Culling Damnation Read online

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  Too many now know she’s Soraya Warloc, only heir to the high elder, and now de facto leader of the enchanters. The list of people who want more than she’s willing to give is increasing, and she starts to tune it and everyone out. It’s overwhelming to constantly hear she’s not doing enough while no one is offering to step up and help. And with Beltane right around the corner, her schedule’s already packed with what her coven needs.

  A dark spirit shows up in Chicago and is hunting a specific prey. Soraya is called in, and not only is she upset that there will be a lot more dead with the evil that was summoned, but something is wrong with Detective Hunt.

  Unfortunately, Soraya has more on her plate than worrying over one person and lacking in the relationship experience to know what to do. But when she’s pulled in every direction and feels like she’s going to break, will the right person step up to help her or let everyone bury her in demands?

  The Enchantress is a fast paced ride of sexy fun while balancing the needs of her coven, police investigations, work, supes, and the world that wants so much from her and still trying to move on from the past to find the love we all deserve.

  1

  After the tribunal and I had to return to normal life, the reality of too much hit me and hit me hard in the gut. I retreated on instinct, taking a few steps back… Fine, several steps back, but there also kept being more added that made me retreat into myself more.

  First, the situation with the enchanter elder heirs was insane. I called a meeting right after like I’d said, and almost immediately it turned into people screaming at me, screaming at each other, and—toddlers acted better behaved from what I’d seen. I doubted they noticed when I left a note telling them I wouldn’t return until they started acting like adults before popping away.

  Second, I couldn’t find my mother’s spirit. I had agreed not to send her back without us talking, but now I’d tried to find her and she was nowhere. I figured maybe she didn’t want to wait with the thousands of spirits that always stay around the coven house, but she wasn’t anywhere else I would have thought to find her either. Maybe she’d gone to find her brother?

  My gut told me it wasn’t that and something bad. It couldn’t have been she’d simply moved on when she wanted to speak to me. I was never that lucky.

  Third, there had been a huge shakeup in the CPD, and Chicago and people were angry. Demanding. Assholes mostly. Instead of remembering all I and my coven did for Chicago, they were pissed we’d cleaned some subway stations for New York. They were throwing fits and “reminding” us of everything they did for us.

  Which was a list of bullshit. They did nothing. They didn’t protest or actively try to hurt us, which seemed to be their next plan, and I warned the mayor in very harsh language if any of that started I would activate the barrier.

  I checked out after that, but I’d caught a few interviews from the singers and bands we’d had perform at the tribunal. One talked about what we’d done for his baby, another his vocal chords, and the other about saving her from her dirty security.

  That should all be good and have people praise us, right?

  Wrong. We got raked over the coals for helping a famous guy’s baby and not every baby. We couldn’t win, and I was tired of it. I was exhausted and just at my limit.

  Plus, it was now spring and there was a lot of work ramping up. Oils could be stored for a while after being bespelled, but harvests did not keep, so that meant I was done with the winter slower times.

  Yes, that had actually been slower times in the winter.

  And we needed more as our sales were through the roof with too much starting to be on backorder, which I didn’t like. The more areas we branched into, the rise was ridiculous, but we were pissing off some very dangerous people. Pharmaceutical companies were not happy we could do what their pills and chemicals did but without side effects.

  Part of me wondered if this new wave of unrest and everything against us had someone like them pulling the strings. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, but after the last huge conspiracy we’d uncovered that we were still cleaning up, I didn’t think it was that farfetched.

  I felt the tingle up my spine and made my phone appear, speaking to the dispatcher at Paranormal Investigations that let me know it was a case flagged for me to handle. I got the specifics and the text of the address. With the flick of my wrist, I changed my clothes and made my bag I brought to crime scenes and others’ problems appear.

  I popped over to the address and flinched when I saw it was a hospital. There were several reasons a crime scene would be there flagged for me, but I prayed it wasn’t one in particular. I just wasn’t in the mood, really, I wasn’t.

  Except it was.

  And it was in Chicago.

  Awesome, just fucking awesome.

  I thanked the officer who held the crime scene tape up for me as I entered the psych ward. My heart hurt as I saw people in several different doorways, meaning multiple rooms were the actual crime scene.

  Ducking into the first, I nodded to Connie, one of our seasoned investigators. I went over to the body on the bed and after slipping on my crime scene gloves ran my fingers over the rope marks on the victim’s neck.

  I turned to the room and muttered under my breath. Almost instantly there was a flare of colors, and I bit back several choice curse words when I saw the mixture of a certain spirit.

  “I was right to call, yes?” Connie checked, sighing when I nodded. “I sort of hoped I was wrong.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I grumbled. “Why did you check for the trace?”

