Magic After Dark Boxed Set (Six Book Bundle) Read online

  About the Books

  A Look at Sacrificed in Shadow

  Sometimes, you need a demon to fight demons.

  Lincoln Marshall is a small-town deputy with a very big problem. Six members of his church have been found dead, killed by a rogue werewolf. He'll have to make a deal with the Devil to save victims that have gone missing -- maybe literally. Elise Kavanagh, preternatural investigator and exorcist, is the expert when it comes to violent deaths at the jaws of evil. She's also among the most powerful demons that Hell has spawned.

  Elise jumps at Lincoln's case, and it's not just because of his down-home charm. Someone's laid a trap for her in Northgate, and she wants to find out who. She'll have to team up with Rylie Gresham, Alpha of the last surviving werewolf pack, to figure out who's trying to blame the murders on werewolves. Only together can they stop the killings -- and uncover the secrets buried in Northgate.

  A Look at Crimson Night

  Welcome one and all to Carnival Diabolique- or what I affectionately like to call, the carnival of the damned. My name is Pandora, and though my face might not look familiar to you, you do know me. I'm a Nephilim. What does that mean? I'm half demon, what's my other name? Lust. I'm the dark craving that drives you mad, makes you want, makes you reckless and stupid. I'm the drug you'll do anything to get your hands on. But I'm not all bad. I fight for light, for goodness and truth. I love my job, killing vampires and werewolves, zombies, and freaks... it's what makes me happy. But people are starting to disappear and lately I've felt a dark presence lurking around me. I think it might be a death priest and that's really bad. There isn't much a demon like me fears, but I fear them. This should have been easy, me killing the fanged freaks, getting rid of my pesky priest problem, but I'm about to be betrayed by the one person I thought I could trust with my life and before the night is through I'll be covered in crimson...

  A Look at Influential Magic

  It’s tough being a faery in New Orleans, a city fraught with vampires…especially when their very existence drains your life-force.

  Willow Rhoswen, owner of The Fated Cupcake and part-time vampire hunter for the Void is having a rough week. Four years after her twin brother’s mysterious death, Willow’s life is threatened and the director saddles her with a new partner—her ex-boyfriend, David. To her horror, he’s turned vamp, which causes her physical pain whenever she touches him…and any other specimen of the undead.

  In order to save Willow’s life, David agrees to turn double agent against the most powerful vampire organization in New Orleans. Or so he says. And she’s convinced they know something about her brother’s death. Unsure where David’s loyalties lie, she turns to Talisen, her childhood crush, to help her solve the mystery.

  Caught between two gorgeous men and a director who’ll stop at nothing to control Willow’s gifts, she’ll have to follow her instincts and learn who to trust. Otherwise, she risks losing more than just her life.

  A Look at Fairy Tales and Ever Afters

  The first three titles in the Fairy Tales & Ever Afters series in one compilation!

  Loving a Fairy Godmother

  It ain’t easy being the only Fairy Godfather in existence, especially when the Fairy Godmother of your dreams wants you kicked out of the program.

  Tiernan is given his hardest assignment yet – get a girl by the name of Cinderella her HEA or lose his status as a Fairy Godfather. His supervisor for this job is none other than Reina, the one woman he’s interested in and the one woman who wants nothing to do with him. Well, Reina better watch out, because Tiernan has decided Fairy Godmothers deserve to have Happily Ever Afters too.

  Loving an Ugly Beast

  When a Beast gets a chance to become a Beauty, he takes it.

  Benton never cared what anyone thought of him until Nissa entered his life, but to win her love he would do anything, including make a wish to a Fairy Godmother to change himself. Now he is everything he wasn’t before – handsome, charming, and desirable. But does Nissa really prefer beauty, or will she fight to get her beast back?

  Loving a Prince Charming

  If you’re engaged to a Cursed Princess, don’t expect life to be easy.

  Seth’s intended is the princess of the neighboring kingdom, a poor soul nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty’ because of the curse placed on her. While he’s never met her, he won’t let an innocent suffer and is determined to rescue her before the curse takes effect. But to get to her, he needs the help of Kira, his personal guard and best friend. Unfortunately, only love can break the curse, and while he has no feelings for the princess, his feelings for Kira grow stronger by the day…

  A Look at Maggie for Hire

  When monsters appear in Los Angeles, Maggie MacKay is on the job. No one is better at hauling the creepy crawlies back where they belong. No one, that is, except her dad, who disappeared without a trace in the middle of an assignment.

  Now an elf named Killian has shown up with a gig. Seems Maggie's uncle is working with the forces of dark to turn Earth into a vampire convenience store, serving bottomless refills on humans.

  The only hope for survival lies in tracking down two magical objects and a secret that vanished with Maggie's father.

