The ghost of us, p.28
Chosen, page 28
part #5 of The Grey Gates Series
CHOSEN
The Grey Gates – Book 5
Vanessa Nelson
Copyright © 2024 Vanessa Nelson
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
Find out more information about Vanessa Nelson and her books please visit: https://www.taellaneth.com/
For my readers.
Thank you for following Max’s story, and I hope to see you soon for the next adventure.
Happy reading!
Contents
1. CHAPTER ONE
2. CHAPTER TWO
3. CHAPTER THREE
4. CHAPTER FOUR
5. CHAPTER FIVE
6. CHAPTER SIX
7. CHAPTER SEVEN
8. CHAPTER EIGHT
9. CHAPTER NINE
10. CHAPTER TEN
11. CHAPTER ELEVEN
12. CHAPTER TWELVE
13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
14. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
15. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
16. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
18. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
19. CHAPTER NINETEEN
20. CHAPTER TWENTY
21. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
22. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
23. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THANK YOU
CHARACTER LIST
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter one
Max found a parking spot under a street lamp, the warm light highlighting the dents in the side of her pick-up. She left her shadow-hounds settled in a mountain of blankets in the open back of the vehicle while she headed towards the largest building on the street, the one that was the headquarters of the city’s most powerful bank. The wide street, with tall, impeccably maintained and elegant business and office buildings on either side, should have been quiet in the early evening of a weekend day. Instead, the roadway was crowded. Max threaded her way through police vehicles, crime scene equipment vans, two dark-panelled vans that belonged to the city mortuary, and a throng of people. She had her Marshal’s badge on display, the seven-pointed star reflecting the red and blue flashing lights from the police vehicles. The badge meant that no one tried to stop her. She exchanged a few greetings here and there with people she recognised from previous crime scenes, noticing that most of the law enforcement officers had stiff shoulders and tight expressions. She didn’t blame them. The city had been shaken to its core the day before by an unprecedented, brazen attack on the Order of the Lady of the Light. There had been no time for anyone to properly absorb the implications of an attack on the organisation meant to protect the city against dark magic and the dark lord. And then today there were multiple murder victims at one of the city’s most prestigious banks, in the heart of the city where violent crime was almost unheard of. Either event would have been enough to worry city residents, let alone both happening so close to each other.
So Max didn’t blame the law enforcement officers for their unease. And pretended not to notice the sideways glances from a few more junior officers. They probably weren’t used to seeing a Marshal at a police scene and were most likely wondering what kind of creature had committed the violence inside. Max didn’t have any words of comfort to offer them. If the brief, blunt call from the lead detective was anything to go by, the creatures who had been inside the bank were far more dangerous than even the things that Marshals normally hunted.
As she passed the last pair of law enforcement officers, the ones guarding the entrance to the building, Max’s skin prickled with apprehension. She wanted the detective to be wrong, and to find that there was a simple and human cause for the deaths inside. As awful as murder was, there were other things that needed her attention as soon as she could manage it. Like hunting down the demons who had broken into the Order the day before.
As she stepped from the crowded street into the refined hush of the bank she paused almost involuntarily at the change, the harsh noise of police radios and murmured chatter replaced with profound quiet. The internal building lights were on, giving her a clear view of her surroundings. The ceiling soared overhead, painted with a too-perfect deep blue summer sky complete with impossibly fluffy white clouds. The ceiling was supported by several tall pillars made with veined marble that changed colour from nearly perfect white at the top to a darker tone at the bottom, the floor made of a pale, polished marble the reflected the overhead sky.
The single room was vast, several times bigger than Max’s own house, and almost bare of any furniture. There were a few clerks’ desks and a comfortable seating area complete with a modern coffee machine. The whole effect was designed to intimidate any visitor with the evidence of wealth and power held in the building. Max wasn’t impressed. She’d seen real power, and this wasn’t it. Her bootsteps echoed on the marble floor as she kept walking, heading for the knot of crime scene techs in their blue coveralls and the lone figure standing to one side, arms folded over her middle, detective’s badge gleaming where it was clipped to her lapel.
Detective Ruutti Passila looked as perfect as she always did – as if permanently ready to appear in the pages of a fashion magazine. Her short, blonde hair was artfully arranged around her head, emphasising her striking features, which were enhanced by subtle, expert make-up. She might adopt the casual uniform of most detectives around the city - leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans - but Ruutti’s clothing fit her as if it had been made for her. She looked far too beautiful and delicate to be the dedicated detective she was. For once, Ruutti was wearing a serious, frowning expression. Her normal façade of indifference was gone, replaced by obvious tension, which Max had noticed when the detective had called her earlier. It was something of a relief to discover that there were things that could shake even Ruutti. It almost made Max warm to the detective. Almost. She was quite sure that the other woman would do something annoying soon enough and Max could slip back into her habitual mix of low-level irritation and admiration for the detective.
