Touch of Shadow (The Shadow Sorceress Book 5) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Want to know when the next book is coming?

  Want to know when the next book is coming?

  Touch of Shadow

  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

  Also by Bilinda Sheehan

  Touch of Shadow

  The Shadow Sorceress Book 5

  Bilinda Sheehan

  Contents

  Want to know when the next book is coming?

  Touch of Shadow

  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

  Want to know when the next book is coming?

  Also by Bilinda Sheehan

  Copyright © 2017 by Bilinda Sheehan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  To you, my readers.

  You kept me writing through my darkest days.

  Want to know when the next book is coming?

  To learn more about this series and upcoming books join Bilinda’s mailing list for a chance to get ARCs, member giveaways and sneak peeks.

  Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/bEgDrT

  Website: bilindasheehan.com

  Email: [email protected]

  You can also keep up to date and follow her on Facebook

  Facebook Page for Bilinda Sheehan Author

  or

  Join Bilinda’s Inner Circle

  The Shadow Sorceress Series

  Touch of Shadow

  Book Five

  1

  The crime scene tape fluttered in the breeze. It looked just like every other crime scene I'd ever been to, except I knew for a fact that this one was different. No matter how I cut it, I couldn't get my head around an explanation for how the ghost of this woman, who had only died a few hours previously, had been haunting me for the past two months. Clearly, I was missing something important, and I could only hope that whatever it was, I would find the piece of the puzzle inside the crime scene.

  Of course, that meant I had to go inside the crime scene first, and that was the part I'd been dreading the entire ride over with Victoria.

  "Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there all day?" Victoria said, her tone the usual abrasive level I had come to associate with her.

  "Yeah, I'm coming." There was no point putting off the inevitable any longer. Whether I liked it or not—and I really didn't like it—I was going to have to cross the crime scene tape. And I was expecting that, as soon as I did, I would be assaulted by all kinds of magical energy, and, well, for lack of a better word, feelings.

  Every crime scene carried its own trauma and this one would be no different. But the nagging voice at the back of my mind said this one would be worse. I'd never really had a connection with a crime scene before and I had a feeling a connection would make it a hell of a lot worse.

  I'd seen the photographs, so I knew what to expect from the scene itself, but, as per usual, photographs never quite did a crime scene justice. A photograph was simply a moment caught in time. It couldn't express the emotions, the smells, the feel of air against skin. And it certainly couldn't capture an essence.

  I could read a scene with a photograph, get a taste for whether it was a human or preternatural kill, but the feelings I ended up with were mostly just a bunch of garbled images too confusing to make a real judgement. To get a true picture of what had happened, I needed to walk the scene. It was my least favourite part of the job.

  Ducking beneath the yellow tape, the first wave of metaphysical energy hit me square in the gut and I struggled to stay on my feet. Whatever had happened here, it was big. So big, in fact, that I was surprised it hadn't set off every preternatural creature in King city. The realisation took me by surprise; it had never occurred to me before that an event like a murder could trigger something in the city's preternatural population, but now that I'd thought of it, I knew it was true. It just wasn't the type of thing I could share—yet, anyway.

  Moving up the paved path, I paused before stepping onto the porch and sucking in a deep breath. Mentally preparing myself, I shoved a little extra into my shields.

  Ever since my time in Ireland—my mother's death and the situation with Fionn, the rogue fae who had tried to control me—I'd been working hard on building up my shields and perfecting my shielding. It wasn't easy and it definitely wasn't something that came naturally to me, but it was a necessary evil, and anyway, it was good practice. Control wasn't my area of expertise, but if I wanted to survive the Elite and the Saga Venatione, then I needed to become best buddies with the art of control.

  More than that, if I wanted to survive working as a preternatural investigator, my shielding needed to be bloody good. The last thing I wanted was any other supernatural nasty trying to get inside my head so they could use me as a weapon. Life was hard enough as it was—the complications of Nic and my feelings for him, not to mention his brother, all while I tried to control my own power without worrying about somebody else hijacking me. It was one giant, complicated mess that I could have done without.

  Simply thinking of Nic caused my chest to ache. I missed him, more than I had thought possible. Spending time with him had caused me to fall for him pretty hard, and while I wasn't entirely certain of my feelings, the one thing I knew for sure was that his choosing to join the Saga Venatione had been my fault.

  The rage I had seen in his eyes that last night, the struggle to control himself.... He hadn’t wanted to hurt me, and that was why he was gone. It didn't matter what angle I looked at it from; him disappearing was my fault.