  A Look at Sterling

  Zoë Merrick lived an ordinary life until the night she was brutally attacked. She narrowly escapes death, rescued by Adam Razor, an ex-soldier who offers her friendship and a place to stay. But something else is different. Zoë is unable to control an unexplainable energy coursing through her body.

  Justus De Gradi is a man who can teach her that control. She meets him by chance - a man who's handsome, arrogant, and not entirely human. He reveals that she's a Mage - an immortal made of light, not magic. Zoë must now make a choice: Rebuild her life in the human world with the man who saved her, or live with Justus and learn how to use her extraordinary gifts. Justus has sworn an oath to protect her life, but can he guard her from the one man who has a right to claim it?

  Zoë learns the price of freedom...and the value of loyalty.

  Magic After Dark

  Sacrificed In Shadow

  The Ascension Series - Book One

  SM Reine

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About SM Reine

  Crimson Night

  Night Series - Book One

  Marie Hall

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About Marie Hall

  Influential Magic

  A Crescent City Fae Novel

  Deanna Chase

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About Deanna Chase

  Fairy Tales and Ever Afters

  Volume One

  Danielle Monsch

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About Danielle Monsch

  Maggie For Hire

  Maggie MacKay Magical Tracker Series - Book One

  Kate Danley

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About Kate Danley

  Sterling

  A Mageri Series Novel - Book One

  Dannika Dark

  Beginning

  Mid-Point

  About Dannika Dark

  Magic After Dark

  Copyright © 2013 Bayou Moon Publishing

  Copyright © 2013 by Red Iris Books

  Copyright © 2013 by Marie Hall

  Copyright © 2013 by Deanna Chase

  Copyright © 2013 by Danielle Monsch

  Copyright © 2011 by Kate Danl
ey

  Copyright © 2011 by Dannika Dark

  Interior Layout: Author's HQ

  ISBN: 978-1-940299-05-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  Sacrificed in Shadow

  The Ascension Series - Book One

  SM Reine

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was the kind of bar where truckers stopped to pick up hookers. The women hovered near the back door, smoking cigarettes and picking at their sores; they swayed to the road, back and forth, teetering on Lucite heels that stretched the malnourished muscles of their legs into ropes. The missing teeth were slightly more attractive than the rotting ones that remained.

  They catcalled to Lincoln Marshall when he pulled up in a rented ’96 Toyota Corolla. A brittle-haired blond in her forties plumped her breasts, wrinkled to hard leather from too much sun, and grabbed his crotch the instant he stepped from the car.

  “Look at him,” she told the others. “I love a man with money.”

  He pushed her hand away, but another took its place. A cracked French manicure dug into his balls.

  “Smells nice,” said Frenchy, sliding her palm down the shaft through his briefs. He didn’t even manage a half-hearted erection.

  “Smells like Axe,” said a third. “I love Axe.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Lincoln said.

  The blond barked a nicotine laugh. “Queer.”

  He pushed away the next attempt to grope him, and the next.

  “Think he’s queer? He looks queer.”

  “What a faggot.”

  “Cut him,” said a fourth.

  Lincoln had seen the likes of these bitches when he was in college. They were flies buzzing around the corpses of good towns gone sick, feeding on the rot in the hearts of men. The only way to eliminate them was to eliminate the corpse.

  He smoothed a nervous hand over his hair, cropped so that it wouldn’t brush his ears or collar. He bumped the door of the Corolla shut with his hip. And then he drew his badge. The brass shined in the caged lightbulb on the bar’s back door. Six points of a star, nestled comfortably in leather backing, encircled the insignia of the Grove County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Don’t touch me,” Lincoln said again.

  This time, the women listened. He blinked and they were gone.

  Lincoln Marshall turned a full circle, looking for the pungent women that had greeted him. There was no hint of lycra or animal print. He couldn’t even smell tobacco anymore.

  Semi trucks slumbered on a patch of bare dirt behind the bar, reduced to black rectangles against the navy sky. Music rattled through the tin-paneled walls of the bar, jittering the boards nailed over the windows. Lincoln heard laughter inside, the too-loud voices of drunk men shouting, the rattle of glass bottles.

  But the women were gone. They hadn’t even left footprints in the dust.

  He grabbed the handle of his car door, tempted to drive away. Instead, he pocketed his badge again, and pulled out a notebook. He had written three things on the first page: The Pump Lounge (US-93), Lucas McIntyre - The Hunting Club, and Find the woman. There was a hundred dollar bill tucked in the back page in case he needed gas or a tow truck. The rest of the money was at home. All five thousand of it.

  Notebook back in pocket. Hand smoothed over his hair. Deep breaths.

  Lincoln Marshall walked into The Pump Lounge.

  A live band played on a three feet-by-three feet platform in the corner that passed for a stage. Banjo, drums, vocalist, none of them with any obvious skill. It didn’t matter. Nobody was listening.

