Sin City Angels: The Dabbler Novels Book Two Read online

  SIN CITY ANGELS

  BY

  C.S Anderson

  Alucard Press

  All rights reserved 2017

  Any resemblance in this book between characters and persons living, dead or undead is purely coincidental

  Chapter One

  Nobody notices when the Angel walks into the bar.

  For the record nobody usually does.

  Except for folks like me, I am what is called, a Dabbler. Half human, half Wizard and as far as my father is concerned, a one hundred percent unwelcome embarrassment. I am stronger than I used to be, but even at my weakest, I had enough magic in me to recognize Seraphim when they walk right by me.

  Which thankfully, the Angel does, ignoring me completely. It is clearly on business of its own, so I go back to minding my own.

  To be on the safe side, I should probably get up and leave and find somewhere else to drink so there is no risk of me getting tangled up in whatever business it is here on, but fuck it.

  It is raining outside and I was here first.

  Can’t help wondering why it is here though, this is at best a working man’s bar and at worst a complete dive, with a mostly human clientele. A couple of Weres are drinking boiler makers at the other end of the bar, studiously ignoring me. They would likely, cheerfully drag me out into the alley behind the bar and tear my guts out, but for the moment I am under the protection of the Council, so they pretend they don’t see me. I set a Packmaster on fire a little while back and while these two aren’t from that pack, that little stunt has made me really unpopular amongst the occasionally furry set.

  Other than them, the Angel and myself, everybody else in the bar is human or so skilled at passing as human, that I can’t tell the difference.

  When Angels interact with humans, they tend to do so amongst the rich and powerful so they can influence their choices and exert a measure of control in how things play out. I have only run into a few of them here in Sin City and like now, they have ignored me completely.

  I am so ok with that.

  I just barely survived my last brush with my fellow Sub Rosa, which is just a fancy name of all the various and sundry supernatural mythical types that call Vegas home. My surviving ended up depending on a deal my lady love made with Lucifer.

  Still haven’t found out what the price tag on that is going to be.

  The Angel sits down at a table in the back, this one has taken the form of a large black middle aged bald man. If I squint, I can get a glimpse of the wings it is hiding behind carefully constructed glamour. It sits down with a sense of patience that tells me it is prepared to sit there for decades, if circumstance call for it to wait that long.

  Waiting for what, I can’t help wondering.

  The cell phone in my pocket buzzes, it is the fifth one that I have had this year. The magic in me is enough to play havoc with electrical devices, because I am basically untrained. I don’t know enough to shield it, so I keep shorting the damn things out.

  “Hello.” I bark into it, as I signal the bartender to bring me another pint of my current favorite IPA.

  There is a hissing jumble of static with a weird warbling tone behind it and then there is only Genevieve’s panic stricken voice.

  “Run Robert Jones! Wherever you are run, for your life!”

  Then the phone bursts into flames and cursing, I let it fall to the floor.

  “What the hell man!” The bartender shouts at me from the far end of the bar, I give him a half assed apologetic shrug and stomp the fire out.

  No idea what has Genevieve so wound up, but I am at least smart enough to know that she wouldn’t tell me to run for my life, unless there was a damn good reason to.

  I throw some money on the bar to settle my tab and prepare to get the fuck out of Dodge.

  That’s when an Imp walks in carrying a briefcase.

  Curiosity killed the cat and all that and I am pretty sure some day it is going to be the death of me, because I don’t run like I am supposed to. Instead I watch as the grimy little prick walks straight up to the Angel and puts the briefcase down on the table in front of him. He then bows deeply and turns on his heel and leaves the bar.

  The Angel stares at the case with an unreadable expression for a long moment and then he opens it. As he reaches into, it a pulse generates from him, freezing all of us in the bar in place, it’s as if time has somehow thickened and congealed and we are stuck in it like flies in amber. From the brief case he draws a large handgun.

  He stands up, the next sound is the sound of him clicking the safety off.

  That sound seems to break the spell holding us frozen in time, sound comes rushing back in and with a slight lurching sensation time starts up again.

  Then he opens fire and the room dissolves into screams and chaos.

  It is a new part of the landscape in this country and is becoming just as American as baseball and fucking apple pie.

  We have us, an active shooter situation.

  Yeah.

  I totally should have run away when I had the chance

  Chapter Two

  Instinctively I throw up a protection spell and a few stray bullets rattle off of it harmlessly, their energy spent, they fall to the dirty bar floor.

  The humans around me aren’t so lucky.

  The Weres, to give their furry asses credit, step up and take some rounds for the team, stepping between the demented Angel and the humans in harms way. They twitch and jerk with the impact of the bullets, but since they aren’t silver, they are healing before the scared tourists they are protecting, have even run screaming from the bar. The council will thank them later, letting tourists get splattered across a bar full of other tourists, is generally speaking, the one buzzphraze that gets their damn attention.

  Bad for business.

