Shadow Of Angels (Halfway Between Book 1), page 1
Shadow
of Angels
Halfway Between: Book One
By Kathryn Ann Kingsley
Shadow Of Angels
Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Ann Kingsley.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: January 2020
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-64034-798-4
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
While writing this novel, my mother passed away after thirteen years of battling heart failure. It may seem tacky to dedicate this book—a paranormal romance filled with monsters and demons—to her, but I promise you, it’s rather fitting.
My mother taught me to be the loudest, proudest version of myself. To not worry about pretending to be normal or what other people thought of me and my mile-wide morbid streak. She helped me dye my hair neon red as a child. Helped me make the freakish Halloween costumes I was proud of. I’ve always been an odd child with a fascination for the dark and dangerous. She understood that, embraced it, and never loved me any less.
I never would have had the bravery to write, or publish, without knowing how proud of me she was and, I hope, continues to be.
So, Mom? Here’s to you. I love you, and I’m going to miss you so very much. But I know you won’t be too far away.
Just skip chapter twenty-one, would you? Thanks.
Table Of Contents
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
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter One
Veil was dying.
Again.
At this point, she was on a first-name basis with the sensation of her body shutting down. All her organs were struggling valiantly to soldier on, even though things were entirely out of place and had gone very much awry. A golf-ball-sized hole had been punched straight through her chest. But her body only had one job, keeping her alive, and it was trying very hard to do just that.
She was lying on the floor. A bullet had been what put her there. A particularly large caliber one, judging by the pain. The gun the man had used packed a damn good punch.
It was also likely enchanted and holy.
She figured it went with the territory.
Now she found herself examining the ceiling tiles of a charming little coffee shop. It was trying to make the vintage thing work at all costs, even if it meant putting up fake stamped copper tiles. I bet they’re plastic from Home Depot or something.
It was amazing what came to mind when the brain was struggling for oxygen and blood. The thoughts were always the most random, trivial things. Never anything salient or prophetic. Never anything interesting.
The bullet might have nicked her heart. It had definitely punctured her lung. She knew this, because when she went to breathe, it felt as though she had liquid in her chest. It gurgled like trying to suck air through a snorkel with too much seawater in it. The sensation was just as unpleasant.
It’d be over soon enough, she knew. It wasn’t the first time this’d happened. It wouldn’t be the last. While every kind of death carried its own unique form of pain, she likened it to flavors of ice cream. Sure, it all tasted different, but down at the core, it was the same thing. How she got there might be new and interesting, might be double-fudge or salted caramel, but it all got her to the same place.
Man, I could seriously go for some ice cream right about now.
Lifting her hand, she touched it to the wound in her ribcage. It was sticky and wet. And big. She picked her hand up to look at the blood dripping off her fingers, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. It was painful to breathe, so she opted not to. It would just get it over with easier that way. The darkness that was creeping at the edges of her vision would come faster. The quicker that happened, the quicker she could get on with her day.
Death obeyed, and she felt the darkness rush in closer. The bullet had punched its way easily through bone, flesh, and sinew. The man was also an excellent shot; she’d give him that.
Y’know, Yul Brenner made a weird villain in West World. Again with the random-ass thoughts. It almost made her laugh. She would have, if she had the air and the lungs to do it. Just another weird thought popping up out of nowhere as her brain struggled to survive.
Veil knew the telltale signs that the end was coming soon. She shut her eyes as her lungs burned and willed her body to just give up the ghost and let it end. When a hand grasped hers and clutched it, she blinked in confusion and looked up at the man kneeling over her.
He had long, chestnut hair in a ponytail and sharp hazel eyes. He wore all black, save for a white clerical collar that only made him look tan by comparison. He held her hand gently and with his other one with two fingers aloft gestured in the shape of a cross in the air in front of him. Earnestly, he began to pray in Latin.
It almost made her laugh again.
“Don’t bother,” a familiar voice said from the table nearby.
“What?” The priest kneeling over her looked up, appalled and offended.
“Give her a minute.”
***
Two Days Prior
Boston
Once, not very long ago, the city had been Veil’s home. Well, it was the only place she had spent enough time in to qualify for the title, anyway. And for exactly those reasons, she avoided it as best she could.
Every street seemed to dredge up bad memories and feelings she didn’t want to experience again. She hadn’t been back in…oh, fifteen years, give or take, and another twenty before that. Once in a while she had to pass through, but never long enough to really let the cloud settle over her.
