Blood and Treasure: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Half-Demon Warlock Book 3)

by J. A. Cipriano

  Scott stood, and my heart started to pump a little harder.

  Fuck this. I shot a blast of energy at the ropes, sure they would disintegrate. They didn’t though. They didn’t budge at all.

  “Don’t bother,” he said wearily. “Everything in this room was blessed by Renee Cypress herself. You’re powerless here.”

  Blessed by Renee Cypress? Was she a pastor now or something? That didn’t make any sense.

  My eyes grew wide, and I tried to make as much noise as I could while my brother stood over me. His golden energy twisted to form a dagger. I winced as I stared at it, sure it was headed straight for my heart.

  Terror tore through me as the golden dagger turned, panic lighting up every one of my nerve endings.

  It didn’t come for me though. It turned to Scott, piercing his finger. A drop of his blood fell, hitting me on the nose.

  I blinked, but nothing else happened.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. He squeezed his finger, another few drops splashing against my nose. “What the fuck?”

  “That’s what I was wondering?” I tried to ask, though I was unable to actually form the words because, you know, I didn’t have a mouth.

  He took his finger and ran the bloody thing across my cheek, leaving a streak of blood there.

  “What in the great design?” he muttered. “Roy?” he asked. “Roy? Is that you?” Tears pooled in his eyes. “My God. Is it really you?” He leaned in closer. “It is! Good Lord, it is!”

  He waved his hand, and my mouth reappeared. I gritted my teeth and shook my head, though it did feel nice to be whole again.

  “What the fuck, Scott?” I snapped. My mind was swimming in a lake of confusion.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, standing and running his hand through his hair. “I didn’t know. How could I know?”

  He looked back at the door.

  “I’ll get them. I’ll get the others. I’ll have Renee let you out of there, take off the blessing.”

  “Blessing?” I asked, breathing heavy. “What the hell are you talking about? Renee can’t bless anything? What the fuck happened? I’ve been gone for two weeks, and the whole world goes to hell.”

  “Two weeks?” Scott asked, his eyes softening as he blinked hard. “Is that what you think?” He walked back toward me, setting a hand on my shoulder. “Little Brother, you’ve been gone for seven years.”

  7

  Seven years.

  It couldn’t be right. The words stuck through my heart, reached right into my chest and pulled out the insides. It meant I had missed so much. It meant the world had pulled away from me. Seven years was a lifetime. It was an eternity. I couldn’t have been in that place for seven years. I’d have known. It would have driven me crazy. I was there for two weeks. Two weeks tops. I’d counted the hours. I’d counted the days.

  At least…I thought I had.

  Swallowing hard, I tensed again as the door opened, knowing Renee would be on the other side. What would I say to her? How on earth could I apologize for leaving her like I did? When I sacrificed myself to the tear in time and space my father had reserved for her, I thought it would be the end of things. I figured I’d go out like a hero and leave her with an image of me that all the men who followed would desperately come up short of reaching. Though, maybe they hadn’t, maybe she’d kept one and moved on with him. If so, I could deal with that, maybe.

  It was how it should have been. My plan didn’t have an encore built in. Sacrificial lambs stay sacrificed. That was the way of it. Still, here I was—back after having been gone for the better part of a decade.

  There were no words I could think of that could explain how sorry I was, how horrible I felt for abandoning her like this, even if it was for the right reasons.

  I’d have to think of something though, because the door was opening quickly.

  Unfortunately, Renee wasn’t on the other side of it. Instead, an old man with wispy white hair and a long face and gaunt, hollow cheeks stared at me. He was silent and unblinking as he balanced his weight on a cane in his left hand.

  “Who are you?” I asked, realizing I was still magically attached to this chair, helpless and, as such, vulnerable to whatever this geezer wanted to do to me. To say I was afraid wasn’t completely accurate. Judging by the look of him, he’d probably have trouble taking a nap, let alone a half demon, warlock who’d just received news so devastating, it would have turned Mother Teresa into a foul-mouthed sailor.

  “You don’t remember me, Roy?” he asked, his voice trembling with age. “I suppose that’s for the best. Our last interaction wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

  My eyes narrowed as I took to the task of taking him in more thoroughly. His eyes, silver and flecked with gold around the edges, sort of dusted a memory off inside of me. I had seen this man before. He was right, but in what capacity?

  Those hollow cheeks, that white hair. This man was old, and seven years didn’t make up the difference. I’d have had to have been gone a lot longer than that for him to be a mystery to me now. I’d have had to have been gone at least fifteen years or so to forget someone like him. But where was I then? What had I done fifte-

  “Abram,” I said, my teeth grinding together as a jolt of recognition mixed with anger, hate, and resentment. It was like I’d swallowed that mystical water all over again. My entire body wretched at the sight of the man, and I wanted nothing more than to knock the few remaining teeth out of his mouth.

  “You do remember,” he said, nodding politely. “I was afraid I hadn’t made much of an impression.”

  “The man who sentenced my mother to a lifetime of darkness and solitude, the man who saw fit to toss me out of the only home I’d ever known and forced the only family I’d ever had to disown me? Let’s just say I’ve thought about you more than once.”

