Mages and Masquerades: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Magic Blood: The Warlock Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  Synopsis

  Get a FREE, EXCLSUVE Short Story

  Also by Katerina Martinez

  Also by Tansey Morgan

  Follow the Authors!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Get a FREE, EXCLSUVE Short Story

  Follow the Authors!

  About the Authors

  Also by Katerina Martinez

  Also by Tansey Morgan

  Copyright

  MAGES AND MASQUERADES

  Magic Blood: The Warlock

  Book Two

  By Katerina Martinez

  and

  Tansey Morgan

  Time is ticking, lives hang in the balance.

  I traded in my life of magic and demon hunting for a quiet one a long time ago. In the space of a couple of nights, I've become homeless, jobless, and I'm now hiding from people who want to open a back door to Hell itself. Things could be worse; I could be alone, too, instead I'm rooming up with the sexy mage, Levi, and that's been... interesting. Then one night I get a phone call from out of nowhere, and suddenly we have a lead on the book we've been looking for; or an invitation into a trap.

  Never one to take my own best advice, I spring into the lead head-on and go where it takes me, because the fate of London and the whole of the British Isles is at stake if I don't find that book. Good thing I used to be the best demon hunter in the entire United States; I'm gonna need every ounce of training if I'm going to succeed.

  Teaming up with Tansey Morgan, author of the hit series "The Last Serpent", Katerina Martinez is back doing what she does best; writing gripping, action-packed urban fantasy you won't want to put down. If you like snark, danger, action, and romance with a bit of bite, this book is for you!

  For a limited time only, you can grab a companion novella to this book by signing up to the authors’ reader group email lists. To opt in, click on the link below and go through the quick sign up process. There’s no spam, and you can unsubscribe at any time. The FREE, EXCLUSIVE short story will be available shortly after the book launches.

  SIGN UP NOW!

  Also by Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez

  Magic Blood Series

  The Warlock

  Book 1: Demons and Deception

  The Blood and Magick Series

  Book 1: Magick Reborn

  Book 2: Demon’s Kiss

  Book 3: Witch’s Wrath

  The Half-Lich Series

  THE HALF-LICH BOXED SET

  Book 1: Dark Siren

  Book 2: The Void Weaver

  Book 3: Night and Chaos

  The Amber Lee Series

  THE AMBER LEE BOXED SET

  Book 1: True Witch

  Book 2: Dark Witch

  Book 3: Shadow Witch

  Book 4: Red Witch

  Book 5: Devil’s Witch

  The Cursed and Damned Series

  Book 1: The Dead Wolves

  The Order of Prometheus Series

  Book 1: Smoke and Shadows

  Book 2: Cloak and Daggers

  Also by Tansey Morgan

  Magic Blood Series

  The Warlock

  Book 1: Demons and Deception

  The Last Serpent

  Serpent’s Touch, #1

  Serpent’s Desire, #2

  Serpent’s Kiss, #3

  Serpent’s Bite, #4

  Serpent’s Hold, #5

  Serpent’s Revenge, #6

  The Last Serpent, #7

  The Labyrinth Queen

  The Labyrinth Queen, #1

  The Harlequin’s Harem

  Twisted Fate, #1

  Harlequin Dreams, #2

  Twilight Warrior, #3

  You can also join Tansey’s Serpent Coven and Katerina’s Inner Circle of Mages on Facebook, where you’ll be able to interact with her directly, whenever you want! That’s also where she’ll be sharing early snippets, early cover reveals, and more contests!

  JOIN TANSEY’S GROUP

  JOIN KATERINA’S GROUP

  CHAPTER ONE

  I had ten seconds to reach the other side of the alley and take the corner, or a demon was going to kill someone. How did I know that? Because the someone was Ivy, and while she was a capable Shade, sometimes their magic just didn’t work to trick a demon’s infernal eyes. He had seen her, and when he saw her, he had known known she’d been watching him, tracking him, maybe he’d even known how long she’d been tailing him for. Now he was following her, and I knew, as soon as he got to her, he would kill her, slicing her skin open and pulling her insides out as easily as a human draws breath.

  Push, Hailey, push!

  My heart thrashed against my chest like an animal trying to pound its way out of my ribcage. My hands were pumping at my sides, my legs propelling me across the asphalt floor so fast I was almost flying, lungs burning from the massive distance I’d just had to cross. Three blocks in less than sixty seconds was no joke, especially when you had to avoid people and cars, and do your best to stave off the growing feeling in your belly that you’d miscalculated, and that Ivy’s body had already been pulled open at the hands of a vicious, angry demon.

  I counted down from eight in my head, giving me two seconds to spare as I ran, at the same time drawing the business end of my knife along the top of my forearm. The sensation was cold at first, as the razor-sharp edge of the blade split a perfect seam along my skin. I winced at the sensation, doing my best not to let it slow me down. I had done this a hundred times, but it never got any easier, or any more pleasant.

