Witchmas Eve: a Marshal of Magic file Read online

  WITCHMAS EVE

  By

  Chris Lowry

  Copyright 2017 Grand Ozarks Media

  Orlando FL

  All Rights Reserved

  Direct all inquiries to [email protected]

  Get great tips on Twitter @Lowrychris

  Visit www.ChrisLowrybooks.com

  Have you joined the adventure?

  Battlefield Z

  Battlefield Z – Children’s Brigade

  Battlefield Z – Sweet Home Zombie

  Battlefield Z – Zombie Blues Highway

  Battlefield Z – Mardi Gras Zombie

  Battlefield Z – Bluegrass Zombie

  Battlefield Z – Outcast (June 2017)

  More adventures in the series

  FLYOVER ZOMBIE – a Battlefield Z series

  HEADSHOTS – a Battlefield Z series

  OVERLAND ZOMBIE – a Battlefield Z series

  Witchmas Eve

  “It's beginning to look a lot like Witchmas. Everywhere you turn."

  "Do you mind?"

  "What?"

  "You're humming?"

  "I was not."

  "You were. You were humming a Christmas tune."

  "It's not Christmas," Elvis curled his lip as well as his namesake.

  "That's not the most annoying part."

  "It was more annoying than singing Christmas tunes out of season? I am agog."

  "You are a ghost. A ghost changing the lyrics to Christmas tunes. I'm allowed to arrest you for that."

  "Do you have corporeal cuffs?" he held out his wrists.

  They looked solid, if wispy, a paler version of the intellectual I once called a friend. Still called a friend since he was tethered to me by some unseen form of justice, or crazy karma.

  "You said Witchmas."

  "A Witch mass," he mused.

  If you've never seen a ghost muse it's almost as funny as it sounds. First, he looked pensive, as if he was searching his memory banks for what a witch mass might be.

  He didn't have to tell me. I knew.

  I'd seen one in Germany in World War II, the final war to end all wars since all we engaged in since were police actions in regional conflicts. That coven, like this one, had been doing demon work.

  Back then the Sidhe were involved, and part of the peace process was they would no longer interfere in the matters of men.

  I know the Sidhe don’t' have short memories.

  They're practically immortal and hold contracts, accords and promises as sacred.

  Which meant either this coven had gone rogue and scattered thirteen demons around the United States, or the worse option.

  The worse option by its definition was really bad.

  Really, really bad.

  "I need a beer," I sighed.

  Elvis perked up with that one, then his face deflated, the pensive look replaced by utter dejection.

  "I can't taste beer, Marshal."

  If ghosts could cry, he would be.

  Elvis moaned instead. It was a mournful lonesome sound that sent a series of goosebumps dancing up my spine and made me shiver.

  "I liked the Christmas carol better," I shivered again.

  "Sorry," he said. "I would tell you it's all in your head, because it is. Literally. We're connected now."

  "You'll have to tell me more about it later. Right now, let's get some evidence and find out where to start hunting for these witches."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The crime scene as I called it was empty. Barren. Evidence of the ritual that brought demons back to this plane was erased, the alter destroyed and made to look like a pile of construction rocks.

  I could feel the power of the ley line pulsing below me, a steady thrum of energy like standing next to a buried powerline.

  “1.21 Gigawatts,” I muttered as I stepped through the tingle again.

  “Great Scott!” Elvis drawled behind me.

  “I can’t find anything,” I confessed.

  “Strong magic is afoot,” he said. “And someone is cleaning up after it.”

  Which meant we either still had someone in Memphis doing Witch dirty work, or the purveyor of evil had done the deed and split.

  I was opting for split.

  Memphis isn’t my hometown, since I roam all over the East in service of the Marshals, but I spent a lot of time there. Enough that magic users knew it was a home base, or sorts.

  Technically, my home base was a beat up pick up truck with an eight foot bed.

  It was warded, had a place to sleep in the back and a locked metal toolbox full of implements and instruments.

  Mobile, discreet, and under a permanent shield when I wasn’t around it.

  I sometimes even parked it by the river, just so I could spout out the line, “In a truck down by the river,” to anyone who would offer a laugh in exchange.

  I wasn’t homeless. I was living the dirtbag life, ready to travel at a second’s notice.

  Plus, I had a credit card from the Judge that was black and could get me into any hotel in the world, no matter the star rating.

  When I whipped that sucker out, eyes got wide and the obsequious sucking up began.

  “Where are we going?” Elvis asked.

  I stopped on the edge of the construction site and stared at the flowing water of the mighty river the new neighborhood was perched on.

  Something about the tug of the current drew my eyes, and I let them wander to the South.

  “You would think the Judge would poof us where we needed to be,” I said to the ghost at my shoulder in a distracted voice.

  “He knew you had me.”

  “Yeah, but you haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “I will.”

