San Francisco Night Read Online Free PDF

himself as he took slow, deep breaths. He began to repeat the name of the owner of the Bible.  Father Michael O’Hara.
    Nightingale focused all his attention on the name and stared hard at the Bible. He whispered a sentence in Latin, and imagined the blue aura entering the crystal, helping it to show the direction in which Father Michael might be found, opening his mind to an image of the priest and his whereabouts.
    Nothing.
    The pink crystal remained motionless.
    Nightingale tried again, focusing on the crystal and the Bible as hard as he could, but it just hung where it was. After ten minutes he stood up and put the crystal back in its leather bag. He looked down at the Bible on the floor and spoke quietly to himself. “Rest in peace, Father Michael.”
    He was by no means an expert in the use of the crystal, but he knew that the fact there had been absolutely no reaction meant only one thing – the priest was no longer alive. He pulled on his robe and sat down on the bed. Nightingale needed advice, and there was no one better for guidance in the occult world than Mrs Steadman. It was midnight in San Francisco which meant it was about eight o’clock in the morning in London. He knew that Mrs Steadman was an early riser so he picked up his phone and called her. She answered on the second ring. “Why, Jack. How delightful to hear from you.”
     “I need your help, Mrs Steadman.”
    “That’s what I’m here for. And you know I always love to hear from you. Now, how is the city by the bay?”
    Nightingale hadn’t told her where he was, but it was no surprise that she’d picked it up. She often knew things about him he’d never told her.
    “OK, I suppose, though I’m not getting much chance to see the sights. I’m working again.”
    There was a hissing intake of breath at the other end. “Joshua Wainwright again? You know what I think of him. Jack, the man is not your friend, and not a force for good. He has passed the Abyss and embraced the Lord Of This World.”
    “Yeah, but he pays well,” said Nightingale.
    Mrs Steadman wasn’t laughing. “It’s not something to joke about, Jack. You may well find the cost to you far outweighs any payment you might receive. He cares for nobody but his own sweet self.”
    “And how’s your shop?”  Mrs Steadman ran a Wicca store in east London, which is where he’d first met her.
    “As ever, a change of subject any time you feel uncomfortable. You can’t always avoid important issues. But my shop is doing wonderfully well, thank you for asking.  Now you’ve got me worried, Jack. What are you involved in?”
    Nightingale could hear the concern in her voice.
    “There’s a Satanic group out here who are killing people. They killed a nun, and a priest, I think. And there’s a young girl missing.”
    Mrs Steadman gasped. “Oh! Goodness, no! That’s awful.”
    “Have you come across anything like this before?”
     “You know I don’t move in those circles, but from what I’ve heard, sacrificing non-believers is common to many of the blackest rites.”
    “What do you mean ‛non-believers’?”
    “Non-believers in the supremacy of Satan, so people with faith in other religions.” said Mrs Steadman. “Jack, be careful. You don’t want to be involved with people like that. Tell Wainwright you want nothing to do with whatever he’s up to.”
    “I can’t do that, Mrs Steadman. I owe him.”
    “I sometimes think you’d have been better doing a deal with Satan himself than hitching your wagon to Wainwright,” she said. “People like me can call down power, channel it, hopefully for good. But Adepts of the Left-hand Path use it to impose their will on people and events. Their rule is ‛Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ But the real top people, the Magister Templum, the Ipsissimus, they can store power within themselves, to use as and when they wish. No need for incantations and ceremonies every time, they are raw occult power. And