Charms & Demons

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FablePrint

  Charms & Demons, The Dark Files, Book Two

  Copyright © 2019 by Kim Richardson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in any form.

  Cover by Kim Richardson

  Text in this book was set in Garamond.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Summary: When a series of unexplained witch murders plague New York City, it’s up to Samantha to uncover the culprits and hunt them down with some good ol’ fashion magic.

  ISBN-13:

  ISBN-10:

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Demonology—Fiction.

  3. Magic—Fiction].

  CONTENTS

  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

  BOOKS BY KIM RICHARDSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  A scream split the night air.

  I scuffed to a halt, the hairs on the back of my neck rising.

  The voice was female, young, and human, with a sound of such utter fear and insane terror that it made my stomach churn and my guts shake.

  I was out on my routine patrol of the city, keeping tabs on any unruly demon sightings and standing ready to vanquish any stinking bastard that stepped through the Veil and crossed into our world to make meals of unsuspecting humans. Contracted by the dark witch court, it was my job to keep watch on any supernatural baddie that was up to no good. The pay wasn’t great, but it was enough to get by.

  It had been a quiet night until now.

  I didn’t have the luxury of time to decide on a course of action. When I didn’t move quickly, people got killed. I’d been too slow with Julia, the girl whose parents had hired me to find her, and now she was dead. Killed by a Greater demon, no less.

  Shit. I wasn’t a great sprinter, nor did I have the physique of a seasoned athlete, but I dashed towards the scream, pushing my legs as fast as they would go with a spell forming in my head. My hatred for demons wrestled with my fear, fueling me with adrenaline and an extra burst of speed.

  I despised them. I hated them to the very depth of my soul. And I was going to fry their asses.

  The scream came from the direction of East 14th Street around the corner of 1st Avenue. I raced toward the dark alley squished between Moe’s Vegetarian Lounge and The Pizza Shop, away from the light—always away from the light. To a demon, light was like sticking its finger in the flames of a fire. It burned them immediately.

  Why did I always find myself in dark, dirty alleys with the demon of the hour? Because that’s how exciting my life was. Yay for me.

  My heart thrashed in my chest as I ran across E 14th Street just as another scream cut through the air. Cars whined into motion, tires squealed and loud shouts were hurled from drivers as I maneuvered between them, the pounding of my heart loud over the revving engines.

  “Watch it!” cried a voice.

  “Idiot!”

  “Crazy bitch!” shouted a driver from a gray SUV as its engine sputtered and caught, its wheels spinning on the pavement.

  Smiling, I flipped him the bird and kept running.

  Humans. Such an angry race.

  Breathing hard, I leaped onto the sidewalk, zigzagged through a couple of humans in their mid-thirties and rushed towards the alley. If the humans had heard the scream, I saw no indication. Papers and plastic bags rattled and scraped over the streets in a sudden breeze, and the leaves in the trees rustled and sighed in the wind.

  I reached the entrance to the alley, slipped through an opening in the chain link fence, and darted between several empty cardboard boxes and metal garbage bins. The air smelled of beer, piss and rot—the aroma of a night out on the town. Excellent.

  I blinked as darkness hit me and I slowed to a walk. The alley was cloaked in darkness like a giant drape had blocked all the light from the street and neighboring buildings.

  There was only one explanation for that—magic. Demonic magic.

  My breath came faster as I felt something wrong, unnatural. An uneasy feeling ran over me, cold prickling along the nape of my neck and up my spine. I stood there for a minute, frowning while contemplating whether I should pull out my chalk. But if I couldn’t see, I couldn’t draw a summing circle either, so conjuring a demon from the Ars Goetia was out.

  Damnit. Blinking, I strained to see through the darkness, but it was like standing in a closet with the lights out. I could make out shapes, but that’s where my vision ended.

  Shit.

  Pulse spiking, I flicked my gaze around, trying to pin down the source of the magic and the screaming human. I stepped forward with my hands splayed at my sides and a spell on the tip of my tongue.

  The air was hot and stuffy, and I realized the wind had suddenly stopped. Now just pure, brittle and crystalline silence and darkness surrounded me.

  Then I heard a struggling sound accompanied by a few frightened grunts before the screaming started again. Closer this time.

  And then I was moving again. I acted without thinking, but I couldn’t help it. My instincts pulled me in the direction of that poor human. I had to reach her. I had to save her.

  I sprinted into the alley as fast as I could through the darkness and toward the source of the sound, but I still couldn’t see anything. Only darkness stretched ahead of me as though I could go on for hours and not see a single thing. Possibly I was even trapped in this magical abyss.

  Screw it. I had no choice.

  “Hello?” I called as I halted and listened. “Hello, can you hear me? Where are you?”

  A figure appeared through the darkness, short and plump, the silhouette of a small male or perhaps even a small female. It remained hunched before me, about twenty feet away, but I couldn’t make out the face or tell if it was human or demon.

