Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3)

by David Bussell

  One blast went high, questing off into the distance and streaking through the night sky like a bloodied hand dragged across a chalkboard. The next one found its way to a living target, a blind man’s guide dog, which suddenly went from being a pet, to a mess of flying ground beef.

  Not good.

  Sarah aimed the rod at me, nose upturned, like I was something she didn’t want to catch a whiff of. ‘You messed up again, Jake, just like you mess up everything.’ She joined Damon’s side and the two of them padded toward me like a pair of wolves, closing in for the kill. ‘You’re weak,’ she went on. ‘Weak and feeble. You never had a real job. Never knew how to provide. You’re a loser. A piss artist, just like your old man was.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk shit about my dad,’ I said, surprising myself. I’d never in my life felt an inclination to stand up for my father before, and yet there I was, ready to defend him to the last.

  I felt my lip curl. I had to stop Sarah. Had to put an end to her and Damon, right now. And I knew how to do it too. The only question was, what was it going to cost me?

  I guess sometimes you just have to roll the dice.

  I reached into my jacket pocket for the gift Vic Lords had given me.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Sarah asked, mockingly.

  In my open palm I held a small, bone die.

  As Sarah went to activate the blasting sceptre, I sent the die skittering across the pavement to her bare feet, which caused her to instinctively jump backwards.

  It landed on a one. A single, black dot. Snake eyes, pirate style.

  For a moment, the two of them just stared at the die contemptuously, sitting there on the ground before them like a dud hand grenade.

  ‘Looks like you crapped out,’ said Damon, but his wilting expression soon changed when the single black dot began to expand.

  The dot grew and grew, moving fast, opening up beyond the limits of the die. Soon the aperture had opened up to a sizeable black hole, big enough to encompass the ground beneath my assailants’ feet.

  For a moment, Sarah and Damon seemed to hang in the air like a couple of Wile E. Coyotes, then they lost their case against the law of physics and went tumbling through the portal.

  Sarah tried and failed to make a grab for the rim of the hole, letting go of the blasting sceptre as she did so and sending it rolling across the hotel forecourt. As Damon fell, his fingertips grazed the interdimensional shelf, but he too succumbed to gravity.

  The pair of them sang a wolf-wail duet as they plummeted, until they landed on the other side, crashing down hard enough to knock the air from their lungs.

  I stilled the discarded sceptre with the tip of my shoe, picked it up, and placed it in my jacket pocket. The breach had ceased expanding now, so I stepped up to the lip of the yawning black mouth and looked down. I recognised the realm beyond at once. It was Hell. The same Hell I’d just left behind.

  ‘Please!’ Sarah called up to me, realising where she was, her hands clasped together in prayer, ‘please don’t leave me here!’

  ‘Ah, c’mon,’ said Damon, affecting a friendly tone as he called up to me, ‘I was just coddin ya, fella. Pull us outta here and we’ll head down the pub for a pint of the black stuff, just like the good auld days.’

  Sarah gave him a dig in the arm. ‘He’s the one you want!’ she cried. ‘He’s the one who pushed you under a train! I’m sorry, okay. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him. Let me make it up to you, Jake.’

  ‘Ya feckin’ snake!’ roared Damon, showing her the back of his hand.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You two belong together,’ I said.

  There’s a place for bad people, and they were already there.

  The portal began to shrink as the black hole closed. Sarah made a face like a smacked arse. Damon did his nut, raging and frothing at the mouth. I was about to turn away and leave the pair of them to it, when a third figure arrived by their side.

  The man was dressed in black and wore a hooded robe. Oh, and his head was a giant eyeball.

  Big Blue.

  Seeing me hovering above, peering down at him from the land of the living, his pupil swelled almost to the size of his iris, making it look like an eclipsed, sapphire sun.

  He looked to my two tormentors, then back to me, and even though he had nothing in the way of eyelids, I felt him wink.

