Blood Sacrifice: A Blackham City Urban Fantasy Novel (The August Creed Paranormal Suspense Series Book 1) (The August Creed Series)

by N. P. Martin

  Fuck you, father.

  I pressed my lips harder against Leona's, and she responded in kind. It wasn't long before we were both in that blissful bubble where only the two of us existed like embryos in a womb.

  I woke up later in Leona's queen-sized bed after a brief, fitful sleep that followed the intense, almost desperate sex we had. Hard dawn light seeped through the cracks in the blinds, spilling over Leona's slender, naked form lying beside me. She was still asleep as I sat up and stared at her for a while, getting lost in the beauty of her curves and her athletic but still feminine musculature. Then there was the full-black tattoo on her back of a scorpion, the claws extending over both shoulder blades, the thick tail unfolding down her spine, the stinger itself at the side of her fourth lumbar. It was a bold image, and a little unsettling the first few times you saw it. But when you got to know Leona like I did, you soon realized that the tattoo was entirely fitting of who she was. Leona was a survivor, a fighter, a cunning hunter when she had to be, with a sting that hurt like hell and often killed if it had to. Yet despite all that ferocity, even scorpions had a caring side, and I considered myself lucky to be one of the few people she revealed that side of herself to. She was also funny in her own blunt, abrasive way. It still amazed me that she had a sense of humor at all, given the things she had seen.

  Leaning over, I kissed her gently on the back and then slipped out of bed. In the living room, I gathered up my clothes which were scattered around everywhere after Leona had hurriedly pulled them off me. After getting dressed, I went to the kitchen and made coffee with Leona's ridiculously expensive coffee machine, one of the few luxuries (maybe the only one) that she had in the apartment. Whatever she paid for the machine, it was worth it when I sipped on the hot brew that it served up. I carried the coffee into the living room, opening the sliding door and stepping out onto the balcony into the cold morning air that was like a slap in the face at first, but invigorating after a moment once you got used to it.

  From Leona's swanky apartment building, I looked down to the street below and watched a road sweeper move along like a ladybug on a leaf, the vehicle stopping once so the driver could wind the window down and toss out a cigarette butt into the street he was supposed to be cleaning. Across the way in the tenement buildings, lights began to come on, and curtains were drawn open as the occupants rose to meet another day in Blackham. And rising behind the tenements were the skyscrapers made of steel and glass. Huge structures that almost made you feel like you were in some other futuristic city somewhere. Through the gaps in the skyscrapers, you could also see Blackham State University, the Gothic-style building that churned out the city's best and brightest (allegedly).

  As I gazed out over the north of the city, my thoughts inevitably turned to Mr Black. I refused even to think of him as my father. My father was bad enough when he was alive but however bad or manipulative he was while I was growing up, he was still my father, and I was loyal to him. I had no reason to be loyal to him anymore, though. The man who forced a meeting with me a while ago in Lafayette was not my father. My father was dead and gone as far as I was concerned, and good riddance. Mr Black was just the evil shadow that endured after the demon tore my father apart, turning him into the monster that I had been hunting before. That much hadn't changed, despite Mr Black's true origins. I was still going to bring him down.

  The question was though, how was I going to do it?

  45

  Bad Coffee Blues

  I HAD JUST sat down in the living room when Leona came walking in, looking effortlessly sexy in her white silk dressing gown that just about came down to the top of her thighs. “How long have you been up?” she asked, sliding herself onto my lap and languidly kissing me.

  “Not long,” I replied, gazing like a lost puppy into her blue eyes, which always seemed lighter in the mornings.

  She smoothed my longish hair brown for a moment and then hugged me. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it all out.”

  I nodded as she pulled away. "I know." I didn't know, though. So far, I had no idea of how I was going to stop Mr Black and his insane plan to allow an ancient, unimaginably monstrous being to eat the fucking world up. No idea at all.

  "I'm making coffee. You want one?" Leona asked me.

  “I’ll get it.”

  She put a hand out to stop me. “No. Your coffee sucks, Creed.”

  “I don’t make the stuff. The machine does.”

  “There’s still a knack to it, which you don’t have.”

  "What, like place the cup in the machine and press the button? Where's the knack in that?"

  She was already off me, heading for the kitchen. “I’m glad you don’t approach sex the same way.”

  “What do you mean?” I said in a serious voice. “Of course I do. Insert penis and turn on machine. What other way is there?”

  Shaking her head, Leona laughed as she walked into the kitchen. “You are not wise.”

  “Owls and old men are wise. I don’t want to be either.”

  "Given your age, you're not far off the latter."

  “Careful, Lawson. You’re no spring chicken yourself, you know.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” she said, throwing me a look from the kitchen while she waited on the machine to fill her cup up.

  I nodded. “I know. That’s nearly middle age.”

  Shaking her head, she carried two cups of coffee back into the living room, handing me one. “Shut up and drink your coffee.”

  Smiling, I tasted the dark brew, then smacked my lips. “You’re right. Your coffee does taste better than mine.”

