Sorceress Super Hero Read online

  sorceress

  super hero

  By Darius Brasher

  Click below to sign up for Mr. Brasher’s e-mail newsletter for exclusive information on his new releases. His novels are often sold at a discount for only a few days when they are first released. Newsletter subscribers are the first to be able to snap up these deals and discounts:

  DARIUS BRASHER’S NEWSLETTER

  Sorceress Super Hero Copyright © 2018 by Darius Brasher.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition, Published July 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Special thanks to Michael Hofer, Paul Krause, and Flint L. Miller, higher level supporters of Darius Brasher’s Patreon campaign. Michael, Paul, and Flint your support is much appreciated!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  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

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  OTHER BOOKS BY DARIUS BRASHER

  EXCERPT FROM CAPED

  EXCERPT FROM SUPERHERO DETECTIVE FOR HIRE

  CHAPTER 1

  I was wistfully eyeing the swanlike neck of the gorgeous television star and secret fairy I was supposed to protect and thinking about how good it would feel to punch her in the throat when the gargoyles attacked, changing my life forever.

  “I’m thrilled to be here in Washington, D.C. to receive the United States Institute of Peace’s Humanitarian Award,” my client Willow Wilde said to the assembled throng of reporters and cameramen. “I know I don’t deserve this great honor.”

  You’ve got that right, I thought, wisely keeping the sentiment to myself. First not punching Willow in the throat, and now not saying aloud every thought that popped into my head. Maybe, after twenty-six years of impulsiveness, I had finally learned some restraint. Sage Hawthorne of Capstone Security Consultants was my name, self-control was my game.

  Willow was conducting a press conference on the top floor of the Institute of Peace building before the awards ceremony began on the ground floor. A few dozen members of the media clustered around her in a semi-circle. Willow’s show Born to be Wilde was the biggest on television and had been for years. Willow was rich, an international celebrity and socialite, and had the kind of beauty men would kill their brothers over and launch a thousand ships for. Willow was A Big Deal. She would be the first person to tell you so.

  I stood out of the range of the cameras trained on Willow, but close enough to her that I could get to her if there was danger. Or punch her in the throat if my newfound restraint slipped. My eyes scanned the surrounding area, alert to any hint of danger, magical or otherwise. An earbud was in my ear, feeding me status reports from the members of Willow’s mundane permanent security detail I had positioned throughout the five-story Institute of Peace building. Since I was an independent contractor brought in a few weeks ago rather than an employee of Willow’s like her permanent guards, they resented the fact they had to take orders from me. The fact I was a woman didn’t help.

  Oh well. As long as they did what I told them, I didn’t care what nasty names Willow’s mundane guards called me under their breath. Little did they know I could hear the name-calling. We Gifted humans had enhanced senses, reflexes, and strength, as well as the ability to wield magic. The guards’ ignorance of my abilities was understandable. Few mundanes knew the magical world even existed.

  The Institute of Peace was on Constitution Avenue, near D.C.’s iconic National Mall. The building’s curved roof, fashioned to resemble the wings of white doves, glowed faintly overhead. Willow and I stood on a limestone floor near a waist-high, clear protective barrier which overlooked the George P. Shultz Great Hall, a massive atrium on the ground floor facing the National Mall.

  A large crowd of people who had flocked here to see Willow receive her award mingled in the atrium below, awaiting the start of the ceremony. The sounds of their voices wafted up to us, including the high-pitched squeals of children. A lot of folks had brought their kids so they could see Willow. Kids made up a healthy percentage of Willow’s fanbase, though I couldn’t fathom why. Probably because their brains hadn’t fully developed yet.

  I continued to look around as Willow droned on to the media about how awesome she was. I saw the Lincoln Memorial off in the distance through the atrium’s floor-to-ceiling glass curtain wall. It was nighttime, and the memorial glowed thanks to its internal spotlights. I wondered if Honest Abe would have bought what Willow was selling if he could hear her. Lincoln once said of a political opponent that “he can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met.” Clearly he had never met Willow.

  Willow was saying, “I have dedicated my life to making a difference, improving lives, brightening days, and bringing people together.” Flashbulbs and video camera lights reflected off her jewelry, sequined gown, and porcelain skin, almost making her glow like the Lincoln Memorial outside and the wing-shaped roof overhead. With firm flesh and tight, flawless skin, Willow appeared to be in her early twenties. Appearances were deceiving, as they often were when it came to a citizen of the hidden magical world.

  If Lincoln had never met Willow, it was not because they had not been contemporaries. They had been. Willow was well over three hundred years old. One would think that if Willow really were dedicated to bringing the world together, she would have done it after three centuries of devotion to it, with time to spare to fix global warming. I knew for a fact Willow recently leaked a sex tape of her participating in a foursome on the Internet. I wondered how it fit into her dreams for worldwide kumbaya. Maybe she intended to tame the world’s savagery one horny hung dude at a time. Ambitious, though unsanitary. I’d bet fixing global warming would be less messy.

