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    Doom Sayer: City of Crows, #4
    Doom Sayer: City of Crows, #4
    Doom Sayer: City of Crows, #4
    Ebook296 pages4 hours

    Doom Sayer: City of Crows, #4

    By Clara Coulson

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Aurora, Michigan is finally at peace for the first time in months. It doesn't last very long.

    As Cal Kinsey is creeping up to his one-year anniversary on Riker's team, something else is creeping through the streets of Aurora. One by one, people are falling ill with severe flu-like symptoms, and the doctors are stumped, unsure of the cause. 

    At first, the supernatural community ignores this largely human problem...until a wizard is infected and flies into an insane rage, destroying almost half a city block. 

    That is when the truth comes out: It's not a disease at all. It's an infectious curse.

    With Aurora's supernatural community descending into panic, DSI goes on high alert, and every team is mobilized to hunt down the curse's source. But the ICM refuses to cooperate with the investigation. Terrified practitioners try to flee the city, risking an epidemic. A scared witch attacks a DSI team, killing multiple agents.

    And just when Cal and his teammates think it can't possibly get any worse, the unthinkable happens.

    The new leader of the local ICM chapter accuses a DSI agent of playing a part in the creation of the curse. Specifically, he accuses one of DSI's elite detectives: the one and only Cal Kinsey.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnite and Day Publishing
    Release dateDec 10, 2017
    ISBN9781386254232
    Doom Sayer: City of Crows, #4
    Author

    Clara Coulson

    Clara Coulson was born and raised in backwoods Virginia, USA. She holds a degree in English and Finance from the College of William & Mary and recently retired from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC to return to the homeland and pick up the quiet writing life. Clara spends most of her time (when she's not writing) dreaming up new story ideas, studying Japanese, and slowly reading through the several-hundred-book backlog on her budding home library. If she's not occupied with any of those things, then you can probably find her playing with her two cats or lurking in the shadows of various social media websites. To stay up to date with Clara's books, please subscribe to the Firebolt Books newsletter: https://www.firebolt-books.com/newsletter

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      Book preview

      Doom Sayer - Clara Coulson

      Chapter One

      A perfect scene of domesticity greets me as I drag myself out of the echoes of a dream I hope I don’t remember. My bedroom lit by the early morning sunshine peeking around the window shade, all the furniture cast in a soft yellow glow. Rumpled clothing strewn across the floor, left behind last night by two people who, at the time, couldn’t have cared less about laundry habits. Cooper Lee, in bed next to me, the comforter drawn up to his neck, his head on the pillow, dozing comfortably, hair tousled from sleep and other, less restful activities.

      All is calm and quiet and peaceful in Calvin Kinsey’s apartment.

      Which is what tips me off to the fact that something is horribly wrong.

      I take quick stock of the room, searching for anything out of place, but find nothing until my gaze hits the bump in the road that is my smartphone on the nightstand. Reaching over, I swipe the phone and hit the home button—to reveal the big white clock proclaiming it a quarter past seven o’clock. For a second, I stare at those backlit numbers, my sleep-clogged brain struggling to figure out why that time doesn’t seem quite right.

      And then it hits me: it’s Monday, and I’m supposed to get up at six thirty.

      Oh damn. I smack myself in the forehead. In the, uh, heat of the moment last night, both Cooper and I must’ve forgotten to set our alarms. Usually, Cooper would never forget such a thing—he’s a meticulous guy—but we made the mistake of renting an R-rated movie that featured some particularly salacious scenes, the kind that cause the blood to pool in certain areas below the belt. And in the natural aftermath of that scenario (that is, sex), we were too distracted to remember trivial things, like the fact we protect the world from supernatural monsters from eight to four on weekdays with occasional extensive overtime hours.

      I calculate how much time we have left before we’re shamed for tardiness versus how much time it usually takes us to get ready when we have a sleepover. Ugh, we’ll have to skip breakfast if we want to beat the worst of the traffic, I think sourly. Cooper’s not going to like that.

      See, Cooper doesn’t only love cooking. He loves making you eat what he cooks.

      Or maybe he reserves that behavior for me, seeing as he thinks I can’t feed myself properly. (Honestly, I’m not that bad. I just skip a few meals here and there, and everywhere. And eat a lot of junk food. And drink too much soda. And reheat three-day-old takeout. And…yeah, okay, my diet’s a mess. Cooper has a point.)

      Either way, he’s going to be ticked he can’t whip up his egg, bacon, and pancake combo this morning. But there is a saving grace. In the form of an excellent breakfast restaurant named Kelly’s that’s only a one-turn detour from the office. As long as I eat breakfast, and it’s not from a big-name fast food joint, Cooper should be pacified. Until lunchtime.

