by Alan Baxter
Dedication
For everyone fighting a battle; May you find the strength to never quit.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Acknowledgements
Alex Caine Series by Alan Baxter
About the author
Books by Alan Baxter
Imprint
1
Alex Caine woke to a soft creak in the floorboards of his old weatherboard house. From a fitful sleep he was instantly alert, tense, heart hammering. Breathe, he told himself as he forced the nerves to subside. Just Silhouette returning from a trip to the city to feed. She jokingly complained about the commute, but taking people from the small country town where they lived was far too obvious, so a two-hour each way journey once a month or so was a necessary hassle. The price of eating people and something Alex still struggled to come to terms with. But he loved her.
He glanced over at the clock and anxiety riddled his chest again. Three am. Far too early for Sil to be coming home. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, to gather himself, and images of broken chunks of an obsidian city flashed through his mind, hundreds, even thousands of people cast tumbling into the Void to blink out of existence, as if they had never been. Hundreds more crushed or maimed as Obsidian slammed back into the mortal realm. All of it focused through his consciousness and power, through the energy of the Darak stone embedded in his chest, a living part of him.
You saved thousands of people, Silhouette repeatedly reminded him.
But I killed thousands more. I’ve felt the Void. I know what I did to them! he would counter, the pain a black hole in his soul.
The intensity of the events never ebbed, even for a moment.
Alex centred himself. He was a warrior, a fighter against all odds. He remembered the words of his Sifu: When the battle rages, put aside fear. Of course it is there, but you can make time for it later. When you fight, there is only the moment, nothing else.
He opened his eyes, nerves barely steadied, and sat up in bed. The darkness was absolute, no streetlights for miles around his two acres in the valley, and no moon this night. But Alex had a preternatural vision that out-performed anyone he had yet met, arcane or mundane. He let that vision open, watched through normal space for shades and planes of magic, for the auras of any intruders and the magesign of their activity.
An aroma rose, sickly sweet and cloying. He had been to a seaside resort in England once, years ago, and visited a shop that made candy, sticks of rock with the resort name right through them. The smell there had been the same, intense, hot and sugary. Only this had a layer of something else over it, something oily.
The sensation of magesign in the house swelled. He slipped from the bed, quietly pulled on a pair of loose cotton pants and a plain T-shirt, a frail shield against the vulnerability of nakedness. Someone was in his house, doing magic. The ’sign swelled again and he saw the shades of some kind of searching spell, tendrils questing through the rooms, seeking. He gathered his own power, closed his shields, hid himself from everything, even light. Invisible in the darkness, he flexed his fists and waited.
A movement beyond the door caught his eye. Then another. At least two people stalked his home. The sickly stench grew thicker, the sensations of spell-casting stronger. He recognised the flavour of the arcane energy, similar to that which had pulled him and Silhouette and the others through to Obsidian just a couple of short months before. Silhouette had said it was Fey magic. A tremble moved through Alex’s skin. Were there actual Fey here? Sil had promised this couldn’t happen without plenty of warning. How had they slipped past the wards? After all the work Armour had done to protect him, desperate as they were for him to join them, why weren’t arcane alarms going berserk?
And besides all that, the day before had been Lughnasadh, or Lammas, the thin day, when the Fey had power to pass between Faerie and the mortal realm. They shouldn’t be able to threaten him now, and not again until the next thin day. Was all of Armour’s recent work for nothing?
Silhouette’s dread of the Fey disturbed him. She was hard as nails, old and powerful, for all her apparent youth and beauty, and she feared very little. But the Fey put her on edge. As a Kin, mixed blood Fey and human, she knew intimately the nature of the creatures. As a first generation Kin, rare even among her own kind, she knew perhaps more intimately than most, and if one thing absolutely terrified the love of Alex’s life, it was the Fey. Utterly evil, she had called them. Was it possible some trod the boards of his home?
He searched his memory, tried to remember what he had lately read. He had thought it wise to learn all he could of the Fey, and Kin, and the otherworld of Faerie, but Silhouette scowled and shook her head, dismissing the majority of literature on the subject as simply the musings, mythology and misconceptions shared by humans. Faerie is no fairy tale, Alex, she had said. It is evil and other and inconceivable and best left out of mind.
But as Armour were so keen on him and Silhouette joining them since the Obsidian Incident, he had access to a vast of array of knowledge from their centuries-old archives.
He moved again, silent as an assassin. He tried to get a better view from the room, but the architecture worked against him. He needed to see more, plan a course of action, but doing so might give him away.
The Obsidian Incident. Such a toothless misnomer for the horror of what had occurred, the lives lost. They had given him a lot of time to deal with the traumas of the Incident, and he had tried to use that time to learn. Although often he had been too tired, unmotivated. He slept a lot, fell easily into black moods. PTSD, the Armour psychologist had told him. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
He had learned about the thin days. He and Silhouette had sat nervously through the previous twenty-four hours, wondering if they would have to fight or flee, use some of the new protective measures, but nothing happened. The Fey may not come at all, Silhouette had said, though they knew better. There would be some attempt at retribution for the blow he had struck against them. But it had to be a thin day and they had planned for that with scrupulous attention to detail. How were the Fey here now?
