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New Release: For the Love of Death

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Death has a crush on a mortal and there will be hell to pay…

Someone or something is killing musicians in a ritualistic fashion.  The FBI is investigating me because my cases dealing with magic and things that mortals aren’t meant to deal with don’t make for clean reports.  My old partner doesn’t trust me any more and my new partner isn’t read in on all the crazy magic stuff.

All that I could take, except my guardian angel is distracted by the killer’s latest target.  It gets worse than that, because that distraction might just be something more.  He’s falling for her, and if I can’t protect her from the killer, he might just Fall for real.  So I’ve got to buckle down and find the killer… for the Love of Death.

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For the Love of Death Snippet 2

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Find Snippet 1 here.

In scoping out the bar, I hadn’t even noticed a pair of drunks who’d been snoring in their drinks.  As Amanda went for the jar, the two of them popped up from their table, any pretense of drunken stupor gone, drawing submachine guns from inside their coats.

The bartender had already brought up a saiga shotgun, and I was drawing my pistol aimed at him, even as Sam snatched up a heavy beer mug and threw it hard.

The mug struck the end of the bartender’s shotgun and spun it around just as he squeezed the trigger.  The shotgun blast caught both of the fake-drunks: a heavy slug ripping through the back of the one, out his chest, and into the front of the other, both of them tumbling, opening fire in death with their sub-guns, the roar of gunfire deafening in the small space.

Sam’s hand came down on my shoulder and he spun me around, the world seeming to slow as he let me see a bit of how he perceived the world.

I could see the gunfire from the two dying men scythe into a group at a booth to my side, bullets from the dying men cutting through the three people there.  Any horror I might have felt was stilled by a combination of Sam’s perfect vision and the realization that all three in that booth were armed, weapons falling from their hands as they, too died.

My partner was still in the process of grabbing for the fence who still had the urn or vase or whatever it was clutched in his arms.  At the sound of gunfire, Amanda Ashburn transformed her grab into a dive to the floor.  At the far end of the bar, the two patrons who’d been trying to get the bartender’s attention had drawn weapons, too.  Seriously, is no one in here what they seem to be?

Under other circumstances, I would have gone for cover myself, but Sam’s hand held me in place like an iron bar.  I wasn’t sure if he was simply that confident of protecting me or if he just  wanted me to watch his handiwork.

The two pistoleers at the end of the bar were shooting at Amanda, the bartender, and maybe at me.  Sam didn’t even move, he just smirked at them as the bartender, still spinning from the impact, continued his spin as he fired off the rest of his magazine, one shot blasting the top off a beer tap, spraying both men in the face and throwing their aim off.

The bartender’s third shot caught one of the men in the throat and sent him backwards, while the fourth shot caught the other in the chest.  The bartender’s fifth shot went into a beer keg, blowing the top off and sending the beer tap rocketing back into his face, snapping his head back and dropping him back behind the bar, either dead or unconscious.

Eight people had died in as many seconds or less.  Under other circumstances, I would have been horrified.  With Sam, the only noteworthy thing was that all of these people had been armed and something of a threat to me and that he hadn’t leveled the whole place.

He let go of my shoulder, “You and your partner should leave, now, Ari.  Before things get too wild.”  He said it with a calm cheerful smile, as if he would quite like it for us to stay longer.

I moved.  Amanda had rolled to her feet, protectively clutching the bag of money to her chest with her right hand while she had her gun out with her left.  She didn’t flinch as I rushed over to her and the pair of us sprinted to the door.

On our way out, I shot one glance over to the corner, where the five I had noticed were still seated, watching us.  They’d made no hostile move, but the woman with the spider tattoo watched us leave with cold eyes.

Without knowing why, I could tell that she was sizing us up.  The violence and bloodshed that had just happened didn’t matter to her in the slightest.   The attackers who’d just died were as unimportant to this woman as the lives of insects.

Sam joined us, appearing at my side and falling into step with me as we got out into the street and headed for my car.  “Oh, Ari, the next few days are going to be so much fun…”

***

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For the Love of Death: Snippet 1

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Chapter 1

I knew I was in trouble when death walked into the bar with a big, shit-eating grin.

And boy do I mean that literally.  Samael, the Archangel of Death, stepped into the bar like he knew exactly what was going to happen and that he was going to love every second of it.  I’ll back up a bit by saying that Sam isn’t just the Archangel of Death, the sort-of designated sniper of the preternatural world, but he’s also on a special assignment as my guardian angel.

When I say that, most people would think I was crazy.  It gets worse, believe me, because my guardian’s role is to protect my mortal soul and my physical body, and he’s of the mindset that the best defense is a really good offense.  Most times that meant he settled for killing any humans or preternatural creatures that threatened me in imaginatively gruesome fashions.