  The wind picked up, floating trash paper around us in a swirling tumble of acrobatic flight. An aluminum soda can rolled and rattled across the asphalt and tumbled into a rock strewn ditch.

  A second can fetched up against my hiking boots and held there.

  I bent to pick it up.

  A yellow can of chicory coffee from a world famous establishment in New Orleans. I looked up from the can and saw I was still facing south.

  “You couldn’t just have said it out loud?” I shouted at the clouds on the horizon.

  “Said what?” Elvis asked. “I don’t have to talk out loud. You can hear me in your mind.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Then who were you talking to?” the Elvis impersonator said in a DeNiro voice. “I’m the only one here. You must be talking to me.”

  I held out the can with the faded cover to show him our destination.

  “The Judge wants us to go to New Orleans.”

  “You think?” said the ghost and his eyes got a faraway look in them.

  “That feels right,” he said after a moment. “Didn’t we do something in the Big Easy once?”

  I nodded, but he didn’t see me. He was staring toward the south, following the curve of the river and trying like hell to remember.

  “We did,” I told him. “The medium.”

  He nodded, like someone who couldn’t recall, but knew they should.

  “It’s getting a little misty up here,” he tapped a long slender finger against his temple.

  “But Hannah is still there, right? Hannah can help.”

  Hannah wasn’t the medium, but she could help. At least he remembered her name.

  “Hannah,” I told him and his face lit up in a smile, happy he had pulled that at least from the cobwebs of his memory.

  “Nothing to it but to get to it,” he lifted a lip. “Takin care of TCB.”

  I climbed into the truck and let him float through the open window to se
ttle on the other side of the bench seat.

  “It’s a long drive,” he said.

  I fired up the trusty old straight six and dropped the gearshift on the column to D.

  “Nine hour drive, or five hours on a train,” I told him. “We’ll take the City of New Orleans to the city of New Orleans.”

  That earned another tight ghost smile.

  I sighed.

  What good was a watcher without the knowledge they provided. Pretty soon, Elvis would just be haunting me, and I needed to find out how to stop it. The haunting and the memory loss.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I felt a subtle tug of magic.

  I blinked.

  He blanched.

  Neither of us were supposed to be able to do that.

  My beautiful new friend was a vampire and I just caught him trying to entrance a human.

  Not just an offense, but offensive.

  I slid the coat open to show him the badge on my belt.

  "That what you're talking about?"

  "You can't smell him?"

  I sniffed.

  The air smelled like spices and sand, cinnamon and cardamom, an exotic blend that was sweet and cloying and at the same time covered the stench of something dead.

  People smell it all the time and mistake it for roadkill.

  "You can?"

  "Ghosts can't smell Marshal," Elvis explained. "But he doesn't have an aura."

  I blinked into magic sight, that tiny shift in the spectrum that lets magic users see things most normal humans don't.

  "Pardon me," the vampire begged in a cultured voice.

  He could have been from Georgia the state, or Georgia the country, but either way he was far from home and riding a train to New Orleans.

  "I didn't realize you were the Marshal."

  I tilted my head to one side and studied him.

  "If I had been human, you'd be feeding right now."

  Technically, I am human, but who shares that sort of intel with a bloodsucker.

  "It's a habit," he offered a hand. "Hello Marshal, I am Claude."

  A pretense of peace.

  Vampires have been around pretty much since the beginning of time.

  Some folks debated that they were aliens, sent here to feed on the human cattle and at one time had been the overlords of fallen empires.

  If that was the case, those empires might have declined because their rulers were eating them.

  Some debated that the Vampire was created by Jesus when he resurrected Lazarus. I'd have to ask the Judge since rumor held he was around at the time.

  As far as I knew, Vamps had been here forever. They worked with the Sidhe a long time ago, and announced their independence millennia ago.

  Still, they weren't supposed to feed on unwilling humans.

  There were laws against that.

  "I wasn't going to partake," Claude said. "Call it my predator nature. I cannot help it."

  It was trying to hypnotize me.

  I wasn't sure I believed him.

  "Why are you on a train?"

  "How else would one travel?" he looked around the empty car.

  We were the only two passengers in this section of the train, the seats around us empty due to a low level vibration I cast that made people uncomfortable so they would give me room.

  I should have noticed when he sat across from me.

  Chalk it up to being preoccupied with worse things.

  Thought what's worse than a hungry vampire seducing you for your blood, I don't know.

  Demons, sure, but they were out there, and he was in here.

  I realized there were a lot of empty seats around us.

  Very private. And vampires were fast.

  If Claude decided to take a bite, just a nibble to see what magic blood tasted like, I wasn't sure if I could stop him.

  He shifted forward and the tip of my finger sparked.

  I watched the glowing ring around his eyes contract and he held up a hand.

  "I mean you no harm, Marshal."

