Magic After Dark Boxed Set (Six Book Bundle)

by Deanna Chase

  “No, that was led by this other guy, someone named Father Mikhail Night,” Anthony said.

  Father Night?

  He hadn’t said that he had known Father Armstrong for fifteen years. In fact, he had given Elise the distinct impression that they had only known one another for a few months.

  “That’s interesting,” Elise said in what had to be the understatement of the week, if not the year.

  “It gets better. There were other people that went to this church camp—thirteen total. All of them have gone missing or turned up dead.”

  “Wait, thirteen?”

  “Five of them moved away to other towns nearby. Fairfield, Woodbridge, Bellevue City… But they’ve gone missing, too. It hasn’t been connected to the case because they’re not in Northgate.”

  “Anthony,” Elise said slowly, trying to organize her thoughts, “is it possible that the bodies in the morgue aren’t the people that they believe them to be? They don’t have enough teeth to match dental records, no faces…”

  He caught on quickly. “You think that this group is faking their deaths so that they can go missing?”

  “I ran into Robert Hagy this afternoon,” Elise said. “That’s why I was calling you. He was the man with Father Armstrong.”

  “Oh shit.”

  That summed it up pretty well.

  Twelve people—thirteen, counting Father Night. It was the exact number of people that a coven would get together to perform big rituals. The kind of spells that required a delicate balance of energies, forcing them to be cast on specific moon phases. The kind of spells that took human sacrifice.

  “Text me the names of the other people that attended that camp,” Elise said. “I need to run.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to have a talk with Father Night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Elise flew into the night and reappeared twenty miles away in Woodbridge.

  She coalesced on the front lawn of the house where Father Night was supposed to be hiding. The lights were on in the house, even though it was almost midnight. Everyone else in the neighborhood was already asleep. The glow of light beyond the curtains seemed to taunt Elise.

  She could have tried to mist under the front door, but those cult fuckers had exorcised her once, and she didn’t want to see what kind of magical booby traps they might have waiting for an incorporeal demon this time. Leaning back, she unleashed a powerful kick next to the handle, shattering the lock.

  The door swung open.

  Elise jerked the falchion out of its scabbard as she stepped inside. “Father Night?” she thundered, fist tight on the bare hilt, ears perked for sound.

  Nobody responded. She also didn’t hear any rustling, doors slamming, or other sounds of attempted escape. The air was still, anticipant.

  She would have been able to taste it if there had been anyone in the house. Even when mortals slept, their minds gave off an electric buzz. But there were no functioning brains in the house. Not even the heartbeat of a family pet.

  The house was empty—or its inhabitants were hiding somewhere warded, where she couldn’t sense them.

  She prowled the living room, searching for family photos among the glass-front cabinets displaying antique shotguns, blunderbusses, and pistols. Everything was ancient; the house looked like a museum.

  Elise found what she sought in the hallway leading to the kitchen: a recent family portrait. She pulled it off of the wall and studied it closely.

  The family looked nice enough. Prim brunette wife; husky, bearded husband. She did a double-take at the wife. It was Sheriff Dickerson. Elise had only seen pictures of her on Lincoln’s phone, but in every single one of them, she had been uniformed, with her hair in a tight bun. Her hair was loose around her shoulders in these pictures. When she was smiling, she was unrecognizable.

  Elise pulled a second photo off of the wall. The sheriff and her husband were outdoors in that one, holding a pit bull puppy between them—a dog with a pink nose, brown markings, and a ribbon around his neck. Ace was ridiculously cute as a baby, all giant paws and big eyes. Must have been barely taken from his litter in the photo. And he probably hadn’t tasted human flesh yet.

  “You fuckers,” she breathed.

  She was going to kill them.

  Elise dropped the photo on a table.

  She rolled her feet down the hall, barely making a sound as she entered the kitchen, which was only illuminated by the hallway light. Long shadows stretched from the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, throwing shapes on the wall beyond that looked like stalactites, or the open maw of a demon.