  “There’s a dozen bodies, Soraya. A suicide in a psych ward isn’t unheard of, but twelve in one night can only be a few things. I checked the moment I was on scene like you did.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered when I heard the edge to her voice like I doubted her. “I wasn’t doubting you. I was really just hoping there weren’t so many bodies and obvious.”

  “Yeah, me too.” She gave me an understanding look and stepped out so I had a moment to gather myself. This was going to be a shitty case.

  Then again, I was always called in on shitty cases. I never got the easy or light ones.

  I checked the trace again, thinking of how to explain it best to the police before heading to the main area where everyone else seemed to be waiting. I did a double take when I saw Detective Remy Hunt, not having put together he might be there, as it was in Chicago and he was with CPD’s Supernatural Police Squad, but also at the hurt and anger in his aura.

  What was that about?

  “How much have you told them?” I asked Connie, smiling when she snorted. Right, no one wanted to hear from them when I was called in. Why listen to the employees when the boss was coming?

  “Do you know what we’re dealing with?” Hunt muttered, pulling out his notebook and pen while very obviously not looking at me.

  It made me want to ask if he was okay, but then again this was our first crime scene together since we’d become involved, so maybe he was nervous and wanted to keep things professional? I could do that.

  And check nothing was wrong later.

  “Yes, it’s a ciemny tygrys,” I answered.

  “And what is that?”

  I blew a raspberry. “A fucking headache and a half.” I flipped my long blonde hair over my shoulder. “It’s Polish for ‘dark tiger.’” I made the gesture to back up. “Tiger shifters used to cull their weak. Normally it was someone who had a late or bad shift. There were other reasons, but it was voted on by the Alpha and pride elders. That is the main reason there aren’t many of them.”

  “Because the stress of worrying you might get culled would be enough to screw up a lot of young ones and their shifts,” Ellie, an elf on Hunt’s team, muttered in disgust. “How anyone can rationally justify culling their own is insane.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “The culling was seen as a gentle death as opposed to struggling in life that they wouldn’t survive. It was a kindness to them.” I shrugged when I received several disbelieving looks. “This was a long time ago, before I was even born, so I can’t tell you what they were thinking. I was maybe fifty the last time I heard of a pride culling and the elders were swift and harsh in punishing.”

  “Good,” Hunt muttered. “Okay, so these spirits are culling in death?”


  I bit back a smile that he quickly put it together, his intelligence something I found ridiculously sexy. “There used to also be arranged marriages. Hell, there still is in other parts of the world. There was a pride in Poland that the youngest of six was a girl and she was to be mated off to the Alpha of another pride. The story goes she hated him, terrified of him from the moment they met and what he wanted from her.

  “But her parents ignored her, excited for the match, and women were nothing but possessions back then to use and abuse. Her five older brothers did listen however. One also overheard their sister begging her maid and best friend to purchase poison for her so she had a way out instead of being mated to an abusive and controlling man.

  “Instead, he told his siblings, and the brothers made a pact that they would take the mark on their souls for her death, doing her the kindness instead of allowing her to struggle in a life she wouldn’t survive. They thought it better than allowing her soul to be damned for all eternity for committing suicide.”

  “Or, you know, they could have fucking helped her escape the mating or something rational,” Ellie muttered, shaking her head.

  I agreed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that now. “They did more than mark their souls as they spilled innocent blood of their own family. I don’t know what deal was made or how they became different than any other soul who did that, but they all died at the same time, some theorizing the pact was of blood and binding word. I don’t know.”

  “So a ciemny tygrys is one of these brothers?” Hunt asked, his voice hinting that sounded like a bit of a stretch.

  “Yes, and I know this because I have imprisoned three of the five brothers,” I told him firmly. “Unfortunately it’s a fucking joke to catch them. They are not a normal spirit, and the power they can gather when called is terrifying.” I gestured back to the rooms behind me with the bodies. “If it’s at this level, it breezed through here like the biblical spirit of death that killed the firstborn sons or whatever.”

  “And a ciemny tygrys is easy to call,” Connie added. “It’s like Baba Yaga where it’s a Russian folklore that people brush off as fake or don’t read the fine print of calling her or her sisters. The legend is she protects young women who have been mistreated by men and grants them vengeance.”

  “Yeah, but no one ever seems to remember the price is their souls,” I drawled. “But she’s right. Ciemny tygrys is a Polish legend that talks of spirits as fierce as tigers riding on the darkness of night and taking out those who are weak of heart, mind, or body. And as we know from religious zealots and more, not everything is translated properly or brains used.