  A fifty something blonde woman in a pink pantsuit catches one right between the eyes and a hot spray of blood and chunks of things worse than blood spatters me.

  Ok, now I am pissed off.

  I should be terrified, but as my dear old daddy used to tell me, I am just not smart enough to be afraid of anything. So, I gather every scrap of magic I can muster to me.

  The Angel is beyond my power to hurt with my limited magic. Hell, it would be beyond the strongest Warlock’s power to do any real harm to him.

  But the floor it is standing on and the ceiling above it…

  Well, that is a whole other fucking story.

  As is the gun in its hand.

  I take a deep breath and fling out the strongest shattering spell that I think that I have ever done, it is aimed at the floor, the ceiling and the gun.

  Yeah, precision isn’t really my stock and trade.

  My friend Marcus recently used a power he strictly speaking, isn’t supposed to have, to increase my own little reserve of magic, but the results of my spell surprise even me.

  The gun explodes in his hand, as the floor below him gives way, as a big ass chunk of ceiling comes down on his head.

  The Council’s spin doctors will convince the media that it was a terrorist attack and that the sole suspect died when he detonated his suicide bomb vest.

  There will be no body recovered from beneath the rubble, I sent out a pulse of seeker magic and the Angel has already taken its leave of this earthly plane.

  Sirens begin to wail in the distance and the sound blends into the chaotic mix of screams from the terrified and wounded. The first responders will have their hands full when they get here.

  I need to be somewhere else entirely when they arrive.

  Pulling off my bloody hoody, I toss it aside and grab a leather jacket hanging off the back of a
stool on the way out the door. Its owner is either dead on the floor or is lucky enough to have trampled their way out the back door.

  Lucifer is leaning against the dumpster in the alley when I spill out into it, along with some seriously panicked humans. Once again he is in the form of a raven haired young Japanese school girl and is chewing a big wad of bubble gum. I tend to think of him as male, no matter what form he decides to take and I am never all that happy to see him.

  “Evening Dabbler.” He greets me politely in a bored tone.

  And then he is gone, like he was never there in the first damn place.

  No time to waste worrying about it now, I need to put some distance between me and the bar, pronto! I am not even a block away before the place is totally engulfed in flames.

  As I walk away, I try to wrap my head around the madness that just happened, Angels work quietly behind the scenes of human affairs. A whisper here, a slight nudge there, to influence things towards whatever their secret agendas are. They rarely intervene directly in events and to my knowledge have never gone on a bloody damn rampage in a seedy dive bar before. It makes no damn sense, serves no conceivable purpose.

  I need to get home and let Genevieve know that I am safe, and to ask her just how the hell she knew that I was in danger. She is a unique being, a water nymph who escaped a very powerful spell binding her to a specific place, saved my ass and then took up residence in the body of a slain Succubus, through a deal of some sorts, she made with Lucifer.

  A deal she has steadfastly refused to tell me the details of.

  It is one of the very few things that we argue about.

  Another one is me forgetting to put the toilet seat down, but I think that an undisclosed deal with the lord of Hell, sort of trumps that.

  In my own humble opinion, anyway.

  I wear a brown knotted leather cord around my wrist, Marcus gave it too me with instructions of how to use it, in case I needed to contact him.

  We haven’t seen much of each other since the night his father tried to use us in a bizarre ritual out in the desert. The council hauled his father away, swept a lot of dark secrets under the proverbial rug and promoted my friend Marcus to the head of his House, in place of his father, who is even now rotting in a cell somewhere.

  Marcus lost one of his mothers that night, even as I gained the love of my life, things have been strained between us since then. Neither of us has any idea of how to fix things, so in typical guy fashion, we keep pretending that there isn’t a problem.

  Yeah, that’s another thing Genevieve and I disagree on.

  I hold the cord to my lips for a moment and whisper a single word into it, before tossing it into the shadows on the left side of me.

  Moving off into the night, I walk away from the heat of the flames of the bar burning down and hopefully out of the reach of anyone who would like to talk to me about it.

  Human cops or stranger things, I am not feeling chatty right now.

  An old wound on my forearm suddenly drives me to my knees, with a massive spasm of sheer pain. Blood soaks through my shirt, as I struggle back to my feet.

  A better place to die than on my knees, at least.

  Four extremely attractive and well-dressed club goers drift into a loose circle around me on the street. They don’t say anything, but the pain in my arm tells me what, if not who, they are and what they want. They are…..

  Fey.

  I was grazed by one of their arrows during a narrow escape from The Great Hunt in the midst of our problems with rouge Wizards and their pet Weres, a while back. It never fully healed, as my friend Marcus had warned me, it would not.

  He had also warned me that it would reopen and bleed in the presence of the Fey.

  Which is something of a relief really, because at first glance, it seemed like I was going to be taken out by a boy band.

  “Hey Wrong Direction, what up?” I ask as cheerfully as I can muster, with a sharp pain in my shoulder and blood running down my arm.

  “We were advised that you think that you are funny.” The tallest of them steps forward with a hint of a swagger. It marks him as the leader of this little band.