  The silhouette just stood there, giving me nothing. Great.

  I tapped into the power of my sigil rings and held it with my will. “Hello?” I ventured. Yes, that sounded lame, but I needed to hear it speak before I started shooting off my magic. A dead human would look pretty bad on my record. A fried one, burnt to a nice, blackened and toasty crisp, was even worse.

  And still the silhouette still didn’t move.

  I let out a breath. “Listen, I don’t have all night. If you could just—”

  An invisible force hit me. I never saw it coming, and I certainly never felt it coming either.

  It struck me with the force of a linebacker on steroids. Despite my prepared spell, I didn’t even have time to deflect it. Instead, it felt like a giant had slugged me with one of his massive hands head-on, driving me straight back.

  I flew several feet through the air, hit the pavement with my back, and then clipped my head. My breat
h exploded out of my lungs as I scraped another ten feet along the alley floor.

  Ouch. What the hell was that?

  I tried to muster a breath but my lungs didn’t seem able to manage it yet. I blinked in the darkness as white stars swirled around in my vision. A sliver of panic slipped through me as the idea of facing another Greater demon formed in my mind. Damnit. After all that had happened with Vargal, you’d think I’d have been more prepared.

  Finally, I managed to take a gulp of air, panting as my lungs formed.

  “Son of a bitch,” I wheezed as I rolled to my feet. The world tilted and I did my best not to fall flat on my face. Because that would look totally amateurish. And I was a professional.

  Granted, that demon had some serious magical skill. Ten to one, I’d even go so far as to say he was more powerful than me. Yeah. I was having a great night.

  Still, I wasn’t about to let some degenerate demon kill me. Not while I still drew breath and had a human to save.

  With my jaw gritted, I tapped into my sigil rings again, drawing power from them. Energy coursed through me, filling my veins with the staggering feeling of strength and magic.

  My eyes narrowed, and my fingers splayed as I gestured. “Come on, you bastard!” I cried, trying to see through the darkness, but my eyes would never settle on anything solid. “Where are you? Afraid of a little witch?” I waited, adrenaline spiking through my veins as I listened for a single scrape of a foot on the pavement so I could blast him.

  A wind rose around me, and then the darkness lifted.

  Light spilled into the alley from the moon and the nearby street lamps, bathing the narrow alley in hues of silvers and blues. Shapes became focused until I could see clearly.

  Two things hit me at once. One, the demon was gone. And two, a body lay on the ground not ten feet from me.

  Shit. I ran to the bundle. She was lying on her side. Female from her sheer size and the width of her shoulders under the thin black jacket she was wearing—at least what was left of her.

  My lips parted as I ran my eyes over the body. Because, yes, it was a body. No one could be alive and look like that.

  The skin over her face, hands, and neck was dried, as though all the blood and liquid from her body had been drained. Her teeth were too large, and barely a hint of a nose was left. Just two holes sat where the nostrils used to be amidst skin stretched over a skull. There was no way to determine her age. It was as though I was looking at the dried face of a thousand-year-old mummy.

  What the hell? The only demons I knew that could suck a human into a dried mummy were a succubus and its male counterpart, an incubus. And yet, from what I knew, it would take days or even months to ingest a human’s life force and all of its liquids to end up looking like a dried prune.

  Plus, incubi and succubae didn’t have the skills to conjure up a cloak of darkness. Their magical skills ended with just regular glamours and tricks of the minds. Easy stuff. They had nothing this complex and powerful in their repertoire. This didn’t make sense.

  Nausea bubbled up. Shit. This was bad.

  “Damnit,” I breathed. “I don’t need this right now.” I knelt next to her, grabbed her shoulder and gently turned her over. My heart caught in my throat.

  Narrow scoops of flesh were missing from the side of her neck at the jugular.

  I felt the blood leave my face and settle around my clavicles.

  Holy hell. A demon hadn’t done this. A vampire had.

  Vampires were civilized, educated, and had mastered the art of passing for humans so well that even I could mistake them for a human every now and then. Plus, they normally didn’t go around killing humans—not for thousands of years at least. We had laws for this kind of thing. Humans were off the menu for vampires. If human blood was offered voluntarily, that was socially acceptable. But if you were caught killing a human, it was a stake in the heart for you.

  Over the years, I’d heard the stories of vampires gone rogue on killing sprees. It was inevitable. All societies and races, human and half-breed, had their share of crazies.

  Now it looked like I had a rogue vampire on my hands. And he or she was killing innocents in my city.

  My stomach churned as I rolled my eyes over the dead human. Something wasn’t right. It would take a normal vampire days to drain all the blood from its victim. Unless the vampire was old. Ancient. Powerful. And if that was true, I had a bigger problem on my hands than a simple rogue vamp.

  I had an ancient vampire with powerful magic.

  “Oh my god!” screamed a female voice behind me, making me jerk.

  Heart pounding, I whirled around and looked into the faces of four humans. This night was just getting better and better.

