Seven people
stood at the end of the long bridge, five side by side, two behind them.
All wore black and purple. Sahanu.
“Oooh, now
that’s a uniform,” Roman said. “Look at that. Meant to inspire fear
and dread. Screams assassin.”
“Which is why
they wouldn’t get anywhere within the range of their target,” Curran said.
They didn’t
need to. Their target was coming to them.
I pulled Sarrat
out and walked out onto the bridge. Below me vampire minds stirred but
stayed clear. I grasped one and pulled it to me as I walked. One
should be enough.
“You know who I
am.” My voice carried, bouncing off the massive walls. “You know
what I do.”
The vampire
leaped onto the bridge ahead of me. I made it dig its claws into its own
throat and rip it out a moment before I crushed its mind. Blood spilled
onto the stones.
“My father
thinks I won’t kill you out of compassion. He’s wrong.”
I drew my left
hand across Sarrat’s blade and let my blood fall into the puddle as I
passed. My magic dashed down the drops, fusing them into a solid
core. I pulled the vampire blood to me through it. It surged up and
formed a red sword in my left hand.
“Leave now and
I will spare your life.”
You can read the next part of One Fell Sweep (written by Ilona Andrews) here:
http://innkeeper.ilona-andrews.com/2016/03/11/ofs-chapter-4-part-3/
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Curran asked.
“No. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“One of the rooms in the castle had a creature in it,” Curran said.
“What kind of creature?”
“A large cat.” Curran said. “It glowed.”
“What happened to the large glowing cat?” Why did I have a feeling I wouldn’t like the answer?
“I killed it,” Curran said.
“Aha.” First, baby Ctulthu, then a glowing cat. Maybe Roland’s head would explode.
“It was a saber-toothed tiger,” Julie said. “It glowed with silver.”
Silver stood for divine magic. There was no telling what that saber-toothed tiger was or where my dad had gotten him.
“Snitch,” Derek said.
She waved him off. “He killed it and then he ate it.”
I looked at Curran. “You killed an animal god and then you ate him?”
“Maybe,” Curran said.
“What do you mean maybe?”
“I doubt it was a god.”
“It glowed with silver,” Julie said. “It was definitely worshipped.”
Oh boy.
Curran swerved to avoid a speed bump formed by the tree roots raising
the asphalt. “I could worship a lamp. That doesn’t make it a god.”
“Why did you eat it?” I asked in a small voice.
“It felt right at the time.”
“He devoured it,” Julie said. “Completely. With bones.”
If it was some sort of divine animal and he ate it, there was no
telling what the flesh or the magic would do to him. There would be
consequences. There were always consequences.
“Do you feel any side effects?”
“Not any I want to talk about with them in the car.”
Oh boy.
"Grave Visions
by Kalayna Price is the much-anticipated fourth installment in the
kick-ass urban fantasy series about Alex Craft, a grave witch who can
communicate with the dead.
If you want to hear voices
from the dead in Nekros City, you call Alex Craft. She's a Grave Witch
with reasonable rates and extraordinary powers, who specializes in
revealing the secrets of the dead. But now she's the one fighting to
keep her own secret. She's not human—and her newly discovered heritage
is causing havoc for her both in the human realm and in Faerie. But her
status as an unaffiliated fae also makes her an ideal candidate to
investigate a new street drug that has surfaced in several of the spaces
between the human and fae worlds.
This glamour-infused drug
causes hallucinations that turn real—at least for a while and often with
deadly consequences. Searching for the source of this drug—and its
purpose—lands Alex front and center in the conflict brewing in Faerie
and she must find answers before she's dragged so deep she loses her
freedom."
Excerpt
The first time I raised a shade for profit, my client fainted.
Since then, I’ve tried to better prepare clients for their encounter
with the dead.
It doesn’t always work.
“You son of a bitch,” Maryanne Johnson yelled as she slammed her
palm against the edge of my circle. “I knew you were sleeping with her.”
The shade of her late husband didn’t respond. He sat
motionless above his grave, his face empty and his gaze distant. That
seemed only to irritate the woman more, and she slammed her hand against
my circle again.
“Ms. Johnson, calm down. He can’t understand your anger. He’s dead.”
If she heard me, she gave no indication, and I shuddered as
she hit the circle again, the impact vibrating through my magic. The
circle wouldn’t hold much longer, and if it failed, I’d be standing in
the middle of a graveyard with my shields wide-open. Not a good thing.
“If you don’t take a step back, I’m going to have to end the
ritual,” I said, moving around the grave so that I partially obscured
her view of the shade.
She didn’t listen.
“This is between him and me.” She rummaged through her purse,
muttering curses under her breath. When she looked up again, her smile
was dark. She lifted a small revolver, leveling it at the shade. “How
long were you with that hussy?”
And that’s my cue to end the ritual.
I didn’t repeat the question to the shade, because he would
have answered. He would have had no choice. Shades were just memories
with no will or consciousness. Matthew Johnson may have kept his
mistress a secret during life, but he couldn’t hide the truth in death.
And I had the feeling, regardless what his answer might be, it could
only make this situation worse.
