Blood and Whispers Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Blood and Whispers

  A.C. Haskins

  A NEW URBAN FANTASY

  THE MOST DANGEROUS WEAPON IS A PAST SCORNED

  Thomas Quinn is a sorcerer haunted by the memories of the things he's done over centuries of service to the Arcanum. From battling djinn to killing demigods and dragons, the scars and nightmares have left him a broken man. He has long retired from that life, running an occult shop in Philadelphia for the past several decades, wanting nothing more than to be left alone with his books and his whiskey and his shame.

  But when two detectives come to his door asking about a brutal ritual murder in his city, Quinn must reluctantly take up the mantle of a Sorcerer of the Arcanum once more, and face down those who would threaten the fragile peace between the human and magical worlds. His investigation takes him from the streets of Philadelphia to the court of a Faerie King as he races to stop the apocalypse.

  Thomas Quinn was prepared to fight rogue sorcerers and Fae monsters. But the greatest threat he faces may be his own inner demons. . . .

  Blood and Whispers

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by A.C. Haskins

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2523-3

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-827-5

  Cover art by Todd Lockwood

  First printing, March 2021

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haskins, A. C., author.

  Title: Blood and whispers / A.C. Haskins.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020050086 | ISBN 9781982125233 (trade paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Magic—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A8366 B48 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050086

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version of Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For my dad, Casey, who taught me to love stories and storytelling.

  For my mom, Esther, who first encouraged me to write my stories down.

  And for Mrs. Dawn Burnette, my eleventh-grade English teacher, who, more than anyone else, taught me how.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While the author tends to get all the credit, writing a novel is far more often than not a group endeavor, and there are many people who helped bring this book into reality.

  First, thank you to my parents, for raising me to be a reader: for filling my life with books, for pretending not to notice when I thought I was being sneaky by reading under the covers after bedtime as a kid, and for everything else you did to help me become the man I am. I love you both dearly, and I am so very proud to be your son.

  Next, thanks to those who directly contributed to the writing process, from giving me ideas to helping me with edits and rewrites. In no particular order, I’d like to thank Phil Bolger, Jack Clemons, Keith Finch, Esther Haskins, James Quigg, Eric Koske, Landis Ford, Kimmi Johnston, Jeff Ivie, Sam Stanfield, Emily Vick, Cathe Smith, and anyone else I’m forgetting (there are almost certainly at least a couple) who served as an Alpha or Beta Reader at any point and provided me notes, feedback, impressions, and suggestions for how I could make it a better book.

  Chris Smith, I didn’t forget about you. Your name didn’t appear in that list because you get a special thanks, on two counts. First, for letting me crash your meeting with Toni, at which she invited me to send her the manuscript when I was ready—without that, this may never have happened at all. Second, for going above and beyond when I asked you to provide feedback on the completed first draft. Your notes and comments had more impact on the development of the final draft than anyone. Thank you, for everything.

  I’d like to thank the entire team at Baen Books, but especially Toni Weisskopf, who graciously read my initial submission and, rather than rejecting it out of hand when she decided it didn’t quite meet Baen’s standards, gave me detailed feedback on the aspects of the story I needed to address to turn it into something she’d want to publish—and more than that, something for which I’m proud to have my name on the cover.

  Thank you, also, to everyone who supported and encouraged me along the way. Many of you I’ve already named for your contributions to the editing and rewriting process, but all my friends and family deserve a second round of thanks, whether they helped with the actual writing or not, for helping keep me sane during the stress of writing, and rewriting, and submitting, and rewriting, and resubmitting. I wouldn’t have gotten through any of it without you all.

  And, of course, an especially big thank you to my lovely wife, Nora, for putting up with me locking myself in my office for hours at a time (and sometimes entire weekends) to hang out with Thomas Quinn and his supporting cast rather than spending that time with her. I love you!

  Chapter 1

  They screamed. As the cloud of fire and gas and white-hot cinders bore down on their homes, as the world ended around them, as they and their children faced their last seconds of life, they screamed. A profoundly useless gesture.

  I gripped my glass tightly, the tawny liquid within swirling as my hand trembled. An empty bottle sat on the table next to me, mocking me with its undelivered promises of relief. I’d been drinking for over two hours since the nightmare had woken me up, but the scenes continued to play through my memory, as clearly as when they’d unfolded more than a hundred years ago.

