SORCERER’S CREED BOOKS 1-3
N. P. Martin
MARTIN PUBLICATIONS
Contents
BLOOD SACRIFICE (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK ONE)
Rights
The Sorcerer’s Creed Series
1. Spell Blasted
2. Badass
3. Specter
4. Forgotten
5. A Friendly Call
6. A Welcome Distraction
7. Pyromancer
8. A Visitor
9. Bad News
10. Do Or Die
11. The Mccreedy Family Massacre
12. Quick Drink
13. Darkness Calling
14. Playing With Fire
15. The Library Of Dark Magick
16. Black Magick
17. The Morgue
18. John Doe
19. The Summoning
20. Baal
21. Fight
22. Sanaka's Sanctum
23. Bitchcraft
24. Apparition
25. Mr. Black
26. Synchronized Swimming
27. Partners
28. Gearing Up
29. The Leap
30. The Devil’s Playground
31. Pit Bulls On Steroids
32. A Soul With Itchy Feet
33. Frank And John
34. Soul Ripper
35. Ghoul Status
36. Return Of The Demon
37. Mindfuck
38. The Roundhouse
39. Green Fire
40. Unleash The Magick
41. Revelations
42. Growing Up
43. Fatherly Love
44. Scorpion
45. Bad Coffee Blues
46. Standing Tall
47. Abandon All Hope
48. Dealing With The Devil
49. Final Goodbye
50. The Lair Of Mr. Black
51. Grasping Hands
52. Dark Magick Rising
53. Suffering Defeat
54. Sometimes They Come Back
55. Consumed
56. Light Against Dark
57. Resurrection
58. Aftermath
59. Happy Hour
60. No Rest For The Wicked
BLOOD DEBT (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK TWO)
Rights
1. Family Reunion
2. Hanging Around
3. Forsyth
4. The Red Hill Gang
5. A Dark Briefing
6. Singed Eyebrows
7. Drunken Bastards
8. Division
9. Dark Passenger
10. Warded
11. Into The Woods
12. Witch's Valley
13. Eden Obscured
14. Bewitched
15. The Making Of A Witch
16. Under The Gun
17. Where The Owl Gets It
18. If You Go Into The Woods Today
19. The Promise
20. Free Falling
21. Symptoms Of The Universe
22. Barney's Memories
23. A Dapper Little Man
24. Portal Of Doom
25. The Outer Reaches
26. Tea For Three
27. No Rest For The Wicked
28. On The Hunt
29. Gateway
30. The Land Of Baal
31. Face Off
32. Vortex
33. Somewhat Fucked
34. Back To Earth
35. Aftermath
36. Sci-Cane
BLOOD CULT (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK 3)
1. Welcome To Division Hq
2. Taking The Strain
3. Anarchy In The Usa
4. Creed And The Big Bad Wolf
5. Great Balls Of Fire
6. Daywalker
7. Killing Time
8. Invitation To Madness
9. First Contact
10. Messiah
11. Gordon Grayson
12. Mission Objectives
13. Sting Part One
14. Sting Part Two
15. Poking The Sleeping Tiger
16. Party Time In The Grayson Dimension
17. Jordan's Story
18. The Universe And Other Things
19. Grayson And The Dark Codex: A Love Story
20. Walking Away
21. Wtf!
22. Regroup
23. City Gone Mad
24. Tea For Two
25. Athelstan
26. At The Gate
27. Grayson Manor Revisited
28. Face Off
29. The Power And The Glory
30. A New Dawn
CRIMSON CROW
Rights
1. A Stranger Calls
2. The Vamp In White
3. Vampire's Kiss
4. The Eyes Have It
5. Like A Virgin
6. Black Is The Color
7. Knock Knock
8. Franklyn
9. First Contact
10. Jasper The Great
11. Babylon Calling
12. Photograph
13. An Unfriendly Visit
14. Point Of No Return
15. Tooth And Nail
16. Travel Arrangements
17. Farewells
18. Nocturnus
19. Dealing With The Devil
20. Enter The Chaosphere
21. Sunshine Girl
22. Slainte
23. Blood Sacrifice Sample Chapter
Thanks For Reading
The Watchers Series
Books By N. P. Martin
About The Author
BLOOD SACRIFICE (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK ONE)
AN URBAN FANTASY NOVEL
Copyright © 2017 by N.P. Martin
All rights reserved.