But he would do that with a superior smirk, maybe even a jaunty grin.

I don’t know that I’d ever seen him this happy with himself.  Except, just maybe one time, in a distant, dusty mountain range when a couple hundred insurgents had been trying to kill me.

This is bad, this is really bad, I thought to myself.

The first thing I did was look over at my partner.  Special Investigator Amanda Ashburn was seated with the fence we were here in this particular crappy bar to meet.  Under other circumstances, we would have some kind of backup, both of us working for Colorado’s El Paso County Sherriff’s Department.

Unfortunately, we weren’t here on official business.  We had asked one of Amanda’s contacts in the Catholic Church to translate a list of names, they had asked us for a favor in return.  Something had been stolen from a church and a middleman had arranged to get it back.  The fence who had it was jumpy and the Church hadn’t wanted to set a precedent where they rewarded people for stealing from them, so they wanted us to acquire it and turn it over to them.

The fence in question had been looking for exits ever since Amanda sat down at the table with him.  His nervous darting glances had grown more frequent and I’d already had a sinking feeling as this had dragged on longer than a simple transaction should have taken.  Father Terrence, Amanda’s contact with the Church, had given us a substantial quantity of cash to buy the item back.  He hadn’t been too specific on what it was, just a small box, possibly locked, that was the prize.

I hadn’t dared ask what might have happened if someone had already opened the box and taken whatever was inside.  In just the past nine months, I’d seen all kinds of things that normal people would think were impossible.  There might be nothing in the box, the box might be what was valuable, or what was inside might be incredibly dangerous, melt-your-face-off like the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie.  At the time, it had seemed like a simple favor to go and pick it up.

Now I was wondering just how badly I’d screwed up by not asking for more information.

The supposed fence didn’t look like the typical scum-of-the-earth criminal type I would have imagined.  He was young, he wore trendy-looking sunglasses and designer jeans.  He had a gray hoodie up over his head and the sunglasses hid his eyes.  From this angle, I couldn’t get a good look at his face other than in profile in the shadows from his hoodie.

 I scoped out the room, not really certain what I was looking for, but knowing that there was something I’d missed.  The first thing I noticed was that the bartender’s entire demeanor was off.  Not only was he ignoring several patrons, but his attention was in the direction of my partner and the fence, rather than anywhere else.  No, not just there, but also on the far corner.

There was a group seated there, three men and two women.  They hadn’t stood out the first time I scoped out the room.  They looked similar enough to other bar patrons, except as I looked at them, their attention was focused anywhere and everywhere except on the table with my partner and the fence… or on me.  One was one her phone, another was reading a beer list.  The other three were ostensibly casually talking, but they all kept pausing as they talked, as if they weren’t keeping track of the conversation or weren’t focusing.

They were all remarkably fit and healthy for this sort of place, too.  Up north in the Springs, they could have passed for military, maybe, except for the fact that they all sported facial tattoos, which wasn’t allowed.  One of the women had some kind of spider web tattoo that ran up the side of her neck and onto her face with a remarkably life-like spider crawling up onto her cheek.

One of the men seemed to notice me looking at them and he said something in a low tone to the woman on her phone.  She didn’t look up, but I saw her say something in return.

Samael, the Archangel of Death, walked calmly over and sat down across from me, partially blocking my view.  “Ari.”

“Sam,” I tried to lean over to see around him, but in truly typical fashion, he managed to shift and block my view of the suspicious men and women without needing to move at all.  Sam outwardly looked rather plain.  He could have passed for my brother, if I wasn’t a family-less orphan, anyway.  To me he appeared tall, lean, with olive skin, blue eyes, and raven-black hair.  He looked to be dressed professionally, suit and tie, which should have stood out in a place like this.

I knew from experience that most people would be hard-pressed to realize there was someone at the table with me, and harder pressed to describe what that person looked like.  I also knew that his presence, like most of what he termed the preternatural, would distort electronic recording devices like security cameras and cell phones.

And, when he wanted to, his physical form could shift, despite his apparent size and stature, to be bigger or smaller or, in this case, to block my view of potential threats, just because it amused him.

“You seem happy,” I couldn’t help but begrudge him that.  The past few months had felt like everything and everyone were conspiring to irritate me.

“Some days I enjoy my job more than others,” Sam replied, just as I saw motion over by Amanda.  I looked over to see her set a black canvas duffle bag on the table and the fence reached down below the table and pulled something out of a similar black duffel bag.  His had a symbol of some kind on the side, it looked a bit like some kind of Japanese kanji, though I couldn’t see it well from where I sat.