  “You’d think with all that magick you’d be able to make a decent cup of coffee.” She lifted the remote control of the table and turned on the TV to the local news station.

  I shook my head at her comment as I turned my attention to the TV news. Unsurprisingly, the conflagration at the Roundhouse cinema was the top story. The news showed images of the building, now reduced to a pile of blackened, molten ash, as if the building had melted (which it had in a way). The onsite reporter mentioned the strange color of the flames but reported this was due to a methane gas leak from the sewers underneath. There was no mention of any murders.“Brentwood’s done his job then,” I said. “Covering up the murders.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No.” Brentwood was good at his job, I’d give him that. It amazed me sometimes the things he managed to cover up from the media and the public at large. I sometimes wondered if he was bumping off witnesses because some of the events he was involved in were quite public, with lots of witnesses. “People believe what they want to believe, I suppose. An accidental fire is easier to process than sixty-seven people all having their throats cut by a mad…”

  “A mad what?”

  “I don’t even know what he is. A dark stain on the world.”

  Leona said nothing and we sat and watched the rest of the news in silence, the only other noteworthy event being one of the city's biggest porn stars (Wendy Gush) dying on the job. I was acquainted with Miss Gush through another mutual acquaintance. I also knew the porn star practiced sex magick. The circumstances surrounding her death sounded a little suspicious to me. When (if) I dealt with Mr Black, I would look into Miss Gush's death. For a porn star, she was quite an accomplished adept, surprising me with her command of magick and knowledge of the subject the last time I met her about two years ago. I doubted the cops would look too deep into her case, so I would. If I got the chance, obviously.

  “Freak,” Leona said, shaking her head at the picture of Wendy Gush on the TV. “I don’t how they could do it to themselves.” Despite not holding back during sex (with me anyhow), Leona was still something of a prude. It could have been her overly religious upbringing, but I suspected it had more to do with her dignity and integrity at all costs way of thinking. Not that I thought there was anything particularly undignified or dishonest about what Wendy Gush did for a living, especially when she was using the sex to channel her
magick. But standards of integrity were relative, especially in the occult world. I and every other adepts could attest to that. I didn't bother offering any of this blinding insight to Leona because I knew she wouldn't want to hear it. Her attention was on her phone anyway, having just received a text.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Brentwood?”

  She nodded. "I have to go to work. He wants updates on the Mr Black case."

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  "Not the truth. He already blames me for enough.” Just being involved with magick was enough for anyone to make it onto Brentwood’s shitlist. “Tell him I’m still chasing down leads. Not that I answer to him anyway.”

  Leona shook her head. She thought my problem with authority figures was juvenile. You would think hearing all about my father and his domineering parenting style would make her more sympathetic, though it didn’t appear to. She was military to the core. She would never understand my aversion to authority figures. “He could make your life difficult, you know. He could have you locked up in the Pen.”

  "With the rest of the 'freaks', you mean?"

  “Come on, Creed. You know I don’t think of you like that.”

  "I know you don't. He does, though. Not that I care."

  “He’s just trying to help. Same as you are. Same as I am.”

  “Just different methods.” I'd heard it all before. The fact was, I would never be comfortable with Brentwood's brute force tactics. He didn't care who he hurt in the process of carrying out his directives. I did, though.

  "Right, well this big bad government agent has to shower before going to work." She stood up, leant down and kissed me quick. "You can stay here if you want."

  “No thanks,” I said, swallowing the last of my coffee. “I need to get back to the Sanctum and figure out what I’m going to do about…Mr Black. Maybe your demon friend left me a clue.”

  “That brutish abomination is not and never will be my friend.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You two seemed to hit it off. And with that tongue of his…”

  “You’re disgusting, Creed. Get out of my apartment. I’m rescinding my invitation for you to stay.”

  I laughed. “Alright, I’ll go. Tell Brentwood I said hi.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that. Now get your magick ass in gear and vanish to hell out of here.”

  “I love it when you get bossy.”

  She turned and walked towards the bathroom. “Bye, Creed.”

  "I love you too."

  She didn’t answer as she disappeared into the bathroom. I stood for another minute, until I heard the shower being turned on, and I realized I didn’t want to leave because then I would have to go home and face the awful truth that had been hanging over me since yesterday.

  Which was that my father, in his post-death madness, was about to end the world.

  46

  Standing Tall

  I DIDN’T GO straight back to the Sanctum when I left Leona’s because I knew that going there meant I would have to fully face the dire (not to say fucked up) nature of my situation (of the world’s situation). So I teleported to the roof of the highest building in Blackham City, which was the Moreland Building, named after Reginald Moreland, the city’s billionaire real estate mogul who wanted to leave a little something for people to remember him by when he died three decades ago. That little something became one hundred and twenty-six story's tall with a gold tipped pyramid on top. A gridiron walkway went right around the whole building at the base of the pyramid. Apparently people used to make a big deal of the fact that Reginald Moreland liked to stand out on that walkway every morning (he lived in the building, penthouse suite) and meditate, which was supposedly the secret to his incredible success. There was also talk that old man Moreland was an Illuminati general, which he may have been, I don’t know (I take no interest in those self-serving war mongers). I do know that Moreland practiced magick though, and that he was good at it, even if he did mostly use it to amass a fortune. Whatever kind of man Moreland was, I was grateful to him for constructing the Moreland Building and especially the walkway I was standing on. I had been teleporting to that walkway for the last twenty years or so. It was a place I liked to go to clear my head. All the way up there with the wind rushing around you, it was hard to dwell too much on your problems and I could see why old man Moreland used to go there every morning.

