Fire in Her Blood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Fire in Her Blood

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Shouts for a medic came from behind us.

  They put a body between us, still screaming, flesh burned away until it was barely recognizable as a person. Death sang through me.

  “I can heal her,” the fire witch said.

  The body, perhaps it had been a woman, begged to die.

  “No one can heal her.” The EMT shook his head at the lump of blackened skin and blood.

  “She’s mine,” I replied to the other witch and ignored the man.

  “My Goddess doesn’t think so.” Her face hinted at a smile, but my concentration stayed on the dying one.

  “She’s wrong.” I summoned the power into my body, gathering it into my limbs.

  “Not this one, death witch. This one Raya wants alive.”

  I dropped to my knees beside the body. My hand found a spot in all those burns, a place more solid than the rest, and I poured the power down.

  Fire in Her Blood

  by

  Rachel Graves

  The Death Witch Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Fire in Her Blood

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Rachel Graves

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Mainstream Paranormal Edition, 2017

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1272-9

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1273-6

  The Death Witch Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For all the girls who like to play with fire

  enough to risk getting burned.

  Chapter One

  Deep orange flame licked the darkening sky as the fire burned out of control. The clinic bridged two worlds, a block behind us was the college campus with its “Gone with the Wind” buildings, and a block ahead of us in downtown people shot heroin in the streets. An explosion sent a pack of firemen flying backwards. The flames sputtered to green, then back to orange.

  “Why are we here?” My partner, Danny, was Irish with dark hair and eyes pointing to a hidden supernatural heritage. Still I was sure he’d never felt the pull of magic I was feeling.

  “Someone wants me,” I replied as my eyes began to lose their color. Power started to build in my veins, calling me to the inferno in front of us. I’m a death witch, call death and you might get me. That was happening here—someone wanted death, and I had arrived. This had nothing to do with being a cop and everything to do with being a witch. I let myself go, gave into the power that felt so good, and followed it. Witches might complain about being a persecuted minority, but no one complained about how it felt to practice our magic. No one complained about the high.

  The power drew me out of the car and into the crowd. A woman stood in front of the fire. Around us people wore layers of fire retardant clothes, black ash, and sweat. They panicked and burned. Together we were calm despite the flames or maybe because of them. I looked at her and saw flame-colored eyes staring back at me. The color swirled within them; the red, orange, and yellow marked her as a fire witch. I stared back knowing my own eyes had gone opal white, milky with glints of color.

  Shouts for a medic came from behind us. They put a body between us, still screaming, flesh burned away until it was barely recognizable as a person. Death sang through me.

  “I can heal her,” the fire witch said.

  The body, perhaps it had been a woman, begged to die.

  “No one can heal her.” The EMT shook his head at the lump of blackened skin and blood.

  “She’s mine,” I replied to the other witch and ignored the man.

  “My Goddess doesn’t think so.” Her face hinted at a smile, but my concentration stayed on the dying one.

  “She’s wrong.” I summoned the power into my body, gathering it into my limbs.

  “Not this one, death witch. This one Raya wants alive.”

  I dropped to my knees beside the body. My hand found a spot in all those burns, a place more solid than the rest, and I poured the power down. I lost my five senses to concentrate on the sixth one, everything else became silent. My hearing went first, the sirens, the crackle of flame all gone to nothing. My vision narrowed to the body in front of me as my sixth sense, my death sense, took over.

  The woman had been dying for a long time. She looked forward to death; she craved it as an end to pain. She prayed to God for it. Now I gave it to her, sharing the emotions as she passed between one world and the other—release, freedom from pain, and underneath, a hint of excitement. No two deaths felt the same. I was still new to what I was, but it hadn’t taken me long to learn that. The body shuddered one last time, and the world was suddenly loud again, smoke tasted acid in my throat. My head swam with the confusion of the normal world.

  “She was mine.” The fire witch’s voice went hard as the flames beside us blossomed with anger.

  “Sorry, she wanted me more.” I brushed the grass off my knees and walked away.

  I made it back to the car before my legs started to shake.

  “I need to eat.” I’d ended up in the hospital a few times when I’d done more magic than my body could handle. I didn’t want to end up there again.

  “I’ll find out what’s going on,” Danny told me before he walked away. I wasn’t as lucky as the fire witch. She had a goddess to give her power, all the elemental witches did. All I had for energy was the food I’d eaten. Like most life force witches, I carried emergency food, quick to digest and full of sugar. I preferred junk food but usually ended up with glucose packets designed for diabetics. I popped open one of them and sucked it down.