  A steadily blossoming flower of pain opened, and I had to fight the sickly feeling as blood began to spill from the wound, quickly coating my arm and dripping to my hands from the motion of running. But I could feel it now, magic, rushing through me and around me more freely, aided by the power of my sacrifice, of my self-inflicted injuries.

  I ran the side of the blade along my arm, making sure to smear as much of the blood as I could onto its face, and just as I rounded the corner, reaching the number three on my countdown, I saw them. The knife in my hand started to glow red as my psychic will, my invisible hand, enveloped it, then I released it into the sky until it moved above the tops of streetlights, where their radiance couldn’t touch it, where it disappeared, and where I could forget about it. At least for now.

  “Hey, asshole!” I yelled across the street.

  The demon stopped, and turned to look at me. He was a smooth looking cat in an Armani suit, Italian loafers, and was sporting a haircut that probably cost more than a month’s rent where I used to live. Demons were all like that; all expensive clothes, impeccable physiques, charming facades to hide the rot inside. Demons were so damn good-looking it was a distraction at the best of times, but Warlocks had a way to see through that.

  Even from this distance, from all the way across the other side of the street, I could sense his incredible, cruel, deadly intelligence. This was a creature that had more brainpower than five, ten, maybe even fifty people. Five thousand IQ points of calculating, cold logic backed up
by the ability to see into the near future, and a capacity for brutality that would make even the worst possible human being seem almost redeemable.

  Almost.

  Ivy was walking ahead of him, maybe ten feet of distance between them, her magical invisibility dropped; vulnerable was the word that came to mind.

  “What did you say to me?” he asked, pointing at his chest and glowering at me like I’d spat all over his suede shoes.

  “You need me to speak up, grandpa?”

  “Grandpa? Do I look old to you, you little bitch?”

  I could see Ivy continuing to walk, creating a bigger gap between them two of them, one I didn’t think he would be able to cross now, not without me having ample time to intercept.

  “What you look like is the most pretentious piece of shit I’ve ever come across.” A man in his forties, scarf tucked up to his mouth, hair greying at the edges, passed me in the street and gave me a what the hell look. “It’s cool, he’s a friend,” I said.

  Maybe he muttered something about Americans as he walked off, or maybe he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure. My heart was beating too fast, running away with me. “Now, you listen here,” the demon said, pointing at me and walking across the street. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are to think you can talk to me like that, but—”

  “—yeah, whatever, look; the woman you’re following is obviously not interested, so how about you pack it in and go somewhere else?”

  His cheeks were burning bright red, but don’t let that fool you, this thing in front of me wasn’t human. He did a good job at pretending to be; they could blink, breathe, talk, have sex, do all of the things humans could do. But their blood ran black and hot, almost too hot, like tar, and really, they had more in common with the psychopathic computer from that Stanley Kubrick movie than with people.

  He stopped advancing on me now, and instead spread his arms out wide, turned on his best charming face—I had to give them credit, they really could put on a good smolder—and approached me from a different angle this time. Instead of being annoyed that I’d basically made him look like a fool in front of people, they really hated that, now he wanted to make it look like he was an old friend coming in for a hug, something non-threatening, so I’d lower my guard.

  Fat chance of that.

  “You know what,” he said, changing his tune. “I’m sorry, how about you give me your name, then I’ll give you mine, and we can start over?”

  “That sounds like a great idea,” I said, “Then I can invite you back to my place and we can drink wine, maybe Netflix and chill?”

  “If you’re mocking me I’m going to be very disappointed.”

  All this time I had been backing away from him, luring him toward the alley I had just come sprinting out of. The last thing I wanted was for anything to happen on the sidewalk, in plain view of the public, scarce at this hour of the evening though it may have been. A few paces later, he came close enough for me to let the Sword of Damocles—ok, the dagger of Damocles—fall on him, pulling the dagger down from the night sky and sending it hurtling toward him.

  But the demon had seen the shift in my eyes as the thought formed in my mind, and that was all it needed to be able to glimpse an immediate future where a dagger spilled out of the night and into its brain-pan. There was no way he could have moved fast enough to avoid getting hit, but with an almost arrogantly quick tilting of his head to the side, he was spared instant death by a hair’s breadth.

  The dagger connected instead with his shoulder, impaling itself into his collarbone and snapping it in two from the force of the impact. The demon staggered, groaned, and fell against a one of the alley walls. A beat passed, then another, and no one screamed, no one cried out. At the edge of the alley, a woman walking alone had her phone pressed to her ear and was asking her boyfriend if he wanted her to bring food home tonight or if they were good. She didn’t even glance into the alley, not even to check for potential threats, not that she’d have seen much anyway, but she may have—if she had been paying attention—seen shifting shadows or heard the crack of bone and the subsequent grunt.