Alex jumped as shades of movement shifted in the darkness near the bedroom door. Even now his mind was wandering, his focus weak. Pull it together, for fuck’s sake!
He crouched and moved, watched an intruder’s aura, their shades plain to him as they passed into the large bedroom. He could see shifts and colours of others in the hallway beyond, definitely more than two, maybe four or five. His heart hammered. The shades were like nothing he had ever seen, warping colours like oil on water, but all overlain with deep, dark shadows, black light masking the true nature of their psychic signatures. It hurt his mind to read them, made him nauseous as he tried to decipher intent.
The thick darkness of the night masked their physical presence, he had no idea what they looked like, and the
ir slippery auras made it impossible to guess their shape. An enemy he had no idea how to engage. The one in the room hopped up onto the bed he had so recently vacated and crouched. He got the impression of a dog sniffing a scent. The claggy, sugary aroma filled the room as others hurried in, drawn by some silent signal.
Alex, holding his breath, moved painfully slowly towards the bedroom door. However well they saw in the dark did not matter as his magic rendered him completely invisible. His own shades were locked down tight, concealed in a shell of mundanity. If he could leave the room, perhaps he could get to his car and escape. Or head to one of the more heavily warded areas in the garden, his newly erected stone circle, ancient methods for modern protection. He would grab his phone on the way through the house, call Silhouette for advice, draw on the services of Armour. Anything was preferable to engaging with whatever prowled his bedroom. Even without Silhouette’s warnings it was clear to him that these things were incredibly powerful, dangerous in ways he could not fathom, and he desperately wanted to avoid any confrontation.
He took a deep, silent breath as he neared the door, drawing it into his belly, using his extensive training in chi gung to steady heart and mind. In preparation to slip out the door and into the hallway, he softly let the breath out again.
Sharp movement on the bed and the intense scrutiny of several beings hit him like a series of blows. Before he had time to even register surprise they were on him.
Alex cried out, all pretence of stealth become irrelevant, and thrashed around. He felt blows connect in the darkness, heard high-pitched squeals of pain and frustration as his Darak-enhanced strength and masterful technique delivered devastating attacks. But it wasn’t enough. Even as some creatures fell away, others slammed into him. Sweet, sickly, oily blows rained down, struck his head, neck, body. Pain blossomed all over and something else, something arcane and malevolent, filled the room. No, it filled his mind. As he fought, some magic like he had never felt before infiltrated his very being and tightened about him like steel cables. It was similar to the enchantment the Autarch of Obsidian had used to bind him and his power, except instead of wrapping him up like a straitjacket, it wove tendrils of shackling through every fibre of his core. His chest pulsed and burned, the Darak felt incandescent against his flesh.
With a roar he used his elemental specialty and drew heat from every corner of the house, agitating together a huge ball of radiant flame to burst out from him and incinerate his attackers. If he burnt down his house, he was past caring.
In the sudden, glaring orange glow he saw twisted faces and thin hands raised. His heart double-thumped in terror at the cold, broken shape of the things before him even as they squealed and fell away, wreathed in tentacles of twisting flame. But it was not enough, there were too many, and the magic continued to tighten about him, the blows returned. His bedclothes and curtains crackled with licks of fire, casting an orange dancing light through the room. The long, sharp, gangly creatures were quick. Uncanny, sticklike, jerky movements as some batted out flames and others wrapped a glistening, oily rope around and around him. His shouting and thrashing grew more contained. Their elongated, hollow, dark faces, the skin a deep green-black like the thickest algae scum of a darkened swamp, shifted slowly from concentration to some twisted semblance of joy.
As some beat out the last of the flames, one leaned forward, its eyes a flickering amber in the dark-again room, and hissed something. Its breath was the heaviest, sweetest, most nauseating thing Alex had ever breathed in and darkness covered his mind like a hood.
2
Claude Darvill studied the lie of the bones on the scrap of black canvas and scowled. He knew he was missing something but could not place what and his frustration grew. The reading was confusing. Tendrils of volcanic smoke drifted snake-like around the dark grey rock he used as a table for his tools of magic. His breath steamed in the frozen air. With a noise of annoyance, he gathered the small, yellowed bones in his fist again, once more whispered the incantation. He let his questing mind free, sent his desires out into the aether and cast the skeletal pieces across the rough black material. They fell exactly as they had before, far too accurately for any hint of chance to enter the reading.
‘Fuck.’ Squatting, Claude rubbed his hands together for warmth and stared.
‘Perhaps something interrupts the result?’ a small voice behind him suggested.
Claude didn’t take his eyes from the divination. ‘You think, Sigmund?’ His voice was heavy with sarcasm.
