Brighid's Mark

Dedication

For New Orleans—without your magic I might not have one of the best engagement stories ever. May you continue to survive all the gods throw at you, with all your
joie de vive
on magnificent display.

And for my husband, who asked me to marry him on Halloween night on Bourbon Street.

Chapter One

A dozen discs of light danced over the deteriorating steel boxes of the train yard, while too-loud voices called out in a grim game of Marco Polo. Fog blanketed the chill Midwestern air, while moonlight illuminated peeling paint here, the rusted metal gleam of track there. This is where trains came to die.

And one demon, if Chase Cole had anything to say about it.

A leviathan shriek echoed through the ghost town alleyways of
 
abandoned machines from a long lost industrial age. The lights converged on a single boxcar, immediately blossomed out again as the car rocked and swayed on its remaining wheels. Shots rang out like firecrackers.

Chase hauled his Texan ass over the top of the bucking train car and fired directly into the dark pit of the open roof hatch. He nearly toppled off again as the demon lifted its makeshift sanctuary from the ground in distress.

A tentacle whipped out, mottled green and purple, covered in sucker talons seeping poison. Chase landed on his back as it caught him round the leg, dragging him forward.

He braced his free foot against the hatch. The tentacle pulsed in a boa constrictor grip as it pulled harder. Chase aimed his shotgun at the point where the demon’s limb curled down into the belly of the car, and blasted the appendage from its soon-to-be corpse. He rolled out of the way and into the waiting arms of his fellow hunters, while others climbed onto the roof and emptied their weapons into the shuddering car in a fit of righteous cowboy vengeance. Chase wouldn’t be surprised if the monster’s banshee shriek could be heard echoing all the way to Lake Michigan.

Callie Trevelyan finished wiping demon blood from her sword and unfolded her long limbs, stretching weary muscles. The death cry reached her as she sheathed her sword, and she debated whether she should investigate. Chase would not thank her for interfering in his fun. Still, she’d better check on the cowboy rabble, just to make sure the job was done properly.

This time they’d better remember the head. It was late, and she was tired, bruised, and not in the mood to chase half a dozen gleeful, chittering Kenyshin spawn through Chicago’s maze of sewer tunnels. Again.

She massaged the back of her neck and shoulders, willing the tension to drain as she looked over what she could see of the city’s skyline.
Her
city. She’d been born and raised here, more years ago than she cared to count. She’d lived and loved, lost and hurt—and even died once along the way. She’d fought her way through hordes of demons and a half dozen wars, and yet she always returned.

The Seven-Year War had been the worst. While the world shattered under the pressure of what no one was calling World War III, the Otherworld—angels and demons, creatures of myth and legend—had chosen sides and come out to play as only humanity’s greatest hopes and fears could. And so Callie and her sister Keepers of the Flame, champions of the mythic variety, had been called into active duty.

Another shrill scream tore midnight in two. There was enough triumph mixed with pain to drop Callie’s heart into her vitals.

She didn’t think. She ran.

      
The hunters parted to let her through. Chase lay sprawled on the ground, incoherent with the nightmare of pain and delusion tormenting body and mind. His eyes focused on her with visible effort. “Callie,” he rasped.

Callie swallowed. She slipped a military knife from her boot sheath and tore through his pant leg. A sucker talon protruded from the raging wound, the rent in Chase’s calf dripping thick rivulets of blood and poison.

She handed the knife to a nearby hunter, stifling a curse for Chase’s sake—it would do him no good to see her true concern. “You’ll have to cut it out. Preserve it if you can.”

“Bait?”

“Scrye. Kenyshin are hive demons—we’ll be able to find and trap them much easier than we did tonight.” Someone handed her water. She took a long draught and dumped the rest over Chase’s face to bring him around. “Look at me, Chase.” She swept moisture and damp hair from his death rictus expression.

Chase turned his head in the direction of her voice. “Don’t leave me.”

She forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But you know what comes next.” Behind her came the trickling of whiskey pouring over a blade, the flicker of a lighter igniting.

Warm light illuminated Chase’s long-lashed, bedroom-blue eyes. “Do it.”

Callie pressed her left hand over his galloping heart. After a long, tense moment, he stilled, gaze riveted to her as her steady breathing wove through his struggles for air.

They breathed as one, locked in an anticipatory tableau that stretched each of those moments to the breaking point. The atmosphere twanged and hummed around them like a tightened guitar string. She encountered his walls, secrets he kept even from her.

She exhaled. “Now.”

The hunter who wielded her knife sliced Chase’s leg open until the talon fell away in a spurt of hot blood and pus. Chase jerked once, as though waking from a falling dream, and stilled.

“Take a breath for me, deep as you can,” Callie urged, voice soothing despite her internal struggle with panic. “Exhale until you can feel it in your toes. That’s it.”

Green bile continued to leak from the open wound, followed by a sluggish flow of fresh blood. Finally it ran clean. Callie dumped the rest of the whiskey over the wound and bandaged him up from a first aid kit, at which point he passed out.

Callie sat back on her heels, head spinning. Healing always took a lot out of her, and she’d given it rather more than was strictly necessary this time.

She stood with a weary sigh and adjusted the set of the baldric over her shoulder. “Well, boys. What have we learned today?”

