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

Two powerful backswings knocked out the two men flanking Sellers. He shouted and fired another shot, and the bullet whizzed past her head.

Lyssa crushed his gun hand with a solid blow. Sellers yelped. She kicked the gun toward the wall before it hit the floor. The man winced and clutched his bent fingers.

“Chad Sellers,” Lyssa rumbled. “Do you know who I am?”

He nodded quickly. “Hecate. B-but why are you here? Phoenix is damned far away from Midland.”

Lyssa pointed a baton at this head. “Too bad your stench reached Arizona. I’ve got some questions for you.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

A groaning man crashed through the remains of the front door, his upper chest scorched. Aisha strolled in behind him like she was fashionably late for a dinner party. It was over the top, but Lyssa couldn’t complain after her horror movie performance earlier.

“Hecate and Flame Deva?” Sellers slumped forward. “I’ve got crap luck. Y’all both came here?”

“When one causes enough trouble,” Aisha replied with a sneer, “one attracts appropriate levels of punishment. And you’re a big troublemaker, friend.”

“How would you like to die, Sellers?” Lyssa asked. “In the dark or in fire? In both? We can accommodate your last wish.”

Remaining slumped over and staring at the floor, he shook his head. “This isn’t fair, and y’all are blaming the wrong man. I’m not a criminal. I don’t deserve to be treated like this in my own home.”

“You could have fooled me.” Lyssa pointed a baton at an unconscious man. “You have a lot of men with guns here.”

“This is Texas.” Sellers shrugged. “We have a right to those guns. Y’all have your magic powers. We have guns. Fair is fair.”

Aisha scoffed, “smuggling is a crime, even in Texas.”

“This is America, and I’m a businessman,” Sellers argued, “I move products people want, nothing more. Does that make me a bad guy?”

“Moving products?” Lyssa grew waving tentacles around her head for effect. “Like people?”

“People?” Sellers shook his head. “Go ask the FBI. We don’t do that.”

Aisha scoffed. “Because you’re such honorable men with limits?”

“Because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.” Sellers sat up. “But moving drugs, guns, and that kind of thing? Small, easy, good profits. We help get products to customers. What’s so bad about that? If people want them, who am I hurting? Some of the Founding Fathers were smugglers. John Hancock was a smuggler. John Hancock!”

“And you’re John Hancock in this situation?” Lyssa snickered. “I think I liked Alvarez’s straightforward arrogance better than this self-serving garbage.”

Sellers’ gaze shifted between Aisha and Lyssa. The panic in his eyes seemed genuine. “We ship products people want. That’s all. We haven’t stolen from anyone. We’re not even making the stuff.”

“Well, now, that’s an interesting choice of words.” Lyssa crouched next to him. She collapsed her batons and tucked them away before reaching out to squeeze his cheeks with her cold, gloved hand. “That means you think we’re here because we believe you stole something?”

Seller swallowed. “I can pay you. Whatever you want. I have a lot of money.”

A flaming knife burst into existence in Aisha’s hand. “Killing you would make the world a better place.”

Lyssa squeezed Seller’s jaw and pitched her voice lower than the demon bronchitis imitation delivered by her regalia. Interrogations were a lot like negotiations. She needed to give the man a win by letting him think he was improving his situation with each answer. She already knew the most likely answers to her questions, but she wanted him to confirm them by stumbling into them himself.

“You killed a Sorcerer, didn’t you?” Lyssa let out a sinister chuckle to cover her doubt. “You got lucky somehow, killed him, and found a bag full of shards. That’s not technically stealing. Is that what you’re thinking?”

Sellers laughed hysterically and yanked out of her grip. “If I could take one of y’all out so easily, why am I the one on the floor with a bunch of knocked-out guys?” He grimaced and nodded at the unconscious man at the front door. “Is he still alive?”

Aisha pointed the knife at the man. “For now. We’ll see what happens over the next few minutes, smuggler.”

Lyssa pulled Sellers’s head back roughly. “What then? Oh, did you find the Sorcerer dead already? That’s it, isn’t it? Found a dead Sorc and figured you’d take his things? You figured, what’s the harm? Give some Shadows an edge the next time a Torch shows up? Huh? Is that it?”

“I don’t ask people what they’re going to do with the products.” Sellers trembled. “It’s not our job to ask. We move product, and we’re paid for that. People can do bad things with anything. I read about a guy who stabbed another guy through the eye with a pencil. Y’all going to raid a pencil factory now?”

Lyssa let go, and he fell forward. “Just a middleman, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

Sellers swallowed. “Meaning what?”

Lyssa half-closed her eyes and murmured in Phrygian. Sometimes the show could sell the illusion. Shadowy lines crawled up her arm, growing in number over several seconds before covering the whole thing. Oversized dark fingers twitched and contorted at the end, their unnatural angles changing with each passing second. Sellers’ eyes became saucers.

Stripped of everything else, fear was about the unknown. A violent criminal who associated with other violent criminals lived a life steeped in death. The loss of life wasn’t an unknown, and most in his line of work had inflicted or witnessed it. That experience made it a familiar thing, regrettable but expected on some level.

To terrify such a man, Lyssa needed to expose him to something he didn’t know and had no experience with. Chad Sellers might have believed he would die at the end of a gun or knife someday or even imagined he’d die specifically at the end of Hecate’s gun, but she doubted he’d ever imagined facing long, contorted shadow fingers that looked like something from a nightmare.

Lyssa moved next to his ear to whisper, “I’ll