  I stepped onto the porch and the air grew heavy, the heat making it impossible to breathe. The closer I got to the front door, the worse it became, until it felt as though I was fighting my way through scalding toffee. It clung to my hair, my skin, even my lashes—every time I tried to blink, it became harder to open my eyes once more. I drew in another breath, but I couldn't feel it reach my lungs, and my brain started to scream for oxygen
.

  "Jesus," I said, bending over at the waist and planting my hands on my knees. My vision swam in sickening streamers and I struggled to take another deep breath.

  "What is it?" Victoria asked, moving up onto the porch next to me, seemingly unaffected by what was going on around us, by the power swirling in the air thick enough I could practically touch it.

  How she did it, well, it was beyond me. Clearly, it was a changeling thing, and I couldn't help but feel a little jealous of her. What I wouldn't give to be able to control myself to the degree she could. It probably had something to do with the fact that she'd been alive for a couple hundred years. That much time certainly gave her a head start on the whole control aspect of magic.

  "Don't you feel it?" I choked the words out.

  Victoria stared at me as though I had lost my mind and then shook her head.

  So, whatever was going on was only happening to me, and while that might have been interesting to me under normal circumstances, right now, while I was stuck trying to breathe, I couldn't say I cared about the reason at all. I just wanted it to stop.

  Turning away from the front door, I stumbled down onto the porch steps and hobbled away over the paved path, toward the police tape. It had all started when I’d crossed the line of yellow tape—a line that was supposed to keep civilians out, not investigators like me.

  I had always known crime scenes to be places of great power. But usually the great power only happened when it was time for me to walk the scene, and I hadn't even started yet. I hadn't even gotten inside the door to do my preliminary examination, and with the way I was feeling, I didn't think I would be getting inside at all.

  If the energy was this overwhelming and I hadn't even crossed the threshold yet, I could only imagine what the inside of the house would be like.

  If I was honest, it reminded me a hell of a lot of the scene from my previous case. There had been something about the dead bodies, the trauma, the blood and gore, that had awakened my magic. Of course, the symbols that had been carved into the wall of the church on the first scene hadn't helped any. And it hadn't so much awakened the power that made me a shadow sorceress as it had woken the demon mark on my shoulder. And, to my surprise, it had helped me fight against the fae who had wanted to control me.

  However, there was no sign of the demon mark helping me out this time. In fact, the demon mark had been quiet since I had returned from Ireland, not so much as a peep out of it. I wanted to be happy about it but when I really thought about why it had gone quiet, well, that all by itself concerned me.

  Not that any of that mattered right now, especially not when my vision was beginning to break up through lack of oxygen.

  Grabbing the police tape, I spilled out underneath it, dropping to my knees and crawling across the uneven, warm asphalt in an attempt to get away from the oppressive air that was slowly suffocating me outside Tess Greenville's house.

  The second I was outside the police caution line, the air returned to normal. Gasping, I started sucking down great lungfuls of the clean, fresh, cold air. My eyes watered at the sudden shocking change in my body as my lungs began to clear. Closing my eyes, I lifted my face to the sky and fought the urge to thank God. Sound returned as my ears slowly unblocked and I opened my eyes once more. My gaze met Victoria's shocked expression. She hadn't moved from her spot on the porch.

  Trust a changeling not to come to your rescue. The thought popped into my head, unbidden, and I stifled the giggle that fought to escape me. Clearly, the lack of oxygen was making me hysterical.

  She already thought I was pretty crazy; I didn't need to give her anymore proof of it. Come to think of it, everybody at the scene properly thought I was mad after my little performance piece, and I quickly noticed it wasn't just Victoria staring at me anymore.

  "Great," I muttered to myself before pushing up onto my feet.

  Something prickled at the edge of my consciousness, something magical, and I struggled to grab onto it. It kept trying to float away from me like a small feather or a wisp of smoke on a gust of wind, but I finally managed to hook onto it with my own magic.

  It was metallic against my tongue, the vaguest hint of something spicy and hot. A drum beat echoed in my ears before I shook off the magic and let it go back onto the air where it belonged.

  Clearly, I wasn't the only supernatural being here—well, aside from Victoria, of course.

  The magic had tasted somewhat familiar, as though I had come into contact with it before, but I couldn't put my finger on where or how it was so familiar to me. The only thing I knew for certain was that there was somebody, or something, inside the house, and they were doing my job.

  Brushing my jeans off, I tilted my chin defiantly and strolled back towards the police line. Jerking my hand in Victoria's direction, I gestured for her to come to me. She nodded, and gracefully made her way back down the steps toward me, pausing once she reached the inside of the police tape.