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 persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Neal Martin
Visit my website at www.npmartin.com
The Sorcerer’s Creed Series
Be sure to sign up for my mailing list to get the prequel novella to this series, Crimson Crow, completely free. This book is unreleased and available only to subscribers. And as an added bonus, you will also receive the first two books in my other urban fantasy series, Watchers:
http://www.npmartin.com/creed-mailing-list/
1
Spell Blasted
THE FORCE OF the magickal energy that crackled through the air was so powerful I got slammed back against a dirty brick wall as if I had just been hit in the chest by the Devil's own fist. The spell blew through my every defense. I might as well have been a goddamn Sleepwalker with no protection at all.
What am I even doing here? Where am I?
The faint smell of decayed flesh mixed with sulfur hung thick in the air, signifying that black magick had just been used, and that was never good. It was like turning up at a children's party to find Beelzebub tying balloon animals with a shit-eating grin on his face. Nothing good could come from that. Same with black magick. Bad shit always followed.
I sat dazed on the floor, blinking around me for a moment, my mind fuzzy as if I had just woken up from a dream. It appeared I was inside an abandoned office space, the expansive rectangular room lined with grimy, broken windows that let cold air into the place and which went some way towards drawing me out of the daze I was still in. It was night time, so darkness coated the room, the only real light coming from the moon outside as it beamed its pale silvery light through the smashed skylights in the ceiling.
Confused and more than a lit
tle uneasy, I struggled back to my feet and blindly reached for the pistol inside my dark green trench coat, frowning when I realized the gun wasn’t there. Then I remembered it had gone flying out of my hand when the spell had hit. Looking around for a moment, I soon located the pistol lying on the floor several feet away, and I lurched over and grabbed it, slightly more secure now that the gun’s reassuring weight was back in my hand.
There were disturbing holes in my memory. I vaguely recalled confronting someone after having tracked them to where I was.
But who?
Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear image. The person was no more than a shadow figure in my mind. It could have been anybody. I didn’t even have a clue why I was tracking the mysterious person in the first place. Obviously, they had done something to get on my radar. The question was what, though?
The answer came a few seconds later when my eyes lit upon the dark shape in the middle of the room, and a deep sense of dread filled me straight away. A dread that was both familiar and sickening at the same time. Swallowing, I stared hard at the shape lying prone in the gloom. Then, over the sharp scent of rats piss and pigeon shit, a different smell hit my nostrils. The heavy, festering stench of blood.
When I gingerly crossed to the center of the room, my worst fears were confirmed when I saw that it was a dead body lying on the floor. A young woman, throat slit, symbols carved into the flesh of her naked body which lay spreadeagled, her wrists and ankles tied with rope to four large, rusty nails that were driven into the concrete floor. I shook my head as I considered the force required to drive a long metal spike into concrete. They weren't driven home with a hammer, that was for damn sure, unless the hammer was pure magick.
A circle was painted around the girl's body also. In her own dark blood it looked like. Along the circumference of the circle there were symbols, drawn by a finger dipped in blood that was quick and precise in its movements as if the person it belonged to had drawn the same symbols many times before. A fact that unnerved me almost as much as the body by my feet.
I breathed out slowly as I reluctantly took in the callous butchery on display. The dead woman looked to be in her early thirties, though it was difficult to tell because both her eyes were missing. Cut out of their sockets with a knife it seemed like, the same knife used to cut her throat. I shook my head as I looked around for a second, trying to see where the dead woman’s eyeballs might be, but I couldn’t see them, which meant the killer probably took them with him. Sick bastard.
The woman also looked underweight for her size. She was around the same height as me at six feet tall, but there was very little meat on her bones as if she rarely ate any food. The needle marks on her feet and the bruises around her thighs told me why, as did the leather mini skirt and bloody white boob tube discarded on the floor not far from her body. The woman was clearly a prostitute, and a drug addict to boot. A convenient, easy victim for whoever had killed her.