  “The last time I dealt with a ciemny tygrys the woman thought it would kill all the bullies in her village that were raping women and using weapons as if that made them too physically weak to do it. That’s not the truth, and instead it killed those who had thoughts of suicide. It starts with those who are currently thinking it or considering it, but when its power ramps up, it will kill any who ever thought it.”

  “Shit, I’d be dead,” Hunt muttered, wincing as he realized what he’d admitted.

  “Me too,” I said at the same time as Ellie and Connie. Life was hard, and there were times most people at least thought of it, hurt and in a dark place. No one had a completely blessed life of rainbows and roses where darkness never appeared.

  “What else do we need to know?” Hunt asked after a few moments we all got lost in our heads.

  I flipped my hair over my shoulder again, knowing I did that like a cat flicking its tail to show it was agitated, but it was hard not to be when something was killing and targeting innocents. This wasn’t how people like to start their days after all.

  “They used to only be summoned on a full moon, the time shifters are strongest, but as time and years and the amount of times people called them added up, they no longer need that.”

  “But they’re still only here for twenty-seven days like the lunar cycle, right?” Connie asked.

  “Yes, and you cannot catch them the first week, as they haven’t ‘fully formed’ in a manner of speaking, so you try and catch air,” I answered. “As much as it’s horrible that this will continue, the best time to catch them is those last seven days.” I waved off what Ellie and Hunt opened their mouths to say. “This wasn’t the first time it killed. We have to find the beginning.

  “If we don’t, we could miss it and not be able to catch it at all. After twenty-seven days it goes back to Hades or wherever and takes the one who summoned it with them. It also can only work within a certain area. The last one was strong enough to have a fifty mile radius. We have to find that center where it was summoned from, as that’s how to catch it.”

  “So we need to review any suicides in the past month to be safe?” Hunt asked.

  “Yes. We build a map from there.”

  “How will you know which count?”

  I thought of how to explain it. “You saw when we peeled back the layers of chi when the former CPD police chief’s cousin was killing and framing us. You know we can see auras. It’s like a combination of that. Not trace elements, but we use a spell that shows more than what you can see in the room.”

  “It’s like scenting a room but visually and for what can’t be scented like spirits,” Connie added, and I nodded.

  “It doesn’t always work, and we can’t see just any soul or spirit but those with power and normally have been summoned. It’s how we track demons especially when they possess someone.”

  “Got it,” Hunt muttered as he jotted it all down. “Anything else?”

  I rubbed my tired neck, having a fleeting thought of wishing he would rub it for me instead of this tension I was feeling from him. “Connie, have Helen station someone from PI in every psych ward and mental institution in the area, including suburbs. It won’t like other magic and will avoid it. Unfortunately, it won’t not kill for the night, but one body is better than twelve.”

  “There’s no way to prevent it?” Ellie checked, looking horrified.

  “No,” I whispered, swallowing loudly. “When the moon reaches peak each night it’s on this plane, it will kill. Nothing will stop it until it’s caught or its time here is over. You can’t get everyone who’s ever thought of suicide to safety, as most would not take that seriously or yell at us that we weren’t doing more like with the ghouls. I can’t even send up an alarm over this or evacuate Chicago?”

  “No, you can’t,” Hunt agreed, looking about as grim as I felt.

  What else was there to do? Even if we tried, people wouldn’t believe us… Or blame us. Most times they blamed us.

  My mood felt as dark as the ciemny tygrys when I left the crime scene to let them handle the rest.

  2

  I popped over to Hunt at lunchtime, realizing I’d backed away for too long and the hurt I’d seen in his aura was bothering me. He flinched as I appeared on his desk but didn’t even look at me, still writing in the file in front of him.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Devil?” he asked in a clipped tone.

  “Ms. Devil?” I asked.

  “Well, I assumed you were here for the case. Fuck knows you don’t see me personally and the only reason I’m seeing you now is I’m on a case flagged for you to handle.”

  That wasn’t unfair, so I swallowed my normal snide response. “I warned you that I needed to take a step back.”

  “You’ve been avoiding me. That’s a bit more than a step back. Plus, it’s been weeks.”

  “I’ve been a bit lost in my head,” I admitted, not wanting to confess just how overwhelmed I’d been. He opened his mouth but then closed it, glancing around. “I put up a privacy bubble. No one will see or hear us.”

  He stopped writing finally. “Do you want to take the collar off of me?”

  I flinched, not having seen that coming. “If you want it off, I will take it off. I told you that.”

  “I don’t want it off.” The pen in his hand snapped, and he tossed it in the trash. “I love you. I want you however I can get you, but we live in the same building and I haven’t even spoken to you in weeks. You avoid me. You don’t return my calls or messages. It seems rather apparent you want the collar off.”