  I realized why in an instant. Ivy had run across the street and had come within range of us with her magic bubble of invisibility. It wasn’t true invisibility, we could still see each other, we cast reflections, shadows, but other people seemed to overlook us as if we weren’t actually standing there. Ivy was hiding, though, staying out of sight like I’d asked her to.

  “You bitch,” the demon snarled, his voice deep and hollow. The illusion was broken now, his charm dispelled, like a mask that had turned to ash. Now there was only rage, and imminent violence. “You bitch, you bitch, you bitch.”

  The last colorful word he threw at me carried enough supernatural oomph to crack the windows of the car he’d been leaning against, though not enough to shatter them. I could see him trying to pull the blade out, but failing. Maybe if I wasn’t using my invisible hand to keep the knife right where it was…

  I walked up to him. “I believe the word you’re looking for is Warlock,” I said, staring at him. “I hear you’ve been having your fill around these parts, I hear you’ve been looking for just the right woman to take home. What’s the plan? Possession? Infestation? Impregnation?”

  “Fuck you,” he spat.

  “How about you tell me where the Hell Hole you crawled out of is, and I’ll consider it? Leaving, that is, not letting you fuck me.”

  “Or, I could kill you right now and no one would hear you scream.”

  I shrugged. “Your call.”

  Outside, I was as still as stone, as calm as a mountain, but inside, my brain was working overtime, magic empowering my capacity to think, to process, to perceive. Not even magic could boost my mental capacities to match that of a demon’s, but there was something I could do to throw off his ability to see into the future, and that was calculate every possible thing I could do within the next five seconds, and in doing so create the threads to every single one of those futures.

  The demon’s eyes widened as, playing out in front of him, he saw hundreds of potential futures instead of the small handful most people were capable of imagining at the same time. The confusion made him question his next move, and the instant, mere seconds, of hesitation were all I needed to pull the knife free of his shoulder with my mind, and push it into the side of his skull.

  He couldn’t react fast enough. I watched his eyes bulge from their sockets before immediately turning black. His skin started greying in front of my eyes, the tissue around his lips peeling back to reveal sharpened, crooked, yellow teeth—the only similarity between a demon and a Brute. This was the demonic equivalent of a bloodhound, only they had less hair, the ability to walk on two legs, and claws so sharp they could shear through slabs of steel like wet paper.

  Super dangerous, but entirely predictable.

  “B… b…” the demon tried to say.

  “What’s that?” I asked, making a cup around my ear with my hand. “Speak up, grandpa.”

  “Bitch,” he whispered, before falling limp and collapsing to the floor with a hard thud.

  Ivy stepped out of the shadows, then, walking carefully, giving me and the corpse at my feet a wide enough berth. In the space between us, people continued to walk along the street as if there wasn’t a dead monster only a few feet away from them. Humans were easier to fool than demons. I spared only a second or two to catch my breath, heaving deeply, then I set my backpack down beside the corpse and started pulling things out—first, a tube, then a transparent with an unmarked label on it.

  “What’s that?” Ivy asked.

  “That is how you take down a demon,” I said.

  “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  “Oh, this? Glad you asked. Here, hold this.”

  Ivy didn’t have a chance to agree or disagree. I had inserted one end of the transparent, rubber tube in my hand into one of the bags and had shoved it into her chest. Ivy took it, and stared. “P
roperty of Saint John’s Medical Center?” she asked. “What is this?”

  “Blood pack.”

  “Why do we need a blood pack?”

  “Actually, we need eight. There’s more in the bag.”

  “What?” Why?”

  “If you haven’t already figured it out, then I’m not going to waste time explaining it to you.” I attached a long, thick needle to one end of the tube, then pulled the demon’s shirt open and stabbed it through his chest, directly into what passed for the thing’s heart.

  “Holy shit! What are you doing?”

  I twisted the nozzle on the syringe, allowing a small amount of air to enter the tube and start drawing blood—black and thick—out of the demon, and funnel it into the pack in Ivy’s hands. “I’m exsanguinating this demon.”

  “You’re… what? Why?”

  When I was happy enough with the flow of blood from corpse to bag, I turned my eyes on Ivy. “Look, I’m incredibly grateful that you all took me in. Don’t take my not keeping you in the loop about this as a sign of ungratefulness. But the fact is I’m homeless and jobless, and that is the kind of thing that’s gonna make a girl do desperate things.”

  “Desperate… but, isn’t this illegal?”

  “I highly doubt your country has laws against removing the blood from a demon’s body. For starters, your country doesn’t have enough demons in it to even necessitate a law, so tell me why this is illegal?”

  The bag in her hand was filling up, and she was starting to look uncomfortable. Ivy was a smart girl, young and pretty, with smooth, dark skin and corn-rows in her black hair. She looked like a punk, with her tattoos and her ripped denim jeans, but blood made her squeamish, and the blood in her hands was still hot.