I didn’t need that.
“Rest now,” I whispered under my breath as I reached out with the
part of me that sensed the dead and reversed the flow of magic that gave
the shade form. The words weren’t strictly necessary, but I’d used them
for so many years, they were now part of my ritual, producing a near
Pavlovian response with my magic. The shade dissolved, the life heat I’d
imbued in it rushing down the well-worn path of my psyche.
“No. No. Bring him back.” The woman railed against the edge of my
circle. “He died too easy the first time.” Without her target of choice
visible, she swung the gun in my direction. “I paid for this ritual. Now
bring him back.”
I was seeing the land of the dead overlaying reality, but
even if the revolver looked rusted and ruined in my sight, I had no
doubt it was in fine working order in mortal reality. Ms. Johnson
herself might have had enough innate magical ability that my circle
stopped her from crossing into my ritual space, but unless her gun was
loaded with charmed ammo—doubtful—my circle would do nothing to stop a
bullet. Which meant I had to defuse this situation. Fast.
“Ms. Johnson I think—”
She cocked the gun.
Right. One shade coming right up.
I plunged my magic into the unseen corpse and pulled
Johnson’s shade free again. He emerged looking exactly the same as the
moment he’d died, right down to the bit of tomato soup in his beard.
As soon as the shade appeared, the woman’s rage refocused on
her deceased husband. The bullet she fired passed through the shade with
no effect, but that didn’t diminish her fury. She fired off two more
shots and I crept to the edge of my circle, trying not to attract
attention as I dialed the police.
I seriously needed to start screening my clients better.
****
“Alex, tell me you didn’t sleep here last night?”
I jerked upright at the question and my chair rolled away
from my desk. The coins I’d been analyzing before I’d nodded off
scattered; several rolling over the side of the desk to fall with loud
plinks onto the floor. I frowned at the sound and blinked bleary eyes as
I tried to focus on the speaker.
Rianna, my once-lost-now-found best friend and business
partner, stood in the doorway of my office, her arms crossed over her
chest as her green gaze swept over first me and then the mess that
comprised my desk. At her side, the barghest who acted as her constant
shadow huffed through his large jowls and shook his shaggy head.
“Morning,” I said around a yawn. My neck and back ached—no doubt
from sleeping in a chair—and I stretched, trying to work out the kinks.
“What time is it?”
“A little after eight. You have a . . .” She pointed to her temple and I placed a hand to the side of my face.
One of the coins clung to my skin. I peeled it off, feeling
the slightest tingle of a spell in the metal. Great, one magic coin in
the whole lot and I’d slept on it. Of course, maybe it would do me some
good. The spell felt like a fortune charm and goodness knew I could use a
little luck.
A glance over my desk turned up a blank form. I taped the
coin in the provided box and jotted down my initial analysis. I’d do a
more in-depth check on the spell later.
After setting down my pen, I looked up to discover Rianna
still standing in my doorway, her expression somewhere between concern
and disapproval.
“What? I had a lot to do.” I waved a hand to the mess of coins and
forms. She cocked one dark eyebrow, clearly unconvinced. With a sigh, I
slipped out of my chair and focused on gathering the escaped coins. Even
through the solid wood of the desk, I could feel the weight of her
stare.
“Oh, yes,” she said, drawing out the words for emphasis. “That
looks like an important case. One so pressing, it warranted working
through the night.”
I didn’t answer. Rianna and I both had our private
investigator licenses, and as grave witches, our specialty was finding
answers for our clients by questioning the dead. Analyzing charmed coins
didn’t exactly fall within the typical Tongues for the Dead case
description, but peering into the land of the dead to raise shades did
nasty things to the eyes. So, I’d been searching out cases that wouldn’t
make me blind before my thirtieth birthday. It didn’t pay nearly as
well as raising shades, but it covered some bills without burning out my
vision.
“My last client got arrested before paying for her ritual,” I said,
as if recouping the income justified working overtime on a simple
spell-identification case we both knew wasn’t pressing.
We also both knew exactly why I hadn’t gone home last night. He had a name.
Falin Andrews.
The Winter Queen’s knight was currently crashing in my one
room loft. Considering we were occasionally lovers, that might have been
okay, except that it was the Faerie queen’s royal decree placing him
there and saying I suspected her motives was more than an
understatement. He suspected them too—which was why he himself had told
me never to trust him while he was under her rule. Oh yeah, and he’d
told me that while holding me at dagger-point. Just after saying he
loved me.
Our relationship was complicated, to say the least. In the
two weeks he’d been staying at my place we’d barely spoken, by mutual
consent. And besides, I was sort of seeing someone else. Can we say
awkward? Yeah.
The office was a better option.
When I remained quiet, Rianna joined me on the floor.
Together we gathered the coins, the only sound the clicking of my dog’s
nails on the wood as he moseyed over to see what we were doing—and if we
had food.
Rianna shot a glance at the small Chinese crested and frowned
again. “PC’s with you, so I take it you never planned to go home last
night? I thought you arranged to stay in Caleb’s guest room until you
could figure out what to do about Falin.”