A general scuffling of feet ensued, followed by some casual stargazing. Out of character for seasoned hunters, but not unexpected, considering her reputation. “Remember the head,” someone mumbled.

“
When
do we get the head?” she prompted, schoolteacher before recalcitrant class.

Shuffle, kick, shuffle. Gaze. “Right away.”

“And we make certain it’s
completely
decapitated before congratulating ourselves on a job well done, don’t we?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right, then. Get Chase into the van. We need to get him to the sanctuary.” She turned away. “And make sure you make a thorough job of the cleanup.”

After they dispersed to do her bidding, Callie pulled her phone from the pocket of her leather jacket and hit the redial button. Her call went right to voice mail, just as it had for over a week. Donal’s jovial Irish tones invited the caller to leave a message, unless, of course, he owed them money.

One friend on the seriously injured list. The other MIA—who knew where.

She turned to watch Chase’s prone form being lifted into the back of his beaten blue van. When he was settled beneath a scratchy Army blanket, she moved around to take the driver’s seat. As she passed the back bumper, she kicked a heavy object out of her path with her steel-toed boot. Upon examination, the object was a rock: oddly shaped, gray and porous.

She crouched to pick it up. Removing a leather glove with her teeth left a slight tang on her tongue. Despite the rock’s sponge-like appearance, it was weighty and tingled. As though it carried the burden of secrets.

Obsidian. Dead obsidian, all the color and texture of living stone drained.

In all her time hunting, she’d never heard of live obsidian being used to vanquish a demon, only in the summoning of one. And Kenyshin were hatched, not summoned.

Callie’s hand clenched around the dry, dead hunk in her palm. This was not a good sign.

Liam walked through a soundless landscape, grave dirt rough on his bare feet. The sky was just blue enough not to be black—to illuminate the buildings on either side, the triple spires of the cathedral ahead. He could make out the clock, marking time in reverse. The silhouette of a tree rustled in an unfelt breeze.

Suddenly fire ignited the landscape, tracing invisible lines in flames five feet high. The tree caught, transformed into a living torch. The half shadow of a woman gripped the silky shine of a moonlit sword. A raven flew overhead, shattering the silence. Liam tracked the bird’s progress to the tree, where it glared ancient malevolence at him.

Lines of fire met in the center of the dreamscape, where a fountain of flame grew five times in height. It took shape, churning and pulsating with life. The firestorm shrank to fine, twisting veins. Darkness coalesced, gained texture. Horns twisted against the indigo sky, and super nova eyes exploded with predatory triumph.

The shadowed figure was in front of him now, smiling at him over her shoulder. Her features changed color and shape so rapidly Liam found it impossible to track. She was all women, all at once. And then she became a medium-sized woman, blonde with very blue eyes, and familiar.

“Eva?” Liam reached for her.

And then she was gone.

Liam bolted awake, the Marks crawling over his left arm and across his chest screaming with pain of such intensity his head swam. His bare feet hit the floor as he hunched over, growling between clenched teeth. He forced himself to keep breathing.

Finally, the pain receded to an insidious dull throb—stage by reluctant stage, moment by grudging moment. When a full minute passed without much more than an understated ache, Liam uncurled his spine and exhaled.

Just when his heart resumed normal operations, a raucous shriek from outside stopped it again. He lurched to the window and yanked the white sheer curtains aside. From his third story live-in suite, he had a clear view of the courtyard below.

The fountain had stopped sometime before the Seven-Year War, its stone cracked and pitted and draped in moss, still water a murky black-green. The occasional sluggish burble provided the only sign of life within its depths. The courtyard garden hadn’t been tended in about as much time. He kept meaning to get to it.

The shadow of an overlarge bird darted across his vision and landed on the top tier of the fountain in a violent flutter of wings. A raven the size of a small hawk and with approximately the same amount of predatory intent glared at him. Liam got the impression he was being accused of something, though he wasn’t certain what. But he did recognize a summons when he saw one.

He muttered a curse. Two centuries in this city, and the so-called Big Easy only seemed to get more complicated as the decades passed. Despite popular belief, the vast pantheon of New Orleans’s guardian spirits weren’t deities themselves, but intermediaries between humanity and a distant Creator god who must be served.
 

The Loa were also a bickering, rambunctious, often drunken rabble who amused themselves with intricate Otherworld intrigues they dragged their followers into like unsuspecting guests to a family reunion. A reunion that wasn’t considered a party until half the goers had fallen unconscious and the cops were called to collect the walking wounded. When the Creator god was away, the Loa will play.

Liam wasn’t a follower. He’d been press-ganged via a Crossroads bargain wrought of desperation and illegal Irish whiskey half the world and an aeon away. And for some inexplicable reason no one saw fit to give him a straight answer to, the spirits had brought him to New Orleans, soon after which the prophetic dreams had started.

Such dreams weren’t so much unfamiliar for Liam as they were infrequent. When they did come, however, they always meant one unassailable fact: trouble, in a big, not-so-easy way.

He let the curtain fall back into place. There was only one course of action when the dreams came, and the Loa called.

Get cleaned up. Get dressed. Find the Baron.
 

Saturday’s
was like no other jazz club in the city, and that was saying something. Built smack on top of a gate between worlds, New Orleans and the realm of the Loa lay on one side—on the other, nothing quite so pleasant.