Grave Sacrifice
GRAVE SACRIFICE
Book three of Ace Grant, Demon Slayer
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
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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
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
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Copyright
Acknowledgements
Book three and Ace is still alive and kicking. This isn’t due to Atofo’s healing or even Araceli’s adept hands. No, it’s because of a fantastic group of readers who continue to believe in my work and encourage me to keep adding books to their already stuffed “To Be Read” lists. In no particular order, thanks to:
Ziggy the Hyphenator, Andrew, Brynn, Phyllis, Corine, and the rest of the gang for their help hunting down grammar demons and their excellent critique. And, as always, a special thank you to my co-pilot, Maaike – loving every minute of our journey together!
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You’ll receive updates about new releases and other news as Russ travels the U.S. seeking inspiration for his tales of science fiction and fantasy. The starter library currently includes the first book in each of his series:
Crimson Son – A misfit hacker tries to fill his superhero father’s shoes and stumbles into a web of conspiracy. Only has he been the target all along?
Blood Harvest – Former cop and full time shaman, Ace Grant, will face the forces of Hell to get back home to his family – that is, if he hasn’t already lost his soul...
Pilgrim of the Storm – Sworn to defend humanity from a vengeful god, acolyte Sidge must first undertake an epic journey of self-discovery. First step? Admitting he was never human...
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CHAPTER ONE
Bubonic lurked on the quiet neighborhood street like a bad omen. The hearse’s engine growled a low note. I worried the sound might carry to my father’s stoop and turned the key. Silence. Somehow, the house where I’d grown up, had stayed sequestered from the noise and grind of West Baltimore.
The wedge of a park across the street offered grass and trees, but no real place to do business, illicit or otherwise. Homeless people had found refuge under the low pine boughs before. My father had rousted them with a kick in the pants and a handful of bills for their pocket.
That was the way of this particular street. Tough love.
Row houses crowded close in clumps. Duplex, triplex, they seemed to cling together in the face of encroaching blight. Blight and a returning plague.
My shaman mentor, Atofo had warned me to never go home. His magic, his rules. His people kept separate fires for the sick. Violate that clause and the magic keeping me alive could fail. It could blow back on the ones I love.
Staring at that sheltered stoop through the hearse’s cracked windshield made me wonder if I couldn’t get away with a quick visit.
Enclosed by rounded arches and solid columns, the front door wasn’t visible from the curb where I’d parked between a couple of beat-up sedans. Bubonic’s fractured windshield made spotting movement even harder. But the cracks along with the freshly chipped and dented fender gave my ride the best camouflage she’d ever had.
“Come on, Araceli. Hurry up.”
My alchemist princess had made the walk for me. I couldn’t visit, but I damn sure needed a sign my family was safe after the threats by Mordecai and his demon warden. Mind games, all of it, I had little doubt. But I wasn’t taking chances.
Foot tapping nervously on the floorboard, I slid upward in my seat. The ivory-Bakelite steering wheel creaked under my grip. I held my .40-caliber Emperor Scorpion against my thigh with my other hand, trigger finger tracing the slide. I almost hoped my Catalan Sister would find trouble. I’d have an excuse to burst through the front door, drop a demon, and never, ever leave my son again. Atofo’s rules be damned.
I rolled my shoulders to ease the tension. No, all I wanted was to hear Izaak was safe. If he never saw past This World into the others, his life would be better.
But damn, Araceli was sure taking her sweet time.
Why she’d even agreed to do this favor for me, I didn’t know. She hadn’t said more than two words on the drive all the way from Florida. My best guess was she had to see my son for herself. Still pissed for the deal I’d made with Mordecai, she needed a reason to not want to kill me.
She’d lost her father to that fucking animal.
Damn, everybody had a beef with Ace. Even Atofo hadn’t stuck around after casting the rituals I needed to survive. On that bop from Natchez to Saint Augustine, I’d started to fade, the cancer eating away at my insides. Dizziness. Coughing blood. Caleb kept throwing frantic looks past Araceli’s stone-cold stare. He’d even pushed the edges of the speed limit. Sheila, my fine and fiery attorney, had cradled me like a sick child. With all four of us up front, I was in her lap anyway, and she didn’t seem to mind, not one bit. She’d made me promise to call. Damn straight I would.
Atofo showed up right after Araceli dumped me in the burial exhibit for the ritual. I’d last seen him in the Above, and wasn’t sure he’d even be around to save my ass this time.
He had been. And he hadn’t been happy about it.
“Nice work, chemosabe,” he’d snarled. The golden breastplate strapped to my chest had glinted in his narrowed eyes.
He’d bent over and jabbed that nasty ass fingernail deep into my forehead, digging and scratching to the bone. When he’d finished prying open the skin, he’d pressed his lips around the hole. I felt the jagged edges of his teeth, pointed, feral. Drawing out the poison with a vicious slurp, he’d spat the remains on my face. I grimaced and blinked. By the time my sight had cleared, he’d drifted away like smoke.
