Magic - Chapter 51

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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The Firestarter led me through the woods south of Seattle. We were deep in the thicket with only the sounds of nature for company, and she wasn’t much of a talker. She insisted on walking, even though I could have portaled us anywhere on Earth in a matter of seconds. I hated hiking, especially when I didn’t know where I was going, but I went along with it because it was easier than finding another Firestarter. She was pushing it, though.

“It’s just up here,” she said after a long silence.

I reached the top of a hill and looked down into a chasm below us, full of black char and adorned with a pentagram in its center.

“This isn’t ominous at all,” I said, following the Firestarter to the bottom of the hill.

“Stand over there,” she said, pointing to the other side of the pentagram. It was made of rock and bone. “And hold out your hand.”

She reached behind a rock and pulled out a long, serrated black knife, runed up the hilt in a language spoken by demons and written in unholy texts.

“I know I said I wanted to go to Hell, but I don’t want to be sacrificed to do it.”

“What?” she said and then half-laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, don’t be stupid. I’m not going to sacrifice you. I’m just going to draw a little blood. You do bleed, don’t you?”

“I can,” I said. “I don’t like to.”

“I force all my clients to make a blood pact that they won’t harm me, and in turn, I won’t harm them. If either of us break that pact, the offending party burns up, soul and all. Do you agree?”

I knew all about blood magic. I had entered into these sort of pacts before and initiated my fair share of them. They were unbreakable, even between the most powerful of magic kind.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” she said, walking toward me with the knife. “Do you want to hurt me?”

 “So badly,” I replied. “But I won’t.”

“Swear it on my name and yours.” She was emphatic as she held my palm open. “By the fire of creation.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Aimee. Aimee Donovan.”

“Really?” I said, surprised. “That’s such a normal name.”

“I was normal once, before I was cursed with this. Now, swear it on my name and yours.”

“I swear I will not hurt you, Aimee Donovan, on my name, Oleander White…by the fire of creation.”

She cut my palm, and it bled onto the center of the pentagram. Each drop sizzled on its surface.

“Good,” she said.

“Where did you get that knife?” I asked.

“Funny story,” she said. “I swiped it from somebody that got it from you, actually. A decade ago.” She cut her palm. “I swear I will not hurt you, Oleander White, on my name, Aimee Donovan by the fire of creation.” Her blood sizzled on the rock. When it stopped, she reached down and placed her hand on the center of the pentagram. “Step back.” She lit the rock on fire, and the pentagram burned brightly for several seconds, then extinguished abruptly.

“It’s done,” Aimee said. “Our pact is sealed.”

“Out of curiosity, can I watch somebody else injure you without doing anything, or is this a ‘you can never be harmed when you’re around me type of situation’?”

“You can never intentionally cause me harm or allow harm to befall me, and I cannot let any harm knowingly befall you, either. I’m sure you know that magic has its own rules about what is intentional or not. I would err on the side of caution.”

“Always good advice.”

It took us another hour to get back to the edge of the woods and to Lily. I had insisted on driving if Aimee was going to force me to join her on a weird journey through the woods. She reluctantly agreed. We weren’t five minutes into our return trip before I noticed a black sedan behind us.

There weren’t many cars between where we had stopped and the highway. This particular one followed us back to the 5 North and changed lanes whenever we did once we got there. I started making jerkier motions with Lily, trying to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, but the car kept close behind, no matter what moves I made.

“What are you doing?” Aimee said, grabbing her stomach. “I get motion sickness.”

“We’re being followed,” I said, spinning the wheel toward the exit coming up on our right, cutting across three lanes in the process. When we turned off the highway, I watched the sedan swerving through the streets as I made it further into the depths of the city.

“What is going on?” I asked. “Are you setting me up?”

“Please,” she replied. “If I was trying to kill you, wouldn’t I have done it already? I mean, you literally let me cut you and burn the ground around you. How much harder do you think I would have to work to make it fatal?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s too much coincidence.”

“Speak. Plain. English.” Aimee said.

“We’re being followed, or at least I’m being followed, and the only thing I’ve done today is meet with you, so—”  

“Maybe you have a tag,” she said.

“Never. I’m runed up the ass, and so is Lily.”

“Then maybe you’re just low-jacked. Ever think about that?” I hadn’t. I never thought of non-magical ways to hurt me. “You magical creatures are almost always taken down by some piece of normie tech.”

I slid into a parking lot and jumped out of the car. Sure enough, when I dropped to the ground, I found a little tracker on my undercarriage. “Well, I’ll be. Look at that.”

It was a simple black box with a red blinking light. I pulled it off of Lily, smashed it on the ground and crushed it with my boot. Once I was done, I heard a helicopter overhead. It was heading right toward us.

“Hang on,” I shouted as I jumped back into the car and sped out of the lot. “Let’s see what Phil’s upgrades can do.”

I flipped open the button on the gearshift and pressed the red button. A second later, Lily began to overclock her engine and grunt as she gained speed. I swerved around the other cars on the road.

“It’s still following us!” Aimee shouted.

I was far less worried about the helicopter than the blockade of black sedans in front of me.

 “Tonnau sioc!” I screamed, and the cars broke out of the way. We passed them with ease, but I didn’t see the hole they had dug into the street. When I finally skidded to a stop, it was too late, and Lily slid down the ramp into the hole.

A woman in a black suit leaned over the edge, looking at us. “Prope,” she said.

The hole covered over, leaving us in darkness. I felt us start to move, like we were on a conveyor belt.

“Get us out of here!” Aimee shouted.

“Porth i Ratinger Drug!” But a portal didn’t open. Instead, runes on the edges of the tunnel glowed green, absorbing my magic.

“Do something!”

“The portal’s not working!” I yelled.

“Can’t you demons snap your fingers and vanish to anywhere at will?”

Yes, it was something that demons could do, but I didn’t move like that. I couldn’t. When I was a teenager, I’d almost gotten lost in the abyss when I lost concentration for a second—the dark, inky blackness of nothingness that existed between the snap of your finger and arriving at your location. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t…I—couldn’t—

“Screw this!” Aimee said, fire glowing in her eyes.

“Wait!” I said. “You don’t know what’s above us right now or what will happen if you collapse this tunnel.”

“So what, we’re just supposed to let this happen?”

“For the moment, it would seem so,” I replied, keeping my voice even. “And then, when they let us out, we rain down hellfire on them.”

“I like that last part, at least,” she growled. “Fine. We’ll do it your way, but if I get arrested, I’m gonna be so pissed.”

I smiled. “I don’t think it’s that kind of abduction. It feels like they want something from us. If that’s true, we listen, figure out how to double-cross them, and then we kick their asses.”

“Yeah, yeah. I like that plan.”

There was nothing left to do except let ourselves be pulled through the darkness into the great unknown.

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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.