  They’d screamed, and we’d done it to them. A god had gone insane, and my comrades and I had put him down like a mad dog. But it hadn’t been easy. We’d had to destroy the entire island, and all those people in range of the eruption and the earthquakes and the tsunamis we unleashed. In killing him we’d made a conscious choice, sacrificed them all for the sake of millions of others.

  Thousands. Tens of thousands, even. Tens of thousands of pitiful, desperate, futile screams.

  I’d stood there watching the demise of Krakatoa with my fellow sorcerers from a safe distance. We’d done nothing to save them. There was nothing we could have done to save them. But knowing that didn’t make living with it any easier. It had been almost a century and a half since that day, and the screams still ruined my sleep on a regular basis.

  That wasn’t the only memory that haunted me, of course. Between the things I’d seen and the things I’d done over a very long lifetime as a professional sorcerer, I had no shortage of nightmares to keep me company. Half a bottle of whisky before bed, give or take, and I could usually manage to sleep through them. But not always.

  As I finished the last sips in the glass, I looked at the clock. Just after four in the morning. No point trying to get back to sleep. With a resigned sigh, I threw the bottle in the trash and headed back upstairs to brush my teeth and get ready to face the day.

  At least I didn’t have much of a commute. After getting dressed and a quick breakfast, I made my way back downstairs, flipped the lights on, and glanced around the small shop I owned and operated below my small apartment.

  Floor to ceiling shelves packed with books on every occult subject under the sun lined the walls of the cramped main area, and the rest of the floor was occupied by shorter shelves stocked with the sorts of arcane supplies and tools one might expect to find in such a store. One corner was set up as a reading nook, with a couple of armchairs and a small table. The register sat on a narrow counter toward the back. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was mine—I’d been running Quinn’s Esoterica for almost sixty years now, since I’d settled into my present semi-retirement. I could have lived comfortably without a job, but the shop gave me something to do. Sometimes it was even enough to distract myself from the memories.

  It was still far too early to open up for the day, so I headed through the door behind the counter into the back room and turned on the light. This was both my office and where I stored the good stuff. One complete wall of the room was a wrought-iron cage, locked with a half dozen padlocks of
varying ages and materials, its shelves filled with ancient tomes, jars and vials, boxes, and bags full of the rare, valuable, or powerful supplies and tools that drew my primary clientele to my door—every sorcerer, Fae creature, or other magical being within a two-hour drive of Philadelphia knew Quinn’s was the place to go for hard-to-find items.

  Two of the remaining walls of the room were lined with uncaged shelves, full of various books I kept for myself and my own research, as well as various small statues, knickknacks, and other mementos of a long magical career. From the ceiling hung the taxidermied remains of a tentacled creature vaguely resembling an octopus. Along the back wall there was a small desk, covered in papers and books and an old laptop. Next to it, a coffeemaker sat on a small filing cabinet, yesterday’s cold leftovers still in the pot. Sighing again, I grabbed it and headed for the sink in the customer bathroom.

  Once I had a full cup, I wearily sat at the desk and contemplated the documents in front of me: a large map of greater Philadelphia which I’d been steadily covering with markings, along with a handful of scattered sheets of paper with notes scribbled on them in my near-illegible handwriting. There was also an old book, opened to a page on ley-lines, the currents of magical energy which fuel advanced sorcery for those of us with the knowledge and skill to use them.

  The global ley-line network is a living thing, constantly shifting around in vast and complex—but generally predictable—patterns. But a few days ago, I’d noticed the ley-lines in the area moving unexpectedly, resulting in nodes hundreds or even thousands of yards from where my experience told me they ought to be. Normally one of the largest in the city hovered under Fairmount Park, shifting slowly only from about Strawberry Mansion to The Cliffs between the summer and winter solstices. But now it was all the way down below the Museum of Art, almost a mile from where it should be this time of year. I’d spent most of yesterday mapping out the movements and trying to figure out what was going on.

  I sipped my coffee, willing my brain to wake up, then set back to my task. Focusing for a second to bring my magical senses to the front, I mentally reached out to the nearest ley-line. I followed it along to a node where it intersected another line, feeling the tingling hum of its energy in the back of my mind. Once I reached the node, I felt back to my start point to figure out how far and in what direction it was from me, and carefully marked its location down on the map. Then I returned my attention to the node and followed another line, and repeated the process for node after node, line after line.