‘I just meant …’
‘I know what you meant.’ Claude stood suddenly, making Sigmund take an involuntary step backwards. Claude smirked. He enjoyed how much he scared the small Icelandic ‘tour guide’. The man came highly recommended through a mutual friend, but this fellow was an obsequious and annoying little toady. Darvill had no time for such people. He turned his gaze to pierce Sigmund’s blue eyes, wide under a mop of curly blond hair. ‘I find things, Siggy, you understand that? It’s what I do and I’m fucking good at it. No one, in fact, is better at it than me.’
Sigmund nodded, playing nervously with the hem of his jacket. ‘Of course. But I was just going to suggest that perhaps it might be worth figuring out what is interrupting the magic rather than simply trying to force your sight in spite of it.’
Claude frowned. ‘Hmm. Perhaps you’re onto something there.’ His admission was grudging, but genuine. If the source of the interruption could be found, and circumvented, the divination would be clearer.
‘Is there a ward of some kind, perhaps, preventing your sight?’ Sigmund asked.
‘No. Something more … physical than that. And the read I am getting is contradictory somehow. There’s a misalignment about the result I can’t see through. That fucker Alex Caine — how I wish I had the means to kill him — told me my father died in Iceland. That he killed my father here. He promised to take me to the site, but Armour kept us apart, sent me away. Caine would never have kept that promise anyway, the bastard. But I feel my father somewhere nearby. I’ve spent months tracking his psychic signature and I know I’m close. So close I can almost smell Robert Hood’s foul fucking aftershave. If Caine killed him here, there should be some trace of that death, some echo of his mind ending. Maybe even some fragment of physical evidence, however tiny, however inconsequential.’ He balled his fists. ‘There should be fucking something!’
He crouched again, stared at the scattered bones of ancient crows, imbued with the magic of shamans centuries dead. These were his most powerful tools, his most accurate, and they told him he was right on top of what he sought. But nothing anywhere near confirmed that.
‘A physical barrier,’ he muttered to himself. He stood again, looked around. Nothing but grey-black stone and shale, desolate as the moon, covered with a layer of snow and ice. The snow lay thicker on the higher ground in the distance. It crunched under his booted feet even on the thermally heated ground on which he stood. Tussocks of hardy grass and scrub dotted the landscape, shifting in the cold breeze. Charcoal-coloured volcanic ash covered a lot of the land despite the snow, far from the neat and civilised inhabited areas of the island. There was simply nothing here.
Assuming Sigmund would follow, not really caring if he did or not, Claude strode off across the rocky ground. Taller formations and hills off to one side caught his eye and he moved towards them. As he wandered in between, he muttered incantations of finding and echoes of old magic bounced back to him. He caught a hint of something familiar and paused, closed his eyes to concentrate. He sensed a tiny flicker of psychic signatures he recognised, wisps of old magesign. Alex fucking Caine and his Kin bitch, Silhouette. They had definitely been here, many months ago. Other powerful signatures echoed too, dark, malevolent. He was close and Alex certainly had not lied about killing Claude’s father in Iceland.
A cave mouth yawned darkly from between two tall, leaning rocks and Darvill entered, flicking a torch on as he went. Someone had lived here, a monastic existence of utter
simplicity. The few possessions were still in fairly good order, though dust and hints of ash covered everything. No one resided here now, but they had not too long ago. Could it be something as simple as caves getting in the way? Were his divinations being blocked by complicated cavern systems, confusing his seeking mind? Could plain rock be that obstructive?
Darvill’s eyes widened and he turned from the cave. As he ran back the way he had come, he barrelled into Sigmund, knocked the slight man onto his arse. ‘Out of the way!’ Claude yelled.
He slipped and stumbled on the loose shale and ice as he scrambled to his makeshift table and stared at the crow bones. He gathered them in a shaking fist and rattled them between his palms, muttering slightly different words of magic. He cast them across the canvas and stared, mouth opening in shock and anger.
‘Not caves,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Actual solid rock is between us. And he’s not dead!’
3
Silhouette drove through the dim glow of false dawn, satisfied. Kin didn’t need to feed often and, unlike so many of her kind, she certainly wasn’t of the mindset that humans were nothing more than cattle. But she did enjoy a good feed and had long since come to terms with the requirements of her life. While the killing would never sit well with her, the feeling of a sated Kin hunger was unlike anything else. Her guilt was little different to the carnivore’s empathy for the cow, but she tried to pick her victims carefully.
The highway heading south stretched grey and straight beyond the reach of her headlights, leading her back to the rolling green hills where she lived with Alex. She would never have considered herself a country girl, but he had shown her how idyllic it could be. And the city was only a couple of hours away. Sydney provided plenty of opportunities for feeding. It hadn’t taken her long to sniff out the dens of iniquity populated by criminal and violent lowlifes who exploited decent people everywhere. Hell, every time she fed it was a public service.
She grinned wolfishly in the dim light from the dashboard. Tonight had been particularly fun, breaking into a closed-door poker game and playing with her food before eating. They honestly thought they had the upper hand. For quite a long time, considering. It wasn’t until she actually shifted into her favoured panther-like form and took out the throat of the muscular bouncer by the door that anyone thought her anything but an unfortunate idiot who had stumbled into her own worst nightmare. How that situation had swiftly reversed.
