Immortal Magic (The New York Shade Book 3) Read online

  Immortal Magic

  D.N. Hoxa

  Contents

  Also by D.N. Hoxa

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  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

  Also by D.N. Hoxa

  Copyright © 2020 by D.N. Hoxa

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of

  America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or

  artwork herein is prohibited. This is a work of fiction. Names,

  characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely

  coincidental.

  Also by D.N. Hoxa

  The Marked Series (Completed)

  Blood and Fire

  Deadly Secrets

  Death Marked

  Winter Wayne Series (Completed)

  Bone Witch

  Bone Coven

  Bone Magic

  Bone Spell

  Bone Prison

  Bone Fairy

  Scarlet Jones Series (Completed)

  Storm Witch

  Storm Power

  Storm Legacy

  Storm Secrets

  Storm Vengeance

  Storm Dragon

  Victoria Brigham Series (Completed)

  Wolf Witch

  Wolf Uncovered

  Wolf Unleashed

  Wolf’s Rise

  The Curse of the Allfather (Ongoing)

  Wicked Gods

  Wicked Magic

  Starlight Series (Completed)

  Assassin

  Villain

  Sinner

  Savior

  Morta Fox Series (Completed)

  Heartbeat

  Reclaimed

  Unchanged

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  Chapter One

  Elisabeth Porter,

  Manhattan, October 11th

  I looked at the text and could not believe my eyes. Alyssa Smith was getting married. Married. In high school, we used to call her Pig Nose. How on earth had she managed to find a man who’d want to marry her?!

  R U ready Liz? my best friend Angela texted me. A second later came a picture of a man on a beach, wearing green shorts. A very hot man with blond hair, baby blue eyes, and—check this out—abs. I could count all six of them.

  No way, I texted back. There was just no way in hell that this guy would marry Pig Nose. Just…no way. Angela was just messing with me, that’s all.

  Yes way, said Angela, and then sent me another picture—this one of a woman. A gorgeous woman, who didn’t have a Pig Nose at all.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered at the night and zoomed in the picture. That’s how Alyssa Smith looked now? How in the world was that fair? Her skin was flawless and she had a gorgeous, golden tan. Her hair was no longer mousy brown, but a rich blonde. And was she wearing contacts? Because her eyes had never looked that green before, not in high school. And she’d definitely gotten her nose done. She looked like a freaking model!

  That’s it. I give up, I texted Angela. I was thirty-one years old, and I didn’t even have a boyfriend, let alone plans to get married and start a family. The jealousy, the envy I felt as I stared at Not-Pig-Nose-Anymore’s had me thinking that the screams I heard were coming from inside my head. I got like that sometimes. I heard noises in my head. No biggie.

  But the screams continued, and I had to look away from the screen of my phone to see what the hell was going on. It was probably nothing. This was Manhattan—people screamed in the streets for no reason all the time.

  Except this time, it seemed like the real deal.

  I was walking down 2nd Avenue just like I did six days a week at a few minutes past ten p.m., going back to my apartment from work, and I’d never had any incidents before. Nobody had even tried to rob me, and I couldn’t remember anybody getting shot at in this particular part of the City before. But the people who were staring at the grey, empty back wall of a five-story building seemed to think that we were in the middle of a freaking terrorist attack.

  I stopped walking—I don’t know why. Everybody else had, and we were all staring at the people screaming, pointing at the empty wall.

  “What the hell is going on here?” said the man standing right next to me who I hadn’t even noticed.

  I never got the chance to answer.

  Something hit me in the face, like a blow of strong wind, and it took my breath away for a second. My phone slipped from my hand, and I fell back, holding onto my neck. I couldn’t catch my breath, almost like I’d swallowed something wrong, but all thought of breathing left me when I looked ahead again, and I saw the pink lights flying all around us, hitting people right in the face before disappearing.

  And one was coming right for me again.

  My brain didn’t function. My body refused to move. I just stood there and watched, hands on my neck, eyes unblinking. And I waited for the…what? I had no idea what to expect, I just knew it was going to be bad.

  But the ball of light that looked like a giant firefly leaving a trail of pink behind it didn’t hit me. It hit the man standing right next to me, and he fell back, too. The light disappeared.

  More screams. Someone needed to call the police. We were being attacked, that was it. I looked at my phone on the sidewalk and somehow managed to bend down and grab it. The screen was cracked, but it still lit up. My hands shook as I tried to remember how to call someone and where the numbers were.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man, now behind me, whispered, and I looked up, expecting another one of those giant fireflies to come our way.

