After testing as mundane, David just wanted to earn his botany degree and enjoy his ordinary life. He didn’t count on a First Blood demon portaling into his part-time job to bind with anyone near that dormant nexus, though. Bad luck for David—demons only bind with magicals.
The jig is up.
Now outed as a druid, David navigates the Cumberland metro’s perilous magical community while exploring his link to that demon, Jae. David’s father, Teddy Mace, had closely guarded secrets, including how strong David’s powers were as a child, but what else had Teddy hidden? What got him killed? And once Jae helps David decipher his dad’s lost grimoire, will the murderers target them next?
Add in David’s godfather and Towpath Guild Boss John Griffith, an edible-loving imp sent to be David’s familiar, and frenemy roommate Finnegan who is inarguably the worst fire mage ever, and David’s dream of a normal life spectacularly implodes.
Whoever dismembered Teddy Mace will have to stand in line if they want to eliminate David to keep that cold case arctic. He and Jae are hard to catch. Fully bound? Killing this new demon/magical team may be impossible…if they can stop pissing each other off first.
Content warning: violence, blood magic, explicit male/male sex, generational trauma, parental estrangement, alcoholism recovery…All these people are super fucked-up. But you don’t want to miss necromancy, the dragon of Pittsburgh, and a twelve-year-old oracle who can be bought with video games and chalupas.
131,160 Digital Words
Release Date: October 12, 2024
Chapter One
Shoving my uniform ball cap onto my head, I climbed from my truck in employee parking at the Western Maryland Botanical Garden. Heat from the baking asphalt scorched the soles of my work boots. I swiped at sweat already slicking my temple while I took in the vibrant color beginning to pop in the maples towering over the stone, glass, and cedar of the Visitors Center. I grimaced. Way too hot for early October in the mountain highlands, but I trudged across the arid desert of the parking lot, anyway. Fucking climate change. I veered onto a path to the left, ducking around the rear glass double doors of the Visitors Center to head toward a humble staff building on the side.
The Visitors Center boasted open spaces with interactive exhibits of flora and fauna guests could expect to see in the garden, a gift shop, and an event room that spilled onto a patio frequently reserved for weddings and parties. More importantly, the Visitors Center boasted air conditioning.
The shed for staff did not.
As soon as I stepped through the door, I turned to my right to clock in for my shift. A clipboard hung on a roofing nail next to the time clock, a pen dangling from bailing twine tied to the nail. Signing my name to the roster, I grabbed a radio from the wire basket installed below—cell service was spotty in the mountains and much more so throughout the stretch of acres that made up the botanical park. Two-ways worked better. The valley in which the garden’s designer had developed waterfalls and a pond were a complete dead zone, but radios were good enough otherwise. Mostly.
I dragged the lanyard with my ID badge from under my forest green WMBG polo as I exited the shed and strode toward the greenhouse, which was the genuine beating heart of the garden.
“Running late?” my boss asked when I pushed inside, but she said it with a smile.
Megan was all right. Standing five-foot nothing, the blonde could’ve been mistaken for any of the biology majors the garden hired as grunt labor instead of the PhD and formidable grant wrestler she was. Her jaunty ponytail, blue jean cutoffs, and WMBG logo tank top screamed student instead of management. In the two years I’d worked there, she’d never been afraid to get her hands dirty, though. To wit, she danced around her ongoing pet project, pruning shears at the ready—grafted fruit trees. In fact, the tree she tended was mine, a singularly unambitious graft of crabapple to Granny Smith.
“Class ran over,” I said.
“Dr. Dixon likes the sound of her own voice.” Megan hummed while she snipped away grafts that hadn’t taken. “Not like the trees are going anywhere.” She snickered. “Well. This one will go into our Franken-orchard in the spring, but my point stands.”
The orchard was on the garden grounds without officially being included in the park, a special exhibit open for students and locals later in the fall. Like me, most who registered for the single elective class Megan taught at Frostburg State University chose varieties of apple trees to graft. They were most likely to thrive in this hardiness zone of the Appalachians, and since every student’s grade depended on the success of their grafts, we tended to choose conservatively.
