Magic - Chapter 37

This is the second book in The Godsverse Chronicles, a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.

Ollie wasn't looking for trouble, but after she saved the Antichrist from being slaughtered, it came for her.

Ollie lived by one rule. Never get involved with anyone for any reason; humans, demons, fae folk, it didn't matter. They were all trouble. Keeping her distance was how she survived in the criminal underworld for so long.

Keep your head down and don't piss anyone off. That was her motto, especially since her clients all had access to powerful dark magic.

She thought she had a flawless system for keeping her nose clean, so how did she wind up in a stolen car, with a demon spawn in her back seat, driving away from her ex-lover and a gang of demons ready to skin her alive?

That's a good question.

And why did she agree to help save the demon's life so she didn't get sacrificed to open the gates of Hell?

An even better question.

She had one rule. One stupid rule. And tonight...it goes right down the toilet.

Now, the only way for Ollie to get her life back is to save the girl, prevent the Apocalypse, and track down the people who betrayed her.

They will pay. Oh yes, they will all pay.

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Panda Penny, Inc. didn’t have an address we could find in any public record, and they generally came to pick up their shipments themselves. However, the dock manager was able to pull up a recent shipment they’d delivered to a warehouse across the city.

I always liked driving in new towns. While I had been to Seattle several times, I never brought Lily with me, so I never drove. She purred so pretty taking the corners and exploring the streets.

It didn’t take long to cross Seattle. Compared to LA, just about every other city was tiny, and you could make it across any of them in less than half an hour. Once, in Ithaca, I walked across the whole city in fifteen minutes. You don’t understand scale on a map or a Thomas Guide. A city’s size only sunk in when you were there.

“This is a bad idea,” Dexter said, looking out on the dark warehouse from the dashboard. “I’ll wait here.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Where am I going to go?” he said. “If you lock the doors, how can I get out?” He held up his little claws. “Remember, I have no thumbs.”

I didn’t like it, but I agreed. I pressed the lock down on the passenger side, locked my door, and then shoved the key in my pocket.

A thick combination lock bound two ends of a bulky metal chain together at the metal sliding door to the warehouse. Luckily, it wasn’t runed, which meant I could open it without brute force. I didn’t want to break the lock and give anyone proof that I had been there.

“Clo agored.” I touched my wand to the lock, and it fell open for me. I placed the lock in my pocket and pulled open the sliding door. The light wasn’t any better inside the warehouse, but I was blessed with very good night vision, a gift from my supernatural parents. Boxes and pallets littered the ground of the warehouse, but most of them were empty. They must have moved the last shipment already, and the shelving in the warehouse was equally sparse.

I needed to find the office, specifically the manifest of what was included in their last shipments. After investigating for a couple of minutes, I found it up a set of rusty stairs. The office was sparsely decorated with only a couple of filing cabinets, a metal desk, and two uncomfortable-looking chairs. The desk was piled high with papers, in no discernable order, which I rummaged through. Most of them were invoices, either paid or owed. The descriptions didn’t mean anything to me. Still, I stuffed everything I found from the docks in the pocket of my trench coat. Maybe Phil could decode it. When I reached the bottom of the stack, I found a picture frame.

It was a picture of a blonde woman in a yellow sun dress, smiling, standing in front of the sliding door holding a sign that said, “First day.” It would almost be sweet if the object of the picture weren’t associated with an awful human. I shouldn’t say human. She could have easily been a monster groupie. There were plenty of those.

The sound of metal falling on the concrete below put me on alert. I pocketed the picture and walked to the door. The metal stairs were noisy, so I hopped down from the ledge to the first floor.

“I thought you would be here sooner,” I heard a voice say from behind me.

I recognized the voice as the Firestarter I’d met earlier—the one who had tried to blow me up when we attacked the demon compound. I turned around slowly. A light flickered in the woman’s left hand, revealing the bottom half of her face under a dark hoodie.

“I thought they were connected—your bombing and Benny’s death. Now I guess I don’t have to wonder anymore.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Her voice was raspy. “I’m a contract killer and a good one. I work both sides of the aisle, wherever the money takes me.”

“A mercenary, then.”

“We’re all just trying to get along in the world, using the skills God gave us. I was made in his image, and it would be a betrayal not to use those gifts to the best of my ability.” She pulled her right hand from behind her back to reveal Dexter hanging by his tail, writhing as he tried to escape from her clutches.

“Let him go!”

“We thought we got them all, you know? But then, we found out we had missed one, and well, I do hate to leave a job undone.”

“Chwyth iâ!” I shouted, pulling my wand out of my pocket and pointing it at her. An ice blast flew toward her head. I had to be careful not to hit Dexter. Elkman probably wouldn’t pay up for a dead rat.

The Firestarter didn’t even duck my blast. She simply raised her hand, and the ice melted before it could touch her. She retaliated with a blast of her own, one which sent the wall up in flame.

“You’ll burn it all down!” I screamed.

“That’s the point!” She fired again, and it hit a pallet behind me. Next, she hit a shelving unit lined with boxes. Before long, the whole of the warehouse was going up in flames. “I do so love the fire. A cleansing blaze can be so freeing, and then you rise from it, like a phoenix.”

“Pig dŵr!” I screamed. A waterspout shot out of my wand toward her, but the fire she controlled wasn’t just any fire. It was hellfire she carried—hellfire from the bowels of Hell, hotter and more powerful than anything on Earth.

“Nodwydd haearn!” Iron needles shot from my wand, a thousand of them, toward her. She dodged them and threw up a heat blast to protect against them, but just enough of the needles got through and embedded in her arm that she howled, dropping Dexter to the ground on impulse.

“Go!” I screamed. “Pig dŵr!”

My waterspout mixed with the heat of the warehouse to create a fog of steam around us, which blinded the Firestarter for a moment. Dexter sprinted toward me but then stopped, hesitating. Realizing he was free, he tore off in another direction.

“Stupid rat!” I hissed. I wanted to chase after him, but the fire was licking at me. Hellfire was one thing that petrified me with fear. It could burn down to your soul and evaporate it.  I sprinted out of the warehouse, hopped through Lily’s now-busted passenger side window, and peeled off, having lost Dexter to the night as he scampered away.

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This is the second book in The Godsverse Chronicles, a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.

Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.