City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  Miraculously, I didn’t get burned to a crisp or skewered by the breaking glass. The spirit must have contained the bulk of its heat within a small radius, in order to give it the oomph to melt its way through doors and walls unimpeded. And the glass, which could have slaughtered me like a pig, was either melted before it got close enough to do any damage or blocked by my reinforced combat gear. I managed to cover my face with my arm a quarter of a second before the window blew.

  Given the mild sting radiating from my left ear, a single shard evaded my shield arm and nicked my skin. A single shard, out of thousands.

  Remind me never to mock the Matrix uniforms again.

  Unsteady, I use the damaged wall behind me to stand up and suck in a hot breath, tinged with the faint scent of smoke. Beyond the half-wall and empty window frame, the used-to-be-a-cell that once held the possessed Ally Johnston is now a malformed box, every wall warped inward or outward, the floor tiles charred and cracked, the chairs rendered nonexistent by the intense heat. The cell door is intact, but it’s fused to the wall, and someone’s going to have to saw it open in what I imagine will be an unpleasant restoration job.

  But the state of the room isn’t the worst part.

  The worst part is Ally Johnston’s corpse.

  She sits rigid on her knees, skin and bones burned black as night. The jaw of her scorched skull hangs wide open, skewed, as if she’s screaming. But no sound emerges from the chest filled with organs cooked to char, and below her visible ribcage, skin and muscle peeled away, the only noises I can hear are her intestines, crumbling. Ash.

  As I watch in abject horror, a shudder in the floor unbalances Ally’s body, and it topples over, disintegrating on impact. Her skull bounces off, rolling to a stop near the door, jaw still stuck, eye sockets empty, torched flesh clinging to her forehead and chin. A glob of something somewhat liquid oozes out from underneath; I think it might be her brain.

  Oh, my God. I stumble two steps forward and vomit on the floor, again and again, spilling the remains of what little I’ve eaten today. When my stomach runs out of content to purge, I dry heave, hunched over at the waist, hand on my knee barely keeping me upright. My lungs sting at the lack of air, but I can’t seem to make myself stop gagging.

  And here I thought Jason Franks’ death was gruesome.

  What’s left of the door to the viewing room flies open, revealing Ella and Riker in the hallway, surrounded by a whole contingent of guards. Ella takes one look at me and rushes to my side. “Cal! Are you okay? Are you injured?” She runs her hands over my body, searching for any serious wounds. When she finds none, she moves back a foot and finally notices the mess I made on the floor. Then she tracks her gaze up and up and up, over the half-wall and into the former cell. Ally’s body lies there, immobile and in pieces.

  Ella, despite her years of experience, visibly cringes. “Jesus Christ,” she hisses. Her arms wrap around my waist to hoist me back up into a standing position, and once I’m steady enough, she guides me out of the wreck of a viewing room, into the hallway. The crowd of guards (and Riker) part for me, and Ella deposits me against the wall, whispering, “Breathe, Cal. Just breathe.”

  I gag a couple more times, but then I swallow the sensation down and start gulping in air. The tight pressure in my chest begins to dissipate. Now, if only the taste of vomit would go away.

  Satisfied I’m in one piece, Ella returns to Riker’s side, and the two of them enter the viewing room together, examining the damage and the body of Ally Johnston. The guards close ranks around the door, blocking my view, so I slide myself down the wall and bring my knees to my chest, eyes shut tight. I don’t know how long I sit there, listening to the worried murmurs of the guards, to Riker calling who I assume is Commissioner Bollinger with the news about a dangerous situation in the DSI building.

  Eventually, someone taps my shoulder with a gloved hand, and I open my eyes to see Ella again, this time offering me a water bottle. “Hey, stranger. You thirsty?”

  I accept the bottle with a shaking hand, pop the top, and dump half the water down my parched, stale throat. I don’t stop drinking until my chest burns from the lack of air, and then I take a breather, handing the bottle back to Ella. “Thanks,” I say. “But I think I could do with a good beer or twelve. And maybe a burger. God, my mouth tastes nasty.”

  Ella crouches next to me and pats my messy head. “How about I take you home, and we stop at that burger place on North Elm? You can get whatever you want.”