  I was sitting across the aisle from a vampire.

  Anyone might have guessed by the pale, almost blue color of his skin, the dark gothic outfit favored by so many, or the tips of the sharp canines that left an indentation in his purple blood colored lips.

  Except me.

  I guessed by magic, as in the absence of his lifeforce and the addition of a glamour.

  The glamour was subtle, enough to make people overlook him and pass by his seat.

  But it made me stare.

  Which he noticed.

  He licked his lip with a worm colored tongue and bared his fangs, a threat.

  I slid my coat to one side and showed him the badge.

  The Nosferatu don't have a panic reflex that cause their pupils to dilate. That part of their brain stops working once they die.

  But the skin around his eyes tightened, and the sharp intake of breath was loud enough for me to hear.

  "Not just any geek off the street," I told him.

  That earned me a look from a stern looking school marm type sitting at the end of the cart. It must have looked like I was talking to an empty seat to her.

  She harrumphed with righteous indignation, and even though we were the only two people in the train car, she bustled out of the other door like she was late for a Church meeting.

  "She did not appreciate you," the ghost of Elvis Rodriguez said over my shoulder.

  Correction, only two live people.

  Now down to one.

  I sat across from the vamp.

  "I am innocent of all wrong doing, Marshal," he said.

  His voice was cultured, upper crust New England from the turn of the century.

  The last one, not this one.

  "Just riding the train, partner."

  I wasn't a real cowboy, never had been. But the Marshal of the West had a thing about gunslingers, and I liked it too. Went with the title. At least I didn't wear a hat.

  "Headed for the city of New Orleans?" he asked.

  it wasn't an odd question. Quite normal for two riders on the train to ask of each other.

  But there was something in the way he said it.

  It's tough to read body language on bloodsuckers.

  Since they're dead, they tend to hold themselves still, to the point of being statues.

  I bet there were plenty of victims who stopped by what they thought was an interesting sculpture of marble before being turned into a tasty snack.

  Tone though, can hold a world of meaning.

  Ever heard someone say, "I don't like your tone."

  His tone sent a little tiny shiver down my spine, like it was on the verge of being a threat.

  One of my magical gifts is a little bit of pre-cog, which kept me alive more times than I care to count. His tone was making my warning bells go off like the Liberty Bell on July 2.

  That's right, July 2 is the true Independence Day, even though we celebrate it on the 4th.

  I cocked the tip of my finger in his direction.

  Vampires were lightning fast.

  Magic was actually lightning though, as fast as a thought process, at least when potions weren't involved.

  The statue of a vamp pushed back in his seat, scooting further away from me, going out of his way to prove he wasn't a threat.

  "You're not the first Marshal I've met," he said.

  "Tonight?"

  He smiled, but it was the grin of a predator upon meeting another, not a genuine emotion.

  "Alas, this was many years ago. Your predecessor's mentor, if memory serves."

  Vampires didn't forget, so his memory was just fine.

  That meant he was a couple hundred years old, older than his accent led me to believe.

  "What's in New Orleans?"

  The smile dropped from his cheeks and he gazed out of the window. The soybean and cotton fields stretched out into the darkness on either side of the train, the black night and sparse landscape combining so that it
was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

  "I am meeting an old friend."

  "LeStat?"

  "That book," he sighed, even though breathing wasn't necessary. "Wonders for the tourist trade in an incredible town, but made a poor guide for those of my kind."

  He crossed one leg over the other and rested a thin pale hand upon his knee.

  "Would that it were more than fiction. Still," another sigh. "It was better than what Stoker did for us."

  It might have been a pleasant conversation to pass the time as the train travelled South.

  We both had a few years under our belts, some stories to share as we ate up the miles.

  But it was not to be.

  "Did you feel that?" Elvis whispered in my ear.

  I did.

  A different set of bells were clanging overtime and I glanced past the vampire through the window beyond.

  Someone was performing a spell out there in the darkness.

  A nasty spell with bad intent.

  "Your familiar is correct," the vampire followed my look. "I regret we must wait until later to continue our conversation."

  "We didn't get to talk much."

  "Yet."

  "Yet," I agreed and stood.

  Vampires could see ghosts? I'd have to ask Elvis about that one. Maybe it was stored in his Watcher memories.

  "Marshal," he tilted his head, canines till protruding.

  "LeStat," I nodded back.

  That earned a hint of a real smile.

  "There is a convocation in New Orleans,” he called after me as I moved toward the door of the railcar.

  That made me stop.

  “What kind of convocation?”

  “The kind that could cause you trouble.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “Your predecessor wasn’t as kind to me as you’ve been,” he said in a mysterious tone.

  The kind that sent a shiver up my spine.

  He meant the Marshal back up the line tried to blast him. Maybe even did blast him.

  Since I didn’t, he counted it as a kindness.