  “It’s so important that we all work toward making our planet better for the next generation.” Willow’s world-famous voice was low and breathy, reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s, somehow simultaneously implying innocence, worldliness, a big rack, and its availability to all comers.

  Comers. I swallowed a giggle, earning me a quick but sharp glance from Willow before she turned her attention back to the assembled media throng. None of them paid me any mind. After all, Willow was a star and the reason why they were all here; I was merely one of her bodyguards. I might as well have been a piece of furniture. If they knew I could perform magic, maybe they would have paid me more attention.

  Then again, maybe not. They were transfixed by Willow, hanging on her every word, as if she was divulging the secrets to cold fusion rather than mouthing platitudes I knew she didn’t mean. But really, who could blame them? She was stunning, though slightly plastic-looking and otherworldly, like a sex doll built by aliens who'd only seen human women in Juggs magazine: all breast, butt, pouty lips, thin limbs, and perfectly sculpted blonde hair. She looked like a million bucks in her glittering jewels and form-fitting evening gown, w
hich might not be too far off from how much the ensemble had cost.

  Though I had been known to turn heads from time to time, next to Willow I looked like sun-parched dog-doo with eyes. Tall for a woman, I had pale skin, shoulder-length black hair, and piercing blue eyes. My ex-boyfriends all told me my arctic blue eyes were my best feature. Though I considered myself a liberated woman, just once it would be nice to hear that my best feature was my butt. I would have to ease up on the breakfast pastries for that to ever happen.

  As Willow blathered on, I wondered which of her many suitors had bought Willow’s duds and baubles for her. Or maybe it had all been gifted to her. Willow publicly wearing a company’s clothes or jewels would blast sales through the roof. I doubted Willow had paid for any of it out of her own pocket. I had learned in the weeks I’d been leading her security detail that, despite her fabulous wealth, she was as tight-fisted with it as a leprechaun with his gold. The only reason she gave so much money away, she had told me on the ride here from the hotel, was because otherwise she’d be eaten alive in taxes.

  “As far as I’m concerned, if the pits of Hell open tomorrow and demons gobble up every mundane on the planet, it won’t be a moment too soon,” Willow had sniffed disdainfully in the limousine. “And that goes double for their crotch spawn. Filthy, screeching, snot-nosed, disease-carrying little brats. Living arguments for the wisdom of abortions.” The voice she used in private was dramatically different than the one she used in public, like coarse sandpaper compared to velvet.

  “Because our greatest resource is our precious, innocent, pure, beautiful children,” Willow was cooing now to the microphones. “I believe the children are our future . . .” Disgusted, I stopped listening to her again. If she started belting out Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All, I’d likely choke on my own vomit.

  Tuning Willow out brought my aching feet into focus again. I longed to kick off the idiotic high heels Willow had talked me into wearing with my black pantsuit. “How my chief of security looks is a reflection on me,” she had said, and threatened to call my boss Oscar if I didn’t submit to her foot torture. Every step threatened to send me toppling. My calves burned. My pinched toes felt like they were being slowly pulled through a funnel. Willow had said they were Louboutins when she pulled the red-soled shoes out of her massive shoe collection. Though I had expensive tastes, I wasn’t a shoe gal. I preferred a Louisville Slugger over a Louboutin. More useful in my line of work. How female superheroes kicked butt while wearing heels was beyond me. One of their Metahuman powers, maybe.

  I was the only one not listening to Willow. The male media members were slack-jawed as they hung on her every word. The women were almost as enthralled. Even my eyes kept being drawn to Willow, and I knew she was so bewitching only because of her fairy glamour. Fairy glamour was why so many supermodels and movie and TV stars were closeted fairies—when you laid eyes on them, it was almost impossible to look away, especially if you were a mundane who did not know what was going on.

  Standing this close to Willow and getting the full brunt of her glamour, something primal deep inside of me stirred, whispering enticingly to my lizard brain and parts farther south that despite my lifelong glandular bias in favor of men, maybe it was time to put down the balls and bats and start caressing catcher's mitts. Or at least one catcher’s mitt in particular. I suddenly found myself caressing Willow with my eyes.

  My conscious mind shuddered at the thought. I literally shook myself, trying to shake off the effects of the glamour Willow constantly projected like an eel’s electric field.

  My movement caught Willow’s eye. Her mouth tightened in an almost undetectable frown. In her mind, all the world was her personal stage, and no one had better dare do anything which might take the spotlight away from her. Willow shot me a quick look of pure venom while she continued to mouth saccharine inanities. I winked at her, knowing the impertinence would drive her nuts. Despite the fact Willow relied on me to protect her against the threats she had been getting from the magical world lately, to her, I was just the help who should stay in her place. Before those magical world threats, Willow’s security chiefs had been licensed Heroes. One such Hero, a young one fresh out of Hero Academy, had been murdered a couple of years ago, though in an incident unrelated to Willow. I hoped I would not suffer the same fate.

  Avoid dying. One should always set ambitious goals.

