Ashes to Ashes: The Slaughter Sisters

By Greg Alldredge

Set in the Helena Brandywine universe, this story is the third adventure of The Slaughter Sisters.

New York is alive with magic.

Deep in the heart of Chinatown the alleys hide a secret.

There’s a building that uses magic to mask itself from the mundane mortals that live around it.

A good friend asked the Slaughter Sisters to find a wayward fiancée. How far are they willing to go?

What new monster is tempting men, both young and old to their demise?

In Ashes to Ashes the Slaughter Sisters find an escapee from hell itself. Will they survive?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781949392074

Book preview

A Slaughter Sisters Adventure #3

Ashes to Ashes

A Helena Brandywine Mini Adventure

By Greg Alldredge

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-949392-07-4

Contact the author at:

[e-mail]

@G.Alldredge on Facebook

@MrAlldredge on Twitter

greg.alldredge on Instagram

© 2018 Greg Alldredge

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover Art by Ryn Katryn Digital Art.

Melinda Campbell, Copyeditor

www.MCEdits.com

To my wife who continues to inspire me and put up with my crazy ideas.

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Chapter 10:

Chapter 11:

Chapter 1:

Grace sat in a tree, not any tree, but a huge spreading oak that covered the large cat cages at the Central Park Zoo. Below her, two lions slept safely in their inner cage, as they should. It was a quiet night. Grace should be asleep not babysitting these elegant cats. They were big enough to take care of themselves. However, this was a paying job. The family needed all those available, no matter how silly.

The last two nights in a row, prized cats had escaped their cages. Not just escaped but disappeared from the zoo grounds. They found no sign of the animals anywhere in the park. The manager of the zoo was a creature, an Irish Selkie that hid in plain sight. He had become certain something supernatural or a creature was somehow involved.

Grace remained skeptical. Her sister Faith wasn’t convinced either, but the money spoke to them. Faith patrolled the grounds dressed as a guard for the protection payment. Chastity should be here to help them, her gadgets might come in handy on this happening, but she wouldn’t arrive by train until tomorrow afternoon.

Work like this always bored Grace to tears. While she waited, spells and thoughts of combining magic with other elements would slip past her thoughts. She was never a great experimenter like some witches; she considered herself more of an everyday conjurer. Grace would use her cold fire to great effect on everyday problems but never went above and beyond the easy spells. Her course in life discovered long ago, she decided not to be an influential witch but just to use her magic to keep her family safe while they hunted monsters.

Faith waved from the path as she patrolled past Grace’s position. The movement broke her concentration. She was accustomed to having their third sister with them. She liked the number three; it was a powerful magic number, the number of good fortunes. For most of recorded history, three had remained magical, back to the ancients where Greeks and Egyptians believed in the power of three. Grace hated to see her brother Carl leave Yonkers as any sister would, but the witch in her rejoiced that the three sisters now worked as one.

Nearly as strong as the number four and its power concerning death. She didn’t even like to think about the number four; it made her sick to the stomach.

A flash of lights caught her attention off the property, something moved in the woods of Central Park. If she’d not been in the tree, she doubted it would have caught her attention. It was probably a couple in the bushes searching for a bit of privacy. Not everyone in the park at night was up to no good, some were simply people that wanted to be alone or just enjoy the night.

Unfortunately, that included many bad people and creatures that would use the dark to hide all sorts of mischief. Lights in the dark did not immediately spell doom, but it could.

Humans in the city thought the creatures were the monsters, but the sisters learned better. More often than not, when they got a message needing their help, they would find a man behind the problem. Men with the use of some technology or magic caused more problems than creatures ever did.

Grace realized the world held bad actors of every stripe, she was just too used to seeing the world for what it really was: flawed. Even if a creature were involved, oftentimes it would have been forced to do what it needed to do by a man. She simply saw no way around it.

The lights had kept her attention. They still flashed in the distance. Strange, if it was a couple, they should have found a quiet place by now. A new sound drifted to her tree limb on the wind: the sound of giggles, a strange childlike snicker followed. These were not on the zoo paths but somewhere… closer, like under her. She spotted nothing unnatural below her, but the sounds grew more… mischievous, if a giggle could sound naughty. She had a bad feeling: gravity. The limb she sat on fell from under her body.

She picked this limb for a reason. Strong and thick, one of the major limbs of the tree, it should have held a team of horses, yet it came crashing down with her on it. Not a reflection on the size of her body, something tampered with the tree. Normally she would have several spells ready in case of magic used against her, but since she sat in a zoo, in a park, in the city, she did not prepare a protection from gravity spell, if one existed.

The fall was not too great, about equal to a two-story house. The sandy pit below broke her fall. The area the lions used as a cat box. The rough landing knocked the wind from her body, making it impossible to cast all manner of magics that required a verbal component. If a Mundane attacked her, they did a wonderful job of limiting her spells to a few parlor tricks.

She needed air first, but she had to fight for breath around the mouth full of sand. Spitting and cussing in Yiddish, she tried to call out for help from Faith, but if she had no wind for spells, she surely had nothing for pleas of help.

Still, she remained calm. She landed safely in a cage of metal bars. The big cats were secured. Little could harm her here until she regained her composure.

The giggle turned into near maniacal laughter. Now, Grace worried. The sound of metal scraping across metal caused the hair to stand up on the back of her neck. She didn’t want to think