But her work had called her here. There were only a few things that could drag her back, nearly kicking and screaming. Death on a large scale was one of them.
Death in the city of Boston was something she was familiar with.
This was where she had been raised. This was where she had spent time in the only semblance of a family she had ever known.
And this was where she had killed them all. This was where she had abandoned him to rot.
Veil shuddered. It had nothing to do with the overly dry, overly chill hotel room air. It had everything to do with the image that flashed into her mind. The glint of candlelight off a silver blade that was poised to drive into her chest and through her heart.
That had been the first time she had died and the exact moment everything had gone wrong. The moment she had learned everything had been a lie. She shoved the miserable memory to the back of her mind for the millionth time. It came back to her enough without having to dwell on it.
One foot in front of the other. Always. Immortality was going to drag her down the pavement anyway; she might as well stand up and walk. Besides, there was work to do. There were probably demons to hunt and, more importantly, the humans who brought them here.
She was standing by the window, looking down at the street and busy intersection below. They were staying at the Omni-Parker House Hotel. It was supposed to be one of the nicest hotels in the city. It was the oldest, anyway. It showed, if she were honest. It wasn’t a bad hotel, but it wasn’t her favorite. Namely, she wished she could open the window. She’d much prefer the heavy air of the city and the constant honking, shouting, and shrill whistle of the valet driver below over the rush of the fan and the stifling feeling of over-recycled air.
But there was no use trying to get the windows open. They were screwed shut. Any jumpers might mess up traffic more than usual, and the city might not survive that. It was School Street down below her, and it was bumper-to-bumper in the evening rush hour traffic. That one-lane example of utter failure in city planning was already a majestic cluster-fuck on a good day without somebody turning themselves into street pizza adding to the mess.
Boston was a place built not on top of the old but around it like a bad jigsaw puzzle. It was trying to do its best to cling to the old streets and old buildings that defined it. Unlike New York or Chicago, which hadn’t minded blasting down a few streets to fix problems, Boston was proud to let it linger.
New York and Chicago also had taken advantage of having mostly burned down at some point or another and used that opportunity to build streets in su
Not in Boston.
Major city improvements also never did quite go as planned. The Big Dig was testament to that. It made the populace a little less eager to take on new ones.
This intersection was a perfect example of Boston’s problem. Three lanes of road meeting two lanes meeting one. A seventeenth-century church, a nineteenth-century hotel, and two large glass structures of two very different styles all met at the same point.
School Street met Tremont met Beacon. Really, School Street should have been bulldozed a long time ago, if it weren’t for the string of historic buildings. Although one of them seemed to have been turned into a Chipotle somewhere along the way, so there was that.
Old and new, woven around each other to try to make a cohesive whole.
She resembled the city. Maybe a little too much for comfort. Maybe that was another reason she hated it so much.
Her thoughts strayed and tried to lock on to her opinions of the city below. Anything to keep them from the matter at hand. Anything to keep away from dwelling on what brought her to her former home.
But like a bad yo-yo, her thoughts spun out, ran dry, and left her dangling on the end of the string without anywhere to go. She had to wind it all back up and face the facts. The TV behind her was buzzing away, the local news personalities yammering pointless observations and speculations about one very undeniable thing—this was a city gripped in fear.
People were afraid to go out. They were afraid to leave their houses and apartments after dark. They had a perfectly good reason, by her estimation.
There had been murders.
Messy murders.
One person getting beheaded in an alleyway was awful, but not international news. Two people being dismembered, blood streaking the walls like it had been caused by a piece of rogue farm equipment, and people began to take notice.
But it didn’t stop. Every night, people went entirely missing…or were found in pieces. The sickest part was that the more apt description would be “pieces were found.” The dismembered bodies were never whole. Bits were being taken, but not just any bits. The important ones you’d notice, like the head or the whole torso. They only ever left the limbs behind, if anything other than just the blood.
Nobody had caught sight of what was causing the mayhem. At first, Veil had ignored the news, chalking it up to human, non-magic-using crazies, until the blood left behind by one was scrawled onto the wall in a symbol. It was a circle, with angled triangles and pentagons inside of it. It bore all the hallmarks of a kind of ceremonial magic she was all too familiar with.
It was dribbly, dripping down the cement surface, put there by hand by whoever—or whatever—had murdered the man left crumpled in a heap of torn-up parts nearby. The writing was sloppy, the Enochian was mangled, but it had been clear enough.