  The heater clicked on. The smell of blood slapped her in the face as the air stirred. It was a rich, meaty odor, suggestive of more than just a few drops spilled. And as soon as she slipped around the marble kitchen island, she saw why.

  Father Night’s body was sprawled in a glistening puddle. In such quantities, his blood looked black. It made his cassock shine.

  His arms were spread to either side, ankles together, head missing. Very much like a decapitated Jesus. At another time, Elise might have appreciated the artistry of it.

  Except that this time, it meant she was too late.

  She slammed her fist into the wall, letting loose a string of curses that might have even managed to shock McIntyre. She punched through sheetrock wrist-deep.

  And she heard a responding thud from somewhere else in the house.

  Elise froze, listening for the sound to repeat. A moment later, she heard another thud, and then another, like fists pounding on a door. It wasn’t far. Definitely on the first floor.

  She still couldn’t sense any mortals in the house. But that noise had to be coming from something alive.

  She searched the garage, the living room, the dining room, but couldn’t seem to find the origin of the pounding noise. It didn’t stop. She followed it back into the kitchen again and opened the pantry. There was a trap door leading to the crawl space, and it was bouncing.

  Elise kneeled to inspect the lock. Wards were etched into it. No wonder she hadn’t been able to feel anyone on the other side.

  “Hang on,” she said, “I’m coming in. You might want to step back.”

  The pounding silenced.

  She slammed the hilt of her falchion into the lock once, twice. The infernal obsidian sparked against the metal. On the third strike, the padlock shattered, and she was able to rip the door open. Her blood burned hot in the wake of finding Father Night—she pulled the door off of its hinges and tossed it aside.

  Elise dropped through the door.

  What had once been a crawl space had been carved out, converting it into a space large enough for her to stand in. Anyone taller would have to stoop.

  There was another pentagram smeared on the wall, another cage, plastic sheets spread over the floor. It was a second ritual site, though it didn’t seem to have been used in several weeks. The blood was brown and fading. The only footprints in the dust belonged to the person that had been trying to catch Elise’s attention, which were in the shape of designer heels. Shoes that definitely didn’t belong in a cult’s ritual space.

  “I never thought I would be happy to see you,” said a female voice from the shadows.

  Elise hadn’t heard that voice in a long time, but she would never forget that cold condescension, no matter how long she managed to walk the Earth. It was the voice of a jealous woman, someone who didn’t believe that her boyfriend, James, wasn’t fucking Elise behind her back—a witch, a talented doctor, and an all-around bitch.

  Stephanie Whyte emerged, hunched over in the uncomfortable space. Her strawberry-blond hair hung loose around her shoulders. She looked gaunt and wasn’t preceded by her usual cloud of Victoria’s Secret perfume.

  “Stephanie…Armstrong,” Elise said. “You’re fucking kidding me. You’re the coroner?”

  “The one and only, for the last three months,” Stephanie said. She managed to sound dignified
, even as she all but collapsed in Elise’s arms. Elise hadn’t been expecting Stephanie to grab her, so she staggered under the doctor’s weight, sinking to the dusty floor. “The things I’ve done, Elise—the things I’ve seen—you’d be doing me a favor if you slit my throat where I stand.”

  “You’re not standing,” Elise said dryly.

  She had definitely contemplated slitting Stephanie’s throat a few times—well, spitting in her pancake batter, at the very least—but no matter how much they disliked each other, it wasn’t worth murder.

  There were no stairs leading out of the crawl space, and Stephanie seemed too weak to climb, so Elise wrapped her arms around her.

  “I’m going to do something that will make you uncomfortable. Close your eyes, hold your breath, and don’t breathe until you hear my voice again,” Elise said.

  She expected argument from Stephanie, but the doctor must have been even worse than she looked. She curled against Elise’s chest. Her eyes fell shut.

