City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  Feldman whips up his hand and snaps two fingers, and a bright yellow laser beam bursts out of his palm. My body lurches to the right reflexively, and the beam burns through the shoulder of my coat, the heat so intense that it sears my skin even though the bulk of the light doesn’t touch me. Pain flares up my neck and down into my chest, and I stagger hard into the door of a locker, a scream weeping through my clenched teeth. My gun clatters across the floor, dropped by shaking fingers. I grip my burned shoulder with my splinted hand, tears in my eyes.

  The rogue wizard grunts, irritated he didn’t burn straight through my heart like he intended. He levels his hand at me again, and another wave of magic coalesces in his palm. To his right, the wraiths are now piling into the locker room from the shower area, but with a simple nod of his head, Feldman commands his creations to halt, to let him handle the “Crow boy.” The levitating wraiths sink to the floor all at once, as if someone tripped a collective off switch.

  When Feldman is satisfied his murder attempt won’t be interrupted by his toys, he steps closer to me and—

  Lucian Ardelean drops out of the ceiling, half a dozen white tiles exploding around him. He slams into the floor so hard it cracks, then rises to his full height, brushes dust from his coat, takes off his hat and tosses it onto a bench, and says in that smooth sing-song voice of his, “Patrick Feldman. Just the guy I was looking for.” He peers over the wizard’s shoulder at me and winks in such an exaggerated way that it infuriates me despite the direness of my situation. “Thanks for the help, kid. I appreciate you drawing my prize out of the woodwork.”

  Feldman half-turns toward Lucian, raising his other hand and prepping the same laser beam spell. When he catches sight of Lucian’s amber eyes and identifies him as a vampire, he stiffens almost imperceptibly, a sign of fear. But he doesn’t drop his smarmy smirk, or his puffed-up posture, or let on in any way that he might consider fleeing. Which is a bold move given that vampires can usually one-up practitioners in a fair fight. Most vampires have some command of magic, and when you add that to their natural abilities—super speed, super strength, super senses—human practitioners tend to lose out big time.

  Lucian eyes Feldman’s spell-prepped palm with disinterest. “You really think a rudimentary spell like that is going to put me down, wizard? And here I thought I might be facing a practitioner with an imagination for once.”

  Feldman’s cheeks flush in anger. “Don’t play games with me, vampire. I know your ways. You’re not going to throw me off task with personal insults. I spent the last three years of my life rotting in a jail cell, denied all but the most basic necessities of life. There’s nothing you can say to me, about me, that others haven’t already spit on me a thousand times. So let’s drop the bullshit banter and cut to the chase, shall we?”

  The wizard whistles. The wraiths rise up.

  Twelve cloaked nightmares rush Lucian at once, scythes slicing through the air. At the same time the first wraith reaches the vampire, Feldman fires another laser from his hand, aiming not at Lucian’s heart but at his head, knowing that vampires can recover from anything except extreme brain damage, decapitation, and complete burning. Throughout all of this, the attacking wraiths and the oncoming beam, Lucian Ardelean stands in place, nonchalant, until the fraction of a second before the beam hits him right between the eyes.

  Then, the vampire attacks.

  It’s like I’m back in Gloston Square, watching Lucian emerge from the park and come toward me, watching him rip Mac out of his seat, watching him drop Mac’s body on the car—it’s like that because I don’t see what happens at all. I know what happens, based on the aftermath, but the vampire moves so fast that his body is no more than a blur. One moment, there are twelve wraiths, whole and “healthy” and on the warpath, and the next moment, there are six wraiths on the floor, eviscerated. Limbs torn from sockets. Heads ripped from necks. Organs spilled from slashed stomachs. Scythes clanging as they bounce across the tile and come to rest.

  I blink, once, and Lucian’s fist is slamming into a magic shield projected around Feldman’s body. The force of the impact sends Feldman reeling backward into the wall, and his head cracks against the painted cinderblock. Dazed, Feldman loses his footing and slides to the floor, leaving a bloody streak from where his scalp split. His mouth opens and closes, opens and closes, mimicking a fish, no sound emerging, and with a jolt of horror in my lead stomach, I realize the man is having some kind of seizure.

  Jesus Christ. All that from one punch that didn’t even connect.