  Knowing I could not afford to let my senses and reflexes be dulled by Willow’s glamour, I opened my Third Eye. To do so, I did not need to use the Word, the Will, and the Wave as I did when I cast spells. Once you were used to opening your Third Eye, triggering it was as easy as riding a bike. I had stumbled into how to do it before I got my first period, long before I had any formal magical training.

  The mundane world I perceived through my biological eyes drained away like water in a sink with the stopper removed. It was replaced by a vision of the magical world my mystical Third Eye permitted me to see.

  A 360-degree panorama unfolded and displayed in my mind. Vivid colors of every shade swirled around me in eddies of strong magical current. Since magic drew its power from life, and especially sentient life, magic was particularly potent in major cities. Sometimes I wondered if urban fantasy novels, which were almost always set in cities, were written by Otherkin or Gifted humans, the two general types of citizens of the magical world. Gifteds like me wielded magic; Otherkin like Willow were magic.

  Now I saw Willow for what she truly was. Rather than a blonde bombshell, I saw before me a pinch-faced mousy brunette who looked like she had just sucked on a bushel of lemons. Her skin had so many fine lines that it looked like parchment paper. Willow’s tight dress hugged the lumpy rolls of her body. She looked overindulged, overfed, and under-exercised.

  I closed my Third Eye. I staggered slightly in my infernal heels as the dull mundane world returned and snapped back into focus. Now that I had peeked behind the magical curtain, Willow’s glamour would have no effect on me for a while and I could focus on my job. The lizard part of my brain had needed the reminder that Willow’s looks and allure were no more real than her name was.

  Willow had used a lot of different names over the years: Madame de Pompadour in the 1700s when Willow seduced her way into becoming the official chief mistress of King Louis XV of France; Lola Montez in the 1800s when Willow was the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, eventually ruining him and nearly ruining Bavaria; and Mata Hari in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Willow was a stripper who parlayed what she called “sacred Hindu dances” (hah!) to international fame and fortune before being arrested in Paris during World War I and tried, convicted, and executed as a German spy. Obviously, it had not been Willow who had been executed by a firing squad. A sorcerer smitten by Willow had animated a golem in Willow’s likeness, replaced Willow with it, and teleported Willow away before the bullets hit her. Fairies were vulnerable to iron, so the firing squad’s bullets would have surely killed Willow if the golem had not taken her place.

  I only knew all that about Willow because I read it in the dossier on her the gnomes in Capstone’s research department had prepared. On my own, I did not know much about history, unless you were talking about what happened during season one of Game of Thrones. I was a butt-kicker, not a nerd.

  I didn’t have to be a history buff to know Willow had forged her path throughout the centuries with her looks and on her back. It was one of the reasons why I did not like her. Women who relied exclusively on their looks and sexuality irritated me. If my mother knew Willow, she would call her “a do-nothing bitch.” I did not agree with Mom on much, but that description hit Willow on the head.

  Willow probably knew I was not her biggest fan since I have never been known for my subtlety and tact. She likely thought I was jealous of her. Jealousy was the go-to explanation for attractive women when less attractive women did not like them. I was not jealous. Well, not of Willow’s looks. I was a tad jealous of her money. Whoever said money was the root of
all evil had never been behind on her rent and in credit card debt up to her eyeballs. I was both. Financial discipline, like historical knowledge, was not one of my strengths.

  Willow seemed to be wrapping up her soliloquy of clichés when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, dark forms swoop out of the darkness of the night into the brightness cast by the Institute of Peace’s outside lights. My pulse starting to race, I spun to look at them through the clear curtain wall.

  Before I could raise my voice in warning, the flying forms crashed into the curtain wall, ripping through the thick glass like it was tissue paper. The breaking glass sounded like crashing cymbals. People below us in the atrium screamed. Some pointed up in the air at the monsters beating their wings there.

  For that was what they were: monsters. Three of them. Each the size of a Mini Cooper, each with the body of a different animal—a dog, a ram, and a rattlesnake—and each with giant bat wings that beat the air so powerfully they generated gusts of wind. Their wings were crimson red and leathery, with long sharp talons on the ends. Their bodies were bluish-black. They glistened evilly with an oily sheen.

  Gargoyles. The only gargoyles I knew of in the city adorned the Washington National Cathedral, over three miles away in the northwest quadrant of the city. I didn’t understand what was happening. Gargoyles protected the buildings they perched on from demons and evil spirits, which was why you often found them on churches. They simply did not sprout wings, become animated and oversized, and crash into buildings miles away from their roost.

  Clearly nobody had told these gargoyles that.

  The dog gargoyle suddenly swooped down. Shrieking, the people in the atrium scattered like ants. The dog gargoyle’s massive jaws clamped down around the waist of a man who had tripped and fallen in his haste to get away. The gargoyle rose into the air with the screaming man. Blood spurted from him like fuel from a ruptured gas tank. The gargoyle shook the man like a terrier who had caught a rat. The man’s bones cracked loudly enough to be heard over all the pandemonium. The man’s screaming died as he did.