by N. P. Martin
“What?” I said, unafraid. “You’ll kill me? If you do, you’ll also kill yourself. You got what you wanted, Miss Crow, which is power. But like all power, it comes at a price. You of all people should know that.”
She stared at me a moment longer before shaking her head and turning away, after which I allowed myself to breathe normally again. When she next turned around, the cold smile was back on her face. “How do I know you’re not bluffing?”
“You don’t, not unless you kill me and find out…”
She shook her head again frustratedly. “Damn you, Creed.”
“Relax,” I said. “As long as nothing happens to me, you’ll be fine.”
“And what if someone else kills you?”
“That’s a chance you’ll have to take.”
“And when you eventually die from old age?”
“I’ll deactivate the bomb before that happens.”
“Very considerate of you.”
I smiled without humor. “You can go now, Miss Crow. Our business is concluded. I rescind your invitation here.”
Upon saying those words, it was like the vampire got pulled back by a rope wrapped around her as she was dragged against her will by an invisible force, out of the living room, down the hallway and out the front door where she came to a stop on the front step. Rejuvenated slightly by my victory over The Crimson Crow, I walked to the front door to see her off for good.
“I’ll find a way around this,” she said. “And when I do, I will make you suffer, Creed. Mark my words.”
“Mark my words also,” I told her. “If you do anything to Jennifer, if you hurt her in any way, I will activate that bomb around your heart and obliterate you out of existence. Are we clear on that?”
Angela Crow nodded reluctantly. “We’re clear.”
“Good,” I said. “Bye Miss Crow. Enjoy the sunshine. Maybe some of it will even penetrate that black heart of yours, who knows?”
And with that, I closed the door on The Crimson Crow.
22
Slainte
After spending the next few hours sleeping and recuperating, I called my uncle to check on Jennifer. I wanted to know if she had landed in Ireland safely, and as it turned out she had. I had a brief conversation with her on the phone as I explained what had happened with her mother and how I had managed to sort things out with her. I also told Jennifer that her mother would not be bothering her again anytime soon, although I did warn the girl that her mother knew of her travel plans, so I told Jennifer to keep an eye out when she was in Babylon. Jennifer thanked me once more, her gratitude creating a sense of contentedness and satisfaction in me that went a long way towards strengthening my motivation to not only stay in Blackham City but to also use my particular skills to help more people, supernatural or otherwise.
I told Ray as much when I spoke to him on the phone again. He was happy to hear I had found the right path at last.
“A path,” I told him. “Time will tell if it’s the right one.”
“It is,” Ray said before he hung up the phone. “Trust me, my boy. It is.”
After the phone call, I took a walk around The Sanctum. It was the first real physical Sanctum I'd ever had (the Sanctum I kept in the Astral Plane not counting). For as long as I needed it, the Sanctum in Blackham City was mine. More than that, it was a permanent base. A place to call home at long last.
Throughout all those years of traveling, I thought I didn’t need anything permanent in my life, apart from magick. But walking around the Sanctum, feeling the history and magick steeped in its walls, I realized that permanency (as much as such a concept exists) was what I craved all along. For some reason, I had spent the last six years convinced otherwise, perhaps because (I was now realizing) I was scared of stopping anywhere for too long for fear of what would catch up with me.
That fear was still there in the background, but the difference now was that I was prepared to face whatever came along, from my past or from the present. And Blackham City was as good a place as any to do that.
Of course, now that I was there, I wasn't sure exactly how to proceed. I knew I had to set up shop, but I wasn't sure what kind of shop or even how to go about it. But that was okay because these things had a way of sorting themselves out when you decided on a particular path in life. In the meantime, I would make The Sanctum my own while also getting to know the lay of the land in Blackham City. Something told me that the more I knew about the place and its inhabitants, the easier my job (whatever job that was…magickslinger for hire, I guess) would be.
Standing now by the fireplace in the living room, I poured myself a glass of whiskey and looked around the room for a moment with a contented grin on my face. Then I raised my glass to the empty room and my new Sanctum. My new life. "Sláinte," I said, before knocking back the whiskey. And I don't mind telling you, it was the nicest glass of whiskey I'd ever had.
Oh, and you’re probably wondering about that magick bomb I put next to Angela Crow's heart. Did I really do that, or was I bluffing, as The Crimson Crow had tried to say I was?
Well, all I’m going to say on that is this:
A Mage has to have his secrets, doesn’t he?
Sláinte!
23
Blood Sacrifice Sample Chapter
THE FORCE OF the magickal energy that crackled through the air was so powerful I got slammed back against a dirty brick wall as if I had just been hit in the chest by the Devil's own fist. The spell blew through my every defense. I might as well have been a goddamn Sleepwalker with no protection at all.
What am I even doing here? Where am I?