I’d done the same varieties of apple as everyone else for class, but I’d also experimented with other fruit bearers at my childhood home outside town. The only times I’d been willing to revisit the place had been to tend my grafted trees just as Megan pruned to encourage better growth in the scions here. Until Megan’s class had awakened my curiosity for novelty grafts, I hadn’t been to the house since my father’s murder. I’d planted my rootstock and grafted them outdoors rather than babying them in dad’s greenhouse, but they’d flourished. Bonus: I’d discovered I could handle returning to the landscape of my boyhood if I stayed away from the house, where memories of my father and my old life haunted me most.
If I was careful no one saw my truck before I crossed my dad’s wards onto our land, I’d convinced myself it was okay. I’d be safe.
Everything was a risk, wasn’t it?
“You want me at the pond?” I asked, shying away from the No-man’s-land of my dad’s violent, premature death. “I almost finished replacing the walking bridge on Wednesday. Just needs an hour and a quick clean-up.” Or a lot of clearing tools and setting the space to rights, but given my gloomy thoughts, I was in no hurry to play field guide to tourists.
Megan shook her head. “Nah, I sent Cooper.” She put down the pruning shears. “Can you check out the oaks in the Grove instead?”
Since she’d hired me, I’d occasionally wondered if Megan might have a little druid in her. She was that good with plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs, but other times, I was certain she must have some witchy ancestors. Not enough to identify her as magical at age thirteen when everyone tested for latent abilities, but she always seemed to read me and give me whatever I needed to keep going, to keep growing. Like the plants. She nurtured me as adeptly as she tended to anything with chlorophyl.
The Grove was the most distant section of the botanical garden. So far from the Visitors Center, many guests didn’t bother to hike there. We maintained a cleared understory so the area featured groupings of old-growth trees and not much else. Kids from the junior high came for lessons in leaf identification when school resumed after summer break and Megan had built a roofless reading cabin with a tiny library for selfies as well as dotting faux gnome houses throughout. That area was my favorite in the botanical garden and not just because fewer guests were likely to get in my way. The quiet soothed me. I could bend to settle my palms against the verdant earth to share in the place’s peacefulness and no one saw or cared.
Still, my mouth thinned. Because the Grove featured groupings of many tree varieties. “Just the oaks?”
Megan nodded. “Tourists from Baltimore reported trouble with the dryads.”
I winged up an eyebrow, surprise arrowing through me.
“I know. Right? Since when do dryads let us pesky humans glimpse them, forget watch them racing around.” She rolled her eyes. “Something stirred them up.”
“Maybe a bear.” The black bear population ranged pretty far in search of food before hibernating, though we had spotted none except young adults passing through in the spring since I’d worked there. “If a bear is marking trees, that’d set the dryads off.”
“I don’t think so.” Megan wrinkled her nose. “A bear would make the dryads mad. The Baltimore people said they looked scared.”
My brow furrowed because seriously? What scared a dryad? They were tree nymphs, shy, rarely appearing even to me. The only things I knew about them fearing were loggers and wildfire. “No fire?”
She shook her head, ponytail swaying. “It’s been hot and dry, but no signs of smoke. Cooper’s a fire mage, low-level or not. He said the closest blaze is in Lonaconing.” She shrugged. “We need to confirm that, though. Make sure you have your bear spray on you just in case,” she said, returning her attention to the scion she’d been prepping for winter. “Whatever the problem is, don’t try to fix it yourself.” She lifted her chin to pin me with a flinty stare. “I mean it. Find out what’s bothering the dryads and report back. We’ll plan what to do about it as a team. In the meantime, Cooper blocked the trail to the Grove to keep guests out on his way to finish work on the walking bridge.”
“I’ll be there and back in two shakes.” More like thirty minutes if I hustled and pinpointed the problem as soon as I reached the oaks. The Grove was a couple miles from the Visitors Center, minimum.
“Take the golfcart. We keep the forest floor bare in the Grove as a defensible space against wildfire, but if a spark kindled anyway, we need to know.”
Nodding, I turned, but halted when Megan called to me. “David?”
I looked over my shoulder. “Be careful,” she said.
Uneasy, I exited the greenhouse and headed to the garage where we stored snowmobiles, our lone golfcart, and other heavy equipment. I swiped my employee badge across the reader of the security system and signed out the cart from another dangling clipboard. Moments later, I drove south.