  Two souls for the price of one, a fair trade if ever there was one.

  I watched as he cuffed the wrists of his new prisoners, then the black hole snapped shut.

  24

  I don't know how I pulled it off exactly, but somehow I managed to pick the sweetcorn out of that turd.

  There were only a couple of loose ends left to tie.

  I returned to Legerdomain to reacquaint Jazz Hands with her stolen inventory of course, thereby solving the Mystery of the Purloined Masque. The only item I hadn’t been able to recover was the set of spectroscopic lenses that Sarah had been wearing when she went tumbling into Hell, but Jazzer enjoyed hearing that story so much, she happily wrote the loss off.

  While I was there, I had her enchant me some banknotes, which I used to pay off my tab at The Beehive. I expected Lenny to be happy about it, but instead he simply took the money and gave me a look that suggested I should pay my balance quicker next time if I didn’t want to talk through a ouija board for the rest of my life.

  I returned to the Coyote with a mind to have him help me get my dad out of the Bad Place, but when I arrived at his establishment, I found it vacant. The Coyote had gone out of business, or more precisely, he’d been shut down. I found a calling card in the basement, left there by an angel I knew, an apple-polishing, jobsworth named Adonael. He worked for the Big Man, who’d evidently cottoned onto the Coyote smuggling villains into the Promised Land, and decided to liquidate his little operation. Can’t say I blame him, I’d planned to do the same once I’d had my use of the rancid little hunchback. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to see justice had been served, but it was a bittersweet kind of glad so long as my dad stayed trapped in damnation.

  And then there was the die; the one Vic Lords had given me. I wondered what using that thing was going to cost me. Sure, I’d employed it in an unconventional way—delivering souls to Hell rather than using it as an escape hatch to Earth—but I knew Vic would make me pay for it somehow. One way or another, accepting that ghoulish fucker’s help was going to come back and bite me on the arse.

  I stood in an industrial lift as it climbed the five storeys to my detective agency, pleased that I was heading up for a change, instead of down.

  I knocked a couple of cobwebs aside and pushed through the door of my office to find the place exactly as I’d left it. The morning sun fell slanting through the window, lying on the linoleum floor like a pool of warm honey.

  I looked over the rooftops of Camden Town, thinking back to what Damon had said about me having no humanity. About losing touch with the living world. He was right. Him and Sarah. The only reason they’d been able to sucker me the way they did was because I’d been so neglectful of the mortal realm. I’d spent so long trying to save the dead, that I’d forgotten what I am. Who I am. I’m Jake Fletcher, ghost detective, the busiest dead man since Tupac Shakur. I may be deceased, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a heart. This isn’t Hell. This isn’t some corrupted version of the world I know. This is home. This is now. This is life, and I intend to live it.

  I sat down in my office chair, put my feet up on the desk, and thought back to the last time I’d been here. When work was in short supply and life felt baggy and uncomplicated. A lot had changed since then. I’d kicked in the doors of Hell, clawed my way out again, and brought down my killers, once and for all. Well, twice and for all, in Damon’s case. For Sarah, this was a delayed sentence.

  As I thought of my ex-wife, I felt my finger itch and went to twist at my wedding ring.

  It was gone.

  I looked down incredulously at my finger, which looked so naked now, so u
ntarnished, and felt a sweet relief, like a bad tooth had finally come loose.

  The End.

  LEAVE A REVIEW

  Reviews are gold to indie authors, so if you’ve enjoyed this book, please consider rating and reviewing it.

  REVIEW TWICE DAMNED HERE

  GET THE NEXT BOOK IN THE GHOSTED SERIES

  Coming to Amazon soon!

  …In the meantime, we have a sneak peek at two more Uncanny Kingdom series: London Coven, and Dark Lakes, coming up for you in just a couple of pages!

