Sorcerer's Creed Books 1-3 Read online

  SORCERER’S CREED BOOKS 1-3

  N. P. Martin

  MARTIN PUBLICATIONS

  Contents

  BLOOD SACRIFICE (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK ONE)

  Rights

  The Sorcerer’s Creed Series

  1. Spell Blasted

  2. Badass

  3. Specter

  4. Forgotten

  5. A Friendly Call

  6. A Welcome Distraction

  7. Pyromancer

  8. A Visitor

  9. Bad News

  10. Do Or Die

  11. The Mccreedy Family Massacre

  12. Quick Drink

  13. Darkness Calling

  14. Playing With Fire

  15. The Library Of Dark Magick

  16. Black Magick

  17. The Morgue

  18. John Doe

  19. The Summoning

  20. Baal

  21. Fight

  22. Sanaka's Sanctum

  23. Bitchcraft

  24. Apparition

  25. Mr. Black

  26. Synchronized Swimming

  27. Partners

  28. Gearing Up

  29. The Leap

  30. The Devil’s Playground

  31. Pit Bulls On Steroids

  32. A Soul With Itchy Feet

  33. Frank And John

  34. Soul Ripper

  35. Ghoul Status

  36. Return Of The Demon

  37. Mindfuck

  38. The Roundhouse

  39. Green Fire

  40. Unleash The Magick

  41. Revelations

  42. Growing Up

  43. Fatherly Love

  44. Scorpion

  45. Bad Coffee Blues

  46. Standing Tall

  47. Abandon All Hope

  48. Dealing With The Devil

  49. Final Goodbye

  50. The Lair Of Mr. Black

  51. Grasping Hands

  52. Dark Magick Rising

  53. Suffering Defeat

  54. Sometimes They Come Back

  55. Consumed

  56. Light Against Dark

  57. Resurrection

  58. Aftermath

  59. Happy Hour

  60. No Rest For The Wicked

  BLOOD DEBT (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK TWO)

  Rights

  1. Family Reunion

  2. Hanging Around

  3. Forsyth

  4. The Red Hill Gang

  5. A Dark Briefing

  6. Singed Eyebrows

  7. Drunken Bastards

  8. Division

  9. Dark Passenger

  10. Warded

  11. Into The Woods

  12. Witch's Valley

  13. Eden Obscured

  14. Bewitched

  15. The Making Of A Witch

  16. Under The Gun

  17. Where The Owl Gets It

  18. If You Go Into The Woods Today

  19. The Promise

  20. Free Falling

  21. Symptoms Of The Universe

  22. Barney's Memories

  23. A Dapper Little Man

  24. Portal Of Doom

  25. The Outer Reaches

  26. Tea For Three

  27. No Rest For The Wicked

  28. On The Hunt

  29. Gateway

  30. The Land Of Baal

  31. Face Off

  32. Vortex

  33. Somewhat Fucked

  34. Back To Earth

  35. Aftermath

  36. Sci-Cane

  BLOOD CULT (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK 3)

  1. Welcome To Division Hq

  2. Taking The Strain

  3. Anarchy In The Usa

  4. Creed And The Big Bad Wolf

  5. Great Balls Of Fire

  6. Daywalker

  7. Killing Time

  8. Invitation To Madness

  9. First Contact

  10. Messiah

  11. Gordon Grayson

  12. Mission Objectives

  13. Sting Part One

  14. Sting Part Two

  15. Poking The Sleeping Tiger

  16. Party Time In The Grayson Dimension

  17. Jordan's Story

  18. The Universe And Other Things

  19. Grayson And The Dark Codex: A Love Story

  20. Walking Away

  21. Wtf!

  22. Regroup

  23. City Gone Mad

  24. Tea For Two

  25. Athelstan

  26. At The Gate

  27. Grayson Manor Revisited

  28. Face Off

  29. The Power And The Glory

  30. A New Dawn

  CRIMSON CROW

  Rights

  1. A Stranger Calls

  2. The Vamp In White

  3. Vampire's Kiss

  4. The Eyes Have It

  5. Like A Virgin

  6. Black Is The Color

  7. Knock Knock

  8. Franklyn

  9. First Contact

  10. Jasper The Great

  11. Babylon Calling

  12. Photograph

  13. An Unfriendly Visit

  14. Point Of No Return

  15. Tooth And Nail

  16. Travel Arrangements

  17. Farewells

  18. Nocturnus

  19. Dealing With The Devil

  20. Enter The Chaosphere

  21. Sunshine Girl

  22. Slainte

  23. Blood Sacrifice Sample Chapter

  Thanks For Reading

  The Watchers Series

  Books By N. P. Martin

  About The Author

  BLOOD SACRIFICE (SORCERER’S CREED BOOK ONE)

  AN URBAN FANTASY NOVEL

  Copyright © 2017 by N.P. Martin

  All rights reserved.