  Looking at him again, I purposely let my eyes go red. He always thought of me as a monster. I might as well prove him right. I hated my mother’s coven. I had ever since they’d tossed me aside like I was a piece of trash in the wind. Abram, however, held a special place in the darkness of my heart. The most conservative of warlock sons-of-bitches, Abram sat at the head of the High Council. It was he who leveled sentences down on those who violated the old laws. It was he who decided who was deserving of punishment and who warranted mercy.

  Needless to say, my mother and I had fallen in the latter category in his eyes.

  I had always promised myself that should I ever lay eyes on that smug face of his, I’d rip it off with my bare hands.

  “I see some things never change,” he said condescendingly, taking note of my change in eye color.

  “That’s not true,” I answered. My body reacted to his closeness, the demon in me causing me to lurch forward as far as my binding would allow. “Come closer. I’ll show you just how much I’ve changed over the years.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said, shaking his head and leaning against the doorway. “I’m not here to be combative, son.”

  I wasn’t sure whether it was the fact that I had just left my father, or that I had apparently wasted an entire seven year segment of my life in his Hell dimension, but something about hearing Abram calling me ‘son’ made me angrier than I ever remembered being.

  If I could have, I’d have ended him right there.

  I was still bound though, still locked by my girlfriend’s ‘blessing,’ and Abram was an exceedingly powerful warlock. Old as jazz or not, he was a force to be reckoned with. So, instead of verbally destroying him, I went back to the subject at hand.

  “What are you doing here then?” I asked, taking a deep breath and trying to steady myself. “And where are my friends?”

  “Those are two different questions,” he replied in the same stalwart and compassionless tone which he'd used to deliver some of the worst news of my life. The same tone which had haunted my dreams and scarred the inside of my mind. “I’ll answer the easier one first. Your friends are safe. Your brother has
them in good hands as he has for the past seven years. Dealing with the truth of your girlfriend’s identity has not been without its difficulties. There have been more than a few people who have wished to see her dead over the years, your father among them. Your imp has been treated with a special regard. As you know, our coven has never had a place for supernatural creatures of descending stature.”

  “You don’t say,” I answered sarcastically. My mother’s coven had their noses so high in the air, the bastards could smell winter coming. They looked at other species as though they were inferior, as though they weren’t worth their time.

  “Your personal experience aside, I think you’ll come to find our group has gone in a much more progressive direction as of late.” He moved forward, his cane creaking as it slapped against the floor. “Ironically enough, your actions were an important factor in that decision.”

  “No disrespect, Abram,” I started, before letting my anger get the better of me. “You know what, no. Lots of disrespect. In fact, fuck you, Abram. Fuck you with a six-foot shower rod. I don’t give a damn what your coven has done in the past little bit. I don’t give a damn about anything you have to say. All I care about is my friends. I need to get to them. I need to tell them something very important, and to be perfectly honest with you, I’m pretty pissed at the idea that you’re here at all, much less the fact that I can’t get you to tell me why.”

  I leaned forward.

  “So I’m going to ask you one more time, and if you still dodge my question, I’m going to start getting angry.” I took a deep breath, hoping Abram wouldn’t realize I wasn’t able to get out of my current predicament. “What are you doing here?”

  Then, with a wry smile, which he had to know would get under my skin, Abram gave me the absolute worst answer he could have, the thing I never thought I’d here in a thousand lifetimes.

  “We’re doing the same thing we’ve been doing for nearly seven years now, Roy. We’re working with Renee and Gary.” He moved toward me again. “Working to save the world from you.”

  8

  As soon as the words left Abram’s decrepit old mouth, the shackles and ropes holding me to this chair unlocked, and crashed against the floor. The action took me by surprise at first. I hadn’t felt any energy at play here, much less the kind necessary to undo binds I wasn’t able to break through myself. Still, as I stretched my legs and moved my hands out in front of me, I couldn’t help but be thankful for my newfound freedom.

  “I see your girlfriend has seen fit to free you,” Abram said, clanking toward me with that cane, coughing as he neared. “Even if she didn’t feel the need to do it in person.”

  The old man had a point. If Renee had indeed removed her blessing from the chains and rope (an action I still didn’t really understand) then why hadn’t she come in here to do it herself? A less than optimal thought crossed my mind. Maybe she wasn’t keen on seeing me. Maybe she had moved on and things were different than they had been when I left this place. What had been two weeks for me were seven years for her. It was a lifetime, and maybe she’d used her lifetime to move away from me.

  Maybe she wasn’t though. Maybe the passage of time had been enough to cool the heat between us. I had been gone for a while, much longer than we had actually been together. Could I really expect her to wait for me?

  So much had changed outside of this room, and I had no idea about any of it. The fact that Abram was here at all, working with my friends and spouting nonsense about wanting to put a stop to me, was proof enough of that.

  “Where is she? I want to see her,” I said, allowing my eyes to remain red and sounding as ferocious as I could, given the fact that I had just woken up from a mystically induced slumber.

