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
Time Passes
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Up next …
About the Author
Also by Richard Amos
Copyright © 2019 Richard Amos
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover by Vanessa Garkova
Created with Vellum
One
Jake
The bastard with the rattlesnake tail hanging out of his arse darted around the corner, throwing back a sharp use of the c-word at me.
Charming.
I wasn’t really one to say anything about bad language—I had one of the worst potty mouths in existence. Instead, I gripped my spear tight and hurried after the wanker. The white smoke from my hands curled across the wooden handle, pooling at the golden pointy bits of my double-ended weapon.
“Sonny! Give it up, mate!”
No. He’d never give it up, the stupid knob head. His running steps just got faster.
Stupid prick.
With a groan, I gave chase down the street. I wasn’t gonna stab him with my weapon unless he gave me a reason to. It was more likely I’d clonk him over the head with it—the flat ends of my blades were handy for head cracking.
Every time I touched my weapon, it smoked. I put it down to the effect of residual power in my blood from my time as a weapon of the goddess Hecate—back when I lived in Coldharbour under a cloud of mystery and terror.
In those days, weapons would fly away from me if I tried to touch them, because the only true weapon had been my sparky hands. That rule still applied now, with the only exception being my pointy friend.
We were the perfect match.
I ran down an alleyway, holding my breath against the stench of piss and rotten food. At least it was a freezing cold December night. If it were summer and balmy then, well, gross. The heat always made nasty shit worse. Why did it always have to be these places the bad guys ran down? I mean, not only did I have the stink to contend with but also the rubbish spilling out of the bins to leap over and avoid, the shadowy doorways hiding shit from me.
Sonny the Snake, as he was known, wasn’t really a traditional bad guy—more a pain in the arse who ruined many a nice evening with his stupid thieving ways. There were much more serpentine people than him, even though he was part man, part snake—a creature made from exposure to pods.
Pods were blobs of magic scattered across the planet. They popped up randomly all year round, either bringing something pleasant or something rotten if you got too close to the poxy things. They would either send you on a trip as if you’d taken LSD, or they’d transform your body. And they couldn’t be removed. No spell, no potion, no weapon could get rid of a pod. You just had to wait for it to piss off. There’d been a green one in my kitchen once, which had sat there for twenty-four hours.
Pod-born, like Sonny, were creatures made from pod exposure. Some were harmless, some were harmful, and others were somewhere in the middle. That was why civilians, by order of the government, went around armed with some sort of weapon to hand as protection.
It was the supernatural council’s fault, and their attempts to meddle with the public consciousness. When the whole truth about Coldharbour had been revealed four years ago, the supernatural world could no longer stay hidden. The council didn’t like that but ended up causing a myriad of problems in their failure to cover it up a year after the big reveal.
Idiots!
A small red pod was sitting in the doorway of a building I ran past, about the size of a coin. The smaller they were, the deadlier they could be. I couldn’t help but cringe every time I saw one. They reminded me of the days when I’d been an addict and all the shit that had brought to my life. Every single day, I was grateful for my sobriety, for no longer being a slave to my compulsions.
I stuck two fingers up at it, just ‘cos. Poxy thing.
Poxy Sonny more like it! I’d barely got a quarter of the way into my hot chocolate before I’d found myself out in the friggin’ cold, freezing my bollocks off because Sonny had sticky fingers.
Ugh.
I stopped at the end of the alley just short of another street. Which bloody way did he go?
Even though I still had to deal with the paranormal almost every day—which was a fucker on my family time—I was happy to not be the chosen one anymore, to not have the fate of a city and the world on my shoulders. Despite the craziness of the world I lived in, I loved my life now.
Hurried footsteps behind me.
“I was wondering when you’d catch up.”
Dean came up beside me. “Cheeky.”
I looked over to my super-hot boyfriend, his naturally brooding face giving me the warm and fuzzies. Didn’t matter that the air still stank of piss, and we had a thieving bastard to find—I could still enjoy the aesthetics of my man. His dark eyes, artfully swept-back hair, his gorgeous Asian features, the fully black outfit that made him look like a warrior of the night, the knuckle-dusters—he was the full package of basement-flooding yumminess.
My friend Naomi