Why he’d been mad, I couldn’t be sure. He’d been tossed out of Paradise again, that was my only guess. Guesses were all I had when it came to these beings from the other realms. Above and Below, neither made any damn sense. Then again, This World rarely did either.
I’d recovered the golden breastplate from Mordecai, as requested. But I hadn’t got so much as a text from the Deer Woman about whether we were good or not. Great Sun, Tlatoani, both shaman under her power, they’d declared me some kind of champion. Was that enough for her?
Kibaga’s powers had gone silent too. The cloak, the warrior spirit, I’d last seen it after I draped it over Sheila’s shoulders to protect her. As much as I hated the complications of all this otherworldly bargaining, I felt a bit of jealousy that she’d been the l
ast to wear that spiffy ebony mantle.
Rules. These beings all had rules or whatever. Would I play by them? Could I?
Araceli stepped off my parent’s stoop and started down the steep concrete steps. We’d stopped at a thrift store on the way for a change of clothes. Halloween was months away, and the strapped leather armor of an alchemist wouldn’t have gotten her past my father’s suspicions.
She wore slacks, a paisley button-down shirt with frilly sleeves, her hair pulled up in a bun — she didn’t look like the same woman who’d gone awwf on a courtyard full of Boo Hags. Her muscular thighs stressed the seams of the ill-fitting pants as she galloped down the steep flight toward the sidewalk. On her face, I thought I saw a smile.
I smiled too and eased my grip on the gun. She’d met Izaak. No way just meeting my father would’ve put her in a better mood. The family was all good. Safe.
I let my head tilt and stared at the headliner as I holstered the Emperor Scorpion. I felt free without the weight. Even Atofo’s knife, still in Caleb’s handmade sheath, felt lighter on my belt. No demons to kill. Not today.
Araceli’s grin stayed put, a crooked little secret, until she opened the door. Unreadable again, she slid inside, eyes forward and pulled the heavy slab of steel closed. The silence that came after was what got me.
“So?” I asked.
There it was, that fleeting smile spread across her lips. “He’s fine.” As quick as the smile came, it disappeared. She reached up and with a twist let her dark hair cascade down to her shoulders. “Now take me somewhere I can burn these clothes.”
I cranked the ignition and Bubonic gave a healthy rumble. We’d been hard on her, but all eight cylinders fired. No need to drive past the house, I flipped the wheel and made a sharp U-turn.
In the rearview, I caught my father stepping out onto the top step. Far enough away, he could’ve been my own reflection. A little gray at the temples, a paunch under his beige tracksuit, he wore those few years since I’d last seen him. Never the hugging type, I’d have settled for eye contact and a firm handshake right about now. He stared after us until I’d made the turn off Winterbourne Street.
“How’d you get him to let you inside?”
“I asked. Nicely.”
Good. No magical influence at play. She’d said her Order or whatever had banned the practice, but I’d have made an exception for my father. Of course, I’d learned her Order wasn’t all she was pretending it to be.
“He’s stubborn. Paranoid. I’m just surprised.”
“Both are acceptable,” she replied. “Him being paranoid and you being surprised.”
“How so?”
“Izaak will be a target as long as you consort with these demons.” She seemed to relax a little on the bench seat. “You being surprised?” Her smile had gone wolfish and she turned it on me. “That tells me you continue to underestimate me.”
“Woah,” I said, my hands spreading on the wheel. “Hell no. I saw what you did. It was the last thing about a dozen demons saw. Respect. That’s all I got.”
Her eyes wandered to the seat back. I’d managed to find a way to secure the demon slaying Shaw Sword under a long fold of upholstery. Basket handle in easy reach, I could draw it with a quick motion or cut it free if I needed it faster. She was measuring her own distance from the hilt.
“There could’ve been one more demon dead,” she muttered.
I needed smiling Araceli back and not vengeful Araceli. I needed a partner in this mess. “How was Izaak?”
Her gaze softened and went to the apartment-lined street ahead. “Sweet kid. Has his father’s curiosity though.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I told them I was a counselor at the school. Made up something about a home visit pilot program.”
“My parents bought that?”
“No,” she said. “Your father absolutely didn’t. Your mother though...” Her lip twisted in thought. “She’s got an intuition. Something beyond This World. I think she knew I wasn’t telling the truth but knew I wasn’t a threat either.”
Divination. Runs in the family, I suppose. Jupiter’s mother had a gift or had at least been an amateur astrologer of some kind. All this had to tie back into Kibaga and my own family history. Though power like that running in families had some implications.
“Do you think Izaak...” I trailed off mid-question.
In spite of herself, the smile this time was warm. “He waited until your father had left the room to tell me he hadn’t seen me at the school before.”
“Nothing strange?” I coasted to a stop at an intersection and planted my foot on the brake. “No crazy intuitions or whatever?”