  “Then I suggest you make an appointment. The list of those who wish for an audience with Renee Cypress is long and prestigious,” Abram answered smugly.

  Without much cognitive thought on my part, my hands curled up into fists. His tone, not to mention the content of his words, was pissing me the hell off. The list? I wonder if any of the people on that precious list had ever kissed Renee. How many of them had she said ‘I love you’ to? How many of them had saved her life and how many had she done the same for?

  I wasn’t some stranger banging on her door and asking to be taken seriously. I was her boyfriend. I was the person she was closest to in this world. Or, at least, I had been. I could be anything to her at this point. I might be been nothing more than a memory.

  “I don’t give a damn about any of that, and I don’t give a damn about you,” I said, marching toward Abram. I braced myself, expecting him to power up and attempt to put me on my ass, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he just watched as I brushed past him, grunting as I purposefully bumped his shoulder.

  “What you’ll find out there might be cause for concern, Roy,” he said, not bothering to turn toward me.

  “I’ve been concerned for most of my life, Abram. I dealt with you people when I was a child. I’ve been to Hell and back since then. I’m sure whatever you’ve got planned for me, I can deal with.”

  “Where you came from wasn’t Hell, son,” he answered, still facing the far wall. “Not even close, and what awaits you outside that door isn’t of my making. Nor does it have anything to do with the Astra coven. The source of this is far more intimate.”

  I scoffed. I had heard enough of his idle threats. I knew this bastard. He was as bigoted and closed minded as they came. If he could have done anything to me, he would have already. I needed to find Gary and Renee. I needed to figure out what was going on, and what my friends had been through during the seven years since I’d last seen them. To do that, I was going to have to look past Abram’s paper thin warnings and go forward.

  So that’s exactly what I did.

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and walked through the doorway.

  Tensing my muscles instinctively, I expected to find some sort of magical limbo land, the kind of purgatory pocket the Astra coven was known to inflict upon their enemies.

  Instead, I found myself standing right in the middle of…a hallway.

  “Well this is anticlimactic,” I said, muttering to myself as I took the hallway in. It wasn’t anything special, completely mediocre as hallways went. A long carpeted stretch with brown doors at both ends and cheap, off-the-rack water color paintings along the windowless walls.

  It looked more like the interior of a Scooby Doo haunted mansion than anything that could hurt me at all.

  “Is this the best you’ve got?” I asked, looking back at the door I left open only to find the damned thing had disappeared.

  My palm went to the now filled in wall. No door, not even a crease where the door would have been. It was completely gone.

  “Okay. That’s a little more impressive" I said, suddenly feeling very trapped and almost claustrophobic.

  “Turn around,” a voice said from the far end of the hall.

  I spun to find a Goth teen staring at me. He was skinny with arms covered in sleeves of tattoos and black makeup circling his eyes so he looked like a sad raccoon. In case all that wasn’t enough to make him look like a giant douche, the guy was wearing a leather jacket with no shirt underneath. He spread his arms out, revealing pierced nipples and skin so pale, he absolutely had to be a vampire.

  “This is him?” the douche vamp asked, looking up at the shadowy ceiling and scoffing. “I thought you said he was a badass. He doesn’t look like a badass. He looks like a chump.”

  “It could be worse,” I answered lightly, taking in the vamp and finding him to be less than frightful. “I could look like an Anne Rice reject who broke into his mother’s makeup case.”

  Douche vamp chuckled loudly. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he said as his sharp white fangs elongated.

  “You know,” I answered, letting blue warlock energy spring up in my hands as he sprinted toward me. “Something tells me I am too.”

  Douche vamp was quick. He was over to me before I had a
chance to ready myself, throwing fists into my chest and one across my right check. I stumbled backward, feeling blood trickle down my face. I touched my cheek and found my fingers came away wet and warm.

  Looking down, I saw the culprit. Douche vamp had spiked brass knuckles on his hands, and they were now stained with my blood.

  “Sneaky son of a bitch,” I muttered, letting my eyes pulsate red and my blue warlock energy pool around my hands.

  Douche vamp didn’t seem too intimidated though. He snickered at me as he looked me over.

  “You’re a couple days in the shade away from looking like the fucking flag, bro,” he said and leapt toward me.

  I stepped back, ignoring the building hunger to ‘eat’ him in my gut and blasting him with pure and unadulterated energy.

  Spells were weird things. They basically took the energy that ran us, the energy we as warlocks produced every moment of our lives, and twisted it into something useful to us at any given moment.

  I didn’t have time to be so articulate this time though. So, instead of mentally tying the energy in a bow, I did what I had always been taught not to do during my training. I let the energy fly from me without shape or intent. It was crude. It was crass, and most of all, it was extremely dangerous.

  Energy without a spell to taper it was like lighting a fire in a rain deprived forest. It was wild. It was unpredictable, and it was almost unstoppable.

  But hey, Douche vamp could take it, right?

  Turned out he couldn’t.

  The energy lit his body up like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

  He collapsed backward, bright blue fire covering his entire body. He writhed up and down, before he tried rolling around to put the fire out.