  I blink at her, bleary, and for the first time realize how tired I am. How much that garden fight took out of me. Not to mention coming within inches of death via fiery demonic spirit. “How are you going to drive me home? You’re missing a hand.”

  She glances at her splinted fingers and clicks her tongue. “Don’t underestimate me, kiddo. I’ve done a lot more than driving in way worse shape. We’ll make it to your place in one piece. Promise.”

  “Sure you don’t need me here?” I gesture toward the hallway ceiling. Black streaks stretch across the tiles, trailing toward the elevators at the far end of the hallway, which I assume is how the spirit escaped the dungeon level, through a shaft. It probably left the building altogether by burning another hole in another wall somewhere. Or bursting through another window. “We’ve got a pretty hairy situation, I’d say. Eververse monsters roaming around. Eververse spirits possessing people. A steaming shit pile of Eververse problems, doubling in size by the minute.”

  Ella traces shapes on the wall next to my head. “You’re not wrong about that, Cal. This is one of the more serious cases we’ve had in a while, so many deaths back to back. It’s also been the better part of a decade since we last had a prison break, too.” She drops her hand to my free one and squeezes. “But, serious case or not, we all need our rest. You’ve been through a lot today, and so have I. And Nick’s about walked himself to death, between your infirmary visit and this disaster.

  “Our team is lead on this case, but we can’t play that role well if we’re all tuckered out. Ramirez and Hewitt will be taking over for the night shift, coordinating the search for your big blue ugly and for this angry fire spirit. We—you, me, and Riker—are clocking out for the day. We’ll pick it up first thing in the morning, when we’re not running on empty.” She coaxes me to stand. “First thing you need to learn about real casework, Cal: it rarely involves just your team, and it almost never involves working alone. Most cases are solved through the efforts of dozens of agents, at all levels, from Riker at the top of the command chain all the way down to Cooper Lee in Archives. DSI work is an office-wide effort.”

  She pulls me close to her and slings an arm over my shoulder. “We’ve got dozens of experienced agents of all specialties on the hunt tonight. Let them do their jobs. If we’re lucky, they might even clean up our mess for us. They’ve done it before.” With a tug, she directs me toward the elevators, presumably toward one the fiery spirit didn’t damage in its flight.

  “So, what do you say?” Ella asks. “Burgers and fries sound good to you?”

  “Good?” I reply, suppressing all the stubbornness, the senseless drive to get back up and fight my brain can never rationalize away. “More like heavenly.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A creepy-ass knock on my front door breaks me out of a fitful sleep.

  Buried in thick covers, the rapping sound reaches my ears muffled, and I lift my heavy lids to witness darkness all around me. When I untangle myself from the sheets and pull the comforter from my face with the hand not strapped to my chest, the room doesn’t get any brighter. No light cascades through the open blinds on the window to my left—the night is overcast, and the half-moon is obscured. And, for some strange reason, the streetlights are out.

  I sit up with a groan, muscles aching, jaw sore, and toss the sheets from my sweaty body. A chill from some remnant of an unremembered nightmare settles at the base of my spine, and I shake it off before I reach for the lamp on my nightstand. I turn the switch, but
the light doesn’t come on. I turn it again. No dice.

  As I blink away the confusion of sleep, I realize my apartment is dead silent. The telltale hum of the refrigerator, the soft rush of warm air from the central heating, and all the other background noises of modern-day living are absent. The electricity on my block must be out.

  The knock sounds off again. Soft but insistent.

  My stomach twists into a knot, and goose bumps rise on my exposed arms. Something weird is going on here. The DSI kind of weird.

  I drop my hand down to the nightstand drawer and quietly withdraw my personal handgun. Cool air wraps around my body as I rise and cross the room, feet padding lightly on the old wooden floorboards. I eye my closet before I exit, wonder if I should put on some pants to cover my favorite pair of checkered boxers, but the closet door has rusty hinges. It squeaks.

  I don’t want to alert whatever is in the hallway to my approach.