  Needless to say, the view was also spectacular. If you wanted, you could have a full three sixty view of the whole city and beyond if you walked right around the building. From that height, the city looked vast. A huge conclave of stone and brick and steel and glass, criss crossed with streets and pulsing with the life of the people inside. I stood facing east because I liked to look past all the new looking skyscrapers in the Highlands and out towards the vast expanse of sea beyond, my gaze finally settling on the horizon, that point in the distance that always seemed to promise great things if you only made your way towards it. The promise of a place where dreams could come true and potential could be fulfilled. Or maybe that was just me. Whatever the case, as soon as I focused on that horizon with the sun rising up over the sea, my mind seemed to expand and I felt a certain release of pressure in my head. Which didn’t make things any less dire, but it at least enabled me to escape from the quagmire of dark emotions I been previously drowning in.

  I spent a while up there before I decided to make a call that I hadn’t been looking forward to making since my meeting with my father. That’s if I even got a hold of the person I wanted to speak to, who was notoriously hard to contact given that he was usually of in some far flung corner of the Earth (and the universe if you included the off-world traveling he did) in search of some artifact or rare text, or simply just exploring, which he liked to do.

  As it turned out, it took me six attempts to finally get through to my uncle, Raymond McCreedy. “August, my boy,” he said when he answered, the line sounding clear and not full of static the way it usually was when I called him, which meant he was somewhere with good reception. “It’s good to hear from my favorite nephew again. How long has it been?” His accent was still strongly Irish, despite all his traveling.

  “A few days ago actually,” I said, shouting slightly to hear myself over the wind noise. “You didn’t recognize me though.”

  “Yes, very strange. What was that about?”

  “Long story, but that’s not why I’m phoning. Well, actually it is.” I shook my head suddenly in anger. “Fuck it, you know why I’m calling, Ray. You can’t not fucking know.” The line went silent. “Hello? Ray, you there?”

  “Yes, August, I’m here.”

  “Then answer me. Did you know?”

  “Know what? I’ve been off-world for over year. I just got back here to Ireland a few days ago. What’s been happening?”

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Did you know about my father, Ray? About what he did? About what he really did that night of the summoning?”

  “August, why you bringing that up for?”

  “You knew, didn’t you? You knew he meant for the demon to kill my family, didn’t you?”

  “August, I—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I had a right to know the kind of monster my father was.”

  “I thought if you knew what he really did, that you would—”

  “What Ray? I already blamed him for summoning the demon in the first place.”

  “I know that. I was afraid the truth would—”

  “Push me over the edge? I was already there.”

  “How did you find out? What has happened?”

  I never answered for a moment as I stared down at the city below, feeling raw and exposed. Then I proceeded to tell Uncle Ray everything about Mr. Black, who Mr. Black really was, the murders he had committed and his crazy plan to create a portal so Rloth could come to Earth and eat it.

  “Sweet Christmas,” Ray said after I’d finished. “I k
new there was something going on. The Tapestry has been unsettled of late and I couldn’t figure out why. I can’t believe that bastard brother of mine managed to crawl his way out of the Underworld. Well actually, I can. He was always slippery, was your da.”

  “He’s not my da,” I corrected him. “He’s a monster, plain and simple.”

  “I’m sorry, August. I should have told you the truth long ago. You had a right to know.”

  “I did have a right to know, but I understand why you kept it from me.”

  “I was trying to protect you. Your whole family had just been wiped out and—”

  “When did you know the truth, Ray?”

  “Not soon enough, I’m sorry to say. Shortly after, when an Underworld contact informed me. I was trying to make sure Christopher stayed down there and never got out after what he did to you’s all. Now it seems, my numerous bribes weren’t enough to keep him locked up.”

  “Unfortunately not.” I paused for a moment as I watched a Kestrel land on a nearby building. “I always knew the truth anyway.”

  “You did?”

  “I saw his face, Ray, which told me that he had planned to sacrifice us all. I must have buried the memory.”

  “I don’t blame you for that.”

  “He was going to steal my body, you know? But the demon betrayed him. I’ve still no idea why the demon didn’t kill me as well though.”

  “You know demons, unpredictable bastards at times. Count yourself lucky, my boy.”

  “I need to know how to stop him, Ray.”

  “That won’t be easy, not if he’s been getting power from a Dimension Lord.”

  “But it can be done, right?”

  “With the right magick, anything can be done. It’s finding the right magick though. You want me over there with you?”