WMBG didn’t own a fleet of golf carts because we preferred ATVs. Western Maryland was all hills and valleys, the topography steep and rough in the botanical garden where we maintained the ecosystem so meticulously. ATVs could handle trailers hauling supplies, mountains of compost, and heavy trees and shrubs. Megan had equipped our golfcart with all-terrain tires, but it still labored in steeper areas of the park.
Students didn’t line up for jobs at the garden to ride, anyway. We logged in a lot of miles during our shifts because we enjoyed hiking. We wanted that. Didn’t matter what field we studied: environmental science, wildlife and fisheries, or botany. We wanted our boots on the ground, not pressing gas and brake pedals.
At least the golf cart was quieter.
I zipped along the most direct path to the Grove, keeping an eye out for guests. Weekdays this late in the season, when fall colors began painting the forest in yellows, vibrant reds, and oranges, we didn’t see many tourists, but locals bought annual passes to log their daily steps on cultivated paths with breathtaking scenery. The heat wave must’ve kept those diehard nature-lovers away because I only had to maneuver around an elderly couple and a jogger before I reached the sawhorses we used to close areas under maintenance and repair. I pulled one aside, returned to the cart to steer past it, and then put the golfcart in park so I could drag the barrier back into place.
After, I could drive at full throttle, which was a whopping thirty miles per hour. Quicker than I could run, but didn’t seem much faster, especially if Cooper was wrong about the fire risk. I didn’t spot telltale smoke or smell anything burning, though. I was no mage, but I would’ve sensed something. If a blaze had sparked leaf litter we hadn’t cleared yet…The ground didn’t feel wrong, not like fire at least.
I slowed the cart and parked it when I spied the first dryad outside the Grove’s standing oaks. Megan was right. From a distance, the dryad’s mossy eyes were as wide as pie plates. The green and browns of her skin that operated as a camouflage for the nymphs when they weren’t burrowed deep into tree cores was mottled too, her thin chest heaving with panic. When I stepped away from the cart, two other dryads joined the first, all of whom moved with agitation and distress.
I’d never spoken to the dryads. Tree nymphs were happiest left alone. If they weren’t so shy…But getting caught speaking to a magical creature would’ve blown my cover as a mundane. Non-magical folk didn’t make a habit of talking to skittish dryads. I’d nevertheless befriended the nymphs who had claimed the Grove as their home. I respected their circle and taught other staff members to honor their sacred space. In exchange, they left offerings for me, usually the feather of a bird nesting high in the branches of their oaks or an especially perfect leaf. Last winter solstice, I’d brought them a gift of honey—dryads were suckers for out-of-season sweets—and they’d reward my generosity with an enchanted pebble. I wasn’t sure what the pebble was supposed to do, but I appreciated their good intentions.
Today, the dryads wanted me nowhere near their home. Panic-stricken, they waved me off. “I can’t,” I dared to say as I approached them. With access to the Grove blocked off, no one would hear me speaking to magical denizens of the forest few among magicals could communicate with, so I chanced it, if only to calm them a little. “I need to find out what’s gone wrong.”
And there was something wrong.
I leaned down to dig my fingers into the soil to try to pin the wrongness down, but this was different, something I hadn’t sensed before. Wholly unique. Not fire, no, but this didn’t feel like a bear either. Glancing over my shoulder to ensure it was safe, I stretched my senses. Lines grooved my forehead as I concentrated.
Animal.
Dangerous…but intelligent?
While I’d focused, a pair of dryads drew closer, which set my heart to thumping. These two were the oldest, the ones I’d judged most powerful in their clan. One darted forward to give my shoulder a hard shove, then scrambled away.
Caught off guard, I fell. My ass planted in the dirt. I scowled at the dryads. “What? This is my job. I told you I need to—”
Both glared at me, arms crossed over their chests. The one who’d pushed me pointed with insistent jerks at the golf cart.
I was only positioned a few inches lower, but containing the hidden parts of myself, ignoring those secrets, became exponentially more challenging for me the more of my skin touched the ground. My breath caught as my senses sharpened. Then I inhaled deeply. “What is that?” The scent lingered in my nostrils, but the vibration of wrongness—alongside the trill of danger that lifted the small hairs on my arms—was what resonated inside me. “Blood?”
Ignoring the shrill alarm from the dryads, I pushed to my feet.