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

  Neal Martin

  Visit my website at www.npmartin.com

  The Sorcerer’s Creed Series

  Be sure to sign up for my mailing list to get the prequel novella to this series, Crimson Crow, completely free. This book is unreleased and available only to subscribers. And as an added bonus, you will also receive the first two books in my other urban fantasy series, Watchers:

  http://www.npmartin.com/creed-mailing-list/

  1

  Spell Blasted

  THE FORCE OF the magickal energy that crackled through the air was so powerful I got slammed back against a dirty brick wall as if I had just been hit in the chest by the Devil's own fist. The spell blew through my every defense. I might as well have been a goddamn Sleepwalker with no protection at all.

  What am I even doing here? Where am I?

  The faint smell of decayed flesh mixed with sulfur hung thick in the air, signifying that black magick had just been used, and that was never good. It was like turning up at a children's party to find Beelzebub tying balloon animals with a shit-eating grin on his face. Nothing good could come from that. Same with black magick. Bad shit always followed.

  I sat dazed on the floor, blinking around me for a moment, my mind fuzzy as if I had just woken up from a dream. It appeared I was inside an abandoned office space, the expansive rectangular room lined with grimy, broken windows that let cold air into the place and which went some way towards drawing me out of the daze I was still in. It was night time, so darkness coated the room, the only real light coming from the moon outside as it beamed its pale silvery light through the smashed skylights in the ceiling.

  Confused and more than a lit
tle uneasy, I struggled back to my feet and blindly reached for the pistol inside my dark green trench coat, frowning when I realized the gun wasn’t there. Then I remembered it had gone flying out of my hand when the spell had hit. Looking around for a moment, I soon located the pistol lying on the floor several feet away, and I lurched over and grabbed it, slightly more secure now that the gun’s reassuring weight was back in my hand.

  There were disturbing holes in my memory. I vaguely recalled confronting someone after having tracked them to where I was.

  But who?

  Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear image. The person was no more than a shadow figure in my mind. It could have been anybody. I didn’t even have a clue why I was tracking the mysterious person in the first place. Obviously, they had done something to get on my radar. The question was what, though?

  The answer came a few seconds later when my eyes lit upon the dark shape in the middle of the room, and a deep sense of dread filled me straight away. A dread that was both familiar and sickening at the same time. Swallowing, I stared hard at the shape lying prone in the gloom. Then, over the sharp scent of rats piss and pigeon shit, a different smell hit my nostrils. The heavy, festering stench of blood.

  When I gingerly crossed to the center of the room, my worst fears were confirmed when I saw that it was a dead body lying on the floor. A young woman, throat slit, symbols carved into the flesh of her naked body which lay spreadeagled, her wrists and ankles tied with rope to four large, rusty nails that were driven into the concrete floor. I shook my head as I considered the force required to drive a long metal spike into concrete. They weren't driven home with a hammer, that was for damn sure, unless the hammer was pure magick.

  A circle was painted around the girl's body also. In her own dark blood it looked like. Along the circumference of the circle there were symbols, drawn by a finger dipped in blood that was quick and precise in its movements as if the person it belonged to had drawn the same symbols many times before. A fact that unnerved me almost as much as the body by my feet.

  I breathed out slowly as I reluctantly took in the callous butchery on display. The dead woman looked to be in her early thirties, though it was difficult to tell because both her eyes were missing. Cut out of their sockets with a knife it seemed like, the same knife used to cut her throat. I shook my head as I looked around for a second, trying to see where the dead woman’s eyeballs might be, but I couldn’t see them, which meant the killer probably took them with him. Sick bastard.

