any focusing. So many different outfits from so many eras, and yet, it totally gelled.
“Henri, I do believe they’re pretending not to see us.”
He snorted. “A taste of your own medicine?”
“Bitter for sure but totally uncharacteristic. Let’s see if we can
get some answers, shall we?”
I walked up to the bar and tapped the polished wood. “I’ll have a fruity cocktail, please.”
The bar lady kept polishing her glass, her gaze flicking my way but darting away every time I tried to lock on.
I leaned on the bar. “Hey, I know you can see me.”
“Just act nonchalant,” the man seated on the stool beside me whispered to the bar lady. “Keep polishing, and don’t look at them, and they’ll go away.”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, I don’t normally advertise this, and I swear if you repeat it I will exorcise the fuck out of you, but I can hear you, you know.”
There was a collective gasp, and the room held its breath. Even the music stopped.
Ha, had your attention now, didn’t I?
The bar lady looked at me then, she looked me straight in the eye with her darting ones, and her mouth turned down in a look that was thirty percent sorrow and seventy percent terror. “Get out. Get out while you can.”
The man on the stool tensed. “Vera, you can’t. You shouldn’t.”
“Go,” Vera practically hissed at me. “Go before he senses your presence. Go.”
The room began to darken, and Henri gripped my arm.
“We leave. Now.”
Dread was playing invisible keys up my spine. There was a sense of wrongness permeating the air, thickening and tightening around us. Someone … something was coming.
I backed up, and we turned and strode for the door. I had to get out of there; the air was too thick, almost cloying, and around us, the world was misting, becoming less solid and more ethereal. I knew instinctively that if we didn’t make it out in time, we’d be undone along with this place.
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A Ghost of a Chance: The Nightwatch book 1 Page 1