Blood Craft: The Shadow Sorceress Book Two (5 page)

“What happened after I left with Graham?” I asked, finally breaking the comfortable silence between us.

He sighed, and the happy-go-lucky glow of youth I’d seen in his eyes vanished, replaced with a world weariness reserved only for those who had seen the very worst of what humanity had to offer.

“The scene is a mess; they, removed the bodies of the dead, three other men ended up in the hospital. None as serious as Graham, luckily.” He swallowed hard and hid his gaze from mine.

I didn’t bother reprimanding him. What was the point? I already knew the guilt he carried over the situation. Laying even more of it on him would just be cruel. And that wasn’t something I wanted to be; he’d made a mistake, a costly one, but as long as Graham pulled through, his mistake could always be fixed.

“More of the smoke escaped?” I asked, sipping at my coffee carefully, and Dex nodded.

It seemed like such an inadequate description for it, but I didn’t know what else I was supposed to call it. It wasn’t demonic, I was convinced of that. But it was something along that line, and the faster I could figure it out, the better for everyone involved.

The voice in the back of my head had gone quiet, but it chose that moment to suddenly throw up a name.

Lily.

After everything she’d already done, it made sense that she could be behind the bodies in the River Gardens. Had she summoned something to this world to do her dirty work for her? She’d already proven she was into using lesser creatures as her minions.

“You just thought of something. What was it?”

I jerked, the liquid in the cup sloshing against the sides. Getting lost in my own thoughts while sitting next to an already-suspicious cop was not a smart move. If Graham believed him to be clever, then I needed to watch myself around him. Letting my guard down and getting caught with my magic hanging out for the world to see … well, it was a one-way ticket to the executioner’s block and I didn’t fancy dying just yet.

“Just contemplating what it could be,” I said. Staying as honest as possible was the only way I could throw him off. The second he thought I was lying, well, it would be the moment he decided to start digging a little deeper into my background. “It’s not demonic, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yeah, well, you’re pretty new at the Elite,” he said with a grin, “so I don’t suppose you’re going to know everything.”

I smiled back at him, but I could feel the tension curling in my stomach. He’d already checked me out.

“New, but I did the same training as everyone else.”

“I know that, but there’s no substituting experience.” There was something in the way he said the word “experience” that had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

Was I being paranoid? He couldn’t possibly know anything about me, smart cookie or not. I’d given him no reason, as far as I was aware, to make him think I was anything more than I appeared to be.

Unless he’d seen what I’d done to the forensic guy….

I studied him a little closer as I finished my drink and pushed to my feet.

“Thanks for the coffee, and the ride out of the media circus,” I said, zipping my leather jacket up the front of myself.

“You’re leaving? I can give you a ride home,” he said, eyeing his practically untouched coffee with disgust.

“No, the walk will do me good, and I need a chance to clear my head,” I said, dropping a ten-dollar note on the table.

“You sure?”

I smiled and nodded again. “Yeah, plus, I think your sister needs a ride more than I do,” I said, gesturing to Sara who seemed to be politely attempting to fend off two overly-friendly customers.

Dex glanced back at her and his expression instantly changed.

“I’ll drop by the Elite office tomorrow, so,” he said, but his voice said he was preoccupied as he pushed onto his feet and started across the room.

I watched him walk away, the set of his shoulders suggesting he was about to hulk out on the two idiots pushing their luck. Sara spotted him and I watched her expression change from one of polite irritation to outright panic as she shook her head.

Smiling I headed for the door, and pushed out into the night air.

“We weren’t doing anything wrong, dude, butt out….” The voice of one of the jerks carried across the coffee shop and out through the swinging door.

Laughter bubbled up the back of my throat as the door closed behind me and blotted out whatever Dex said to them. He might have been an issue for me, his curiosity and investigative abilities a little too sharp for my predicament, but he was a good guy and Sara was lucky to have an older brother that doted on her the way he seemed to. At least someone had a sibling that genuinely cared.

T
he air was warm
. August was apparently going to live up to its usual promise in King City. There would be no sleeping beneath the duvet, that was, even if I could get to sleep after everything that had happened.

Cutting down a side street off the main thoroughfare, I picked my pace up. All I wanted was to get home and shower; I hadn’t really thought of anything else beyond scrubbing the blood out from underneath my nails and putting on fresh clothes. When the morning had started, spending the day in blood-soaked clothes hadn’t exactly been on my radar.

A glass bottle skittered across the tarmac and my pace faltered as I glanced behind me. I couldn’t see anything; the streetlights were dull, causing shadows to stretch out across the seemingly empty road.

But as I searched the area, what I couldn’t see with my eyes, I could instead feel. Magic made the air heavier and I could feel it pressing on my skin like an oppressive hand.

