Finch Merlin and the Djinn's Curse , livre ebook

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141 pages

English

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The lost city lies beyond a locked gateway. But the key is not what it seems...Now a map-maker extraordinaire, Finch must find the place Erebus so desperately seeks-although the "how" and "why" remain unclear. And a certain vengeful Necromancer is bent on beating Erebus to the punch, and he'd be more than happy to make Finch collateral damage.With his friends' lives on the line, Finch will fall back on his old trickster ways to get his hands on the gateway's key. In secret, he plans to uncover a loophole, a way to end his servitude for good. The answer might lie in Erebus's past servants and their storied history with the djinn...The djinn have lost their connection to Erebus, and Raffe doesn't know how much longer he can cope before his alter ego goes insane. That's the only reason he agrees to travel halfway across the world to find answers for Finch. Raffe aches to end the djinn curse that threatens his future with Santana, but he'd have to achieve the impossible: separate himself from the demon within.

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	01 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	3
EAN13	9781695141230
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Copyright © 2019
Hot Pancakes Ltd
www.hotpcakes.com
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.
ONE
Finch
T he cold seeped into my skin like I’d downed liquid nitrogen. Everything felt numb. A vast, white landscape of ice and snow stretched before me, interrupted by fractures that revealed a dark, impossibly deep ocean beneath.
I floated above it all, half dreaming, half awake. The lines of reality blurred through the bluish haze that burned my eyes and seared into the backs of my retinas.
My body-my real body, not this Casper reboot-was somewhere else. I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. It evaded my mind, just out of reach. Wherever it was, my body sketched these sights and put names to important landmarks. If I really concentrated, I could sense a hand trembling over a page, way off in the ether of… that other place. My hand. Though it felt like it belonged to someone else.
I hung in limbo, detached from my physical body yet still faintly linked. The terrain below was starkly beautiful but felt dangerous. Like I could tumble out of the sky and fall into that frigid water, never to be found.
I need a break before my eyeballs blow.
I plunged into my mind and reached for the blue-tinged strands that formed a direct line to my body. I tugged on them, as if I were a caver in trouble, which wasn’t too far from the truth. A moment later, the icy world disappeared and I landed back where I’d started with a painful thump. I blinked a few times to get rid of the lingering blue haze and weird sensation of spectral floating.
“Is all well, Mr. Merlin?” A voice behind me made me jump.
“Mary, you’ve got to stop doing that!” I yelped, turning to face a familiar presence. “You might not have to worry about having a coronary anymore, but I’m still fair game.” Speaking of spectral floating…
Mary Foster hovered nearby in all her translucent glory, dressed in a high-collared gown complete with a cameo brooch at her throat and about five strings of pearls. The whole nineteenth-century shebang. She had been shot by a Winchester rifle and sought sanctuary in this house after her death, as allowed by the woman who’d built the place-Sarah Winchester. Mary wouldn’t admit it, but I got the feeling she liked to scare the living daylights out of me. I’d only been here a day, and she’d already made a habit of it.
Mary smiled. “You were gone for a long while. I started to worry.”
“I just needed a break. No worrying required. Look at me-I’m the picture of A-OK.” It made me uneasy, leaving my body in this study room with the likes of Mary and the rest of her spooky pals, who could all come and go as they pleased. They had walking through walls down to a fine art, and it made for some tense trips to the bathroom.
“Why do your eyes glow when you go into that peculiar trance?” She swooped in, coming right up to my face and stealing the breath from my lungs. Another activity these spooks just loved to indulge in. I’d stopped outwardly screaming about twenty-four hours ago-aka, within the first thirty minutes of arriving-but the inward screams were still in full force. Staring into the dead eyes of a ghost would never be comfortable.
I shrugged. “It’s just part of the map-drawing.”
“Is it coming along as you desire?” She stared down at the paper in front of me. Half of it was covered in the same lines, markings, and names as before-a partial road to Atlantis. The rest lay frustratingly blank. Etienne had underplayed the whole “it’ll be more difficult without the oranges” thing. Way underplayed it. He’d described it as trying to write an essay, when tired, without caffeine. But this was like trying to write an essay while comatose, or, at the very least, with half my brain leaking out of my head.
So, why not regrow some more of those screamy orange willow shrubs, right? Well, as it turned out, they were hard to get hold of. The chemist team from San Francisco had swiped the last rare cutting of one to help me out, via Ryann. But they’d destroyed theirs, as per Ryann’s insistence, in case they dabbled in some orange tasting and started wigging out. And Etienne wasn’t about to hand more over to me, or he’d have done that before I left.