  But instead I saw something much more terrifying.

  The back wall of the five-story building, one I’d seen for the past three years now, every single day, was…it was disappearing. Some sort of an invisible fire was spreading onto it, but there were no flames. The holes in the wall began small, then grew bigger and bigger, until almost all of it had disappeared completely.

  Behind it wasn’t a building. It was a street. A wide street with trees along the sides and some weird green lights that seemed to be hanging onto nothing but air. People were looking at us from in there, and they seemed just as shocked to see us as we were to see them. On the left wall, I could barely make out huge colorful graffiti, but I must have been reading it wrong. It said: Welcome to the New York Shade! The beer is cold, the food is warm, and death is just another state of being.

  “Somebody call 9-1-1!” a man from the crowd shouted. “Somebody call 9-1-1!”

  The phone was in my hands. If I could just take my eyes off the disappearing wall for a second…

  Someone was coming from the street, and they were running. I don’t know how many of them there were, but they stepped out of the wide street with the weird green lights
and onto the sidewalk. They looked at us for a second, as if to make sure we were all there. Then, they raised their arms up.

  Screams filled me from head to toe.

  “Move!” the man behind me shouted, and he grabbed me by the arm to pull me away but not before I saw.

  There was light coming out of those men’s hands. Bright, colorful lights—and it was spreading over us, in the sky, intending to suffocate us, for good this time. The man let go of me, but I continued to run with everybody else, unable to let out a single sound, unable to see anything but my feet. As the screams became more distant, I began to hope that I might have gotten away.

  That’s until something pushed me on the back and sent me tumbling to the ground.

  Everything suddenly disappeared.

  Chapter Two

  Damian Reed

  2 hours earlier

  The smell of cooked meat made me feel like my stomach would be turning if it were capable. Living in a dead body sometimes had its advantages. Only sometimes.

  Recently, I’d been craving normal, which hadn’t happened in…I couldn’t even remember how long. Now, as I watched the six men sitting around me, enjoying their food, hearts alive and beating in their chests, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like. What it had been like, before I was turned.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try this? You’re missing out on the best ribs in Manhattan,” Everest Bush said. He was a real estate analyst and co-owner of a firm that was the best in the City. He and the rest of his team were also my team now. They were all good at their jobs, especially the youngest of them—Matthew Connor, Managing Director. He was quiet, the quietest of them all, but he was very observant. He gave you the impression that he was always confused, but nothing escaped his attention. You could see it in the way his eyes moved, analyzing details, the way he listened intently to anything anyone had to say. I was pretty sure nothing went on at the real estate firm that he didn’t know about.

  “No, thank you, Everest. Like I said, my liquid diet is very important for my health.” I raised him my glass of wine. “Thankfully, wine is liquid.” Just a lie I’d told them when they insisted on taking me out to dinner tonight.

  “Well, when you’re feeling better, we’ll do this again,” Everest said, the corners of his lips smeared with grease.

  “You seem so young,” Bob Shermack said from across the table, the oldest of them, over sixty years old. “Are you sure we haven’t heard about your family before? I knew a Reed when I was a boy. Lincoln was his name. Any chance you’re related?”

  I understood his curiosity. To them, I looked like a twenty-six-year-old man, younger than even Matthew Connor who was in his early thirties, and it didn’t make sense to them that I could have all that money to invest—unless I came from some old and very wealthy family.

  “Not that I know of, no,” I said to Bob Shermack.

  “Where did you go to school, if you don’t mind me asking?” Matthew Connor asked.

  “There now, this isn’t an interrogation,” Everest Bush said, forcing out a laugh. “We’re here to celebrate and have a good time.”

  At that, they continued to eat and drink, and talk about other things. I didn’t take it personally. They were all curious—I’d expected it. I’d be suspicious if they weren’t, because all six of them were human, just like the other sixty-four sitting around us in the fancy restaurant I could have gone without seeing tonight.

  The reason why I’d chosen to work with humans was that they were farthest from the Sacri Guild’s control. They did have their hands on human affairs, more so than supernaturals knew, but it was considerably less than everywhere else.

  That, and I wasn’t interested in making money fast. It’s why I invested in commercial real estate—not for fast returns but for preservation. I wanted good real estate assets that would preserve their value, regardless if they generated any rental income. And that was exactly what this firm was going to provide me with.

  The phone in my pocket vibrated with an incoming text while Bob Shermack was lecturing us about the importance of loyalty in business. It was Moira.