The urge to run coursed in my veins, my human instincts telling me that whatever was following me in the dark wasn’t something I wanted to mess with. But there was another part of me, a darker side, that wanted to stay and play. And by play, I mean it wanted to rip whatever was coming for me limb from limb.

I’d never considered myself to be a particularly violent person—the crime scenes were always way too gruesome for my taste—so where the sudden urge to spill blood had come from, frankly, was scaring the shit out of me.

Something growled in the dark and I balled my hands into fists. My hesitation had obviously cost me whatever advantage I might have had—the sound was far too close and there was no way I would outrun whatever was slowly advancing on me through the shadows.

“I don’t want to fight you,” I said, calling out into the darkness naïvely, hoping it would be enough to make whatever creature was stalking me to give up and walk away.

Something moved in the darkness, sliding between the shadows, its yellow eyes glowing in the dim light of the streetlights as it never took its gaze from me.

He stepped out of the shadows and I felt the tension coursing through my body ratchet up several notches. The bouncer from the club watched me with his yellow eyes, and I knew they hadn’t been that colour in the doorway of the dive bar. It wasn’t the type of thing to go unnoticed.

“Alone at last,” he said, his voice a low growl that seemed to reverberate up through his massive frame.

“Unless you want to spend the night in a cell, I’d turn tail and run … wolf,” I said, my own voice carrying across the space between us.

“I don’t take too kindly to little girls thinking they’re bigger and badder than I am.” He took a threatening step forward. Or, at least, I was pretty sure he was trying to threaten me.

Shapeshifters were normally the types to avoid confrontation. They could definitely fight and their speed and agility made them the perfect candidates to play the role of bodyguards and general muscle, but unlike the vampires, they preferred to keep out of the lime light, usually only coming out into the open if they’d gone rogue.

I laughed, the sound bouncing around the enclosed space of the alley, causing him to falter.

“I’m glad I amuse you—will you laugh as I rip your guts out of your soft underbelly?” He didn’t wait for an answer; obviously my laughter had escalated the situation and he charged across the small space between us, giving me only a split second to react.

I wasn’t going to out-manoeuvre him, especially not when it came to speed and strength, and if he wrapped his hands around me, well, I knew from sparring training at the Elite academy that he would have enough power to rip my head clean off.

Ducking to the side, I threw my body forward into a roll, coming back up with my athame already in my hand. He growled, already turning as he lunged for me once more. His clawed hand tore across the front of my chest as I hopped back and brought my blade up through his arm.

Pain bloomed across the front of my body and I swallowed it back. Reacting to the pain would only drive him on; it was the usual predator-prey drive, and there was no way in Hell that I was going to be his prey tonight.

Lifting his head, I watched as he scented the air and then grinned, his human teeth replaced with a mouthful of wickedly sharp wolf ones. “I smell your blood,” he said, his yellow eyes glinting with excitement.

“And I can see yours,” I said, gesturing to the thick blood dripping down my dagger onto the ground.

“You smell sweet. When I eat your heart, will your magic become mine?”

I didn’t answer him; there was no point, all he was trying to do was throw me off my game. Instead, I focussed in on him, watching his body for the slightest twitch or tremor that would tell me where he was going to move to next. He might have been bigger, stronger, and faster, but I was trained and he wasn’t.

He moved, his body shifting into a blur as he barrelled towards me. I’d seen it in the flex of his muscles and neatly sidestepped him, bringing my dagger up and drawing it down his side.

The rumbling roar of his pain tore at my eardrums; he might not have felt the blade entering his arm, but the gash I’d just opened up down the side of his body with my silver athame was something he couldn’t ignore.

He dropped to the ground and roared again, slamming his fists into the road as he twisted his head up to look at me.

“I’ll kill you for that,” he said, his voice wet, and I couldn’t help but wonder just how deep I’d allowed my blade to go.

My intention had been to wound, to put him down, not kill him. Glancing down at my hand, I realised the blade was coated in blood, all the way up over the hilt, making my grip on it slippery. The blood was still warm, but it was rapidly starting to cool in the night air.

“Shit,” I said, letting the blade slip from my fingers and clatter noisily to the ground.

The part of me I’d felt earlier, the part that wanted to rip the wolf limb from limb, was actually excited by the feel of his blood on my hands and my stomach rolled at the realisation.

What the hell was wrong with me?

Scrubbing my hand down my jeans, I quickly pulled my cell phone from my pocket when the sound of the wolf’s laughter made me pause.

“If you’re calling the paramedics, don’t bother. I’ll be healed by the time they get here.”

“The blade was silver,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously as my finger hovered over the call button.