She started to laugh then noticed my concern. If magic ran in the blood, he might already be infected. Trouble might be his the rest of his life.
“Forgetting the prison correspondence course already? Matrilineal,” Araceli said. “Most ancestral magic flows through the mother’s line.” She backed off her lecture. “For Izaak, that would be your wife. She have any latent ability?”
Another car approached on the right. An abrupt honk and the low slung Crown Vic sped through the intersection, limo tint hiding any cruddy gestures. I crept through and tried to recall everything about Keandra’s parents.
Only a few blocks east, they’d been deeper in the trenches than I had. Her mother was a hairdresser. Ran a salon in their living room which had absorbed the astringent smell of hair product and nail polish. Her father had been in and out of prison on drug charges. Then again, everyone on her street had.
“You said he had my curiosity,” I muttered, lost in thought. “Don’t have to be born magic to find it. You can just stick your nose in the wrong grave.”
“He first asked if I worked for the school nurse. Said she’s creepy.”
I huffed and cracked a smile.
“Then he started into the interrogation. The color of the gymnasium on the playground. Where my husband was. My age.”
I winced. “You saying I’m direct?”
Araceli arched an eyebrow. “The first day we met you were asking what I knew about swords.”
I gave in and let loose a chuckle. “No blacksmith alive is that damn intimidating with a nail. A real blacksmith should be making horseshoes and shit. Remember that heckler?”
She shook her head and laughed. “The look on his face.”
Her guard lowered remembering the day we met, time for me to ask another favor.
“Speaking of horseshoes, I’ve got one I want you to see. It’s hanging over a certain house out in the swamps around South Carolina.”
The laughing stopped. “The old man? Fortune?”
I nodded.
“You think he can help?”
“I hope he can. You’re right about all this two masters noise. But he’s linked to Kibaga’s Cloak somehow. Fortune’s trunkminding, or whatever he calls his mojo, that’s what unleashed the power. I saw him cuttin’ it up in the field behind Fenwick and again at the prison. That’s what unleashed those buried magics. He’s got to have an idea about how to control it. If I could only use it, maybe I can repeat what happened in Natchez on a bigger scale. End this Sunset King, not just hit the reset switch.”
I’d leaned forward, my words flowing urgent and visceral. I felt hungry, groping for the swagger offered by the cloak. Those pangs of jealousy I’d felt thinking about Sheila wearing that warrior’s shroud spiked with a sudden intensity. I wanted that power back. Needed it.
“Ace,” Araceli said, her chin lowered, hand near her waist where she kept her knives. “Are you sure more dealings with him is a good idea?”
“Don’t start with me.”
Bubonic roared as I pumped the accelerator. Yes, all this business was dangerous. All I had left was danger. But I had to put an end to Armageddon and if that meant cracking open every Pandora’s Box from here to the West Coast, so help me...
“Maybe whatever that Kibaga power was has served its purpose. Unlocking the potential
on that old plantation, freeing the captive magic there, maybe you won’t hear from this Crossroads Devil again. It could be for the better.”
She unbuttoned her shirt, reaching for her leathers behind the seat. Her pants were next, broad daylight, not a care for the traffic or the crystal clear glass. She didn’t even have the side of the car where the windshield had splintered. Compact and tight like a gymnast, she had just enough room to start wriggling into her armor. She went about it all businesslike, no hint of seduction. In her sports bra and solid colored underwear, she could’ve been headed to the gym I guess.
My eyes might’ve strayed, but my thoughts hadn’t if that had been her intention.
“At the very least, I need to warn that old hoodoo. See if he needs anything. I saw him in a vision at the prison. Maybe he’s in trouble.”
“If you actually had the sight, you’d not get into so much trouble yourself.” She moved on to strapping her armor down. Several buckles encircled her waist to tighten in the back. More ran down her arms and legs. Vials and knives jangled. “But we know demons want Fortune’s land. Of course he’s in trouble.”
“Then we should help.”
Araceli stopped her squirming and let a strap fall from between her teeth. “Did he ask?”
“We’ll do him a solid.”
“Deu meu,” she sighed. “Solids, favors, every action has consequences outside This World.”
“What do you care? Sooner I die, sooner you get your hands on the demon slaying blicky.”
She finally settled into her seat and cranked the window down. The thrift store shirt and pants fluttered then ripped outside to float to the curb behind us. I wagged my head in disapproval.
“You forget,” she said, rolling up her window and smoothing her armor. “I’ve met your son. For the moment, I’d like to keep his father safe. For his sake.”
“Did I ask?”
She raised an eyebrow and got quiet.
We’d made our way down North Avenue approaching the ramp for the interstate. Only the graffiti had changed since I left Baltimore four years ago. The buildings boasting the tags were all in their same dilapidated, hollow state. New gangs claiming burned out territory. Prison sentences and cemeteries determining the balance of power. Ritual sacrifice.