  We need you, she said and sent me the address of the Bane’s offices.

  Putting the phone away, I stood up.

  “Gentlemen, thank you for your company, but I’m afraid I must leave. There was a family emergency, and I’m needed right away.”

  “Oh, my. What happened? Is everybody okay?” Everest said, and to his credit, his concern wasn’t fake.

  “Yes, everybody is okay, but I need to leave anyway. It’s been a pleasure.” I stepped away from the table. “Have a good evening.”

  “Of course, Damian. The pleasure is all ours.” Everest stood up to shake my hand. “I hope everything gets resolved quickly.”

  I thanked them again, paid the bill with one of the waiters by the entrance, and walked out of the restaurant.

  October was a bit colder this year. The wind bit into my skin when I hid in an alley across the street and began to run, not exactly alarmed. Moira and the team had received their first official job the night before—to find a stolen family heirloom for the family of a very powerful witch. I wondered what the trouble was, but I wasn’t concerned. The Bane could handle themselves just fine.

  As I ran, I passed a six-story apartment building I’d gotten very familiar with lately. Sinea Montero lived in it, on the fourth floor. The lights were off. She wasn’t home, but it was all the same. Even when she was and she knew I was there, she never opened the door anymore. She never came out on the balcony.

  It confused me as much as it made me…unhappy. Wasn’t she the one who said that time didn’t fix things, that one needed to talk about them? Unless she didn’t want to talk to me at all, which would explain everything perfectly. All of it because of a lie and my bad temper.

  Worse yet, it had only been thirteen days since I last saw her and I had no idea what to do—break down her door and make her look at me, or wait some more? Very, very confusing.

  As I ran faster, I was glad that I didn’t need to decide anything right away.

  Chapter Three

  When I arrived at the office, I knew right away why I’d been called. There were five people in there, and whomever the team had brought with them had a heartbeat. Bane Inc. was in a wide, three-story building in Rose Hill. It was both close enough and far enough from the New York Shade, and it had plenty of space. The logo was engraved in a piece of thick glass, mounted on the wall next to it. I didn’t have to knock. The door was open.

  It led to a small round foyer with indigo-colored armchairs across from the front door and two identical doors to their sides. There was a water tank at the corner with a bin next to it, a hanger, and a coffee table with a few magazines on it. I went through the door on the right—both led to the same room because they hadn’t wanted separate offices. It beats me why they broke the wall to make that second door, but according to Moira, it looked more symmetrical.

  Their office was one large room with four desks and some furniture on the left. The team were in the middle of it, one swiveling chair between them. On it sat a woman, possibly over eighty, her dark hair all over her face, some of it stuck to the blood dripping down the corner of her lips, matching the color of her shirt. Her arms seemed to be tied behind her. Her eyes were closed, but she was alive. Just unconscious.

  “What have we here,” I asked, trying to stifle a smile. I went and sat on the first desk—Emanuel’s, I think. Their first job and they already had somebody unconscious in their offices. They were off to a great start.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” Moira said under her breath, hands on her hips. She was the only one looking at me. The others were all marveling at the dark linoleum floor.

  “It looks like you’ve found whoever you were looking for, and she’s apparently refusing to share the information you need, so you knocked her out and called me here to see into her memories.”

  They all flinched, almost at the
same time.

  “In that case, it’s exactly what it looks like,” Moira said.

  “I mean, we could beat her some more, starve her or something, but it’s just a stupid heirloom,” John said, scratching the back of his head. I realized he had a bit of dried blood left on his face—like he’d bled but had cleaned up afterward. “She’s a nasty piece of work.”

  “She’s powerful,” Moira said. “If we let her wake up for longer than five minutes, it’s all spells and explosions, and I do not want to mess up the office. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Emanuel sighed loudly. “If you could just bite her, that’d be great, Dam.”

  “You know what we need? We need a witch or a wizard or a freaking sorcerer,” said Zane. “We’re going to be interrogating people now, okay? We won’t just be killing things. There will be talking with people in this job, and we are in no way prepared to do that. All we know how to do is kill!”

  He sounded a bit panicked.

  “Yeah, dickhead. We got that after you almost bit her head off,” John said.

  “What the fuck was I supposed to do? She was spelling me,” Zane shouted.

  “Get out of the way, that’s what,” said Moira.

  “He’s got a point. We’re not cut out for this. If someone attacks me, I want to kill them, not apprehend them and ask them questions,” Emanuel said.