  Lucian straightens his posture in the wake of the punch and glares distastefully at his hand, which looks like someone ran over it with a truck. Fingers shattered. Knuckles crushed. Ripped tendons hanging out in the air where his skin peeled away from his bones.

  The vampire displays no sense of pain. He observes his broken hand until it starts to heal at a rapid pace. Then he turns around to face the remaining wraiths, five of whom are converging on him at once, trying to overwhelm him with what remains of their number. And the sixth wraith, the final wraith, is…

  …looming over me.

  I was so enraptured by Lucian’s impossible power, I didn’t see it coming.

  The scythe swings down. I try to dodge by pushing off the lockers, but it’s not enough, not quite enough. The blade hooks the same spot in my sleeve as the last one did, and this time, fabric weakened, my trusty DSI coat succumbs to an enemy attack. My sleeve tears, the scythe punches through, and metal bites the skin beneath, so quick, so sharp, so deep, I don’t even feel it until I crawl away in a panic and haul myself to my feet.

  The first thing I feel is the warmth of blood, pulsing out of the wound, soaking my coat sleeve, cascading to the floor like a broken fountain. The second thing I feel is the searing agony of a bone-deep laceration, muscle split like butchered meat. My left arm hangs useless at my side, every twitch of my fingers a spark of fire in my damaged nerves. The scream that emerges from my mouth is choked off by shallow gasps, and as I grip the wound, trying to staunch the blood flow, it’s all I can do not to hyperventilate in sheer, unadulterated terror.

  I’m going to bleed to death.

  There’s a puddle of blood on the floor already.

  No ambulance will get here in time to save me.

  I stagger through the mess as I retreat from the wraith, leaving crimson footprints.

  I’m already feeling faint.

  My back hits the wall, the fallen Feldman only five feet away from me, still trembling in the aftermath of his seizure.

  Shit! What do I do?

  The wraith rights itself, bringing its bloodied scythe to bear again, prepared to finish me off with another well-placed blow. It whips its head back, triumphant, and its hood slips away, revealing the bald, mottled head and the lidless glowing eyes that’ll haunt me all the way to hell. The wraith glides toward me, its feet scant inches off the floor. Ten feet away from me. Six feet. Four feet.

  A shot rings out.

  A bullet nails the wraith between the eyes, and it recoils with a screech, slimy dead blood leaking from the wound and trailing down its face. My attention snaps to the locker room entrance, where Detective Matt Lassiter stands tall and proud, despite looking worse for wear. One side of his face is swollen and bruised, like somebody slammed it into a wall, and there’s a nasty bleeding gash on the opposite temple, where a blunt object hit home.

  Feldman must’ve ambushed Lassiter before he came after me, not wanting to risk any distractions in his kill the Crow for petty revenge plot. Only he didn’t anticipate Lucian’s interruption, which gave Lassiter enough time to recover.

  Though Lassiter’s save might not matter. I’ve lost over half a pint of blood, and it’s still pouring through my fingers. I’m lightheaded, dizzy, consciousness fading, thoughts so disorganized I can barely keep my eyes open and remain standing on my own two feet.

  Without a miracle, I’ll be dead in minutes.

  Despite never having fought a supernatural cr
eature in his life, Lassiter bounds toward the wraith and fires his gun three more times. Each shot pierces the monster’s face, causing it to shift farther and farther away from me, until there’s enough distance between us for the detective to position himself protectively in front of me. The wraith, shaking off the shots, groans angrily when it realizes Lassiter has cut off access to its prey. But it doesn’t hesitate to ready its weapon again. It believes it can take on two mortal men as well as one.

  It’s wrong.

  To my surprise, very wrong.

  The wraith swings its blade. Lassiter ducks beneath it as swiftly as a man a decade his junior, and yanks out of his coat pocket a small, blue rectangular object that my beleaguered brain identifies as a Bic lighter. Lassiter flicks the lighter on, a small flame springs to life, the top of the lighter comes into contact with the fleshy underside of the wraith’s jaw—and the fire catches hold of the flammable flying zombie.