“I did.” And it wasn’t so much that I’d worked it out as that
Caleb, my landlord, had insisted. The problem was . . . “The guest room
isn’t soundproof and I don’t think Caleb and Holly ever sleep.”
“So they’ve officially hooked up?”
“Who knows if it’s official, but they go at it like bunnies.”
Rianna gave me a sympathetic glance as she passed me the last of the coins. “I’d invite you to my place, but . . .”
But she lived in an enchanted castle in Faerie. Well, actually my
enchanted castle, but I’d never been inside it. I’d inherited the
castle in a rather grisly way and the whole thing creeped me out.
Besides, I’d have to pass through the winter court to reach limbo, where
the castle currently resided, and with the Winter Queen determined to
add me to her court, it wasn’t worth the risk of her finding a reason to
detain me. So yeah, not currently a viable option for a place to crash.
I shrugged. “I’ll figure out something.” Climbing to my feet,
I dumped the coins into a magic-dampening bag—my client thought they
were cursed, and though I’d found no evidence of any malicious spells,
better safe than sorry—before straightening. Rianna rose slower,
levering herself up with the edge of my desk. She teetered when she
reached her full height. I looked at her then, really looked at her.
When I’d first rescued Rianna, she was a wasting shadow of
her former self, but in the last few months, she’d reclaimed a soft glow
of health. The glow was missing today, her cheeks pale and dark smudges
ringed her eyes.
“Are you feeling okay? I’m the one who passed out at her desk, but
you look worse than I feel.” Though I was definitely feeling the weeks
of gradual sleep deprivation.
Rianna gave me a feeble smile before shrugging. “I think maybe I caught something.”
“I didn’t know changelings could catch a cold.”
Another shrug. “Apparently. It must be going around. Ms. B.
won’t be in today. She said something about the garden gnome being
unwell.”
If I wasn’t frowning before, I definitely was now. When I’d
inherited the castle, I’d also sort of acquired the people—well, two fae
and one changeling—living in the castle. Like I said, creepy. The
garden gnome I’d never met, but Ms. B was a brownie who’d tended the
castle for longer than anyone seemed to remember. She’d taken a liking
to me and recently decided to claim the roll of receptionist at Tongues
for the Dead—I hadn’t had a say in the matter. She was gruff on the
phone and some of our clients balked at her diminutive size and inhuman
appearance, but I’d gotten used to having her around the office. I’d
never heard of a fae getting sick, but honestly, despite the fact the
fae had come out of the mushroom ring seventy years earlier, or the fact
I’d recently discovered I was more fae than human, I didn’t know all
that much about the day-to-day life of fae.
“Well, I hope he recovers quickly. And you too,” I said, my frown
deepening. Rianna was all but leaning on the barghest. The large doglike
fae stared at her, concern clear in his red-rimmed eyes. “Do you have
any rituals scheduled today?”
She shook her head, swaying slightly with the movement.
“Good. Maybe you should keep it that way.”
She gave me a half nod, as if completing the movement would have taken too much energy. “I think I’ll go sit down.”
“Do you need a healer? Or a doctor?”
“No, I just . . .” She trailed off as she turned, swaying a moment
before taking a breath and putting one foot very purposefully in front
of the other. “This’ll pass in a minute. It’s happened a couple of times
in the last week. Let me rest a moment.”
I walked around my desk and helped her into one of the client
chairs. She collapsed gratefully, but I didn’t get a chance to question
her because my cell phone buzzed on my desk and I had to rush back
around to grab it.
The displayed number wasn’t one of my saved contacts, but I
recognized the Central Precinct extension, so I guessed the caller. It
had been a while since I’d heard from my favorite homicide detective,
and our last few encounters hadn’t gone all that well, so I was relieved
he was finally calling.
“Hey, John,” I said, tucking the phone between my shoulder and ear and heading back to Rianna.
“Craft?” a gruff male voice asked from the other side of the phone.
It wasn’t John.
I stopped in my tracks and briefly considered playing it off
as a wrong number. If this was a client, professionalism was way past
gone. But there was something familiar about the voice, I just couldn’t
put a name to it. After an uncomfortably long pause, I confirmed he’d
reached the right number.
“This is Detective Jenson. I need you at the morgue in an hour.”
He disconnected as soon as the last word escaped his mouth,
leaving me no time to accept or deny his request. I pulled the phone
away from my ear and stared at it like it might morph into something
venomous. Because of my—largely unexplained—involvement in several major
cases, John and I had suffered a falling out. But his partner Jenson?
We’d never been close. And since my fae heritage had manifested, he’d
been downright hateful toward me. Well, most of the time at least. It
had been made clear to me that the police department wouldn’t be hiring
me for a case anytime soon, so why did Jenson want me at the morgue?
“Alex?” Rianna made my name a question, concern mixing with curiosity in her voice.
I shook my head as I redialed the number Jenson had called
from. The line rang four times before going to voicemail. Frowning, I
ended the call without leaving a message.
“Well,” I said, shoving the phone in my back pocket. “I either have a job . . . or I’m about to walk into a trap.”
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UK Edition:
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