  The rest of my apartment is as dark as my bedroom, all the little lights from my kitchen appliances, the TV, and the video game consoles rendered lifeless by the outage. On the street outside, not a single car zooms by, spitting faint music or coughing out exhaust. It’s like the population of Aurora packed up and moved while I was sleeping, leaving an empty city in their wake. My throat goes dry at the thought—even though I know it’s absurd.

  If big blue ugly is in my hallway, knocking on my door, then it won’t matter if all my neighbors are sleeping tight in their beds or not. I’m a dead man walking either way.

  The knock reverberates through my door a third time. But it hasn’t grown loud or angry or impatient. Whoever or whatever is waiting for me isn’t in a rush.

  I peek around the threshold of my cramped living room, down the darkened hall, and analyze the locked door for a moment. Big blue ugly could break it down, frame and all, with a blow or two from his hammer, so he would have no reason to knock. Unless he’s a lot more polite than I gathered from our confrontation in the garden. If not him, then it could be the fire spirit, in possession of another poor soul like Ally Johnston. Maybe it came here for a little vengeance in response to its imprisonment at the office.

  Or maybe it’s something else altogether. I won’t find out by hugging a wall in my underwear.

  My feet sneak me down the hall as silently as I could hope on the warping floorboards, and as I near the foyer, I flick the safety off my gun. Every inch closer I get to the door, my muscles tense up that much more, and when I reach the thin wooden barrier between myself and what could be a menacing creature from the abyss, I’m wound up tight enough to spring at my opponent like an overstretched rubber band.

  Dropping my gun into my sling, where I can quickly grab it, I use one, trembling hand to unlock the deadbolt and…

  I grab the tarnished knob and yank the door open. So fast it swings around in a full one-eighty arc, colliding with the wall beside it. The doorknob hits with so much force it drives a hole straight through the drywall, and the thunderous boom of the impact resonates across the quiet hallway.

  The empty hallway.

  There’s nobody there. No big blue monsters. No fire spirits. Nobody but Cal Kinsey in his boxers pointing a gun at empty air as his own front door rebounds and smacks him in the face.

  I stumble forward into the hallway, hand on my aching jaw. Muttering a string of swears, I probe my chipped teeth with my tongue to make sure the door didn’t knock any out. At the same time, I scan the hallway in both directions, searching for any movement, any slinking shadows. But I’m the only idiot standing in the hall in the middle of the night. And the footsteps of my neighbors now heading for their doors to discover what the ruckus is all about tells me that “idiot” will probably be the nicest label I have in this building for a long, long time. Nobody likes the noisy asshole.

  Rubbing my face with the back of my hand, I turn to retreat inside before any of my neighbors spot me loitering and get an eyeful of Cal Kinsey’s almost everything. Before I pass the doorway, however, a flash of yellow catches my attention. A small, square piece of yellow stuck to my front door at an angle. I squint a few times, confused by the dimness, before I realize what it is: a sticky note.

  Someone woke me up in the middle of the fucking night with a creepy knock and left a sticky note on my door? What is going on with my life right now?

  Mr. Rutgers, my next-door neighbor, unlocks his deadbolt, and I have two-point-five seconds to grab the sticky note, hop across the threshold, and close my door (softly) before he sees me. I make it with about a fifth of a second to spare. Then I stand there, leaning against the door, heart hammering in my chest from the false start of a battle I thought I was in for, eyes glued to the half-crumpled sticky note between two of my fingers. There’s writing on the note, but I can’t read it in the dark.

  Through the front door, I hear Mr. Rutgers mumbling something to somebody else on the hall, and, lips zipped, I move out of the foyer toward my kitchen. Out of curiosity, I glance over my shoulder to examine the hole in the wall. It’s the size of a grapefruit. Guess I won’t be getting that security deposit back.

  I reach the pitch-black kitchen and set my gun on the island in the center, then rifle around in my junk drawers until I find a small flashlight. Sticking the note on the countertop, I flick the flashlight on and point it at the trifling piece of paper someone nearly gave me a heart attack to deliver. There’s only one word written on it.

  Or, more accurately, one address. A website address.

  www.auroraopsfans.mic

  I stare at the note for a minute and try to remember if I’ve heard the name of that website before, but it doesn’t ring a bell. From the name, it sounds like some sort of fan group based in this city, but what the heck does the ops part refer to? What are they fans of? Army Black Ops? Operations Technology?