  Elise bled into darkness, wrapped her misty form around Stephanie, and dragged the woman to the first floor. It only took an instant, but she knew from what Anthony had told her that it felt like a lifetime. He hated being transported by Elise—he had only voluntarily done it once since they moved to Las Vegas together, and that was because they had been about to fall off of the top of the MGM Grand. Anthony preferred Elise’s embrace to death. That was about the only thing he preferred it to.

  Stephanie was gasping when she reappeared on the kitchen floor, clutching her throat.

  “You can open your eyes,” Elise said. She pressed her hand against Stephanie’s forehead. The skin was clammy.

  Her eyes flew open. “What did you do to me? How did we get up here?”

  “Remember the demon apocalypse?” Elise asked. Of course Stephanie did. There was no way that anyone who had been in Reno at the time could have forgotten. “Long story short, it changed me. Can you walk?”

  Stephanie found the strength to stand—probably motivated by the urge to never have to be carried by Elise like that ever again.

  “Is that Richard?” Stephanie asked when she looked over the counter to see the body.

  “No. But he’s dead, too.”

  “Good,” she said fiercely.

  Elise pulled Stephanie’s arm over her shoulder and helped carry her through the living room. “You were the one modifying the cadavers, weren’t you?”

  She gave a hollow, mirthless laugh. “Modifying. Nice word for mutilation. Yes, it was me. I couldn’t bring myself to join their circles of power, so I desecrated the bodies instead. Heroic, don’t you think?” Stephanie’s calm front was cracking. She sounded like she was on the verge of breakdown.

  “You survived,” Elise said. She wasn’t going to judge whether or not Stephanie could have done better, escaped, or even stopped them. It didn’t matter. What had been done was done. No point in regretting what couldn’t be changed. “How did they get you?”

  “I was coming to meet someone in Northgate. They intercepted me. Forced me to take Richard’s name and claim to be his sister, though he didn’t treat me like one.” Stephanie’s eyes burned like coals. “Tell me he died painfully.”

  He had died instantly, probably without ever realizing he was attacked. Elise said, “He suffered.”

  Stephanie looked all too pleased by that.

  Elise pushed the front door open. Rylie and Abel’s werewolf energies were approaching, which meant that Seth and the pickup had to be getting close, too. She could let him take Stephanie somewhere safe. For now, she sat the doctor on the front step.

  “You got my message, didn’t you?” Stephanie asked. “About Lucinde?”

  “I got it.”

  “I won’t lie to you. I had hoped James would get it.”

  Elise’s mouth twitched. “Well, he’s here, too.”

  Stephanie’s face softened. “Is he?” She looked around, as if expecting to see him there at that moment. When she had left Reno, James and Elise had still been a somewhat functioning partnership. She probably had no clue that they were enemies now.

  A mean part of Elise wanted to say, Yeah, but James didn’t come for you. Maybe it was Eve’s kindheartedness coming out, maybe Elise had grown up since their petty rivalry, but she kept that thought to herself.

  But Elise still wasn’t mature enough to comfort Stephanie the way she obviously needed. She set the doctor down, backed away, and said, “Do you know what happened to the priest in there?”

  “I heard some kind of argument, a scuffle,” Stephanie said. She shuddered. “They had kept me under there for two days. I thought the racket meant they had finally decided to sacrifice me, but they left an hour before you came. I have never been so relieved to hear your foul mouth in my life.”

  Eve’s niceness must have really been creeping up on Elise, because she didn’t remark on that snide comment, either. “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like they planned to perform a sacrifice tonight, so I imagine they’ve gone to one of the other ritual sites.”

  “Tonight?” She knew that it wasn’t the full moon, but she had to look up and double-check anyway. “All of the other murders have been on the full and new moons.”

  Stephanie shrugged weakly.

  A pickup pulled alongside the curb. The doctor tensed, but Elise said, “Don’t worry. It’s a friend.”

  Seth jumped out. It was too warm for the baggy winter coat he wore, so she imagined that he must have been heavily armed. He moved nimbly despite the added weight.

  He stopped at the end of the sidewalk, eyes widening at the sight of the woman sitting on the step. “Stephanie?”

