mission magic 01 - the incubus job Read Online Free PDF Page A

“There wasn’t anyone else there. Just Ritter and the three victims. He’d killed all the others. He’d been torturing and killing women for years. I’d have thought you’d be thrilled we took him down and saved three of his victims. I did think you were thrilled.”
    “He had that little house where he did all his torture,” I recalled, ice tracing through my veins. I’d learned to compartmentalize the horror I felt when we did those jobs. Otherwise I could never have survived as long as I did. Ritter hadn’t been the worst killer we’d found, though he was in the top five. He was definitely the most prolific. “Right there on the little lake. The victims could look out on the prettiest view while he cut them up. No one could hear them scream.”
    “That’s where we found Julia, Sharon, and Melanie Brooks. Still alive,” Law reminded me.
    Sisters. Ritter had kidnapped them from a park in California and driven them back to his compound near Aspen, Colorado. He considered himself an artist, with the women being his canvas. He cut, tattooed, and branded intricate patterns into their skins, covering every square centimeter. He kept them alive with magic, taking weeks to finish each skin canvas. When he was done, the bastard drilled holes in their heads and hung them on cables, like macabre paintings. A museum dedicated to his own heinous art. He had money to burn and enough magic to keep the bodies from rotting. The oldest bodies had been there for more than twenty years.
    I shuddered. We’d found three victims alive, but the dead had been legion.
    “It was bad,” Law said, his voice careful, as if he didn’t want to spook me. “One of our worst.”
    It was the worst, though not for the reason he thought. I kept going, more glad than I realized to be finally saying it out loud.
    “After we rescued the girls and got Ritter, we did the extermination,” I said. The ghosts had been scared. They were all young—between eighteen and twenty-five years old, most of them right around twenty-one. Ritter liked to snag his victims from college bars and frat parties. They’d be drinking and not paying enough attention. He had a little box truck and would go through several states, gathering up a supply of victims, then take them back to Colorado to work on them. It made it hard to narrow down where to find him since his hunting ground was the entire continental United States.
    At the time we did the extermination, I don’t know how many ghosts there were. I did the summoning to call them all together.
    “There were so many ghosts,” I said, my throat catching. “Hundreds of them.”
    “Two hundred and thirty-nine,” Law said. “All the bodies were in the house. Ritter had used magic to keep the spirits from moving on.” They’d been scared, some clinging to each other. They were overjoyed we’d gotten Ritter.
    I could close my eyes and see each and every one. Not every person who dies violently sticks around as a ghost. I’d expected some but not all. Ritter had wanted an audience for his work. Sick fuck.
    I was sicker. Me and Law both.
    Those women had been torn from their homes and families, tortured for weeks and weeks, then killed. They hadn’t been allowed to move on, and when they were finally going to be freed from Ritter’s hold, we step in and give them final death. Sure, maybe it was a mercy but maybe not. We didn’t bother to ask. We didn’t care. Our job was to exterminate them so they didn’t get loose in the world.
    Two hundred thirty-nine ghosts—two hundred thirty-nine women—all slaughtered twice. It took Law and me only about a minute. Ghost extermination is easier than it ought to be.
    My throat closed and I looked down at the floor. Guilt swamped me under a tide of black tar. I’d told my ghosts. I had been honest about myself. All the same, I could feel their condemnation permeate my inner shields.
    “That’s it?” Law demanded and stomped across the room to stand in front of