And if the symbols carved into her pale flesh were anything to go by, it would seem the girl wasn't so much murdered as ritually sacrificed. I would have to look the symbols up later when I got back to my Sanctum, but at a guess, I would have said the girl was an offering to one of the Dimension Lords, though I had no clue which one (there were many). The symbols themselves were not only complex, but they were also carved with surgical precision. The clarity of the symbols against the girl's pale flesh made it possible for me to make out certain ones that I recognized as being signifiers to alternate dimensions. Though again, I didn't know which dimension was being referred to. Glyphs such as the ones I was looking at were always uniquely different in some way. No two people drew Glyphs in the same way, each person adding their personality into them, which could often make it hard to work out the precise meaning of certain ones. The intuitive feelings I got getting from those Glyphs however, were enough to make me believe that each one resonated only evil intent.
Crouching down to look at the Glyphs more closely, I took out my phone and used it to take pictures of them all so I could compare them later to the symbols in the reference books I kept at the Sanctum, not mention my old case files. It was clear, though, that I had been onto whoever did that. And if I had to guess, I would have said the girl wasn't the first person to be murdered in a similar fashion by the killer. Not by a long stretch, given the precision and clear competency of the killer, whoever they were.
“Son a bitch,” I said, annoyed now that I couldn’t recall any details about the case I had so obviously been working on. It was no coincidence that I had ended up where I was, a place that reeked of black magick, and murder that had occult written all over it (literally, in the victim’s case). I had been on the hunt and I had gotten close to the killer, which was the likeliest reason for the dark magick deployed against me.
Whoever the killer was, they wielded profoundly powerful magick (magick with a “k” that is…real magick). A spell that managed to wipe all my memories of the person in question wouldn't have been an easy spell to cast, or even come by for that matter. The killer was also a Sorcerer of some kind, of that that there was no doubt. And given the depth of power to their magick, it also felt to me like they channeled power from some other source, such as whatever Dimension Lord they were sacrificing innocent girls to.
Whatever the case, the killer’s spell had worked. Getting back the memories they had stolen from me wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s if I could get them back at all, which depressingly, I feared might just be the case.
Shaking my head at the grimness of the situation, I was about to stand up so I could get some full-body shots of the victim when a voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
2
Badass
I JUMPED AT the sound of the deep but feminine voice coming from behind me, inhaling sharply before freezing on the spot. The reason I froze wasn't so much out of fear or fright as it was out of sudden recognition. The voice projected an effortless authority and contained a husky quality that would have been sexy if the woman’s blatant aggression wasn’t so overpowering.
I stood up slowly and turned around, assuming the person would recognize me, but a split second later, the concrete floor exploded out around my feet as a massive booming noise filled the whole room. Chips of concrete blew up and stung my face, making me feel more like a goddamn grenade had been thrown rather than a bullet fired. “Jesus!” I shouted as I jumped back in shock, my ears ringing from the gunshot. “What the fuck are you doing? It’s me, for Christ’s sake!”
“Drop that pistol or the next one goes in your chest.”
“What?” What was she playing at? Didn’t she know who I was? “Leona, it’s me. Its Creed.”
Leona Lawson cut a dark, imposing figure as she stepped out of the shadows. She was tall and athletically lean, her black hair short and brushed over to one side of her forehead. I couldn’t see her eyes very well in the gloom, but I knew they would be like focused blue chips of ice set into that delectable porcelain skin of hers. She was dressed as she usually was, in tight fitting black leather trousers and a top that clung to the mounds of her perfectly sized breasts. A long, black leather coat that hung down almost level with the top of her heavy combat boots made her look streamlined and dominant, which I already knew her to be in every way.
The hugely intimidating gun she held looked almost too big for her hand, but she didn't struggle even slightly with the guns heft and looked entirely comfortable holding it. The gun was one of two custom Berettas with laser sights that she carried in leg holsters, each gun fully loaded with 9mm hollow-point rounds that would put an ugly hole in just about anything, including my chest if she so desired. “I said drop the pistol.”