  The monster understands the ploy a moment too late. It reels back in terror, but its skin burns like tissue paper in a bonfire, and by the time it’s five feet away from Lassiter, it’s engulfed in flames from head to toe. It shrieks, deafening in the confined space of the locker room, until its vocal chords melt away, and then it collapses to the ground, burns for a few more seconds, and disintegrates into fine black ash. The ash, no wind to carry it, paints the floor in a fine mist, and the wraith is officially no more.

  Lassiter gawks at the ash, then glances at the lighter in his hand, like he can’t believe that actually worked.

  What a ballsy move, I muse, using a tiny lighter to…to…

  My legs lose traction. I slide down the wall and land in the dangerously large pool of blood on the floor. Lassiter wheels around, sparing the injured Feldman a passing look before he crouches in front of me and pries my bandaged hand off the gushing laceration.

  “Nicked an artery,” he says. “We need to stop the bleeding.” He starts to peel his coat off and tug his shirt from his waistband, a move that makes me think he’s going to attempt that tried-and-true movie trope where the quick-thinking hero tears their clothing to create a makeshift bandage to save the poor, injured victim from an untimely death by blood loss. Which is ironic, considering that I’m supposed to be the—

  “Kinsey! Stay with me.” Lassiter smacks my face. “If you die on my watch, your teammates are going to skin me alive, and I would prefer for my skin to stay attached to the rest of me.” He chuckles faintly, trying to hide how worried he is that I’ll die any second. “I’m going to make a tourniquet for your arm, and hopefully that’ll staunch the bleeding until the ambulance arrives.”

  Someone walks up behind Lassiter. Lucian. The vampire eyes the fresh blood smeared across the floor, tracks it back to my injured arm, and clicks his tongue in mild annoyance. “Jeez, kid. I can’t take my eyes off you for thirty seconds, can I?”

  Lassiter whirls around, gun up and trained on Lucian’s face. “Who the hell are you?” If he’s daunted by Lucian’s obviously inhuman eyes, he doesn’t show it.

  Lucian sighs, checks on Feldman, who’s struggling to move, and then abruptly pushes Lassiter into the lockers. Lassiter coughs, breathless, and tries to shoot Lucian, but the vampire simply knocks the gun out of the man’s hand with a swift flick of his wrist. The gun flies through the locker room and disappears into the darkness of the shower area beyond, clattering across the floor somewhere inside.

  Lassiter observes his empty hand like he doesn’t understand what happened.

  Lucian observes Lassiter like he’s waiting to see if the ballsy detective is stupid enough to attack a second time.

  He isn’t.

  Satisfied, Lucian squats in front of me. “Second time today I’m playing saving grace for a Crow. If my buddies back home find out about this, I’ll be the laughing stock of the century.” He rolls up the sleeves of his coat and shirt to his elbow. As he’s doing so, my wavering focus is cast over his shoulder, to the opposite corner of the room, where a neat, organized pile of dismembered wraith limbs, torsos, and heads sits slowly rotting. Lucian must’ve dispatched the remaining five wraiths with as much ease as he took the first six—there’s not a scratch on him.

  My attention is wrenched back to the vampire when his gleaming fangs sink into the flesh of his own wrist. He drags his fangs down his arm, splitting skin and veins, a mockery of a suicide. When he pulls away, his mouth and chin are drenched in blood, and his arm is a mangled mess.

  Lassiter gags at the sight, but I’m so shocked and simultaneously fatigued that I do absolutely nothing. I freeze and stay frozen, even when Lucian’s other hand shoots up, grabs my jaw, and forces my lips to part.

  Lucian shoves his disfigured wrist against my mouth, and hot blood spurts against the back of my throat. The vampire’s pulse pounding through my skull is the most unnerving experience of intimacy I’ve ever had in my entire life. Revulsion floods my gut, stomach clenching, bile creeping up my throat, but something, maybe the vampire blood, maybe one of its not-quite-human qualities, crushes my ability to vomit. And when Lucian yanks his wrist away and holds my jaw shut, I’m compelled to surrender to the reflex, the strangely comforting reflex, to swallow.

  There’s a second where I feel totally normal, regular old Cal Kinsey stuck in another dangerous situation…

  …then the vampire blood enters my system.