  The woman also looked underweight for her size. She was around the same height as me at six feet tall, but there was very little meat on her bones as if she rarely ate any food. The needle marks on her feet and the bruises around her thighs told me why, as did the leather mini skirt and bloody white boob tube discarded on the floor not far from her body. The woman was clearly a prostitute, and a drug addict to boot. A convenient, easy victim for whoever had killed her.

  And if the symbols carved into her pale flesh were anything to go by, it would seem the girl wasn't so much murdered as ritually sacrificed. I would have to look the symbols up later when I got back to my Sanctum, but at a guess, I would have said the girl was an offering to one of the Dimension Lords, though I had no clue which one (there were many). The symbols themselves were not only complex, but they were also carved with surgical precision. The clarity of the symbols against the girl's pale flesh made it possible for me to make out certain ones that I recognized as being signifiers to alternate dimensions. Though again, I didn't know which dimension was being referred to. Glyphs such as the ones I was looking at were always uniquely different in some way. No two people drew Glyphs in the same way, each person adding their personality into them, which could often make it hard to work out the precise meaning of certain ones. The intuitive feelings I got getting from those Glyphs however, were enough to make me believe that each one resonated only evil intent.

  Crouching down to look at the Glyphs more closely, I took out my phone and used it to take pictures of them all so I could compare them later to the symbols in the reference books I kept at the Sanctum, not mention my old case files. It was clear, though, that I had been onto whoever did that. And if I had to guess, I would have said the girl wasn't the first person to be murdered in a similar fashion by the killer. Not by a long stretch, given the precision and clear competency of the killer, whoever they were.

  “Son a bitch,” I said, annoyed now that I couldn’t recall any details about the case I had so obviously been working on. It was no coincidence that I had ended up where I was, a place that reeked of black magick, and murder that had occult written all over it (literally, in the victim’s case). I had been on the hunt and I had gotten close to the killer, which was the likeliest reason for the dark magick deployed against me.

  Whoever the killer was, they wielded profoundly powerful magick (magick with a “k” that is…real magick). A spell that managed to wipe all my memories of the person in question wouldn't have been an easy spell to cast, or even come by for that matter. The killer was also a Sorcerer of some kind, of that that there was no doubt. And given the depth of power to their magick, it also felt to me like they channeled power from some other source, such as whatever Dimension Lord they were sacrificing innocent girls to.

  Whatever the case, the killer’s spell had worked. Getting back the memories they had stolen from me wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s if I could get them back at all, which depressingly, I feared might just be the case.

  Shaking my head at the grimness of the situation, I was about to stand up so I could get some full-body shots of the victim when a voice stopped me in my tracks.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker!”

  2

  Badass

  I JUMPED AT the sound of the deep but feminine voice coming from behind me, inhaling sharply before freezing on the spot. The reason I froze wasn't so much out of fear or fright as it was out of sudden recognition. The voice projected an effortless authority and contained a husky quality that would have been sexy if the woman’s blatant aggression wasn’t so overpowering.

  I stood up slowly and turned around, assuming the person would recognize me, but a split second later, the concrete floor exploded out around my feet as a massive booming noise filled the whole room. Chips of concrete blew up and stung my face, making me feel more like a goddamn grenade had been thrown rather than a bullet fired. “Jesus!” I shouted as I jumped back in shock, my ears ringing from the gunshot. “What the fuck are you doing? It’s me, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Drop that pistol or the next one goes in your chest.”

  “What?” What was she playing at? Didn’t she know who I was? “Leona, it’s me. Its Creed.”

  Leona Lawson cut a dark, imposing figure as she stepped out of the shadows. She was tall and athletically lean, her black hair short and brushed over to one side of her forehead. I couldn’t see her eyes very well in the gloom, but I knew they would be like focused blue chips of ice set into that delectable porcelain skin of hers. She was dressed as she usually was, in tight fitting black leather trousers and a top that clung to the mounds of her perfectly sized breasts. A long, black leather coat that hung down almost level with the top of her heavy combat boots made her look streamlined and dominant, which I already knew her to be in every way.

  The hugely intimidating gun she held looked almost too big for her hand, but she didn't struggle even slightly with the guns heft and looked entirely comfortable holding it. The gun was one of two custom Berettas with laser sights that she carried in leg holsters, each gun fully loaded with 9mm hollow-point rounds that would put an ugly hole in just about anything, including my chest if she so desired. “I said drop the pistol.”