The faint smell of decayed flesh mixed with sulfur hung thick in the air, signifying that black magick had just been used, and that was never good. It was like turning up at a children's party to find Beelzebub tying balloon animals with a shit-eating grin on his face. Nothing good could come from that. Same with black magick. Bad shit always followed.
I sat dazed on the floor, blinking around me for a moment, my mind fuzzy as if I had just woken up from a dream. It appeared I was inside an abandoned office space, the expansive rectangular room lined with grimy, broken windows that let cold air into the place and which went some way towards drawing me out of the daze I was still in. It was night time, so darkness coated the room, the only real light coming from the moon outside as it beamed its pale silvery light through the smashed skylights in the ceiling.
Confused and more than a little uneasy, I struggled back to my feet and blindly reached for the pistol inside my dark green trench coat, frowning when I realized the gun wasn’t there. Then I remembered it had gone flying out of my hand when the spell had hit. Looking around for a moment, I soon located the pistol lying on the floor several feet away, and I lurched over and grabbed it, slightly more secure now that the gun’s reassuring weight was back in my hand.
There were disturbing holes in my memory. I vaguely recalled confronting someone after having tracked them to where I was.
But who?
Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear image. The person was no more than a shadow figure in my mind. It could have been anybody. I didn’t even have a clue why I was tracking the mysterious person in the first place. Obviously, they had done something to get on my radar. The question was what, though?
The answer came a few seconds later when my eyes lit upon the dark shape in the middle of the room, and a deep sense of dread filled me straight away. A dread that was both familiar and sickening at the same time. Swallowing, I stared hard at the shape lying prone in the gloom. Then, over the sharp scent of rats piss and pigeon shit, a different smell hit my nostrils. The heavy, festering stench of blood.
When I gingerly crossed to the center of the room, my worst fears were confirmed when I saw that it was a dead body lying on the floor. A young woman, throat slit, symbols carved into the flesh of her naked body which lay spreadeagled, her wrists and ankles tied with rope to four large, rusty nails that were driven into the concrete
floor. I shook my head as I considered the force required to drive a long metal spike into concrete. They weren't driven home with a hammer, that was for damn sure, unless the hammer was pure magick.
A circle was painted around the girl's body also. In her own dark blood it looked like. Along the circumference of the circle there were symbols, drawn by a finger dipped in blood that was quick and precise in its movements as if the person it belonged to had drawn the same symbols many times before. A fact that unnerved me almost as much as the body by my feet.
I breathed out slowly as I reluctantly took in the callous butchery on display. The dead woman looked to be in her early thirties, though it was difficult to tell because both her eyes were missing. Cut out of their sockets with a knife it seemed like, the same knife used to cut her throat. I shook my head as I looked around for a second, trying to see where the dead woman’s eyeballs might be, but I couldn’t see them, which meant the killer probably took them with him. Sick bastard.
The woman also looked underweight for her size. She was around the same height as me at six feet tall, but there was very little meat on her bones as if she rarely ate any food. The needle marks on her feet and the bruises around her thighs told me why, as did the leather mini skirt and bloody white boob tube discarded on the floor not far from her body. The woman was clearly a prostitute, and a drug addict to boot. A convenient, easy victim for whoever had killed her.
And if the symbols carved into her pale flesh were anything to go by, it would seem the girl wasn't so much murdered as ritually sacrificed. I would have to look the symbols up later when I got back to my Sanctum, but at a guess, I would have said the girl was an offering to one of the Dimension Lords, though I had no clue which one (there were many). The symbols themselves were not only complex, but they were also carved with surgical precision. The clarity of the symbols against the girl's pale flesh made it possible for me to make out certain ones that I recognized as being signifiers to alternate dimensions. Though again, I didn't know which dimension was being referred to. Glyphs such as the ones I was looking at were always uniquely different in some way. No two people drew Glyphs in the same way, each person adding their personality into them, which could often make it hard to work out the precise meaning of certain ones. The intuitive feelings I got getting from those Glyphs however, were enough to make me believe that each one resonated only evil intent.
Crouching down to look at the Glyphs more closely, I took out my phone and used it to take pictures of them all so I could compare them later to the symbols in the reference books I kept at the Sanctum, not mention my old case files. It was clear, though, that I had been onto whoever did that. And if I had to guess, I would have said the girl wasn't the first person to be murdered in a similar fashion by the killer. Not by a long stretch, given the precision and clear competency of the killer, whoever they were.
“Son a bitch,” I said, annoyed now that I couldn’t recall any details about the case I had so obviously been working on. It was no coincidence that I had ended up where I was, a place that reeked of black magick, and murder that had occult written all over it (literally, in the victim’s case). I had been on the hunt and I had gotten close to the killer, which was the likeliest reason for the dark magick deployed against me.
