Southwest Nights (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 1) by Kal Aaron (large ebook reader txt) 📕

to resemble a normal outfit, though she’d lose some of the physical protection and sorcerous enchantments accompanying its true form. It also helped not to scream “Sorceress” to her own kind. They weren’t all her friends.

There was nothing wrong with the Sorceress and the woman separating themselves when not on the job. Not everyone needed that, but sometimes a person needed to remind herself she wasn’t the Grim Reaper when she spent so much time in a skull mask.

Elaborate raised sigils covered the regalia’s pieces. They were hard to see without close inspection.

Although the look of the outfit invoked shaped dark leather, that was the product of how the outfit had customized itself when Lyssa had first bound it. The secrets and true nature of the material had vanished with the fall of Lemuria.

Lyssa grabbed the mask and slipped it on. It covered her face entirely, replacing the pretty dark-haired woman with a nightmarish mix of evil biker Goth chick, the Grim Reaper, and Santa Muerte. A thin layer of wispy, twitching shadows outlined her body, darkening and obscuring her features even more. Lyssa Corti was gone. Hecate the Night Goddess had replaced her.

She filled her pockets with magazines before holstering the pistols. Sorcery had its place, but guns cast a death spell all their own. Though, she was cheating with the help of enchanted bullets.

“You doing okay, Jofi?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

His voice was louder because his physical form, the two pistols, now lay right next to her body. Having a spirit bound into her guns was another cheat.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Lyssa replied.

A bright yellow Ducati Panigale V4 racing bike was parked inside her garage, ready for her. It wasn’t a motorcycle that allowed a woman to keep a low profile, especially one dressed in such an attention-getting way outside of Mardi Gras, Halloween, or a comic book convention. As much as she loved her bike, working the job meant keeping Hecate and Lyssa separate.

She mounted her bike and gripped the handlebars, imagining obscuring clouds flowing over it. They appeared and consumed the bike, replacing it with a gray and black chopper, her Dark Mantle disguise. No one on the planet could mistake Hecate’s ride for Lyssa Corti’s Ducati.

She grinned. “Too bad I didn’t end up as the Sun Goddess. That’d make this easier.”

“At times, I wonder if you ended up with the right regalia,” Jofi replied.

“Gee, thanks. I was joking.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes I can’t figure out if you really don’t understand human jokes or if you’re messing with me.” Lyssa shook her head.

She cast another spell, this one requiring more concentration. She layered thin strands of shadow, mentally sewing and weaving, along with a whispered chant. Her bike and body faded from view, becoming insubstantial until only a tiny, thin patch of darkness remained. The dark form flowed through the cracks in the garage, staying close to the ground as it moved toward the street.

Lyssa hit the road. She couldn’t move as fast as she would have liked since using the thinning spell took more power than most of her techniques, even with the help of her regalia and Jofi. She was grateful she lived in a neighborhood with a lot of trees to provide cover, which was rare in Scottsdale. She needed a hidden tunnel like the one at her old house.

Once clear of her block, Lyssa ended the thinning spell and returned to her normal size. She kept her wraith form, which made her a full-sized shadow flowing along the side of the road. The bright afternoon sun made her more conspicuous. People would notice her, but they wouldn’t know who she was.

A child playing on the street cocked his head and looked her way. He seemed more curious than afraid.

Lyssa didn’t care about the occasional sighting. She’d traveled all around the county using the wraith form to ensure everyone knew Hecate called Maricopa County home. She’d even spent half-days in Tucson and Flagstaff the previous week to expand her reported range of terror.

Without her full safety spells and rituals being in use, traveling hidden too far along city streets was a good recipe for dying in a wreck. She released her cloak near a corner, popping into existence as she approached the intersection and stopping at the red light.

She didn’t expect any cops to track Hecate down to give her a ticket but giving the locals fewer reasons to dislike her might help her in the future. No cop would ever fully trust a Sorceress with a hidden identity, but her time in San Diego had shown that she could pull them almost all the way with effort.

An old woman walking along a nearby sidewalk stopped and looked her way, then shrieked and clutched her hands to her chest. “I’m not ready to die! I’ve been doing everything my doctor said to lower my blood pressure. I’ve even been doing the Dance Master DJ Supermix game my grandson gave me for exercise.”

It’d been a while since someone had mistaken Lyssa for Death. This many years after the revelation of sorcery on M-Day, she was always surprised that people didn’t assume anything strange they saw was the result of sorcery. There might not be many of her kind around, but they were talked about and featured on the net and TV.

“I’m not here for you.”

Lyssa’s voice was pitched low and distorted by her mask. Her feminine silhouette was unmistakable in her outfit, but the mask and tone changes added enough questions about her identity to allow her to live in a normal house without reporters or assassins showing up and ruining her strawberry-ice-cream-and-reality-TV time.

“Oh, thank you.” The old woman moaned gratefully. “I promise to keep doing what my doctor says.”

“You do that. And call your grandkids more. Thank your grandson for the game.”

“I will.” The woman nodded, relief spreading on her face.

Lyssa sped toward the address. Samuel’s message had said she needed to head out immediately, but it hadn’t mentioned an expedited arrival. Getting there