“Help me.”
A woman’s voice drifted through the air, barely more than a whisper.
My eyes narrowed as I peered into the darkness. A young woman stared back at me with haunted eyes. It took me a long moment to recognize her. This was one of the missing campers. The horrors of the last few days had eroded her youthful good looks; the drawn, emaciated features before me were just a shadowy reflection of her once-stunning beauty. The poor girl hunched on a chair, hands secured behind her back with thick, ugly vines that had sprouted from the ground.
Cynical bastard that I am, I hadn’t expected to find any survivors. I lowered my weapon and took a step toward her.
I was almost upon the hapless victim when a sharp pain once again tore into my chest. My scar burned as if the demon’s biting nail were piercing my flesh right now, rather than ten years ago.
I froze and my face grew cold. I knew what this meant. I knew what I had to do.
I raised Hellseeker.
Leveled it at the terrified, traumatized woman in the chair.
And pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWO
REALITY SPED UP the instant I unleashed the wrath of the blessed weapon. The helpless expression on the woman’s face gave way to a cold glare of unbridled hatred. Her restraints vanished into thin air as she hurled herself to the ground. The move saved the witch’s unholy life, but she wasn’t fast enough to completely avoid my bullet. A piercing shriek, more animal than human, echoed through the cabin—Hellseeker had found its target. Black blood exploded from the witch’s arm moments before the cabin’s shadows swallowed her.
My pistol is a formidable weapon in my ongoing battle against all things that go bump into the night. But it’s not enough for Hellseeker to graze a supernatural foe. A shot to the head or heart is needed to put an end to a creature of darkness. I’d wounded the witch, but she was far from being defeated.
In other words, all I had managed to do was piss off Mercy Blackmore. Great.
An invisible force seized me and a wave of deadly cold slammed into my chest, taking my breath away. I knew all too well what that meant. The witch had cast a spell on me. The only reason I was desperately gasping for air instead of exhaling my internal organs was due to the protective pentagram-shaped ring on my finger, the Seal of Solomon. Another helpful tool in my battle with the forces of darkness…
I’m no wizard. When I first embarked on my quest to hunt monsters, I’d naturally toyed with the idea of mastering magic. Why not, right? If you comb through tome after tome of arcane occult knowledge, you have to wonder if there might be a way to put it all to good use. After all, you have to fight fire with fire, right? Wrong! Only a fool would dabble with such forces, as Joe liked to remind me all the time.
You play with fire, you’re liable to set the whole goddamn world ablaze.
If you’re lucky.
To quote my mentor once again, “Magic corrupts, and black magic is an express ticket to Hell.” In other words, human nature and magic represent a recipe for disaster. Even if you start off with the best of intentions, odds are good that using magic will eventually corrupt you—or get you killed.
I’d faced enough mad sorcerers in my day to know this to be true, all of them fallen idealists who’d succumbed to the dark siren call of unholy power. There were no good wizards outside fairy tales—or at least I hadn’t made their acquaintance yet. Our primate brains are poorly equipped to handle the high price that comes with such power.
That said, only an idiot takes a knife to a gunfight. Mastering spells that bend reality may be a sure shot to becoming a big bad, but using magical artifacts to battle monsters is another story. Without Hellseeker, my protective ring and my other weapons, I wouldn’t be much good in a fight against a bloodthirsty vampire or ravenous shapeshifter.
Pistol blazing, I scrambled away from the menacing silhouette.
Even though I was still among the living, I felt like I’d gone a couple of rounds in a vicious MMA bout. A bulletproof vest can save your life, but the bruises sure as hell will keep you from catching a good night’s sleep for days afterward. Magical defenses are a lot like that. The Star of Solomon, for example, could ward off one or two magical attacks, but the ring would soon become useless under a sustained assault.
I had to defeat Mercy Blackmore before she cast another spell.
My mind went blank as the witch lurched at me from the darkness. No trace of the human mask remained now. The creature was the stuff of nightmares. Bloodshot eyes leered back at me from a ghostly white face cratered and crumpled by the passage of time. Gray hair clung to the pale scalp in heavy, dirt-caked clumps. Thankfully, layers of tattered black rags covered the witch’s grotesquely distorted body.