It wasn’t a box.  At least, it wasn’t like any box I had ever seen.  It was some kind of big clay jar, about eighteen inches tall, maybe eight inches wide at the widest, and tapering at either end.  The fence set it on the table and it seemed to have far more weight than any object that size should, thumping on the table with a echoing thud that penetrated the far corners of the bar.

All conversation ceased.  The entire bar went still and I saw everyone’s attention had gone to the table.  The fence noticed and he scooped the jar back off the table and slid his chair back in a squeak that echoed through the still bar.  Amanda was looking at the jar in with confusion and curiosity.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I muttered.

Sam’s smile widened, “Sometimes, Ari, you can be remarkably perceptive.”  He stood up from his chair, shrugged his shoulders a bit in a motion akin to a boxer preparing for a bout, and his next words made my stomach sink, “And here… we… go…”

Amanda reached out to try and stop the fence and then all hell broke loose.

***

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Coming Soon: For the Love of Death

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Hey everyone. Sorry for the long delay in updates, but I’m happy to announce that my next book, For the Love of Death, is coming soon! It’s the third book of the Angels of Death series. I’ve got it done, edited, a cover, and all the rest, so check back for more in the next couple of weeks!

I’ve also got some updates for the website and general news and I’ll go into that next week. That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

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New Release: A Quiet Death

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A dead man just ran away from his own murder scene.

Six months ago, that would be someone else’s problem.

My name is Ari, and after hellspawned werewolves tried to rip my soul out, I made this sort of thing my problem.  Now I am working the case, well, me, my sharp-shooting partner, and my guardian angel, the Angel of Death.

It’s a case that involves human trafficking, corrupt politicians, necromancy, sorcery, seduction, and a deal with the Devil.  You know, same stuff, different day.

Unfortunately for me, that’s only the beginning, because something evil has escaped onto our world.  I’ve got to take it down, before things get out of hand.  Because if things start to go off track too much, then the thing looking over my shoulder protecting me might go off like a tactical nuke.

But that’s part of life, right?  Who wants to die a quiet death?

A Quiet Death is now available! https://amzn.to/3vvOqzT
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A QUiet Death: Snippet 2

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Here is the second snippet for A Quiet Death, sequel to In Death’s Shadow:

“What do you think?” I asked as we walked back to Amanda’s car.  “Zombie, wight, vampire?”

“I have no idea,” Amanda drained the last of her coffee.

“You don’t?” I asked in shock.

She opened her door and paused, looking over the roof of the car, “I’ve been doing this for all of three years.  Until a few months ago, the worst I worried about was a fire-lighting dwarf arsonist.  Bodies shouldn’t get up and walk away.  I would think your friend there would have something to do with it.”

We both looked over at Sam.  The literal angel of death.  Archangel, I reminded myself, his name was Samael, which translated to something like “Venom of God.”  “You’ve been quiet.”

“You haven’t asked me any questions,” Sam answered.

“If we did, what would you say?” I asked.

“Digging into the kind of thing that can animate a dead body is probably best left alone by your kind,” Sam told me.

“That’s what I figured you’d say,” I growled in reply.  For all that he was assigned to protect me, Samael sure didn’t seem to go out of his way to help.

“Me too,” Amanda noted, climbing into the car and waiting as I folded down into the passenger seat before she started it up.  “I figured he wouldn’t be all that much help.  That’s why I’ve got a little list of people to talk with.”

“Like Father Terrance?” I asked.  The catholic priest had served as a contact before.  From what I understood, he’d coordinated with the church’s militant anti-monster unit, the Peregrinatio Contra Umbram.  He had also helped Amanda back when she’d had her first encounter with the unnatural and helped her cope.

“I’ll talk to him later tonight,” she said.  “I was thinking of someone else, someone a little more on the gray side.”

“Like a CI?” I asked.  There were confidential informants who provided law enforcement all kinds of tips, but I didn’t know if that kind of thing existed for the supernatural.

“Eh, more like a deal broker, but he might be willing to give us some information,” Amanda answered.  She pulled out, slapping her coffee into one of the cup holders even as she accelerated out, throwing me back into the seat.

She had to slow down at the first major intersection as we missed the light.  Like most of the big intersections here in Colorado Springs, this one had four panhandlers, one on each corner.  A ragged-looking man, wearing an ill-fitting set of camouflage pants and a military dress coat had a sign about being a veteran in need.  Having served myself, I would have felt some sympathy if I’d believed him at all.  Nothing about the way he stood or moved looked military.

I gave him a baleful glare as he came up next to our car.  He still jingled his can outside the window, though, as if he didn’t care at all.