  BECOME AN INSIDER

  …and receive FREE BOOKS, including an EXCLUSIVE prequel to the GHOSTED series. Also, be the FIRST to hear about NEW RELEASES and SPECIAL OFFERS in the UNCANNY KINGDOM universe. Just hit the link below…

  FREE BOOKS!

  LONDON COVEN: FAMILIAR MAGIC

  Here’s a SNEAK PEEK at the first London Coven book, another series set in the Uncanny Kingdom universe…

  “Three dead witches.

  An unknown killer.

  One big mistake: they left me alive.”

  1

  It was the absence of magic that first got me, hitting me like a punch to the stomach.

  As I stepped forward my legs actually shook a little, like they might give way and drop me to the ground. So much for the seen-it-all, jaded, powerful Familiar.

  My name is Stella, I belonged to the London Coven as the Familiar to a trio of witches, and I’d just arrived back to find the door hanging off its hinges. After discovering this, I’d just stood looking at the thing for a few seconds, confused. It was impossible. It couldn’t be. And yet there it stubbornly was.

  The entrance to the coven itself sits in Hammersmith, west London; just a few streets away from the underground station. It’s situated down a blind alley, so called because only those who know it exists can actually see it. A simple but very effective bit of perception magic that makes the alley invisible to most, even when looking directly at it.

  Let’s get back to that impossible lack of magic.

  It assaulted my senses like a rancid smell. Like meat gone bad. The coven and the blind alley that lead to its door should be noisy with magic. Alive with boiling, agitated power. It was home to my masters, Kala, Trin, & Feal, the most powerful witches in England, and every inch of the place was infused with magic, old and new, black and white. On top of that, there were the spells of protection. Thousands of them. Anyone that wasn’t meant to be there could find themselves stepping into a patch of superheated air that would melt the flesh from their bones. Or perhaps they’d blink and, just before their heart gave out, they’d find themselves confused as their eyes opened one last time to see their insides were now on the outside. There were any number of ways it could happen. Any number of creative deaths to discover. The coven was locked up tight, it had to be. It was impossible for anything to step inside that wasn’t invited. And yet…

  The door—

  The lack of magic—

  I swallowed hard and ducked through the gap created by the half-off door, straightening up slowly on the other side.

  The place was dead.

  There wasn’t a whisper of magic to be heard. To be felt. Tasted.

  It was impossible.

  I know I keep using that word, but it was true.

  Every building, every street, every hill and river and grain of sand contains some residue of magic. It’s all around us every day. Even if this place hadn’t been a coven, hadn’t housed three of the most powerful magical creatures in the country, the very fact of its existence meant it should emit traces of the Uncanny.

  But there was nothing.

  I reached out with all of my senses, desperate for anything. For a ghost of some ancient incantation.

  I came up empty and it terrified me.

  ‘Kala? Trin...?’

  Silence.

  I stepped into the first room; it was empty but there were signs of a struggle. ‘Kala?’ Chairs on their sides, broken glass on wooden floorboards. The coven smelt the same despite the lack of magic; that weird mix of cinnamon, freshly cut grass, and lavender that seemed to permanently drift around the place, no matter which potion was cooked up or meal was prepared. The smell of my master’s witchcraft. I turned back and stepped into the hallway again.

  ‘Intruder, my name is Stella Familiar and you will show yourself or I… or I will…’

  I pressed a palm against the wall to steady myself and swallowed, throat dry. The emptiness was getting to me, giving me the shakes. All magical beings are connected to the power that radiates from all things. They feed a little on the magic that naturally occurs, and I was no different. I soaked it in, night and day, without even thinking about it. It sustained me, made me stronger, gave me the energy to cast spells, and, for want of a better word, gave me a ‘buzz’. But now, in this place, in this empty coven, I was like a junkie who’d suddenly gone cold turkey after a lifetime of indulgence.

  And it hurt.

  It was actually disturbing to me how quickly I was affected. A minute had passed, tops, and I was a shaking, sweaty wreck.

  I grunted, straightened up, and tried to get my shit together.