  At one table, three bikers in fringed leather vests argued with a jaundiced skeleton of a man. An old woman wearing Daisy Dukes was sobbing at another table, consoled by a trucker. A man was slumped at the end of the bar, thigh fat drooped over either side of the barstool, snoring into a pile of vomit. The bartender, a brick house of a woman with a heart tattooed on her cheek, wiped down the chunks with a dishtowel.

  “What you want, sugar?” she asked Lincoln. Her eyes flicked over his polo shirt, khakis, and loafers.

  “Lime and tonic on the rocks,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  “You’re stained,” the bartender said, jerking her chin at his crotch.

  He looked down, surprised to see a circle of moisture over the lap of his khakis. He hadn’t even been aroused by the assault outside, yet his body had reacted to the pawing.

  Angry heat crept up his neck. He could see his face purpling in the sliver of clean mirror behind the bar. He was a handsome man, Lincoln Marshall, and he knew it—from the square jaw to the bright hazel eyes, the cheekbones that could cut right through any woman’s heart, and the broad shoulders. Girls in high school used to tell him to go to Hollywood. Become an actor. But he’d returned from his full-ride football scholarship to protect Grove County. Nothing was more important than that.

  He wasn’t a man that wet himself over crack whores.

  “Don’t take it personal,” the bartender said. “They get everyone.” She slid a tumbler toward him. He caught it.

  “There was nobody out there,” Lincoln said.

  She gave him a knowing look. “Take the booth. He’ll be here soon.”

  “Who?”

  The bartender had already turned her back.

  Lincoln glanced at the door that he had used as an entrance. The night outside was black, blacker than it had any right to be. He couldn’t even see the rickety wooden steps leading to the threshold. It was like someone had draped a blanket over the doorway. He wouldn’t be going out that way.

  He wouldn’t be going out the supposed front door, either. It was nailed shut. He got a real good look at the bent nails as he slid into the booth positioned next to it. The table was covered in a yellow crust. Sulfur? It was hard to tell with the overbearing stench of piss and vomit and cheap liquor.

  Lincoln set the tumbler down. He didn’t dare drink. Alcohol-free or not, he didn’t trust the bartender to serve him something that wasn’t laced.

  Ripping napkins out of the metal container, he scrubbed at his trousers. He had shot a load at having broken fingernails dug into his genitals and hadn’t felt the orgasm. Some unsettled part of him wondered if the hooker had stolen the sensations from him. The Devil was working black magic behind a bar on US-93, miles from Alamo City, where even God couldn’t shine His light.

  “You’re a long way from home, Deputy.”

  A bear of a man took the opposite side of the booth. The hair on his head was prematurely receding, but what remained looked like it had been dyed blue with Kool-Aid. What his scalp lacked carpeted his beastly arms and stuck out the collar of his wife beater instead. He wasn’t trying to hide his shoulder rig. Two pistols, positioned for a cross-draw, gleamed black in the dim light of The Pump Lounge.

  “Lucas McIntyre?” Lincoln guessed.

  McIntyre tongued his stretched labret plug and smiled.

  In any other situation, Lincoln would have offered to shake his hand. But he still had a fistful of messy napkins and his nerves were wound tight. He wasn’t going to touch this filthy redneck riddled with facial piercings, not when a single touch from the women outside had juiced him dry of both semen and courage.

  Find the woman.

  “How can I help you?” McIntyre asked.

  “Aren’t we still waiting on someone?”

  “No.”

  “You said on the phone that you could hook me up with her,” Lincoln said.

  “I can. You talk to me
first.” His sentences were staccato, choppy as his thinning hair, like talking was an effort.

  Lincoln tossed the napkins onto the table. “I could have talked to you on the phone if it was like that. I didn’t have to come…here.”

  “You did ‘cause we said you did,” McIntyre said. “Tell me what you need. I’ll tell you if you can see her.”

  Lincoln didn’t like this. Not one bit. But he could tell when he was cornered. He had no leverage to negotiate, and he wanted out of this hellhole as soon as possible. “There have been murders. I’m told that she’s the expert with this stuff.”

  “Deputies deal with murders,” McIntyre said.

  “They’re considered animal attacks. The bodies are mauled beyond recognition. Remaining flesh is semi-masticated, and the rest of the bodies are consumed.”

  “First they’re murders, now they’re animal attacks.”

  “It’s both,” Lincoln said.

  McIntyre raised his pierced brows. “So it’s like that.”

  “Yeah. It’s like that.”

  “Full moons?”

  “And new,” Lincoln said grimly.

  That was the information that clearly convinced McIntyre. An average crackpot wouldn’t know that werewolves—real werewolves, the Devil gloved in a man’s skin—transformed twice a month: once when the moon was full, and once when there was no moon at all.

  McIntyre rubbed his jaw with a meaty hand. There was a chunk missing from his chin that looked like a bite wound. “How many?”

  “Six dead.”

  “Survivors?”