  “Seth,” she sighed, “thank God, someone sane. Help me stand up.”

  Elise had run out of the ability to be surprised for the week. “You know each other?”

  Seth grabbed Stephanie. “Yeah, she’s family,” he said, earning a shaky smile out of the doctor.

  Distant alarm bells were ringing in Elise’s skull, telling her that she should be worried about this—there was some connection there, something she was missing, something that was going to come back and bite her in the ass. But she didn’t have time to dive into her alarming instincts.

  “Where are the other ritual sites, Stephanie?” Elise asked, helping Seth carry her to the pickup.

  “There’s a cabin in the mountains—”

  “We cleared that one,” Seth said.

  “—and the basement of the church in Northgate, St. Philomene’s Cathedral.”

  “Shit,” Elise swore, ignoring Stephanie’s icy look. She had just left Northgate. Who knew how much damage the cult could have done while she was gone? “Seth, will you tell Rylie that we need to turn back?”

  “I’m on it,” he said.

  Elise vanished.

  The stained glass window was a picture of an apple. Elise had been in Father Night’s office twice, spoken to Rylie about Cain’s cult, and walked laps around St. Philomene’s while searching for Richard Armstrong. Yet she hadn’t given a thought to the fact that the window behind Father Night’s desk was a red apple, bordered by the branches of a tree, until she broke in to search for a murderous cult.

  Patterns. Elise’s job was to find them, break them, understand what they meant.

  She’d completely missed this one.

  “Anthony’s going to laugh his ass off at me,” she muttered, kicking aside Father Night’s rugs in search of a warded trap door like the one in Dickerson’s pantry. His floor was smooth. There wasn’t a single trap door in the entire damn church, and Elise had been looking for twenty minutes.

  Where was the entrance to the basement?

  She sure as hell could have used Rylie’s nose to speed up the search. Unfortunately, the werewolves were still looping back from Woodbridge, and it would be a while before they managed to catch up with her.

  But someone might be getting sacrificed under the church at that moment. Elise couldn’t wait to get in
—she had to find it now.

  She tried to flash through the cracks in the floor, but it was like slamming face-first into a brick wall. The basement was warded in much the same way as the sheriff’s office.

  Wards might not stop a physical penetration. Elise slammed her heel into the floor. The wood groaned.

  Magic roiled, burning through the air, filling her nose with the scent of burning ozone.

  She kicked the same part of the floor again, two more times. It didn’t break. Kopides were supernaturally strong, and some demons even stronger, but she lacked adequate leverage to shatter the floor.

  Her eyes traced up Father Night’s door frame to the spiral of stairs inside the tower and the darkness at the top.

  It would be a long way to fall.

  In a flash, Elise appeared at the top of the tower, momentarily merged with the darkness. She could see the entire office through the shadows: the empty leather chair, the bundle of petrified twigs on his bookshelf, the old Bible under the window. But she couldn’t see beyond the door. Whatever wards the cult had placed on the cathedral blocked the rest of the church.

  Elise reformed herself into a corporeal human form at the apex of the bell tower’s arches. For an instant, she was suspended in air, unmoving, almost hovering.

  Then she fell.

  Twenty feet of spiral staircase flashed past her. She pulled her knees to her chest, crossed her arms over her face, and hit the ground.

  She might as well have shot a cannonball through the floorboards. Wood exploded around her. Dust and plaster and soil showered to the ground.

  Elise landed on one knee, hand to the ground for balance, and looked up.

  The ritual space under St. Philomene’s was the largest of the three. The bloody pentagram had been painted across the floor from wall-to-wall, creating a circle large enough to accommodate a coven’s full company of thirteen. A dozen equidistant points had been demarcated by candles, and robed figures stood over each one. The center of the pentagram held a half-dozen shiny steel tables with an elevated pulpit overlooking them.

  Each table had a body on it. Bloody, mauled, daggers jutting through the mouths as if penetrating the soft palate. Already dead. Sacrifice over. Ritual complete.