Ruutti nodded to Max by way of greeting, but turned her attention back to the scene in front of her, and the reason why the crime scene techs were clustered around.
Bodies. A lot of them. Max stopped a few paces away and cast her eyes over the scene, letting herself feel the horror of what was in front of her before she got to work. Being told that there were multiple victims and she needed to see the scene hadn’t prepared her at all for the gruesome sight in front of her. There was one body on its own amid a wide spread of spattered blood, staring blindly up at the ceiling. That was bad enough. Worse was the pile of bodies to one side, discarded in a callous, careless heap. Max drew in a breath, the air full of the scent of blood and the faint overtone of whatever cleaning products the bank used to keep the marble floors gleaming.
Forcing herself to look, Max turned her attention to the lone figure. The crime scene techs were focused on the pile of bodies just now, but they had left a narrow path marked off with yellow tape to the body. Reluctance making her feet heavy, Max moved forward. She needed to see what had been done to the woman, and why Ruutti had called her here.
Max stared at the body in front of her with a mixture of sorrow, anger, and frustration. The dead woman - whoever she had been - had not deserved the end that she’d met. Most of her clothes were missing, giving Max a clear view of the knife wounds that marked the woman’s pale skin. Crouched next to the body, Max could see a lot more detail of the cut marks than she was happy about. It looked like the killer or killers had taken their time slicing into their victim. Everywhere apart from her face. For some reason, they had left her face alone, and even in death, Max could read all the agony and horror that the woman had endured before her body had finally given out and she’d passed away, her make-up smeared with the trails of dried tears, her dark eyes open and staring at the painted ceiling high overhead, short brown hair spilled out in a dull halo. The cuts on her skin looked mostly fairly shallow, designed to draw blood but not immediately kill the victim. Max’s mind supplied the words she didn’t want to think about. Ritual torture. And not done by humans, either. The air was full of dark magic, brushing against her skin and making her fingers twitch, wanting to reach for her gun and defend herself against an enemy that was no longer here. The magic was newly familiar to Max. Demon magic. Ruutti had been right. As usual. Max might not like the woman all that much, but the detective was very good at her job.
“These ones are different from the others.”
The voice cut through Max’s thoughts. In concentrating on the dead woman, she’d almost forgotten about Ruutti standing nearby. And the other victims in this building.
Max’s eyes moved past the detective to the other bodies. She saw the familiar figure of the city’s chief medical examiner kneeling on the other side of victims, her expression hidden by the hood she wore, her petite frame dwarfed by the blue coveralls she and her team were wearing. Max suspected Audhilde’s face would be as grim as Ruutti’s.
“Five victims here in total,” Ruutti said, her voice clipped. “Audhilde has confirmed they all have similar injuries, and all died about the same time.”
Max took another look at the woman’s injuries and her chest tightened. The wound pattern was different, but the injuries and the magic in the air were too similar to the recent cases she’d seen. Dark magic per
“Any word on cause of death?” Max asked. It sounded like a strange question, crouched beside a woman bearing so many cut marks and with so much blood around her, but she’d learned not to make assumptions.
“Audhilde will confirm at autopsy,” Ruutti said. She hesitated. “I suggested blood loss, and it seems that’s possible.”
Max nodded. Audhilde wouldn’t want to make any definite statements until she’d had a chance to properly examine the remains. Blood loss was a painful way to die, Max knew from previous investigations.
Sadly, she also knew from previous investigations and crime scenes that blood rituals were more potent when carried out on a ley line intersection. She straightened, sending her awareness out, trying to see past the quiet activity around her. It didn’t take long. Even amid the horror of what had been done here, the air saturated with the sharp, metallic tang of old blood and the choking cloud of dark magic, she could still feel the deep, warm current of power that ran under the building.
“There’s a ley line intersection under us,” Max said. “Do we know who the victims are?”
“No confirmed identities yet,” Ruutti answered.
“The last victim, the one in the middle, was one of the managers here,” Audhilde said, getting to her feet and stripping off her gloves, dropping them onto the nearest body for collection along with the corpse. She shoved the plastic hood back from her face, her soft brown curls a tangled mess around her head rather than the organised chaos Max was used to seeing. There were purple shadows under Audhilde’s eyes, suggesting that the ancient vampire hadn’t got much rest recently. Audhilde normally wore her years lightly, blending effortlessly in with the mostly human population of the city. Today, though, Max could sense the weight of her age across the short distance between them. “I think I recognise one of the men as also working here. You will probably find that they were all employees or customers.”
Audhilde moved to stand near Ruutti, her expression tight as she looked at the dead woman in the middle of the floor. “I’ve called Kolbyr. He didn’t answer. I’ve asked him to meet me here,” she said, her normal warm tones shading to coolness, as they often did when she spoke about the dark magic master.
“Good,” Ruutti said, glaring at the pile of victims as if they were somehow responsible for their fate. “But we think this is the demons’ work, yes?”