  "What the hell was that about?" she asked, eyeing me warily as though half expecting me to drop to my knees and start suffocating once more.

  "Who is in the house?" I said, gritting my teeth in an attempt to keep my anger under control.

  Victoria shook her head and glanced back over her shoulder in the direction she had come from. The curtains were drawn, and despite making it almost to the front door, I hadn't been able to see inside.

  "No idea," she said. "The tech guys, and I presume the crime scene crowd, but none of our own. We're the first on the scene."

  She wasn't lying; the fae couldn't lie, and anyway, I would have tasted it on the air. I was calling it a new skill that I'd picked up in Ireland. Well, not so much in Ireland, but from my time spent in Faerie with Fionn, the fae who had tried to possess me.

  "There is someone inside that house doing what I am supposed to do." I clenched my fists and fought the urge to dive beneath the yellow tape once more, race up the steps, and confront whoever was inside in the house. The only thing that stopped me was the memory of what had happened the first time I'd attempted to enter the house and the trauma my body was still struggling to recover from.

  Something in the air popped and I felt the magic beyond the crime scene tape give way. It rushed toward me and then over me, the wave washing across my skin and ruffling my hair before dissipating once more.

  Clearly, whatever had been happening in the house was now over.

  Gripping the tape once more, I slipped beneath it cautiously. I wasn't going to be caught out again. But when nothing happened, I breathed a sigh of relief and strode toward the steps, leaving Victoria to stare after me.

  Reaching the base of the porch, I halted, my breath catching in the back of my throat as I caught sight of the man who had exited the house. He was tall enough that he had to duck beneath the door lintel and his black skin glistened in the afternoon sun like onyx.

  His eyes met mine, and for a moment, I could have sworn I was staring into the eyes of someone else, someone I'd met once before. But as quickly as the feeling arrived, it was gone.

  The man blinked in the sunlight, the tension he had been carrying in his shoulders ebbing away as he sauntered down the steps toward me.

  "I don't think we've been introduced?" he said, his accent heavy enough to make me feel as though I had left King City and was instead taking a stroll down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He held his hand out to me but his skin still prickled with the ebb and flow of his power and I kept my hands firmly at my sides.

  "What the hell were you doing in there, tampering with my crime scene?" I said.

  "Your crime scene? I think you're mistaken. My name is Marcel Deco, and this here," he said, gesturing to the house behind him, " is my crime scene. Ain't nobody know more about Voodoo than I."

  I felt the colour drain from my face. There was a reason his power had seemed both familiar and alien to me; he'd been performing some kind of Vaudan ritual in the house, his magical equivalent of what I did when I walked a scene. The last t
ime I'd come into contact with practitioners of Voodoo, I'd lost a clump of my hair and it had found its way to being wrapped around a small doll. It had very nearly cost me my freedom.

  The thought of working alongside another Voodoo priest left me cold.

  "The Elite doesn't need your help," I said, defiantly.

  "You might think you don't, but your boss begs to differ," Marcel said.

  "Graham?"

  "The very one. Call him up, see what he has to say, but I'll tell you here and now, whether you like it or not, you and I—we will work together," Marcel said, before striding past me, down the path toward the gate.

  "Where are you going?" I called after him.

  "Magic is thirsty work; come find me when you want to talk like adults," he said, dismissing me with a wave.

  There had to be some mistake. Graham wouldn't call in someone from the outside for a case like this. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was exactly the kind of thing Graham would do. He would want the best, and from the taste of his magic I'd gotten earlier, he was the real deal.

  But it was that more than anything else that worried me. In the wrong hands, Voodoo was dangerous, and after my initial meeting with Marcel Deco, I was still in the dark as to whether he was one of the good guys or one of the really bad ones.

  2

  "So you did call him, then," I said wearily, fighting to hide the anger from my voice. Graham had the weird ability of being able to weasel my true emotions out of me, and right now, I didn't want him to know just how pissed off I truly was.

  The moment Marcel had left, I'd immediately gotten on the phone to Graham, but it seemed Marcel was right and it was just as I had suspected: Graham had called him in because he was the foremost expert in everything Voodoo. Before the case had been handed over to us, Graham had received a call from a concerned cop about the type of case this was. Apparently, the markings inside the house had instantly sent up red flags. While Voodoo wasn't strictly against the law, what with it being a religion, the practice of raising the dead, necromancy, and the trafficking in souls was illegal, and like the shadow sorcerers, most of the truly powerful Voodoo practitioners had been hunted into extinction—or, at least, they'd been sent so far underground everyone believed they no longer existed.