“Easy, there,” Amanda seemed to sense my anger.

“Guy there never served,” I growled.  “It pisses me off that he’s lying about military service to get people to feel sorry for him.”  In the minivan behind us, a harried-looking soccer mom brought down her window and passed him some bills.  The grifter gave her a gap-toothed smile and moved along to the next vehicle, shaking his cup.

“Nothing to do about it.  We could arrest him for panhandling, but in case you hadn’t noticed, we’d fill the jail up before lunchtime,” she noted.  “I can’t say I like the fake vets, either.  My older brother was Army and my little brother joined the Marines, after all, but what can we do?”

I didn’t know what to say to that.  There wasn’t anything we could do.  Colorado Springs had laws against panhandling, but there were so many homeless, many of them drug users, that the police would do nothing but arrest people if they did.  The Springs had a number of charitable shelters that helped to get people back on their feet, but the area also had homeless camps that had taken over several of the parks.  There were thousands of people, and this intersection was a pretty good demographic, about half or more claimed to be military veterans, half of them were drug addicts, and more than half were subject to mental illness.

It wasn’t just an eyesore, it had become a public health issue, with the Riverwalk area being contaminated with human waste and discarded drug needles.  That was bad enough, but I’d heard that the unclaimed bodies at the morgue had become a bigger issue, they had hundreds of bodies in storage, corpses from overdoses and the like that nobody wanted and nobody claimed.

The city had asked for more money to deal with that, but for now, they’d pulled in a couple of refrigerated trucks to deal with the excess.  They were parked out right behind the coroner’s office and every time I had to drive past it was a grim reminder.

Sam, of course, seemed to find it amusing.

The light changed and Amanda wove her way through traffic, driving with a single-minded focus and complete disregard for little things like physics and passenger comfort that left me white knuckled.  My guardian didn’t seem fazed, but that didn’t reassure me, either.  He liked living on the edge and he’d as much as admitted that he could, if he wanted, pull me right out of the car, right out of reality if my life was under real threat.

Amanda pulled us up out front of a new-age holistic medicine store in a strip mall, one of the ones with a pot dispensary on one side and a bong shop on the other, two doors down was a sign for a “gentleman’s club.”  “This is your CI?” I asked.  The sign over the shop read The Hidden Hand.

“Sometimes things are more than they appear,” Amanda answered.  “Follow me.”

She didn’t walk straight for the door.  Instead she walked over to the side, squeezing between a no-parking sign and a scraggly-looking dead tree, then walking back towards the door.  The behavior was odd enough that it left me standing there, wondering just what she was doing.

I knew enough not to argue, but I felt pretty silly as I did as she’d done.  “Why did we do that, wards or something?” I asked.  She’d warded her house before, but we hadn’t had to do anything special to get in.

“It’s a path,” Samael growled behind us, “I didn’t know she knew about the pathways.”

“I’m learning,” Amanda shot over her shoulder at him, even as she pushed the door open and stepped into the shop.

“What’s a pathway?” I asked quietly, but Sam didn’t answer.

Stepping into the shop, I felt as if the sounds of the outside world cut off immediately.  The lighting in the store seemed off as well.  Some kind of purple coating on the inside of the windows dimmed the outside sunlight to a dull purple glow and a few scattered lamps gave little pockets of light, leaving the shop with an otherworldly feel.

“This is not a good place for you to be,” Sam growled.

“Afraid we might learn something?” Amanda jeered at him.

“Nothing you can learn here would be good for you,” Sam told her in a deep voice.  I shot him a look and realized with shock that he’d shifted closer to his full form.  His eyes had gone jet black and the air around him seemed to shudder and crackle a bit.

“Ah, customers, welcome,” a friendly voice spoke.

I pulled my eyes away from Sam, and noticed the speaker right away.  He was a tall man, dressed in robes of Middle-Eastern origin.  He wore a keffiyeh, though I didn’t recognize the tribal pattern and the light made it difficult to differentiate the colors.  I suppose even in the light of day I wouldn’t have been surprised if I didn’t recognize the pattern, since most of my experience in that region of the world had been focused on small areas where I’d been deployed.

“Kasah, my partner and I are here to ask you a few questions,” Amanda answered.

He came forward, “Ah, Deputy Ashburn, I hadn’t recognized you in work clothes, normally you wear something more comfortable,” Kasah answered.  He had strange, golden-tinted irises, and his perceptive gaze swept over Amanda and then me.  To my shock, that gaze went to my guardian.  “Powerful one, are you here on business as well?”

Sam’s voice answered in that same deep tone that I could feel in my bones, “Peddler, I am here in my role as guardian.”