  Danny was back a few minutes later. We spent some time interviewing the students who called in the fire. They saw the smoke from a nearby soccer field but didn’t know much. We got the names and numbers for the clinic director and his employees, but no one was at the scene. The fire chief wouldn’t say arson, but even if it was, there might not be anything for us to do. The big glass doors I walked through every morning read “Supernatural Investigative Unit” not “Fire Department.” Until someone determined the fire was the result of a fire witch like the one who was fighting it, a demon, or some kind of magic, it
wasn’t our case.

  Back at the squad room, weak sunlight filtered in through the windows on the west side of the building. Dust danced around in the beams. I pitied it for a second. Our lieutenant was an ex-Marine; no dust fell that wasn’t immediately extracted. He’d been gone for a week at inter-department meetings, and the room was still the cleanest in the building. There were no messy desks or piles of papers in the SIU. I sat down at my own desk and fiddled with the paperwork that said I had been at the scene of the fire. Nearly five-thirty on a Saturday, I doubted I’d get much done. Finally, I gave up and headed toward my boyfriend’s place with a smile. Unfortunately, Jakob was even more observant than the average vampire.

  “Could work have really gone so well?” he asked, as I walked through the door. I almost never smiled about work.

  “Not work. I’m looking forward to tonight. Let’s go.” Our plans were unconventional. First, there was church. Jakob was truly devout, and he’d been denied mass for a long time. Arranging for a vampire to attend church services had been a monumental undertaking. It was worth it. He had more money than anyone I’d ever known, he could fly, and he was the strongest vampire in the city, but church was a gift I gave him that no one else ever had. Every time we went I got to see the joy of it in his eyes.

  Before we went in, I saw my partner again. Danny looked like a different man holding on to three squirming little girls. Maeve, Nora, and Emma all had their father’s dark curls and pale white skin. As always they were dressed for church in matching dresses and brightly polished patent leather shoes with white tights. At ten, Maeve looked the most grown up; her features bordered on adolescent, and her silhouette was thin. Emma, the baby at five, was still pudgy and round. Nora, the middle child, was a mix of the two. They looked cherubic, but looks could be deceiving. I’d seen them beat each other with a ferociousness usually left to the boxing ring. Growing up the only child of a widowed mother, I’d longed for a big family with lots of sisters. Watching Danny’s girls cured me of that.

  The once-a-month Saturday night service was the girls’ favorite, probably because it was different from the routine. It hadn’t existed until I made it happen for Jakob. We all went inside and met Katie, Danny’s wife, in what was quickly becoming our usual pew. The Latin mass was different, longer but without holy water at the doors or a cross behind the altar. The changes didn’t make much of an impression on me.

  I’d come occasionally with Danny’s family and watched the ritual on TV with Jakob, but otherwise, I was only visiting this world. After a final blessing, the girls scrambled outside while the adults joined the line of people waiting to shake the Father’s hand. Standing outside talking, I was half of a perfectly normal couple. I fit in. It wasn’t real, but for a second I could let myself believe I hadn’t killed someone with magic only a few hours ago.

  I was savoring the moment when a yelp from one of the girls had me rushing into the darkness. There was a skinned knee and two skinned palms as the result of a lightning bug catching incident. As their sometimes babysitter and auntie, I rushed to help with the aftermath. By the time the three were bandaged and wrestled into the car, the parking lot was empty. I found Jakob waiting for me by his car.

  “I’m so grateful for this.” He opened his arms for me. I stepped into his embrace as I opened a button on my church dress, more than willing to go back to my real life.

  I sighed dramatically and turned around, leaning my back against him as if I was exhausted. “It was tough. Emptying the chapel in the middle of summer. Convincing Father Samuel. I’d say you owe me.”

  “You have no idea.” He kissed the top of my head. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” I turned back to him and kissed him lightly. This time he broke the embrace.

  “I have a sudden intense desire to give you something.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re meeting Mark at a flea market.” I handed him the car keys.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a car.”

  I tried to cover my shock. I had been joking, flirting a little. He wasn’t. Jakob had money, lots of it. A few months ago when I complained about my job, he’d offered to buy me a business. “Do I really need a car? I can take the train almost anywhere I need to go.”

  “My house is nearly an hour from the city; you can’t get there without a car.”

  “Good point.” How could I argue with his German logic? “Is taking you to church really worth a car?”

  “Oh it’s worth a great deal more than that,” he said, and the look in his eyes told me he meant it.

  ****

  We met Mark, Jakob’s best friend and my sometimes coworker, outside the high school basketball court that became a flea market on Saturdays. Even in the darkness, Mark hid his face against stares. The worst of the scars came out of the collar of his shirt, splitting his left cheek open. His straight black hair hung down to his chin in an attempt at camouflage, but it couldn’t hide the sharp point beneath his eye.