Whatever had troubled the nymphs wasn’t dead. I’d know. But the flood of coppery metallic scent swamping me indicated that death loomed, inching near. I lurched forward, so transfixed I barely registered the sudden halt of birdsong. The dryads shrieked. The others joined the pair who had stepped forward, but I only vaguely noted their hands on me, struggling to yank me away, which was a neat trick considering how strong the nymphs were when properly motivated.
They just weren’t motivated enough. They couldn’t stop me. Once I caught the aroma of spilling blood, nothing could.
I lurched into the cluster of oaks and crossed into their sacred circle. The dryads abruptly fled and without their tugging to pull against, I face-planted into the loamy earth. I shook my head, no doubt streaking dirt all over me as my bleary head spun.
A faint whispery growl reached my ears.
I froze. Horrified trepidation filled me. I lifted my chin…
A human-sized lump filled the center of the dryad’s circle. Not human, though. The form was deep red, almost black. My muzzy mind puzzled through the pieces, incapable of connecting them to a whole. Strong, muscled legs similar to but not quite like mine. The arc of an inky claw as big as my fist led to more claws and a foot. Midnight black armored braces hugged a heavily muscled forearm, a thin gap in the metal revealing more shadowy skin. I squinted, fighting to focus. Were those sigils? My attention flitted to the still, barbed tip of a long tail, then the leathery edge of an oddly bent wing, onward again to a curved horn rising inches above thick curls, the red shading of the horn contrasting with a black mop of hair.
Sucking in a stuttered breath, I startled when my brain finally processed the eyes that slowly blinked at me. They, too, were devoid of color, as dark as the remotest crevice never to greet the sun and my stomach roiled, the sense of wrongness exploding inside me like a nuclear warhead. Because those irises should not be black.
They should be red.
Instinctive terror shattered whatever magic had mesmerized me and, with a gasp, I scrambled backwards in the dirt. My heart galloped, beating against my ribs so ferociously, I wondered in a daze if it would flee my chest. The shaking started then, my hands, legs that threatened to no longer support the weight of my body, the shiver of mortal dread quivering in my belly.
The demon didn’t pounce. He stared. Motionless. Weak.
Pumping the last dregs of his blood from gaping slashes that canvased his entire body into the soil of the now ruined sacred circle.
A small sound worked up my throat, one I’d never made before, part horror and part…something else. The something I’d ruthlessly smothered and denied my whole damn life. Despite that sound, I fumbled for the radio I’d stuffed into my back pocket and brought the receiver to my mouth, shock making my fingers awkward as I floundered at punching the buttons. I shuddered my relief, my stare never leaving the demon’s when discordant static fractured the silence.
“Megan,” I mumbled, trying to remember English, how to form words.
“Copy, David. You find whatever’s causing trouble at the Grove?”
I trembled anew, an equal mix of fear and comfort addling my already swamped mind. “Evacuate the park,” I said, putting a little more steel into my voice. Proud that it had stopped shaking, “Evacuate immediately.”
Megan squawked my name, her tone shocked. Frightened.
She needed to be both. “Especially the magicals. Clear them out as fast as you can.” I swallowed the knot lodged in my throat. “Call the cops. We need their battle mages. All of them.”
I wanted to explain to my boss, confirm she grasped the life-imperiling danger I’d found in our midst, but the radio tumbled from my numb fingers to the forest floor, my concentration narrowing on the dying demon. Choking down sour bile, my gaze locked onto the demon’s fixed stare, I inched off the ground and my blood curdled at the curl of his dark crimson lip, revealing a flash of white teeth. They, too, were stained with blood.
So much blood.
My head told me nothing could survive the loss of thick dark red forming a widening puddle around the demon’s prone form, but my head could go fuck itself because refusing to allow my power to rise or not, everybody knew demons became more dangerous when they were this near death. Even mundanes knew that.
The demon said something. Softly. A whisper that slid past his cracked lips. Gibberish, at least to me. I wasn’t sure which language the demon fought to speak, which tribe this demon called his own, but that ultimately didn’t matter since I didn’t know any of their languages, including the smattering of random words kids liked to toss at each other in junior high to front how tough they supposedly were.
Understanding the words he spoke wasn’t important. What was vital for my survival was grasping that the demon was tempting me, trying to lure me in.
Reaching the sacred circle would’ve helped. The demon must have been on the edge of death to remain so debilitated despite soaking up the magic the dryads had invested their lifetimes sinking into this patch of earth, but dryads numbered among the weakest of magical creatures. Their power wasn’t enough.