“Ah,” Kasah shot me a look, “he must be very important to have so powerful a guardian.”  He smiled at me, “Anything you want in the shop, on the house.”

“I’m good, thanks,” I told him.  I hadn’t really looked around the place and with how Sam’s back was up, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do so.

Kasah’s smile didn’t waver and he looked back at Amanda, “What can I do for you Special Investigator Ashburn?”

“How much does a human body go for in your circles, Kasah?” Amanda’s tone was accusatory.

Her CI blinked, a slow, almost serpent-like motion.  “My shop has no trade in slaves, Deputy.  That sort of thing might draw the wrong attention, no matter how willing the merchandise may be.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what he was talking about.  “No, we’re talking about a dead body,” I blurted, hoping to head off any forays into that kind of topic.

“A corpse?” Kasah smirked.  “There are values to different aspects, of course.”  He moved over to a row of shelves, upon which there were rows of jars.  “Sinistra Kidney, for example, is quite valuable.  Bibitor Liver, hmmm, less so in these times.  Fortem Heart, oh, so very precious…”

“Not pieces, the whole thing,” Amanda snapped.

“A whole body… how very distasteful,” Kasah pulled a silk handkerchief from inside his sleeve and covered his face, as if he were nauseated.  “Unless it were processed, the valuable pieces extracted and prepared, it would not be valuable for sale to my customers at all.”

I thought about the damage that the three-fifty-seven rounds had done to the body, about the blood and bits of tissue splattered all over the floor and walls.  “There wouldn’t be much left of any organs,” I told him.  “Lots of damage to the body.”

“Then I would have little interest for my shop,” Kasah waved his other hand, even as he kept his handkerchief over his mouth and nose.  “Please tell me you did not bring such a thing?”

“A body is missing,” Amanda growled at him.

“What?” Kasah seemed surprised enough that he lowered his hands.  “Missing, as in someone took it?”

“From a crime scene,” Amanda went on.  “And missing as in a witness says it stood up and jumped out a window.”

“Perhaps this body was not a corpse after all,” Kasah smirked.  “Tell your people they should make certain of such things.”

“They were certain, and there was enough blood that no one would be standing up, much less diving out a window,” Amanda snapped.  “Got anything here that could do that kind of thing?”

Kasah’s gaze flitted to the beaded curtain to the back room and back to us, a motion so quick I barely caught it.  “There is nothing dealing with necromanticrituals in my shop,” he told us.  “And what you’re describing is either dark art of the worst sort or…” he trailed off.

“Or?” I asked.

“Or we’re dealing with something that isn’t human at all, right?” Amanda asked.

Kasah gave a slight nod.

“If you’re not dealing in that kind of thing, it doesn’t mean your customers aren’t,” Amanda said after a moment.  “I’ll need a list.”

“I can’t give out a list of my shop’s customers,” Kasah shook his head.  “They would never trust me again!  Half of my dealings are built upon trust and discretion!”

“And bodies don’t get up and run about on their own.  This is bad, Kasah, it was a normal person who saw this.  If this happens elsewhere, it could draw attention.  We could get a panic,” Amanda gestured out the purple-tinted windows.  “We get large numbers of people seeing things, it will draw official attention… you know, like the fellows that came to town a few months ago?”

Kasah hissed, “The Peregrinatio Contra Umbram.  I don’t want them poking their heads in this.”  There was venom in his voice, hate and… fear?

“I warned you when they came to town last time, Kasah.  But if you don’t give me what I need to move forward on my own, I’ll have no choice but to talk to them to see what they know, and they’re not going to draw any lines between the gray and the black.”

Kasah brought his handkerchief up and covered his face, “Fine,” he spat.  “I’ll get you your names, but don’t tell them where you got them.”  He went into the back of the shop, sending his bead curtain rattling.

***

A Quiet Death comes out 30 April 2021!

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A Quiet Death: Snippet One

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Chapter 1

Rolling to a stop just outside the small house on the edge of town, my partner, Special Investigator Amanda Ashburn somehow managed to unbuckle her seatbelt, scoop up her coffee, and open her door in one smooth motion.

It took me rather longer than her to get my tall frame unfolded from her car.  A few months ago she’d had a comfortably large government-issue SUV.  Apparently wrecking it in a battle with hellspawned werewolves and cartel hitmen had meant Colorado’s El Paso County Sherriff’s Department had allocated her something rather more economical.

By the time I’d unfolded myself from the car, she was already walking up the steps to the small house, “What have we got?” She was asking of the two deputies who stood to either side of the door.