  After I stick my flashlight in my sling, I pick up the note and my gun and traipse back to the bedroom. My phone is still sitting on the dresser, plugged into a socket made useless by the blackout, and I grab it on the way to my bed. Plopping back down on my mattress, I drop the gun to free up all my fingers so I can type, then open my phone’s web browser. I double-check the spelling of the address, type it into the search bar, and wait as my phone connects to the page at the speed of nineties dialup. The outage must have affected the nearby cell towers, too.

  But, finally, the page loads, and up pops a forum with a painfully red background and small, black text. (Someone needs to take a web design class.) The site has no title header at the top, so I zoom in using two fingers to get a closer look at the sub-forum topics. FAQs. Member Introductions. Latest News. Scheduled Meet-ups. Cool Research Materials. History of the Occult. Study of Demonology. Practical Magic: A Starter Guide. Summonings and Séances. Real Paranormal Experiences: Tell Us Your Story!

  Gee, that went from normal to weird-ass in six-point-two seconds.

  I drop my phone into my lap and sigh. It’s an occult site. It’s one of those online watering holes where dumb kids interested in TV-style ghosts and demons reinforce their foolish obsessions with other dumb kids. Most of the time, these websites are harmless. None of the members are actual practitioners, just normal teenagers and college frat boys playing around with Ouija boards somebody bought at a toy store. Throw in some alcohol, a foreclosed house, and a guy hiding in the shadows with a sheet over his face, and you get meet-ups where these dumbasses have “scary paranormal experiences.”

  Most of the time.

  But every now and then, an unlucky kid with an ounce of magical talent stumbles upon some serious shit, real spells dug up from a second-hand bookstore or a yard sale. And rarely, a real summoning circle, sketched out in detail for that poor, misguided kid to replicate. And then…well, that’s where the tragedies come in.

  Could it be that this website is somehow related to big blue ugly, the fire spirit, and the deaths of the college kids? Is there a real sorcerer hiding in plain sight among the normal boys and girls, a sorcerer with a vendetta against som
e of the other members? Were Jason Franks and Alicia Wilkins and even Ally Johnston members of the site, targeted for some occult-related reason? Or did one of these dumb brats, posting blurry ghost pictures from abandoned asylums, manage to summon an Eververse creature on his own?

  No. No way an ignorant kid could have summoned big blue ugly. Even with an example circle, that summoning would have been too advanced for a beginner, as Erica the witch explained. But could it be that a kid stumbled onto an easier summoning spell for the fire spirit? Spirits are far simpler to conjure up than corporeal beings, so it is possible that one of these forum members brought the spirit to Earth.

  Maybe it was Ally Johnston herself. Without anti-possession charms or a strong, resistant magic will, she would have been easy prey for the spirit. Maybe she dabbled in the wrong type of magic and paid the price. And then, maybe it was the fire spirit, using her body to boost its power, that summoned big blue ugly. Maybe the spirit and blue ugly are in cahoots with each other, working toward some goal. They were in the Memorial Garden together. It could be that the murder spree is a joint effort.

  But what could a couple of Eververse beings want with the lives of some college kids? What could Franks and Wilkins have possibly done to warrant that level of vengeance? It’s far more likely that the two of them angered a human sorcerer, maybe someone on the forum, and he or she summoned both creatures to…

  Bah! I don’t know. It’s too late in the night for critical thinking.

  I toss the sticky note and my phone on the nightstand and stuff my gun underneath my pillow, just in case. In the morning, I can bring the forum up with Ella and Riker, and the analysts can take a crack at obtaining the member list. If the victims were members of the site, we might have a lead. If not, then some asshole scared the shit out of me in the middle of the night as a prank. Ha, ha, play a funny joke on the Kook!

  I bury myself in my covers again, pulling the comforter over my head, and press my face into the pillow. I can feel the softened outline of the gun beneath, reassuring. With a yawn, I close my eyes and try to ignore the oppressive silence of a world without electricity. If the power’s still out in the morning, I’ll have to shower at work, which will suck, but at least I’ll have a few good hours of sleep under my—