by N. P. Martin
Blood Sacrifice (The August Creed Series Book 1)
A BLACKHAM CITY URBAN FANTASY NOVEL
N. P. Martin
Martin Publications
Contents
Rights
The August Creed Series
1. Spell Blasted
2. Badass
3. Specter
4. Forgotten
5. A Friendly Call
6. A Welcome Distraction
7. Pyromancer
8. A Visitor
9. Bad News
10. Do Or Die
11. The Mccreedy Family Massacre
12. Quick Drink
13. Darkness Calling
14. Playing With Fire
15. The Library Of Dark Magick
16. Black Magick
17. The Morgue
18. John Doe
19. The Summoning
20. Baal
21. Fight
22. Sanaka's Sanctum
23. Bitchcraft
24. Apparition
25. Mr. Black
26. Synchronized Swimming
27. Partners
28. Gearing Up
29. The Leap
30. The Devil’s Playground
31. Pit Bulls On Steroids
32. A Soul With Itchy Feet
33. Frank And John
34. Soul Ripper
35. Ghoul Status
36. Return Of The Demon
37. Mindfuck
38. The Roundhouse
39. Green Fire
40. Unleash The Magick
41. Revelations
42. Growing Up
43. Fatherly Love
44. Scorpion
45. Bad Coffee Blues
46. Standing Tall
47. Abandon All Hope
48. Dealing With The Devil
49. Final Goodbye
50. The Lair Of Mr. Black
51. Grasping Hands
52. Dark Magick Rising
53. Suffering Defeat
54. Sometimes They Come Back
55. Consumed
56. Light Against Dark
57. Resurrection
58. Aftermath
59. Happy Hour
60. No Rest For The Wicked
Thanks For Reading
Books By N. P. Martin
About The Author
Copyright © 2017 by N.P. Martin
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Neal Martin
Visit my website at www.npmartin.com
Cover: Pavel Tomashevskii
The August Creed Series
BLOOD SACRIFICE
CRIMSON CROW
*MORE TO COME*
Be sure to sign up for my mailing list to get the prequel novella to this series, Crimson Crow, completely free. This book is unreleased and available only to subscribers. And as an added bonus, you will also receive the first two books in my other urban fantasy series, Watchers:
http://www.npmartin.com/august-creed-list/
1
Spell Blasted
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. Sliding down the wall to the stinking floor like I'd just taken a hard right hook to the jaw, I felt the invasive magick of whatever spell had been unleashed fusing within me, creating an effect that I couldn't stop. That I couldn't counter with my own magick because the spell had been let loose before I got a chance to deploy any kind of defensive shield to stop it. The spell blew through everything I had, including the talisman around my neck, the protective tattoos on my body and the Druidic runes etched into my trench coat. I might as well have been a goddamn Sleepwalker with no protection at all.
Still, no sense lamenting things now. The effects of the spell had taken hold, and I knew there was no choice but to suffer the consequences. Goddamn, I thought, as I lay half conscious. Too bloody eager to…
To do what? What was I even doing there in the first place?
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.
So whatever spell had been cast on me, I knew it was sure to have a deeply undesirable effect, though I didn't know what that effect was as yet, beyond causing me physical pain when the force of it slammed me against the wall. That and the peculiar feeling I’d been experiencing since the magick hit me, a feeling that was so vague at that point it was hard to explain. It was like a type of emptiness inside of me, almost as if my inner light had dimmed. Like I said, it was hard to explain, but it was still a feeling that caused me worry in the back of my mind and something told me that the cause of the feeling would present itself soon enough.
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. I didn't recognize the room at all. Worse, I didn't even know why I was in there in the first place.
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 in my hand. Then I stood looking around all wide-eyed like someone who had just been caught up in a bomb blast.
What the hell am I doing here?
There were disturbing holes in my memory. I vaguely recalled confronting someone after having tracked them to where I am now. 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. Worse, I had no clue why I was even 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 smell of rats piss and pigeon shit, the 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 foot 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 obviously 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 symbols 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 this. 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 girl'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. 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 Mage or magickslinger 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!”
2
Badass
I JUMPED AT the sound of the deep but feminine voice coming from behind me, inhaling sharply before freezing on the spot. The reason I froze wasn't so much out of fear or fright as it was out of sudden recognition. The voice projected an effortless authority and contained a husky quality that would have been sexy if the woman’s blatant aggression wasn’t so overpowering.