“Although these killings are different to the last ritual killings, at the abandoned building and the school,” Max said carefully, “I do see similarities, not least the presence of a ley line intersection.” She had a moment of displacement as she had to specify which ritual killings she was referring to. There had been so many - too many - over the last few weeks. All of them involving dark magic, and the most recent involving demons. The last two victims had been killed in rituals which had pulled out their life force and transferred their energy to the demons who had performed the rituals. She looked back down at the dead woman and the sense of displacement faded into sharp anger and a renewed urge to be moving, to be doing something. The demons needed to be stopped. “I can’t see any runes or other spell markings on this victim, but that doesn’t mean magic wasn’t involved.” She touched two fingers to her forehead in a mark of respect for the dead, then left the centre of the open space, joining Ruutti and Audhilde next to a great, old-fashioned writing desk that looked like it had been made along with the building, several hundred years before.
Ruutti and Audhilde were almost the same height and, as usual, Max felt overgrown and clumsy next to the petite, elegant women. She was fairly sure she’d forgotten to brush her hair before she left the house, glad that it was short enough to tuck behind her ears and out of the way. She might have a prominent bone structure, but it wasn’t elegant in the way of Ruutti or Audhilde. Max’s features had become pared down through hard experience, her skin traced with scars. And while she might wear a leather jacket, it was nothing like Ruutti’s. Max’s jacket was scuffed and worn from use, the long-sleeved t-shirt she wore already covered with a scattering of dog hair, and her hard-wearing trousers were designed with function rather than fashion in mind.
“I called the Order,” Ruutti said, white around her mouth as she transferred her hard stare to Max. “I thought they would want to see this. The idiot I spoke to suggested that they were too busy to be bothered with this matter.”
Audhilde made a soft, unladylike sound. “They’ve got problems of their own,” the vampire said. “The Order was invaded by demons yesterday.” Although Audhilde had not been in the Order the day before, Max was not surprised that she was so well informed. Audhilde had connections all across the city.
“That was them?” Ruutti asked, astonishment taking over her face. “I mean, I’d heard the news reports of the Order being attacked. I hadn’t realised it was the demons.”
“Three demons, one descendant of Arkus, a bunch of members of the Syndicate, and one traitor within the Order,” Max said, voice soft. Her mind supplied the names and details. Donal and Finn, the newest demons in the daylight world, who had taken over the dead bodies of two well-known residents of the city. The demon Queran, who had been living in the daylight world for a long time. Evan Yarwood, the seemingly human, disgraced former chief of detectives in the city who had revealed himself to be a descendant of the dark lord and mastermind behind the Syndicate. Queran and Evan seemed to have formed a dark conspiracy between them. Their efforts had allowed Donal and Finn to make their way into the daylight world, and they seemed to now all be working together. And then there was the traitor. Samuel. It was Samuel’s name and face that hurt the most. The once-forgettable warrior of the Order who had been the effective second-in-command, he had betrayed his oaths and the Order by throwing his lot in with the demons. Max was still shocked by that.
She shook her head. The memories were so fresh, and yet it was hard to believe that the betrayal and attack had taken place only the day before. She’d left the Order in the early hours, heading home for some much-needed sleep, and had only just woken up when she got Ruutti’s call. Judging by the amount of blood Max could still smell in the air, the killings here had happened after the demons’ attack on the Order. The demons hadn’t taken any time to regroup or rest, but instead had gone on this killing spree. Most likely led by Donal and Finn, Max reasoned. Queran had managed to live in the daylight world for a long time without being noticed. This messy and brutal set of killings would have drawn attention, no matter what else was happening in the city.
“Well, at least demons attacking the Order should get Kitris’ attention. Finally,” Ruutti said, a hard edge to her tone. The head of the Order had been behaving out of character for a while, not answering calls for assistance and hiding away behind the Order’s supposedly impenetrable walls.
“I’m sure it would, but he’s dead,” Max said, wrapping her arms around herself. The hurt of Samuel’s betrayal paled in comparison to the sharp shock and pain of Kitris’ death the night before. Her mind replayed the moment that Kitris, confronted with the betrayal of his closest confidant in the Order, had taken his own life. The single gun shot rang through her head and she flinched. The memory was too recent and too raw, pain searing through her chest as if she had been the one who had been shot.
The silence around her drew her attention out of her memory and she found both Audhilde and Ruutti staring at her with similar expressions of astonishment.
“Dead?” Audhilde asked. “You’re sure?” Clearly, Audhilde’s sources hadn’t known that particular bit of information. It had been less than a day, though, and Max suspected that no one in the Order was talking much to outsiders right now, let alone disclosing news of Kitris’ death.
“I was there,” Max said softly.
“So, who’s in charge at the Order?” Ruutti asked. There was more than a little self-interest in that question. She had a clutch of dead bodies to deal with, people most likely killed by demons. Dark magic and demons were the Order’s jurisdiction. Ruutti was doubtless wanting to mark the case as one for the Order, maintaining her impressively high clearance rate.