  ‘Intruder, my name is Stella Familiar and you will damn well show yourself to me for punishment!’ The words roared out of my mouth with a strength I really didn’t feel.

  There was no reply.

  I placed a hand on the door to the main coven room and pushed.

  I tasted death before I saw it.

  That coppery tang on the tongue that twisted my stomach and told me exactly what I was going to see before my eyes had chance to catch up.

  There were three bodies on the floor inside. Three bodies, but more than three pieces. Kala, Trin, Feal, my masters, my coven’s high witches, had been torn to pieces and scattered around the room.

  Eyes wide, hand to my mouth, I stepped inside.

  ‘No…’

  The world had gone mad.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Nothing was capable of doing this to the witches of the London Coven. Together, the three of them wielded enough power to crack open mountains, and yet my shoes were now soaking in a pool of their collective blood.

  I crouched and placed a hand on a hunk of meat that could have once belonged to any one of my masters. It, like the coven itself, was empty. Not just of life, but of magic. Of power. Something had broken into a place it was impossible to break into, survived the magical protections it was impossible to survive, and torn to…

  …and murdered my masters. Murdered creatures of immeasurable power. And then, to finish things off, they’d drained every last drop of magic from the place.

  It was impossible on top of impossible on top of impossible and it made me tremble.

  I stood, angry. Angry that I’d allowed fear to infect me. I cradled that anger and blew upon it, igniting it like the first spark of a new fire. It didn’t matter that this was impossible, it had happened. It didn’t matter that the kind of power needed to have even achieved one of the impossible things done to this coven would be enough to turn me into a puddle of bubbling goo.

  None of it mattered.

  All that mattered was that the coven was breached and my creators had been murdered as though they were nothing. As though they were less than nothing. They’d been ripped and shredded and tossed aside. My nails dug into my palms and drew blood, but I didn’t flinch. It felt good.

  I was going to find out who was behind this and do something impossible myself.

  I was going to get bloody, horrifying revenge.

  I was nothing but a lowly Familiar, but I swore on every spell I knew that I was going to avenge my slaughtered coven.

  ‘Listen to me. Listen closely. You’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve made a terrible mistake and you don’t even realise it. My name is Stella Familiar, and what’s happened here today will be met with fury like you could never even imagine. Do you hear me? I know you can. Whoever did this, I will find you, and when I do, I wi
ll rip your heart from your chest!’

  A noise—

  A movement in the corner of my eye—

  I whirled and caught sight of something my mind couldn’t quite pin down.

  I wasn’t alone.

  And I was in terrible danger.

  2

  Whatever the creature was, it was taking its time. I had the distinct impression it was trying to scare me.

  It was working.

  Normally in this sort of situation, with an unknown beast stalking me, ready to leap and tear my throat out at any moment, I’d draw on the surrounding magic and cast a spell that would turn the thing into confetti. Sling a spell first, ask questions later, that was my usual way of dealing with threats. But there was no surrounding magic. I extended my senses as far as I could, invisible tendrils firing out in all directions, desperately searching for a hint of the strange to draw upon, but everything was cold.

  This was a dead place.

  The creature unleashed a low, rumbling growl that shook the floor beneath me. I was in deep trouble. I tried to ignore the blood, the chunks of my dead masters, and I reached out again to try and make sense of what I was up against.

  A voice—

  A single word, repeated staccato—

  Kill-Kill-Kill—

  The words rolled in my head as I came upon the thing stalking me. It was a slippery creature, hard to get a clear grip on, but it was obvious it wasn’t the person behind this attack. It was a booby trap.

  Okay. It was time to take stock.

  I had no magic to draw on, only the weak power I already had stored inside of me, and even that was dulled by my surroundings, as though my magic was shrinking back in confusion at the emptiness around me. Did the creature keeping just out of sight know that? Did it realise I was running almost on empty? That I’d be bringing a slap to a gunfight?