  Tracing ley-lines like this is done by feel, not sight, so I couldn’t exactly look up addresses—I had to figure out the distance and direction between each node as I went along and mark it on the map so I’d be able to compare the magical geography to the physical later. The work wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was tedious and time consuming. I had to be meticulous, triple-checking each step; any error would throw off everything I calculated after that point.

  At some point my gray tabby, Roxana, wandered down from the apartment upstairs to curl up in the bed I kept for her behind the desk chair. By the time I’d finished mapping out the changes in Center City and the surrounding neighborhoods, I looked up to realize it was time to open up shop for the day. I threw back the rest of my coffee and steeled myself to interact with people.

  I needn’t have bothered, as I had no customers that morning anyway. Could have been the rain. That’s it, I told myself, it’s the rain. Definitely not my customer service skills.

  I didn’t dislike people, necessarily. But I had a reputation in the magical underworld as a recluse, practically a hermit, who only dealt with others when necessary. Aside from customers and the occasional conversation at Bran’s Pub, my interactions with other people were largely limited to some important professional contacts, visits to the Market, and attending the Grand Conclave every thirteen years as my rank obliged me to do. I’d long since stopped bothering with social pleasantries. It had been a couple decades since the last time I’d been on a date, and it had not ended well—Samantha was a nice girl, but I wasn’t suited for dating anymore. The only woman I’d ever really loved had died seventy years ago. Her death was among the more prominent of the many memories which haunted my dreams.

  In the absence of customers, I stayed in the back, idly reading through whatever I could find on ley-line movements in my personal collection, and had a few glasses of whisky to tide me over and keep the whispers in the back of my mind at bay. I had nightmares enough in my sleep; I didn’t need them disturbing me during the daylight hours. I tried to put other thoughts out of my mind and to focus on my research.

  The problem appeared to be that no matter how carefully I mapped the ley-lines or how many old books in long-forgotten languages I strained my eyes to read, the simple truth was that none of the authors on my shelves really seemed to know much about the nature of the ley-line network and its shifts. I’d looked—there were no historical records tracing the movements of the lines or the nodes anywhere that I could find. Plenty about using the energy contained within them, but little to nothing about their nature. It was a puzzle. Was this recent change something unique and unusual? Or was it merely part of a longer cycle?

  I’d studied ley-lines in more depth than most—one of my mentors, an immortal sorcerer named Johannes, was something of an expert on them. But I hadn’t spoken to him in three-quarters of century. Calling him for help on my ley-line curiosity wasn’t really an option. There was far too much baggage, too much history. I just wasn’t up to dealing with it. I put Johannes out of my mind, settled in with my survey notes and my map and my Scotch, and tried to look for patterns in the chaos.

  Eventually I noticed that closing time had come and gone without the bell over the shop door ringing even once. I set aside my reading and stood up with a groan, then headed out to lock up. As I turned the deadbolt and set the magical wards, I noticed my hand was starting to tremble. Whether it was from the booze, the constant struggle to ignore the little voice whispering in the back of my mind of things I’d rather not think about, or simply that I’d forgotten to eat lunch, I couldn’t say. Maybe all three. Regardless, I knew it was a sign I needed to eat something and get as much sleep as I could manage.

  I didn’t feel up to cooking, however. I grabbed the holstered Smith & Wesson J-frame revolver from my desk drawer and clipped it inside my waistband just to the right of the belt buckle, then unlocked the door I’d just locked so I could venture forth for dinner.

  The gun was just one of my many eccentricities. Sorcerers tend to have enemies, even those of us who keep to ourselves, so we always need to be prepared to defend ourselves when outside the relative safety of our wards. But most of my brethren prefer to stick to magic. To my knowledge, I was the only ranked sorcerer in the world who had ever even considered a gun as more than a novelty.

  There was a time—back when I was a dedicated soldier of the Arcanum—when I would have agreed with the rest of the magical community that guns were pointless for someone like me, who could throw fireballs and lightning from the tips of his fingers, who had fought demigods and demons and Fae monsters. The destructive power of a bullet paled in comparison to the things I could do.

  But those days were long past. I hadn’t conjured battle magic since the Shadow War. After what I’d done, what I’d seen on the Fields of Fire, I couldn’t stomach the thought of doing so again. Defensive magic was fine, but the idea of burning my enemies down with the power I’d drawn on that day revolted me to my very core. I knew I could still do it, should I be driven to that level of anger again. I also knew now what it would cost me to lose control like I had that day and I had no desire to add to my existing collection of torturous memories.