Descended from Dragons: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 1) by Tricia Owens

Author:Tricia Owens [Owens, Tricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

I felt right at home, which was not a good thing. Christian's family room looked like an extension of my cursed bathroom, except it wasn't a hallucination that disappeared when I blinked hard enough.

It was decorated the way you'd expect a single guy would do it: with oversized black leather sofas, a big, ugly wooden coffee table capable of holding plenty of beer cans and Big Gulp cups, and a gigantic entertainment system on which the majority of Christian's decorating budget undoubtedly had been spent. Surrounding the enormous flat screen TV were all sorts of expensive-looking electronics like Blu-ray/DVD players, receivers, and various portable stereo systems. The floor was white tile. The tiles would be the easiest to clean of all the blood.

Stick an m80 firecracker inside a balloon filled with blood and you'd get the scene I was looking at. Blood was spattered everywhere. Arterial-type spray had painted the blades of the inert ceiling fan, dripped down the sliding glass doors, and was speckled along the ceiling molding. The thickest concentration of blood was on the coffee table, where a large puddle suggested it was the epicenter of the carnage. The leather sofas were probably also drenched, but the black color hid most of the evidence. I still wouldn't sit down on them for a million bucks.

"This is stranger than it looks, guys." Melanie tiptoed as close as she could to the sofas without stepping in any splotches of blood. She sniffed the air. "Yeah, way stranger!"

"The only way this could be stranger than it looks was if you told me I'm actually looking at a sriracha hot sauce fight gone wrong."

"Ha! It's definitely not sriracha." She leaned down and sniffed the back of the sofa. "Hmm."

I felt Vale's presence before he entered my vision from the corner of my eye. He'd regained his color, but he wore the expression of someone who was approaching a familiar car smashed in the midst of a ten car pile-up.

I understood his dread, but something was nagging at me and it became apparent a second later.

"There aren't any drag marks," I said. "A body that's lost this much blood isn't walking away from this. It's not even standing. So how did it move? Did someone else carry it away?"

"Someone did carry it away and it probably wasn't that difficult." Melanie hopscotched back to us. "The blood didn't come from a human. It's goat blood!"

Learning we were looking at the scene of a ritual sacrifice was only marginally better. I couldn't bring myself to feel relieved.

"I guess that explains the brimstone smell on Christian," I said, though I was sorry I had to when I saw Vale's expression.

"He wouldn't have attempted to summon a demon," he said softly but in a way that revealed how extremely pissed he was. "Whatever this is…it's not what it looks like."

"Are you sure?" I persisted, because he so far hadn't exactly been forthcoming. "Rituals aren't always for evil purposes, you know. He could've been, I don't

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.