Catching Hell
D. B. Sieders
CATCHING HELL
By
D. B. Sieders
Copyright © 2021 D. B. Sieders
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Edited by Tee Tate.
Cover Design by MiblArt.
All stock photos licensed appropriately.
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Published in the United States by City Owl Press.
www.cityowlpress.com
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For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at [email protected]
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 events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent and permission of the publisher.
To all my favorite authors,
Thank you for the inspiration
Contents
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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
Sneak Peek of Waking the Dead
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
Additional Titles
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Don’t miss more of the Jinx McGee series coming soon, and check out the Soul Broker from D. B. Sieders with WAKING THE DEAD
The road to hell begins when the reaper darkens her door.
A chance encounter with a dying stranger opens an empathic connection between down-on-her-luck caregiver Vivian Bedford and the world of spirits. Lazarus Darkmore, a grim reaper in a charming and seductive package, seeks to recruit her as a soul broker. Guardian spirit Ezra and his new apprentice Zeke offer protection from the reaper—so long as she works on their side of afterlife management. But these guardians are no angels, and their methods leave Vivian fearing the price of their protection.
Her ability to channel conscious energy from the living, something no guardian or reaper can do, could be a game changer. If she can control it, she can use this power as leverage. And she needs a bargaining chip, especially when she discovers that incapacitated living mortals can supply energy for the spirit realm, making her disabled sister Mae a prime target for guardian and reaper alike.
Can she move from pawn to major player in order to save Mae, and herself, from a horrific fate beyond the simple and fleeting terrors of death?
GET IT NOW!
Chapter One
Life goal number 666: Be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says, “Oh, crap. She’s up!” — T-shirt worn by Jinx McGee, demon hunter.
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I saw my first demon when I was five. I was looking in a mirror.
I’d been brushing my teeth when I glanced at my reflection and noticed I wasn’t the only one there. A presence lurked behind my eyes. It wasn’t nice. It was angry, and it wanted out. I don’t know if the demon living inside me had always been there, but that was the first time I saw her. My scream almost burst my own eardrums—and my older sister’s since she’d been standing beside me. She didn’t see the demon. Neither did my mom. They both thought I was imagining things.
They were wrong.
Still, when life gave you lemons, you were supposed to make lemonade. Life gave me a demon, so I became a demon hunter. I never learned how to make demonade, let alone market it.
Since becoming a demon hunter, I’d seen six hundred and sixty-four demons…not that I was counting. Demon number six hundred and sixty-five targeted the man I was currently surveilling on my latest stakeout. The man and his demon stalker were my latest demon-hunting assignment in downtown Nashville, and shit was about to go down.
Like the fact that said demon stalker was currently speeding through the air on a collision course with a wagon full of drunk tourists who, being strictly human, couldn’t see it.
“Look out,” I yelled. Damn it, where was my partner? She’d texted to tell me she was stuck in traffic, but I could’ve really used some backup. While unseen, the freaking demon could do real, visible damage.
Crap, I couldn’t wait for Lacey. I’d have to break protocol and go after the demon and its mark on my own.
The demon, who was a streak of black only I could see, whizzed past the man it was targeting and through one of those pedal taverns clogging up Broadway and Second Avenue. The damned demon knocked the penis headband right off one of the intoxicated bachelorettes. Bummer. I enjoyed phallic party favors almost as much as I enjoyed drunken revelry. It would’ve been fun to pick it up and crash the party. I could shove one of those drunk gals off her stool and take her spot, pretending to be a sixth cousin twice removed who no one really knew, but she endeared herself to the group anyway.
Jane McGee the jolly bridesmaid had a nice ring to it. It was what a gal my age should be doing.
Too bad I was working.
I was Jane “Jinx” McGee, demon hunter, and would be until I figured out how to get rid of the demon currently possessing me. Long-term relationships, marriage, white picket fences, and a whole lot of normal weren’t possible for me at the moment. I’d have to settle for keeping drunken bridesmaids and the rest of humanity safe from unauthorized demon shenanigans.
“Oh! Sadie lost her wiener.”
The shout came from another one of the rolling bar’s occupants, who nearly fell out of her seat laughing, blissfully unaware she’d been dive-bombed by a demon. Damn it, tempters moved fast. I hoped this one was corporeal. They weren’t necessarily easy pickings, but easier to catch than the immaterial variety. Corporeals were still fast as all get-out, even with a body, but at least they couldn’t transform into ether and vanish into vents or gutters.