I stood up slowly and turned around, assuming the person would recognize me, but a split second later, the concrete floor exploded out around my feet as a massive booming noise filled the whole room. Chips of concrete blew up and stung my face, making me feel more like a goddamn grenade had been thrown rather than a bullet fired. “Jesus!” I shouted as I jumped back in shock, my ears ringing from the gunshot. “What the fuck are you doing? It’s me, for Christ’s sake!”
“Drop that pistol or the next one goes in your chest.”
“What?” What was she playing at? Didn’t she know who I was? “Leona, it’s me. It’s Creed.”
Leona Lawson cut a dark, imposing figure as she stepped out of the shadows. She was tall and athletically lean, her black hair short and brushed over to one side of her forehead. I couldn’t see her eyes very well in the gloom, but I knew they would be like focused blue chips of ice set into that delectable porcelain skin of hers. She was dressed as she usually was, in tight fitting black leather trousers and a top that clung to the mounds of her perfectly sized breasts. A long, black leather coat that hung down almost level with the top of her heavy combat boots made her look streamlined and dominant, which I already knew her to be in every way.
The hugely intimidating gun she held looked almost too big for her hand, but she didn't struggle even slightly with the guns heft and looked entirely comfortable holding it. The gun was one of two custom Berettas with laser sights that she carried in leg holsters, each gun fully loaded with 9mm hollow-point rounds that would put an ugly hole in just about anything, including my chest if she so desired. “I said drop the pistol.”
Jesus, she’s serious.
Frowning, shaking my head, knowing there was something greatly amiss, I did as she ordered, slowly placing my old custom made Smith and Wesson on the floor. As I straightened up again, I looked down at the red laser light dancing over my chest, knowing full well she would shoot me dead if I made one wrong move, despite the fact that I remembered calling her to tell her to meet me there.
But she was treating me like a stranger. Like she didn’t know who I was, which was bullshit because she knew me better than almost anyone. We slept together, for Christ’s sake! She was, although she would never freely admit it, my girlfriend. And yet there she was pointing one of her cannons at me, ready to put a hole in my chest big enough to fit your fist through. There could only be one explanation for her lack of recognition. The damn spell. “Are you saying you don’t know me?”
Leona Lawson came forward, her boots thudding loudly on the floor, her leather coat swishing against her legs. “I’m saying I don’t know you from Adam, motherfucker. As far as I can see, you’re a lunatic who just killed that girl right there, and for that, I’m going to put a bullet in your head, so you don’t ever kill anyone else.”
My heart missed a beat when she pulled back the hammer on the Beretta. “Wait!” I said. “Jesus…how would I know your name is Leona Lawson and that you work for a secret government division that investigates magickal and occult goings on, huh? I called you, for Christ’s sake, told you to meet me here.” I thought of something. “Check the call records on your phone. You have me listed as Creed. Do it.”
Leona shook her head as she said, “There’s no one named Creed in my contacts and nobody called and told me to come here.”
“Then how did you know to come in the first place?”
Her stare turned a frown. “I…”
“You don’t remember, do you? That’s because your memory has been wiped, along with my name off your phone it seems. Does it not seem strange that you don’t know why you came here?”
She stepped closer, frighteningly imposing, her face an impassive mask as always. But underneath I sensed her confusion. “You think I don’t know you’re trying to trick me like the dirty hedge magician you are?”
“Wait, hedge magician? That’s a bit low, even for you, Le—”
She stepped forward and stuck the gun in my face, the barrel looming large and dangerous in my sight line. “Why’d you kill the girl? Some fucked up ritual is it? A sacrifice to one of your messed up gods?”
My hands were up as I leaned my head back slightly away from the huge gun. “Look, Leona, I called you, remember?”
“Stop using my name. How the hell do you even know my name?”
Oh Christ, this was worse than I thought. She didn’t seem to know me at all, even after more than three years of friendship, if you could call what we had a friendship. Leona didn’t do friends particularly, or relationships (not normal ones anyway) for that matter. If you asked her to describe our relationship she probably would have said, “Working.”
“Listen,” I told her, knowing I was wasting my breath, but stumbling ahead anyway. “My name is August Creed. We’re friends. We work together sometimes. We even, you know…”
“What?”
“Sleep together.”
A snort of derision burst through her thin lips. “First of all, I would never sleep with someone like you—”
“I take offense at that, but anyway.”
“And second of all, I have no idea who the fuck you are, except that you’re a killer and I’m taking you in. Although I’d prefer just to shoot you in the head right now, since that’s what you obviously deserve. My boss, however, will want to talk to you, see what kind of psycho you really are.”