He shrugged, the movement causing his face to scrunch up in pain. “So? You didn’t leave any silver in the wound and I’m not exactly a runt. Something like this isn’t going to keep me down for long, and when it passes, I’ll be only too happy to show you what true pain is.”

As though to emphasise his point, he stretched; his joints popped as his entire body rolled and shifted. From where I stood, it looked like his back was made of water and there was a wave running straight down the centre of it.

The sound of bones snapping and realigning filled the air, and his clothes tore as his body shifted.

“Crap,” I said, more to the air than anyone nearby, and the wolf grinned at me as his face became elongated.

“Run, little girl, the chase will make you taste all the sweeter.” The way he spoke out through his half-human, half-wolf face was beyond creepy and this time I took him at his word.

Scooping up my knife, I darted down the alley. I wasn’t far from home and he wasn’t fully shifted. All I needed to do was outrun him. How hard could it be? Once in wolf form, he’d only have two extra legs….

“Crap,” I said again, and picked up my pace.

A
ir burned in my lungs
. I really needed to train harder, do more cardio for these sorts of situations. My legs were beginning to ache and my heart hammered in my chest, the noise of it filling my ears, making it impossible to hear anything else.

I was a member of the Elite; the last thing I was supposed to do was run away from a fight, but I wasn’t an idiot either. This wasn’t a fight that would end well. One mistake on my behalf and he would kill me. One mistake on his behalf and I would be left with no choice but to kill him.

Darting out through the mouth of the alley, I dashed through the late night traffic; the sound of screeching tyres and panicked screams told me the wolf was closing in on me. Despite knowing they existed, people weren’t really used to seeing shifters roaming the streets of King City, especially when the shifter was three times the normal size of a wolf and had the single-minded determination of a psychopath.

My cellphone buzzed in my pocket and I whipped it out. Nic’s name pulsed on the screen and I answered without breaking my stride.

“Now … is really not a good time…” I said, my voice high and breathy as I crossed into the next street and rounded the corner onto my own road.

“You’re running?” Nic said; the smile in his voice at some other time might have been cute, but not when I was running for my life.

“Shifter, wolf, and he is pissed….”

“Rogue? Wait, who’s chasing who?” The sudden concern for my wellbeing was overlooked as something large and hairy crashed into my back.

The phone clattered to the ground, breaking apart into pieces as I scrambled to climb to my feet once more. Gruff, as I’d decided to call him in my head, had hopped out past me, his momentum carrying him forward but that didn’t last.

From my knees, I jerked my head up and watched him eyeing me, the intelligence in his wolf eyes sending a shiver down my spine. There was a glint in them that no true animal could recreate.

Sliding my hand down to my weapons holster, my hand closed around my gun. The bullets were lead with silver casings; the real silver bullets only came out when an execution order was handed down, and they weren’t the ones the Elite usually used for rogue shifters. A rogue shifter was notoriously hard to take down: they almost never felt pain and only a sawn off shot gun at close range, loaded with silver buckshot cartridges, were known to stop them. Once fired, the shot would break apart and spread through the shifter’s body, systematically shutting down their vital organs. A death at the end of a bullet like that, I could only imagine, was excruciating.

Of course, I’d never hunted a rogue shifter before, and I’d certainly never had to put one down. The only hands-on experience I even had with them had all been done in the safe confines of the Academy.

What I was dealing with now, well—although he was a shifter, he definitely wasn’t rogue. He knew exactly what he was doing.

He launched himself towards me and I ripped my gun from its holster, aiming it for the broad width of his body.

I pulled the trigger twice, the crack of the gunshot ripping the air. The shifter’s howling scream as both bullets landed in their target was enough to set the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. He hit the ground and still he crawled towards me, pain now clouding his yellow eyes.

“If you move another inch, I’m going to empty my shotgun into your ass!” Nic’s voice cut over the panting sound the wolf was making.

I jerked my head up in surprise and watched him approach slowly. He was as good as his word—the shotgun he held in his arms was levelled directly at the shifter and if he fired, he would take off its entire hind quarters.

The shifter’s fur rolled and spilled outwards from its body, replaced with a sudden rush of human skin. He groaned, his bones sliding beneath his skin as though there was nothing there to connect them, and I felt my stomach roll as I watched his joints shift and pop back into place.

I held my gun steady in a two-handed grip, keeping it trained on the shifter as his eyes rolled in his head.

“Where did you come out of?” I said to Nic, keeping my gaze trained on the creature in front of me. He’d already proven that he could overcome injury faster than I’d ever thought possible for a shifter, and I wasn’t about to make that mistake twice.