  My heart rate triples, my pulse races, my senses sharpen—my pain fades. In a matter of seconds, the river of blood rushing from my arm slows to a trickle, and a tingling sensation reminiscent of a half-asleep limb envelops my arm from shoulder to elbow. Healing. I can feel the flesh knitting itself back together, and I know that if I dare to look at my injury, I’ll be able to watch it heal too, my blood vessels and muscles and torn skin regenerating as if viewed in a time lapse.

  But I won’t look.

  I can’t.

  Because there’s something undeniably wrong about the process. Something distorted. Something corrupt. It’s like I know, on some instinctual level, that Lucian’s blood is humanity defiled, DNA that, long, long ago, played victim to a creature of the Eververse that should have never stepped foot on Earth, the progenitor of the vampire race that left its mark on the world in the form of immortal hybrids with an unending thirst for blood. It’s like I believe, down to my soul, that the foreign blood in my body belongs to something that should not be, and would not be, if the veil between here and there hadn’t been torn asunder by dark and deadly things deigning to play god. It’s like that—and a thousand other horrible feelings at once.

  So I don’t look at my arm.

  I tug my spare gun out of its holster and shoot Lucian twice in the chest.

  The vampire totters backward and lands on his ass, face contorted in surprise. He tugs his coat free of wrinkles so he can see the bloody holes left by the bullets, and gives me a quizzical look. “Well, gee, kid, next time I see you in critical condition, I’ll let you die.”

  “I didn’t…ask…for your help,” I pant out.

  Lucian huffs. “Oh, so you’d rather die than accept help from a vampire?”

  “Not a vampire. You.” I sit up straight, the pain that was crushing my chest now a quickly degrading memory. Glancing at my left shoulder, I see the burn from Feldman’s laser beam spell is healing too; all that remains is a discolored scar. The initial burst of hyper-fast healing will wear off shortly, I know, but a moderately heightened healing factor will linger for over a day. By tomorrow, it’ll seem like I was never injured at all, belying my torn and red-stained uniform.

  Lucian sends Lassiter a gesture that says, Can you believe this kid? So ungrateful.

  Instead of agreeing, however, Lassiter levels a biting scowl at him, likely because Lucian’s push bruised his ribs.

  Lucian, irate at our lack of appreciation, stands up and shifts toward Feldman to, I assume, resume his brutal beat down. But he stops short, a baffled look on his face, and when I follow his line of sight, I find what has him shaken: the den
t in the wall where Feldman was lying is now empty, nothing left of the wizard but a long smear of blood trailing down to the floor.

  I say to Lassiter, fear budding in my chest, “Did you see him get up?”

  Lassiter gives me a blank look. “He was there one second, and then he wasn’t…”

  Lucian growls out, “A veil.”

  “Good enough to fool your vampire senses?” I ask. “Last one I saw had a weakness where it couldn’t hide shadows.”

  “Some practitioners are better at veils than others.” Lucian performs a slow, three-sixty spin, surveying the entire locker room. “The best veils are nigh impenetrable to any senses, including tuned magic senses and the heightened physical senses of vampires and werewolves.”

  Though my entire body is trembling, I brace myself against the wall and push myself to my feet. “How good do you think Feldman is?”

  “Well, considering I can’t see, hear, or smell him…”

  “Right.” I tuck my gun back in its holster.

  Lassiter rubs his ribs, cringing, then rises alongside me. “So where the heck did he go? Did he flee the building? Or is he hiding out, lying in wait for a second ambush?”

  “I did crack his skull open,” Lucian says. “So it’s possible he ran off, vowing to fight another day, when his brain’s not scrambled. But something about that guy’s behavior—the arrogance, maybe, or the batshit insane I’m going to blow up buildings and give you riddles about my next target plan—makes me think he’s not the type to give up just because the going gets rough. If I had to guess, I’d say he defaulted back to his original plot and used the short time we were all distracted to…Oh.”

  Everyone feels the pulse of magic, even Lassiter, as the wards in the shower area flare up to full power. I can’t see the countdown from where I’m standing, but I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it now reads mere seconds from zero. Feldman wants me dead, and he’s not going to take a concussion for an answer. So he’ll blow up a goddamn middle school, along with four cops and a vampire. And he won’t regret it either, any more than he regretted the dozens of civilian deaths at the convention center.