Whoever the killer was, they wielded profoundly powerful magick (magick with a “k” that is…real magick). A spell that managed to wipe all my memories of the person in question wouldn't have been an easy spell to cast, or even come by for that matter. The killer was also a Sorcerer of some kind, of that that there was no doubt. And given the depth of power to their magick, it also felt to me like they channeled power from some other source, such as whatever Dimension Lord they were sacrificing innocent girls to.
Whatever the case, the killer’s spell had worked. Getting back the memories they had stolen from me wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s if I could get them back at all, which depressingly, I feared might just be the case.
Shaking my head at the grimness of the situation, I was about to stand up so I could get some full-body shots of the victim when a voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
Thanks For Reading
Thank you for reading the book!
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The Watchers Series
The Watchers Series is my first urban fantasy series and there are a total of six books in the series. The series tells of Leia and her struggles against demons and her troubled past. These struggles take her all the way to Hell, in which two of the books are set. If you’ve ever wondered what Hell might be like, these books will give you some idea. It’s a fun but brutal adventure series packed with action, humor and a little bit of romance. Below you can read a sample chapter from the first book, Hell Is Coming.
ABOUT HALF AN hour later, Frank was driving us through the city in his black Chevrolet, heading towards the rundown South Side that was predominantly populated by gangbangers and small time drug gangs. They were never done killing each other in that part of the city. I ventured into it a few times in the past with Kasey to buy drugs, and last time, I vowed never again after we got surrounded by a bunch of gangbangers who refused to let us leave unless we gave every one of them blowjobs. Seriously. It was only a passing cop car that allowed us to get away, distracting the gang long enough for us to run.
So I wasn’t exactly thrilled that Frank was driving us into that area, passing by the projects and youths hanging around on every street who looked at us like we were their mortal enemies. “What the hell are we doing here, Frank?” I asked. “This place sucks.”
“Well, you’d better get used to things sucking,” Frank said, seemingly unaffected by the stares we were getting from almost everyone we passed. “Because this job sucks big time.”
“That’s encouraging, Frank. Thanks for that.”
“Just telling the truth. Did you think chasing monsters was going to be a walk in the park?”
“No, obviously.”
"Well then, welcome to the job." He pulled the car up along a stretch of wasteland on the edge of the projects. Across the street was an old abandoned factory building that was just about the grimmest thing I'd ever seen. It was long and sprawling, and every window in the place had long since been broken. Through the windows, all you could see was impenetrable darkness.
“What’s in there?” I asked. “You still haven’t told me what we’re doing.”
“I’ve been chasing a vampire for months now,” Frank said, looking out the window at the factory building. “Normally I don’t bother too much with vamps, not unless they do something to get on my radar.”
“Like killing people for blood, you mean?”
“Vamps do what they gotta do. I’m not going to chase every one of them down. This one turned a senator’s daughter a while back.” He pulled a photograph out of his jacket and handed it to me. The picture was of a young girl, pretty with long blonde hair and big blue eyes, dressed in riding gear and standing by a stable with a horse in the background.
“Poor girl,” I said, handing the photo back. “Still, a senator’s daughter is more important than anyone else, is that how it goes?”
“No, but I got asked by the senator to kill the vamp who did it. It pays to keep in good graces with these guys sometimes. Now he’ll owe me.”
I shook my head. “Politics.”
"Politics makes the world go ‘round. Don't
be so naïve." He got out of the car, and I followed him to the trunk. When he opened it, he lifted a false bottom, revealing an entire array of weapons underneath.
“Holy shit, Frank.”
“I like to be prepared.” He reached into the trunk and took out two machetes, handing me one. “Here.”
“No stakes? I thought you needed wooden stakes to kill a vampire.”
“Decapitation is the best way. Cut the sucker’s head right off. No pun intended.”
I hefted the machete in my hand, took a few practice swings. It was heavy and very sharp, and I wondered how many vamps Frank had killed with it over the years. He also took a gun and put it in the waistband of his jeans. "I thought guns couldn't kill vampires," I said.
"It makes me feel better carrying it." He closed the trunk and looked around to make sure no one was watching us. We were pretty much alone it seemed, though I still felt jumpy. "A few ground rules before we go in there," Frank said. "Number one, stay behind me at all times and don't wander off on your own. Number two, if we meet any vamps in there—which we will—you don't hesitate, you use that thing to kill them, or they'll kill you."
I nodded, the reality of the situation we were about to walk into now sinking in. Fear whispered in my ear as it waited in the wings. “What’s number three?”
"When we find the head vamp, you let me take care of him. No heroics. This vamp is old and very cunning. You wouldn't be the first hunter to die at his hands."
“What if you need help? Am I supposed to just to stand there?”
“Hopefully, I won’t need help, but if I do… just be careful. I don’t want a teen vampire living in my cabin.”