  “What did you do?” exclaimed the same voice, belonging to a dark-skinned woman in her thirties. She waltzed right up to me in her tight red dress. As she stared at the body, her large eyes widened by the second and her mouth opened in silent “o.” I’d seen that expression before on so many humans and on so many occasions—the expression of disbelief, horror, and the usual “this can’t be real.” Yup, I’d seen them all.

  A man with tanned skin and glasses came up next to her and pushed her out of the way to get a better view. He stared for a moment. Then blinked. A sound escaped his throat as he spun around, sending chunks of his vomit in wide arcs all over the pavement.

  Lovely.

  I stood up slowly, my mind swirling with spells and hexes, but I readied a memory charm instead. To hit four humans with a memory charm wasn’t impossible, but it would take some expert coaxing to keep them still while I did it.

  The other two humans, a woman in a black wrap dress and a man in a dark suit, kept their distance—obviously the smarter ones.

  “She’s a terrorist,” said the man in the suit, his face twisting in anger.

  Okay, I take it back. Not so smart.

  “This is some kind of bio weapon,” said the same man, pointing a shaking hand at me. “Like anthrax or something. It’s not natural. It’s engineered.” He covered his mouth and stepped back, grabbing his date with him.

  Okay, so I did look guilty and this situation really looked bad as I knelt next to the body. Though, without a magical explanation, human forensics would show that the body had been drained completely. It would have taken some kind of lab or medical equipment to do it, and a person in an alley alone wouldn’t have been able to pump all the liquids out of a body.

  “It’s not anthrax,” I said, my voice calm as I gauged the distance between me and the closest human who was still vomiting. Hit him when he’s bent over, and all that. “Anthrax doesn’t drain you of your bodily fluids. It attacks your lungs.”

  “And how do you know that?” accused the same man. “You sound like you know all about this.”

  Great. This was certainly going nowhere fast. “Google it if you don’t believe me.” I sighed. “But I didn’t do this to her. I found her like this.” Totally true. But the accusations that rippled over their faces and reflected in their eyes said otherwise.

  “You killed her, you fucking psycho,” said the same man in the suit, though from a safer distance from me and my supposed victim.

  “I didn’t,” I said as I took a step forward towards the man who had stopped vomiting. His face was pale and looked like he might resume spewing chunks at any moment. Damn. Humans were so overly dramatic and so quick to judge. “You have to believe me. I heard a scream and I came to investigate. I only wanted to help her.” I could tell I was just wasting my breath. I was already guilty in their eyes.

  The man in the suit’s face was screwed up. He shifted from foot to foot, looking like he was contemplating either bolting or hitting me with a hard object—perhaps hitting me and then bolting. “Then why aren’t you calling 9-1-1?” his face went hard with accusation. “Where’s your phone.”

  Touché. Time to work the memory charm.

  The woman in the red dress gasped. “Look, she’s wearing gloves,” she exclaimed, po
inting at my hands, and I stilled. “She’s got gloves! Gloves!” she shrilled. “It’s anthrax! She’s going to use it on us!”

  Ah. Hell.

  “You’re not going to get away with this. You killed her!” cried the woman in the red dress, just as her friend pulled out her cell phone, pointed it at me and started taking pictures. I ducked my head just as her date pulled out his cell phone and dialed three numbers.

  Yup. That was my cue to leave.

  I turned and ran.

  They didn’t follow. Screw the memory charm. It was too late for that. And I wasn’t about to stick around and wait for the cops. That wouldn’t go so well—for the cops.

  The last thing I needed was the attention of the New York City cops on my case, especially when I had a rogue, ancient vampire skilled with magic loose in the city.

  Yeah, this had turned out to be a hell of a night.

  But something inside me said this was just the beginning.

  2

  I stood before the bathroom mirror, naked, my eyes traveling down my arms where most of the scars were. The skin was marred in various shades of beige and red and pink. My palms were the worst—thick with scar tissue.

  I let out a sigh and stuck my fingers in the Gypsy No. 5 Skin So Soft Healing Balm and scooped out a large gob.

  “Please work.” I rubbed the green-colored ointment on my arms and then my hands. My nose wrinkled at the smell of mushrooms, earth, and vinegar. If it had smelled like roses, I would have had my doubts. The worse it smelled, the better the ointment. That’s when you knew it was going to work. Or so I hoped.

  First, my skin pricked and tingled where I’d administered the ointment, and then it cooled like I was applying Vicks VapoRub. Ah-ha. It is working.

  I looked at myself in the mirror again, my pulse throbbing. Nothing. Well, nothing yet. The bottle said to expect results in two to three days. I had to give it time. My Aunt Evanora, the wisest and most powerful dark witch in the entire North American continent, told me the ointment wouldn’t work. She’d said my scars were too deep, too thick, that the damage done to the tissue was irreversible. Nothing would smooth out my skin ever again.