“I was at your apartment when I called, I thought you’d be back…” he said, cautiously moving around the naked guy on the ground. “When I heard you running—well, I put two and two together, and I could hear the shouting from outside your door.”

I chanced a look in his direction and he was smiling, the dimple in his cheek visible even under the poor streetlights.

I’d gotten so close to actually making it home when the shifter had caught up to me. I wasn’t as slow as I’d first imagined, but I still hadn’t been fast enough to outrun him. Obviously, I definitely needed to hit the gym harder.

The grip I had on the gun was beginning to make my arm ache and I lowered it slowly.

“Can I borrow your cell? I really need to call this in,” I said to Nic.

“Already done. I told you, I could hear it from up the street. I called the Elite as soon as I knew what was going on; they’re on their way down here with a crew, but they’ve missed all the fun.”

“Yeah, great fun,” I said, wincing as the adrenaline started to leave my body, every ache and bruise finally beginning to make itself known to me. As I moved, my shredded leather jacket rubbed against the scratch marks down the front of my chest and I bit down on the string of curses that formed in my mouth.

Cleaning and bandaging it was going to burn like a son of a bitch! Holstering my gun, I asked, “You got this?” I gestured to the moaning guy still lying on the ground and Nic simply nodded, keeping his shotgun trained on its target.

Approaching the fallen man, I gripped his shoulder and flipped him over onto his back. The two neat bullet holes in his shoulder and stomach smouldered as blood oozed from the wound. Someone was going to have to fish the bullets out of him, and there was no way in hell I was volunteering for that job.

“Not so hot at healing now,” I said, the sound of sirens splitting the air.

“I’ll make you pay for this,” he said through gritted teeth, and I shook my head.

There was no way he was going to make any one pay now. This was a definite death sentence; the courts would instantly look at him as a liability, a loose cannon, and although I was certain he wasn’t rogue, there wasn’t a judge in the country who would take that risk.

The street lit up with the blue lights of the Elite emergency response truck and I took a step back from the guy on the ground. He was their problem now; tomorrow would be soon enough to sort the paperwork out.

Steven Myrtle hopped out of the truck, the flash of the blue light illuminating him in his full riot gear uniform. I recognised him from around the office and I knew he was close friends with Anthony “The Machine”.

“Where is it, Morgan?” he asked, taking a cursory glance at the man lying at my feet.

“You’re looking at him,” I said, gesturing to Gruff who was still gritting back his huffing breaths of pain.

“This is the rogue?” Steven asked, his face a mask of confusion as he approached Gruff.

“Yeah, he attacked me over on Crescent. I got as far as here before I was forced to draw my weapon and shoot him.” I kept my voice as matter-of-fact as I could. There was not a chance in Hell that I was going to let him know that I’d gotten dragged into a hand to hand fight, that I’d wounded him and then run. I wasn’t exactly the most popular among the men of the Elite; if they heard I ran from a fight they wouldn’t congratulate me for doing the smart thing, I’d be branded a coward. And in the Elite, a coward was the last thing you wanted to be.

The look Steven gave me was a sceptical one and I sighed. He crouched down next to Gruff, staring down at the wound pattern.

“I wouldn’t….” I started to speak but it was already too late.

Gruff lunged upwards, wrapping a half-human half-clawed hand around Steven’s neck and dragging him down towards his waiting mouth. Steven let out a half strangled scream as Gruff bit down on him.

I pulled my gun once more and fired off another round, but Gruff dragged Steven down over him, using his body as a shield.

“I don’t have a clear shot, Amber,” Nic shouted, moving around the screaming and flailing body of officer Steven.

Adrenaline coursed in my veins once more as several more Elite officers arrived on the scene. I darted forward, keeping my gun low as I struggled to find a weakness in Gruff’s cover.

Just as I reached the two struggling men, Steven surged upwards, his body crashing into mine and knocking me to the ground beneath his weight. The sound of gunfire filled the air as Steven jerked and gurgled on top of me, blood pouring from the wound in his neck. I could feel a wet heat spreading out across the front of my clothes.

Rolling him to one side, I propped myself up and surveyed the scene. Gruff lay face down at the end of the street, utterly still, and I knew without having to ask that he was already dead. Nic stood a few feet away, one side of his face a bloody mess and the short barrel of his shotgun bent up at the snout.

Turning back to Steven, I pressed my hand to his neck, but his eyes were already glassy and the twitching movements of his body were the involuntary movements of the dead.

“Shit!” I swore, balling my hands into fists as I dropped back onto the road.

“Morgan, is he…” one of the officers called out to me, but he didn’t need to finish his sentence. The look on my face was obviously all the answer they needed.

It seemed one shit-storm in a day just wasn’t enough, and in my line of work … well, it was only a matter of time before people started dying.