After that, no matter her hatred for the city and her desire to never come back to Boston, she had to do something to stop whatever was transpiring. She couldn’t look the other way.
Neither could her friend, who was currently tapping away at his laptop like a madman. They were a team. He found her the jobs, she went out and did them. They had the same goal—to make sure as few people as possible in this world suffered the same fate they both had.
Veil’s job?
Cult hunter.
Not like she carried a card or anything. She called it a job, but it wasn’t like she went off to get certified in it. She had enough background in the topic to be an “expert.” Both in the creatures that stalked the shadows, and the kind of crazies who worshipped them.
Demons were real. Angels could be worse. Even worse than them, though, were the humans who dedicated themselves in service to them, who prayed and knelt in devotion to one or more of the ancient creatures.
The ones who had their silly little altars and lit their candles and drew their symbols in chalk on the floors weren’t so bad. They were harmless, and she let them slide by. It was the ones who then etched those symbols in human flesh who were the bigger problem.
She hunted them down, one by one, and did what she needed to do to make sure they wouldn’t hurt anyone again. That was her bad excuse for “work.” It didn’t even come with a paycheck. Not really. Once in a while, she’d take a gig here and there that came with a dollar sign attached. Missing persons, mostly. It was lame, but they paid extremely well.
She looked back at her friend. Richard was in his forties now, gray at the temples, glasses having grown thicker over the years, as he peered over them and typed away. She had met him when he was eight years old. He had been huddled in a cage in the corner, his head buried in his hands. He had listened to the screams of his mother and six-year-old sister as they were diced to pieces, dissected alive, all in the name of glorious Belphegor.
The joke was on them. Belphegor had retired years ago.
She had “dispatched” the cult in the best way she knew how. She murdered them all. She hated taking lives, but they had given up their right to live when they started chopping up innocent people. She had taken the boy outside and hugged him and stayed by his side until she had to make her exit as the cops arrived. Veil didn’t do well with the police. Too many very good questions that she had entirely unacceptable answers to, like, “How did you get through the locked door?” and, “Does any of the blood you’re wearing belong to you?”
It usually didn’t. That tended to be the wrong answer. Cops got huffy at that kind of thing—go figure.
She’d kept an eye on Richard as he grew up. His family was gone, his dad having been shot by the cultists when he tried to protect his family from being taken. The poor kid had been put right into child services. He was adopted at around ten years old by a nice family who cared for him. She had made sure he had everything he’d needed. When he went to college—and went on to get his doctorate—she had quietly paid for his tuition and made it look like a miraculous scholarship award.
She’d done her best to stay out of his life and to stay away from him. She only brought trouble, and any association he had with her was going to end poorly. That worked right up until the invention of the internet. Then, Richard had found her. He tracked her down by finding the occult bastards she was after right before she did.
The first few times he pulled that stunt, she walked away from him and told him to go away and leave her alone. She insisted she was dangerous. But the man was brutally stubborn, and he kept at her for years. Finding her targets before she could, texting her the locations—she still didn’t know how he had gotten her phone number—and meeting her at the scene before she went to work.
Finally, she had given up. He was better at hunting down her quarry than she was, that was for damn sure. And, once she’d given up and let him help, they had become fast friends. It was Richard’s digging and connections that had turned up the classified image of the circle painted in blood on the alley wall in Boston.
If it had been any ol’ ceremonial magic circle, she would have come to stop the sect, and it wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary. It wouldn’t have bothered her or brought up the memories that were pulling at the back of her mind and ruining her mood.
But it hadn’t been just any circle. Ceremonial circles had rules. They worked in certain ways, using lines and the right words to draw power. They tapped into energies and pulled from them. One wrong line and it was as useful as a lead balloon. This one…had invented a whole new set of rules. But, much like looking at the first cubist painting by Picasso, she knew it still worked. Even if it defied everything she knew.
The other problem was whose power it was tapping into. Whose name was scrawled in sloppy but legible Enochian. It was one that made her skin crawl. One she knew quite well.
Asmodeus.
The sun was going down, and that meant that it was almost time to get going. All the recent murders and disappearances all happened at night. Cliché, but not unexpected. She walked away from the window and slumped down at the opposite side of the table from Richard. Their hotel rooms had a little adjoining living room-ish kind of thing with a kitchenette, and while it was tiny, it worked. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be in town for long.