I needed to slow the demon down, but first I had to follow it to the more private location it had chosen to claim the human it was after.
One of the gals on the pedal tavern handed me a shot glass as they passed, and I downed the contents in a single gulp while they hooted and hollered, giving me high fives and shouting, “You go, girl.” The bachelorettes had good taste in tequila, at least. Ah, to be an ordinary human, blessedly unaware of creatures that go bump in the night. With a nod of thanks, I returned the glass and set off at a light jog to catch up with the demon’s target.
<
br /> The oblivious human hadn’t noticed the demon tracking him, of course. Poor sap. He just had the inexplicable compulsion to go wherever the demon had chosen. Demons had all kinds of nasty mind tricks they used to manipulate their prey. If they went around openly on the attack, people would soon become too afraid to leave their houses and hunting would be harder.
Demons were ambush predators.
I’d been watching the demon’s target, a middle-aged father of two, for over a week. He’d been demon marked, and when one of our patrollers spotted the demon’s mark—invisible to humans but a clear signal to other demons the bearer was already taken—she’d called us in. I’d been waiting for the demon, intent on siphoning his soul—or stealing his life-force for those who didn’t believe in souls and such—to lure him to a secluded location so it could claim its next meal.
The poor guy looked more like Santa Claus than demon chow with his jolly round face, salt-and-pepper beard, and generous belly. The red Hawaiian shirt really tied the look together, but thankfully he wore khaki pants instead of red crushed velvet.
That would have been completely over the top.
I wondered what this guy had done to get a bull’s-eye on his back. The case file was scant on details but flagged as urgent.
No matter. I’d find out soon enough based on the flavor of tempter demon he’d attracted. He ducked into a dark alley—how original—as his demonic stalker finally stopped zipping around and stepped out of the shadows. With my enhanced senses, I observed the demon stalker assume a form that halted the man dead in his tracks and turned him into a quivering mass of lust and longing.
Ah, a succubus had tagged him. My demon stirred within me, excited by the prospect of hunting.
She’s hungry. So am I.
I shuddered as my demon’s thoughts echoed in my mind along with her ravenous excitement. Fortunately for me and the rest of the planet, my demon was under my control and on a tight leash. She’d only taken over fully once when I was young, but once had been enough.
Nothing would ever be as bad as that, and the memory sent a shiver down my spine.
I couldn’t afford that little trip down memory lane. I had work to do. And I needed my personal demon, who I called Hannah, to do it. When I summoned Hannah, she gave me the strength and demon magic to subdue and capture rogue demons. The fact that she was much more powerful than the tempter demons we hunted—and currently an unknown entity in the demon hierarchy—made us a winning team if a tad unstable. The obsidian mirror Hannah was bound to was supposed to prevent her from taking over and going off on any unauthorized side quests or killing sprees.
That made the two of us unsuited for normal careers like banking or public relations. Since it took a demon to find one, however, being demon possessed made me eminently qualified for my current job.
I reached the alley and took a closer look at its occupants. The corporeal shape-shifting succubus’s appearance surprised me. Instead of going all hot, sexy, and ho-bag, she went for plain and unassuming. Her baggy skirt, oversize sweater, and mousy brown ponytail screamed librarian. Maybe her mark had a book fetish?
Nah.
I unsheathed my enchanted knife, crept down the alley, and prepared to kick some demon ass.
Chapter Two
“Oh, God.” Santa’s low, husky voice echoed through the alley. Stumbling footsteps followed, muffled as the man went deeper into the side street, closer to the succubus. I couldn’t see him as clearly but spotted his shadow.
It quivered like an honest-to-God bowl full of jelly.
Gross. Then again, if he finished…prematurely, it would give me more time to nab the demon before he recovered enough to give it another go. My knife flashed with streaks of dazzling purple light and then glowed a brilliant red. I nearly dropped the damned thing.
“Oops.” I scrambled and ducked behind a stack of boxes to avoid being spotted. Amateur move. Shaking the knife and slapping it against my thigh didn’t do anything other than leave a bruise. My blade was still switching from blazing red to flaming purple, and purple wasn’t a demon color. Demon hunter training 101: red was for demons, blue for celestials, green for ghouls, yellow for mythical or elemental creatures, and white for vampires. The brighter the glow, the stronger the creature.