“Shooting,” the one answered.  I recognized Damien Garcia as I came up.  Mostly because we’d done our in-processing together.  He’d transferred down here from Denver, taking a job here in Colorado Springs over a better paying position up north, mostly because things in Denver were getting out of hand and, as he’d told me, he was a family man who wanted to be there while his kids grew up.  He and Deputy Alison had been partners for a month now, since he and I had run

“Perp is in the first room, Detective Haley is with her,” he told us both.  He gave me a nod and then went back to spreading out the crime scene barricades.

“Nikki, huh?” Amanda asked.  “Glad she got the perp.”  I could see she wanted to ask more questions.  Questions like why she and I had been called out if they already had the shooter.  She settled on, “Where’s the vic?”

Damien flinched a bit, “Uh.  You should talk to Sergeant Haley.”

His face had gone a bit pale as he said that and I saw him swallow nervously.  Whatever had spooked him, it was something that he didn’t even like to think about.

I felt a chill go through me as I realized that.  The last time I’d seen the law enforcement so spooked, it had been because werewolves had infiltrated a good chunk of the Colorado Springs police force, mostly by ripping their victims to shreds, consuming their souls, and then taking their place.  It had been in an attempt to track me down and obtain a certain artifact in my possession, but the police didn’t know that and they hadn’t been mentally, spiritually, or emotionally able to deal with the profoundly unnatural events.

I followed Amanda inside, doing as she did and taking care to avoid the splintered doorframe, “Somebody likes impressive entries,” I noted.

She pointed at the dusty bootprint on the sagging door, right near the deadbolt.  “Human,” she said in a low voice.  “Hit it right next to the deadbolt.”  She pointed at the doorframe, where the deadbolt had shattered right through.  “Just a simple locking latch, anchored in with half-inch bolts to the frame.”

“Yeah, one kick and that’s all she wrote,” I nodded.  Helping out with the county during my trial period, I’d seen the aftermaths of plenty of break-ins and forcible entries.  Most homeowners thought a deadbolt meant their door was secure.  After seeing just how easy it was to kick in a normal door, I’d drilled my latch plate at my new apartment with two-inch screws right into the frame.  If I had the chance, I was going to try and talk my new landlord into letting me swap out the wooden door for a steel one, too.

“Like you need to worry about a home invasion,” Sam chuckled in my ear.

I shot my guardian a look, but he just gave me a toothy grin in return.

Amanda went into the front room.  Sergeant Haley was there, the senior deputy of Major Crimes Unit, she looked a bit like a bear with a sore tooth at the moment.  “Took you two long enough,” she growled, “did you stop for coffee or something?”

Amanda sipped her cup of coffee in response.

Oh, it’s going to be one of those days, isn’t it?  I thought to myself.  Haley had transferred in from Colorado Springs Police Department, just as a lot of the Sherriff’s department had transferred over to the police in the wake of the horrible losses the department had suffered.  There’d been a lot of restructuring during all those transfers.  As part of that restructure, Special Investigator Amanda Ashburn and Probationary Deputy Kiehl (that was me), got folded under Major Crimes Unit.

Colorado Springs Police Department and one Special Investigator Ashburn hadn’t gotten along very well.  My partner had been investigating what most would term the supernatural for years, and she’d been given a lot of leeway so long as whatever had happened stopped happening and there was a nice, believable story about what had happened.

She’d lost a lot of that leeway in the wake of seventeen dead police officers.

No one suspected the supernatural, of course.  Even when three of the werewolves had materialized inside the police precinct, all most of the normal people had seen were deranged bikers swinging big knives.  The bodies of otherworldly beings seemed to just… unravel, and all the footage of the various attacks seemed either horribly out of focus or hard to look at or showed nothing out of the ordinary at all.

It reinforced what my guardian angel had told me: the human mind was not designed to understand things outside of the natural order.

“Sorry we’re late,” I told Sergeant Haley, “We were down south.”

“Traffic is getting awful,” Haley admitted.  “Glad you’re up here, though, this is…”  She made a face.  “Well, I don’t know what the hell this is.”  She gestured at where a woman sat, Henry “the Hunk” Alison stood next to her.

Henry was a tall, good-natured Provisional Deputy who’d gone through the Academy with me.  When they’d been calling off names the first day of our academy and they’d called off “Alison” and he’d replied with his soft, deep voice, it had thrown our instructors off and their constant calls of “Alison” had becomes something of running joke until they’d resorted to calling him by his first name, Henry, then Hank for brevity, and then finally someone had turned that into Hunk and finally, “the Hunk.”  The moniker had followed him after he graduated, in good part because no one could look at the tall, handsome young man and call him “Alison.”