  The other three don’t speak or even move, they stand there like statues and simply stare at me as their leader moves to stand in front of me.

  “You don’t look like much.” He tells me disdainfully as he gives me a long look up and down, a disappointed look on his male super model face. His skin is pale and his hair is ebony.

  “Wait until we get to know each other better, then you can really experience the full level of let down.” I tell him flatly.

  All of them suddenly have long glass daggers clenched in their fists, I didn’t see any of them draw them.

  “You are marked by the hunt, we were told to seek one such and bring him back to our realm for questioning.” Their leader tells me blandly.

  “No thanks, places to be, people to talk to and all that.” I tell him brightly as I gather magic in, as discretely as I can.

  “I am afraid that I will have to insist.” The one who has done all the talking so far, tells me politely enough.

  Marcus did this little thing with my level of magic, but even with what he gave me, I am a little wiped from the huge spell I flung at the crazed Angel in the bar. I am a Dabbler, used to being outmatched and over powered. So, I know a few low level, but useful, spells that have meant the difference between living and dying while I was on the run from the death warrant Daddy dearest had once put on me.

  Some of them are just plain fun.

  Lucky for me it has been raining, I gather the spell to me and cast it under my breath as I throw my hands up sharply over my head.

  Mud hex!

  Instantly all the puddles around me start to bubble and boil. A few seconds later, they all start to spew columns of stinking mud that come crashing down all around me.

  Protected by the spell, none of it touches me.

  The Fey boy band, isn’t so lucky.

  They are all knocked to the alley floor by the sheer weight of the mud cascading down of them, their fashionable clothing ruined in seconds and their startling good looks obscure by dripping masks of dark foul mud.

  I waste no time while they lie there stunned, by the time the first one struggles shakily back to his feet, I am blocks away and still running as fast as I can.

  There is no time to waste patting myself on the back for my clever escape. The night has gone to shit on me, first the crazy ass Angel shooting up the bar and then Wrong Direction trying to snatch me up. I need to get home and make sure that my love is safe.

  Not another damn thing matters.

  Chapter Three

  Nothing and nobody else makes a try for me and I make it to my apartment building in one piece, more or less. I lean against the wall of the deli across the street from my place and send the barest flicker of magic at the wards I have placed around my home.

  When the flicker comes back to me telling me that all is well, I let out the breath I didn’t even know that I was holding. Relief floods me, but even so, I decide to err on the side of caution and arm myself.

  It has been that kind of night.

  I wrap my knuckles sharply nine times on the newspaper box on the corner and say the required words. It opens with a metallic groan and instead of newspapers inside, there is a Springfield XDS 9mm and two extra magazines, loaded up with jacketed hollow points. I load the gun and stick it into the pocket of my pilfered leather jacket, the extra magazines go into another pocket.

  As I cross the street it starts to rain again, the weather has been a little on the wet side for Vegas, since Genevieve emptied the entire reservoir feeding the water fountain display at the Belagio, on the heads of some misbehaving Wizards. Something about what she did that night, seems to have changed the weather a little.

  She pretends to have no idea what I am talking about, whenever I try to talk to her about most of the things that happened that night.

  I dig out
my keys as I double time up the three flights of stairs up to our place. All my wards are in place, but all my senses are on high alert. My wards are the best I can make, but then again I am just a Dabbler, somebody or something stronger than me could have found a way around them.

  When I open the door Marcus is sitting with Genevieve at our scuffed up kitchen table, he flashes me a tired smile as I come in and she is up from the table and in my arms before I can even say anything.

  “I thought I had lost you.” She sobs into my neck.

  “Fat chance.” I whisper into her ear.

  She looks up at me and gives me the smile that always warms me from the inside out and makes everything ok.

  “Tell me everything.” Marcus demands as he hands me a cold beer and opens one for himself as well.

  So, I sit down and walk him through the weird shit fest that has been my life so far tonight, he listens intently without interrupting and when I am finished he leans back in his chair and shakes his head slowly.

  “The Fey seeking you, I can wrap my head around at least, though why now is a valid question. We escaped The Hunt months ago and you haven’t exactly been in hiding. The insane part of course is the Angel shooting up the bar, it is literally, I am almost sure unprecedented. I will have my house historians go over the records, but I really don’t think they will find anything. What was to be gained from such a spectacle? The Seraphim don’t need guns, he could have killed all of the people in the bar with a wave of his hand. He could have wiped the place out of existence with a small shrug of power, why the gun?” Marcus sounds baffled, which makes me very nervous, because he is one of the smartest people I know.

  I was sort of counting on him having a few answers, instead of more questions.

  “We should go see the Librarian.” Genevieve says as she opens a bottle of water and guzzles the whole thing down.

  Marcus and I exchange a quick look, it isn’t a terrible idea. If anyone has a record of something like the Angel attack happening before, Chris Haney would be the guy. Local Subrosa call him the Librarian.