The demon needed to feed and in hiding though I may be, I was the strongest magical nearby. The circle had been an appetizer. I was a feast.
The demon said my name. Thick, as though both syllables were exotic to him, his voice tremulous, he called out to me. “Dah-veed.”
And that something else buried deep inside me snapped.
I flinched, the twang of that garbled name resounding within me like a ricocheting cannon ball. The demon crushed the determined madness at my core that had held my powers at bay. Magic poured out of me in an excruciating rush. Grunting at the ache, I gritted my teeth. My muscles clenched.
The demon smiled, mouth curving regardless of the weakness that made him unnaturally still.
His compulsion had me now. My power was his to plunder. He knew it. I knew it too.
I was strong. The only magical I’d met who’d equaled my intensity had been my dad, murdered when I was a boy. My power was so fierce that only it could be wielded as a tool to conceal what I was and what I was capable of, not just from mundanes but also from other magicals, specifically the ones who monitored me for any hint of my father’s talent rising inside me. My power had placed me in so much peril and yet, was also what allowed my masquerade as a mundane. I was ten when my father was killed. I’d turned twenty-one last month and in all the years between, no one had suspected I wasn’t as mundane as my mother. Nobody had guessed.
The demon saw through my subterfuge. I hadn’t needed to succumb to the demon luring me within its physical reach. He began siphoning my magic from me, anyway, and if the demon recovered enough power? He could cast his own magic to heal the devastation inflicted on his body.
The demon’s hold on me was faint, though. I could retreat and if I crossed the barrier of the dryad’s circle, now tainted with the demon’s blood, I knew with astonishing certainty that re-entering the Grove would end the sapping of my magic. The demon would die.
But I did not step away, even when a spark of ruby red lit the demon’s eyes.
The cursed magic he’d unleashed within me rejected the clamoring of my beleaguered mind to run as far and as fast as I could. My long-denied power would suffer no escape, not with so strong a potential partner this close. If I inched forward, stretched out my arm…My stomach plummeted, sick and horror-struck, because the moment the thought entered my head, my hand lifted toward the wounded demon, who grinned evil intent.
For once, my magic controlled me.
I don’t know how he mustered the strength. The demon had to be almost gone to whatever awaited him in the afterworld, but the demon shoved his clawed hand forward too.
My spine bowed as our fingers brushed. Agony shot through every part of my body as my power rushed out to greet the demon’s desperate, dying quest to survive. The pain was unbearable, like electric shocks and an inferno encompassing me all at once. My screams echoed distantly in my ears while my torment consumed me.
I must have blacked out. When I blinked, struggling to bring my surroundings back into focus, I wasn’t crouched low in the leaf litter at the perimeter of the dryad’s circle anymore. I was in the center, bands of flaming hot steel that were the demon’s arms locked around my abdomen. His heated breath puffed my temple, rustling my hair. My heart seized, my body stiffening in instant alarm.
Demons weren’t of this world. Contrary to what mundane religions taught, they weren’t from Hell or any other deathly afterworld. They lived all right, same as every other creature, and they suffered and died as readily as we did, too. Demons simply came from another dimension, one vastly different from ours. No human had ever portaled to that plane, to the daemonica’s origins. None who tried had survived to tell the tale, anyway, but safe to say the environment, cultural norms, and social hierarchy were as foreign and unthinkable to us as ours were to the rare demons who fled to the human realm.
My life was nothing to this demon. Less than nothing.
If, in our foolish arrogance, we humans applied our psychological constructs to this alien species, demons fit every parameter of psychopathy I’d learned in Psych 101 my first year at Frostburg State U. They killed without mercy or an iota of remorse. Sly trickery and manipulation were a demon’s bread and butter and they enjoyed playing with—tormenting—the prey they hunted, be their target a simple woodland squirrel or humans. Us. Demons had no capacity for empathy and any idiot stupid enough to search for kindness in them would discover only a black void. A demon’s singular focus was survival. They dedicated every moment of their every day to that lone pursuit. Demons took no action that didn’t improve their odds of sustaining life—theirs.
Tearing a human to shreds with razored claws to feast on both the meat and drink deeply from his prey’s well of agonized terror was not outside the sphere of typical demon behavior, particularly one that had recently portaled from their dimension to ours.
And this demon had caught me in his grasp.