With his blonde hair, blue eyes, height, and features, he probably could have gone into acting or modeling or something.  With how seldom he spoke and his friendly nature, he tended to put people at ease with no issues.

“That’s Angela Gowther.” Sergeant Haley gestured at the short, brunette woman seated on the couch.  She looked jumpy and nervous and her gaze kept going to the kitchen, almost like she was worried she’d left the stove on or something.

“Victim or perp?” Amanda asked.

“Little bit of both,” Haley shrugged.  She pulled out her notepad and read off it.  “Twelve forty-five, she hears a knock at the door, goes to check it.  It’s a man, one Andy Chin.”

“That guy,” Amanda scowled

“Chin?” I asked.

“Chin is suspected of multiple home invasions.  He also has ties to the local mob, acts as their enforcer, real nasty piece of work,” Sergeant Haley growled.  “His daddy got deported back to China, but Chin was born here in the US so the couple minor felonies he’s got just meant a few stays down in Canon City.”

“Great,” I shook my head, “so he broke in?”

“He did, and she shot him six times with her three fifty seven,” Sergeant Haley held up an evidence bag, with the weapon inside it.  “Then she reloaded and shot him another six times.  Then she called us.”

“She reloaded?” Amanda raised her eyebrows, “Good on her.”

I couldn’t argue with the sentiment, but Haley gave us a glower.  “She didn’t need to shoot him that many times.  Undue force.  That’s why she’s in cuffs.  Now that you’re here, I’m taking her back to the station for further questioning.”

“Seems pretty open and shut as self-defense,” Amanda noted.  “But I suppose that’s up to the DA’s office.  Where’s the body?”

“That’s why you’re here,” Haley told us.  “Garcia and the Hunk got on scene nine minutes after the shooting.  Garcia confirmed Chin’s ID from his wallet.  The Hunk confirmed no pulse and called the coroner.  They both started interviewing the shooter.  When I showed up, there was no body.”

My partner and I both stared at her.  “What the hell do you mean no body?”

“Check the room across the hall,” Haley told us.  “But it looks like either he stood up and walked off… or someone took his body before it even got cold.”

***

Any hope I’d had that this was some kind of joke to play on the new probationary deputy went out the window, along with what had to have been Chin’s body.

I paused to take pictures of the broken glass while Amanda was taking pictures of the huge swathe of blood across the floor.  She paused and pointed at a twisted bit of metal.  “See that?”

“Jacketed hollow point?” I asked.

“Yeah, still bloody, must have blown out of Andy Chin’s back along with a few pints of his blood and plenty of bone and organs,” Amanda shook her head, pointing at the bits fanned out around the obvious impacts.  “What have you got over there?”

“Something went through the window,” I told her, feeling like I wasn’t too smart as I did it.  But what else was there to say?  “Glass is broken but there are… well, bits, attached.”

“Yeah,” She walked over and pulled a set of tweezers and picked a bit of what looked like skin and hair off a remaining shard of glass.

“Werewolf?” I asked hopefully.

“Nah, it looks human.  And this is the middle of the day.  Plus there’s blood and remains.  Anything preternatural should have been gone by the time we got here, or on its way out.”  She dropped the skin and hair in an evidence bag.

“So…” I cleared my throat, trying to get the words to come out, “What you think happened is that Chin, after taking twelve rounds of three fifty seven to the chest, he what, just stood up, jumped through the window, and ran off?”

“Let’s talk to Garcia,” Amanda answered.

We went out front.  A news van had shown up, parked next to the coroner van.  I recognized the coroner, Doc Leo and a couple of his assistants.  The stooped man looked pale and wan in the bright sun.  They didn’t seem particularly disappointed not to be loading up a body.

Garcia was standing down by his patrol car.   He still had a wary look to his eye and his expression sank as we approached.  “Hey Damien,” I nodded at him.

“Ari,” He nodded back.  His gaze, though, went to my partner, “Look, Special Investigator Ashburn—”

“I don’t think you did anything wrong, Garcia, I just want to know what you saw,” Amanda told him.

I saw sweat bead his forehead and he looked around, as if he were looking for his partner or any backup.  “I told Sergeant Haley what I saw,” he told us.  “I pulled the guy’s wallet out, found his driver’s license, recognized Andy Chin’s face and name, and then left the Hunk to confirm he was dead while I interviewed the shooter.”

“What did the Hunk do, then?” Amanda asked.

“He called it in that there was no rush on the coroner,” Garcia told us.  “I mean, you could see the guy’s internal organs, blood everywhere, guy was toast.”  He shook his head, “Then the Hunk joined me and we interviewed the shooter, took her firearm, and then when I went back out in the hallway, the body was gone.”