      Gently, I shake Cooper’s shoulder to rouse him.

      He mumbles nonsense at me, annoyed, until he finally cracks an eye open. Eh? What’s going on now? he slurs out.

      Time to get up. Past time actually. We forgot to set an alarm.

      Cooper stares at me, uncomprehending, and then it sinks in. Shit! How late are we?

      Not late yet. But we have to hurry.

      So we do.

      In fifteen minutes, we bumble around in my cramped shower together—by the way, showering with somebody is by far the least sexy thing in the world when you’re rushing—dry off, get dressed, brush our teeth, comb our hair, and head out the door, all without tripping over our own feet. And if we didn’t look like complete fools jogging down the hall to the elevator and pounding on the down button, I’d be tempted to call us impressive.

      We make it to my truck with no time to spare, and a minute later, we’re on the road, already dodging commuter vehicles that are starting to clog both lanes as rush hour consumes the streets. But the weather is fine, if not a little hot and muggy, that late August humidity that seems to linger on forever, so the traffic keeps moving at a decent speed, minus a few boneheaded moves from distracted drivers. By quarter to eight, we’re only five minutes from the DSI office, which gives us plenty of time to pull into Kelly’s and grab a hearty meal to go.

      Kelly’s has no drive-thru, so the parking lot is a nightmarish clutter of cars this time of day, but I manage to squeeze my truck into a narrow corner spot after another patron backs out. Cooper and I exit the truck and power walk to the front entrance, mentally preparing for the onslaught that is Kelly’s at prime breakfast hour. Thankfully, there’s no line curling out onto the sidewalk today, but even before I tug the door open, I spy five customers ahead of us. Given how fast the Kelly’s staff normally hustles, I estimate it’ll be six minutes until we get our food.

      Cutting it close, but the office is just down the street. We’ll make it.

      We take our place in line, eyes on the menu posted above the cash registers to ensure they haven’t swapped meal numbers. I have a usual, and so does Cooper, and there’s no time to deviate from routine, so we settle into checking the news on our phones and sharing funny tidbits from gossip columns with each other for the short minutes it takes the employees to clear most of the customers in front of us.

      After a handsome guy in a tan suit strolls out the door with a massive sausage and egg burrito, only a married couple remains between us and our delicious breakfast platters. The husband gives one more cursory glance at the menu, grumbles out his order, and plucks a few bills from his wallet. The wife glances at a special of the day poster on the wall, and decides to go with that instead of whatever she normally chooses, feeling a little adventurous today. The cashier taps their orders into the system, their total pops up, the husband moves to hand the money over, and…

      That’s where it all goes south.

      The wife drops. Like a sack of bricks. One second she’s smiling at the thought of chowing down on French toast, and the next she’s on the floor. Her head smacks the tile and bounces off. Her arms flop limply across her torso. Her eyes roll back into her head, leaving nothing but ghostly whites. And a hushed gasp of pain wafts past her lips like an afterthought, the only sound that indicates she’s even remotely aware of what’s happening.

      A hush falls over the restaurant for two seconds that pass like a long winter, a dozen people standing frozen, waiting for a sign that the world hasn’t fallen off its axis.

      The sign doesn’t come, and time jerks back into its usual flow.

      The husband tosses his money on the countertop and sinks to his knees, panicked. Honey? Are you all right? He shakes her shoulders, but she’s unresponsive.

      My brain digs through the dregs of my knowledge and tosses out the first-aid training I learned in the academy. I fall to one knee, grab the woman’s wrist, and take her pulse. At first, I find nothing, and a jolt of fear shoots through my body. But then I feel it, slow and erratic, as if her heart is struggling to pump blood through her veins. And another thing—her skin is hot. Not mild flu hot. But like raging infection hot. The kind of hot you can’t possibly ignore sweltering under your skin.

      How the heck was this woman acting fine and dandy a minute ago?

      I glance over my shoulder at Cooper, who’s caught between kneeling next to me and staying upright, knees slightly bent. Call 911, I say. She’s extremely sick.

      What? says her husband. How? She wasn’t sick when we got here.

      Are you sure? I throw up an air of professional skepticism, the kind a doctor uses to coax the truth out of difficult patients. Think carefully. Did she have a headache this morning? Nausea? Did she feel warmer than usual when you touched her? That’s about the extent of my medical knowledge, beyond basic anatomy and how to treat common injuries with stopgap measures when you’re working in the field, but as long as I can keep this guy talking, maybe he won’t freak out. And if he doesn’t freak out, maybe the rest of the patrons won’t freak

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