“I’m getting there. Slow and steady wins the race, right?” I broke out of my cramped headspace.
She frowned. “I am not sure that can be correct. The swiftest has always been the victor, from the races I have witnessed. Slow and steady would only win if you were racing against someone who was slower and less coordinated than you are.”
“Well, lucky for me this is a one-man race, then.”
I sat back in my chair and looked around the room. It always took a few minutes to readjust after delving deep into that altered state. Melody had given me a study room for privacy, though privacy was a pretty loose term with a mansion full of spirits who didn’t give a damn about locked doors or “alone time.” The sickly green walls, with a thick border of mahogany, hadn’t gotten any prettier since the last time I took a break. If Sarah Winchester had been aiming for haunted vibes, she’d hit the bullseye.
“How long have you been watching me, anyway?” I jolted again as Mary’s face loomed over my shoulder.
Every time she did that, she took a good ten years off my life.
“I have decided to be your sentinel during these times. One can never be too careful in a house such as this. Not all spirits herein are as amiable as myself,” Mary replied, in her clipped, old-timey British-American hybrid accent that would’ve put Cary Grant to shame.
I nodded. “I guess it’s only natural to have a few angry souls hanging around, considering the nature of this place.”
“Oh, more than a few.” Mary floated off to the far side of the room. “The majority of us have softened over the decades, with a sanctuary to call home, but there are some who, I fear, will never relinquish their grudges upon the family whose rifle stole their lives.”
“You never did tell me exactly how you ended up here,” I said. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, not unless she’d been using a dynamite skin cream before she died. She drifted to the hefty desk where I’d been working. Or the “escritoire,” as she liked to call it.
“A man hurt me, Mr. Merlin. Well, he did more than hurt me.”
Her voice sounded sad, and it made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I stared down into my lap, feeling guilty for bringing up the subject.
“Ah… Was it your husband?” I wasn’t sure why I’d jumped to that conclusion. Given the time she’d come from, I just assumed she’d have been married.
“No, the wretch robbed me of any hope of marriage. He was a jealous suitor who did not like that I cast his affections aside for another. I went out walking with the man who might have been my husband, when he shot us both in cold blood. The man with me survived, but I… well, you can see that I did not.” She hovered back and forth-the spirit version of fidgeting.
“How come you haven’t crossed over?” If that had happened to me, I’d have been off like a shot on a one-way ride to the afterlife.
She laughed softly. “I suppose I am not ready to depart this world. I had so much life left to live when I was murdered, and I cannot quite surrender this existence, even if I no longer walk in the real world. Being here is a… compromise of sorts.”
“It’s not a curse, then, to stay here?”
“Goodness, no. It is a gift,” she replied, with a faraway smile. “It is a place to appease the angrier souls, who might otherwise have turned into poltergeists. Sarah Winchester did us a great service when she built this mansion. A prime example of feminine grace and dignity. She did not have to make amends for those who died by her husband’s creation, but she did. And it gives us an echo of life, though our hearts no longer beat.”
I’d learned a lot about the Winchester Mystery House from Mary Foster. Sarah Winchester had hired a Kolduny to place a spell on the foundation of the house, and that spell held strong to this day. From what I’d gathered, the Kolduny magic in the very bones of this place acted as a vortex-though Mary had used the term “specter funnel”- drawing deceased victims of the rifle into the house if they didn’t pass on, giving them a choice as to whether they wanted sanctuary here or not. A sort of primary intervention to prevent potential poltergeists. A lot of Ps. If they stayed, the spell made the ghosts visible and able to speak to the breathing residents, as a constant reminder of the history of the Winchester name. The main part of the house was open to tourists, but an interdimensional bubble provided the secret hiding place for the ghosts and the Winchesters.
“What wonders did you discover on your latest voyage of the mind? Did it reveal that rogue you mentioned?” Mary broke me out of my thoughts.
“Davin? No.” I’d soared over Antarctica a few times now and found no sign of him. I took that as an indication that Davin was nowhere near done deciphering the map. We were still in the running.
“That is excellent news, is it not?”
I sighed. “I hope so, or Erebus will have his panties in a twist.”
“Mr. Merlin! You should not speak of undergarments in a lady’s presence!” She gaped in horror.
“Sorry. I mean, he’ll have my guts for garters.”
Mary shook her head. “Mr. Merlin, please-you will turn my cheeks quite scarlet!”
I doubt it… I didn’t say so, since I didn’t want to be mean. She was dead, after all. That required a softer touch. “Erebus is that chaotic fellow you told me about? The one on whose behalf you are doing all of this map business?” Mary recovered from her mortification pretty quickly.
I nodded. “Yep, that’s the one.”
“You speak so very peculiarly, Mr. Merlin, if you do not mind me saying. I confess, I hardly comprehend half of what y