“Just like that?” Amanda asked.

“Yeah… yeah, just like that,” Garcia told us, but his eyes looked a little wild.

“You didn’t see anything else, Damien?” I asked.  “Like maybe he got up off the floor and dove out the window?”

Damien didn’t answer.  He didn’t really have to.  His face had gone gray and his hands shook a bit.

“Ah, shit,” I shot Amanda a look.

“You know, you tell anyone that’s what you saw, they’ll have you in an ‘I love me’ jacket and on happy meds before you could finish, right?” Amanda noted.  “Which is why you won’t even tell us.  And that’s why we won’t be writing any of this down.”

Damien gave us both a grateful look.  “I’ve seen… well, I’ve seen a lot.  But nothing I’ve ever seen before is like what… what happened.  But you two aren’t saying I’m crazy…”  He trailed off and he looked between Amanda and me.  “I heard a lot of strange things about what happened a few months back…”

“Some drug cartel hired guns went rabid, that’s all,” Amanda told him in a relaxed tone.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Damien let out a tense breath.  “And Andy Chin must have been wearing body armor or something.”

Anyone who got a look at the room where Chin had been shot wouldn’t believe that.  But then again, if there wasn’t a body, there probably wasn’t going to be a whole lot of forensics.  In fact, if Chin was considered to be on the loose, then the shooter wouldn’t be charged for his “murder.”

“Yeah,” I nodded.  “Body armor, that makes sense.”

Damien gave me a nod, “I hope you guys find him.”

I shuddered a bit at the thought of what might make a corpse get up off the ground.  Nothing good, I would bet.  Zombies, vampires, do those sort of things really exist?  I hadn’t asked.  My introduction to the supernatural had been a thousand-year-old werewolf trying to kill me and the follow-up had been his entire pack trying to finish me off… and the werewolf lord himself escaped from hell.

I’d survived those encounters, but I still hadn’t learned much about the powers that be.  I didn’t know what was possible.  I had no idea about the supernatural or preternatural.   For all that I had a guardian angel, he didn’t exactly tell me anything of use.  A glance at Sam showed him smirking at me as normal, his dark eyes sparkling as usual in the presence of recent, graphic death.

“Well, we’ll take it from here, Damien,” I told him.  “Thanks for your help.”

I hoped I had time to get more of a crash course on all this.

***

Fantasy, Reading

Coming Soon: A Quiet Death

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A dead man just ran away from his own murder scene.

Six months ago, that would be someone else’s problem. My name is Ari, and after hellspawned werewolves tried to rip my soul out, I made this sort of thing my problem.  Now I am working the case, well, me, my sharp-shooting partner, and my guardian angel, the Angel of Death. It’s a case that involves human trafficking, corrupt politicians, necromancy, sorcery, seduction, and a deal with the Devil.  You know, same stuff, different day.

Unfortunately for me, that’s only the beginning, because something evil has escaped onto our world.  I’ve got to take it down, before things get out of hand.  Because if things start to go off track too much, then the thing looking over my shoulder protecting me might go off like a tactical nuke.

But that’s part of life, right?  Who wants to die a quiet death?

A Quiet Death will be released 30 April on Amazon. Check back here for snippets coming soon!
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New Release: In Death’s Shadow

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Hey Everyone, I’m happy to announce that In Death’s Shadow is live in the Kindle store.

https://amzn.to/2vUtOYR

My latest novel, In Death’s Shadow is an urban fantasy novel I really loved writing and I’m happy to announce that the sequel is nearing completion even as this one goes live.  If you’re a fan of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher or Monster Hunter by Larry Correia, I think you’ll enjoy this series.  Give it a look and I hope you enjoy!

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In Death’s Shadow: Cover Reveal & Blurb

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Hey everyone, here’s the cover for my upcoming Urban Fantasy release, In Death’s Shadow.  I plan to release it at the end of the week.

Ari lives in the shadow of death.

Ari is a combat veteran who has chosen to leave the military behind and live a quiet, normal life.  He’s got a few problems though.  For one thing, the cops think he’s a serial killer.  For another, a vengeful politician has put Ari in his crosshairs.  To make matters worse, Ari has a guardian angel… and not just any angel, Ari’s protector is the Angel of Death.  When his life is in danger, people start to die, and Ari’s guardian can sometimes be indiscriminate whose life he takes when protecting him.

That’s not even the worst problem.  Death wasn’t assigned to him by mistake.  An ancient werewolf wants Ari dead and even with death on his side, Ari might not survive.

Ari needs to find a way to stay alive, to clear his name, and most importantly to get out from under the shadow of death and live a normal life… even if it kills him.