  Mark arrived to help with the city’s werewolf problem this summer, and I’d convinced him to put down roots here. I was shocked to discover he only owned clothes. Not a couch, not a bath towel, not even a single spoon. He’d managed to get a house on his own, but getting him to furnish it was an uphill battle. He didn’t see the need to make the house a home.

  “Tell me again why we’re here,” he groused not even glancing at the rickety tables set with odds and ends.

  “Because there’s a chance someday you’ll want to take a nice girl home with you, and she’ll need a place to sit. Maybe you’d even invite Phoebe over.” I watched his face when I said my best friend’s name hoping for some hint of how their relationship was going.

  “Nice girls don’t go to the places I go.” Mark could be a bit of an ass. We were working on it. Slowly.

  “All right, not Phoebe, not a nice girl. A not so nice girl, whoever she is, she’s going to want a place to sit.”

  “I’ve dated one woman in the last four hundred years; it seems a little pointless.”

  “One woman in four hundred years means it’s possible. Besides, you can’t live in an empty house,” I countered.

  “It’s not empty,” he protested. “I have a bed.”

  “You have a mattress. It hardly counts as a bed.”

  “Any chance you’re going to step in and save me?” he asked Jakob.

  “Hmm, what? I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

  “So obviously church went well,” Mark commented dryly. He had no use for religion.

  “Better than well, he wants to buy me a car.”

  Jakob might be older and more powerful, but Mark was a thousand times more modern. I hoped he’d understand.

  He only shrugged. “To each his own I guess. Maybe next you can replace that battered Bible.”

  “You have a problem with his Bible?” I asked. Jakob’s most prized possession was an ancient handwritten Bible. It didn’t burn him when he touched it, so I assumed it was unblessed; better that than deconsecrated with blood.

  “No, the woman who gave it to him.”

  “Uh-huh, is she still alive? Should I be jealous?” I asked both of them, but Jakob answered.

  “Maybe, and definitely not.” He glared at Mark for bringing up his lost love, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I had spotted something among the jumble of old furniture and mirrors that called out to me. I walked a few paces ahead and knelt to lovingly caress a wooden chest. It was small, three feet long, but only two feet wide and deep. It had once been black, but now it was faded and chipped. On the sides a pair of doves faced a heart, on the top a giant white flower with a yellow center was surrounded by leaves and smaller versions of itself. I ran my hands over the smooth lid. It was the work of an artist who was probably dead; the kind of artist we didn’t have in the world anymore.

  “You want to buy me something? I want this,” I said to Jakob without turning around.

  “It’s ancient and battered, why would you w
aste your time?” Mark said.

  “Careful, I’m in love with someone who fits that description. Actually, you fit that description, and it’s prettier than you are.” I searched for the person who was selling it. I only had fifty dollars in my pocket. If I was lucky, they’d let me put down a deposit and pick it up later. I caught the eye of a man unloading a truck. He called to someone else, who finally came over. “I’m interested in this chest. It’s amazing. Do you know what the flowers on the top are?”

  “I got no idea.” The heavyset man wearing stubble looked less than anxious to talk.

  “Edelweiss,” Jakob supplied.

  “You don’t even know what it is, do you?” Mark laughed. He was laughing at me, but I was too entranced to care.

  “I don’t care what it is. I want it. How much?” I turned to the befuddled man in front of us.

  “Not for sale, sorry.”

  “What?” I shrieked. “Why not?”

  “We use it to store the breakables. I sell it to you I gotta get another box. Sorry.”

  “But!” I turned to Jakob, willing him to get it for me.

  “She wants the chest; perhaps we could come to an arrangement?” he asked the reluctant salesman. The man caught a look at him in the moonlight, his pale skin and paler lips. His eyes went from Jakob to Mark and then back to me.

  “Hey I know you! You’re the death witch from the news this summer.” The man stepped quickly backward, crossing himself. “Not for sale to you or your friends, not for any price.”

  I didn’t protest. His casual bigotry shocked me into silence. I was used to being with people who didn’t care what I was. I’d forgotten there were people I’d never met who hated me. We walked away, and Mark tried to comfort me.

  “It didn’t match anything you owned anyway.” He really was a decent person, just socially stunted.

  “Everything I own came with the apartment. It doesn’t look like me because I bought the whole package.”

  “Wait, you bought it? Lecture after lecture about creating a personal space and you bought the decorator’s model? That’s it, no more shopping for me. Tomorrow morning I’m hiring a decorator.”