I totally remembered that from my training.
Members of the seven tempter demon classes didn’t produce purple, and they didn’t get such a powerful reaction from my weapon/demon detector. I’d only ever gotten a screaming neon glow around my powerful demon boss and his associates. Bizarre. Cue the X-Files music.
Red and blue mixed to make purple, at least in the mundane world. Did that mean there was a celestial in the vicinity? They only ever visited “special” people to bestow help, blessings, or some nonsense like that. Demon-hunting operations didn’t encounter them as far as I was aware. None had ever come my way.
Didn’t matter. And I needed to stop dicking around.
I fired off a text to HQ so I’d have additional backup on standby in case Lacey didn’t show up in time. There were about six texts from my partner, probably telling me to wait for her instead of going off on my own and doing something monumentally stupid. Again. But really, I didn’t get in over my head often.
Okay, who was I kidding? I got in over my head all the time.
I might have had some very minor issues with impulse control.
The smart choice would be to wait for Lacey. Then again, if Hannah was right and the succubus was super hungry, she might feast on the man’s soul before my partner arrived.
The succubus lured the man in with her mojo as he continued his slow march toward her, sobbing and moaning. “Is it really you?”
If I didn’t do something, he’d be dead, and his kids would be left without a father.
I’d lost my father at a young age, before I even knew him. Mom said he’d bailed, leaving her with two girls to raise on her own. By all rights, I should hate him and want nothing to do with him. But like all gals with daddy issues from absentee fathers, there was a hole in my soul with his name on it.
And somewhere in the depths of my soul, I missed him terribly, even after all these years.
Nothing I could do about my dad, but this man’s kids weren’t going to lose their dad tonight. Not if I could help it.
I’d just have to wing it.
Peeking to make sure the coast was clear, I slithered down the alley with my back against the grimy brick wall. Night-vision goggles would have been nice. My big bad boss—BBB or Triple B for short, though I never called him that to his face—totally needed to spring for some state-of-the-art equipment. Fortunately, my eyes adjusted quicker than the average mortal’s—a side effect of demon possession I could control without Hannah—and I spotted the man, Jack Murkowski, now chatting with the succubus-in-librarian’s-clothing. Desperation wafted off his aura in sickening waves, along with something else I couldn’t identify. He stank like gloom, doom, and bad news with a hint of brimstone, but that was what happened after repeated exposure to inhabitants of the hell realm.
Cliché for sure, but some stereotypes were true. While the alternate dimension we called hell wasn’t all lakes of fire and eternal suffering, it apparently had an abundance of sulfur. They should bring some Febreeze there, or maybe deodorant.
The scent bothered me, and not just in the literal sense. It also alerted the senses and instincts I’d developed by tracking and capturing all manner of demons. Succubi didn’t smell like brimstone. They smelled like whatever scent most attracted their victim. Given the form the succubus assumed, Murkowski most likely favored musty old books with a hint of rose water. Something was off.
Everything about this assignment was off—the lack of detail in the case file, something wonky with my knife’s supernatural threat detection system, and a succubus seemingly going off script.
Anxiety warred with adrenaline as I prepared for attack, but adrenaline won.
The succubus had the patience of a seas
oned hunter. I’d give her that. She didn’t go in for the soul-sucking kiss or shag right away. Instead, she toyed with her ponytail and lowered her gaze to the dirty ground. The act didn’t exactly fit the location, not to mention the honky-tonk music and hoots from downtown tourists moseying along in Music City. The succubus reached out and placed a small hand on his shoulder, demonic gaze aglow with anticipation and hunger her victim couldn’t see.
But I could.
Time to strike.
Steeling my resolve, I reached into my shirt and pulled out the locket that held my obsidian mirror, the instrument that allowed me to control my inner demon. I kept it on a silver chain, close to my heart. Well, more like between my boobs, because I guarded my girls with my life.
I popped open the locket and gazed into the polished obsidian’s shiny black core as reality and time slipped away. My brown eyes glowed with a thousand sparks of light as my features twisted and my face split into an evil grin. “Okay, Hannah,” I whispered. “Let’s do this.”
The demon merged fully with my consciousness and took over my body, though I held the proverbial leash. I closed the locket and tucked the black mirror safely between my girls. Then my demon-controlled body crawled up the wall and into the shadows, masking our movements and scent so the succubus wouldn’t detect us before we struck.
Catching Hell Page 1
