The Ghoul Vendetta Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE SPI FILES NOVELS

  “Fresh and exciting, humorous and action-packed . . . urban fantasy at its best.”

  —Ilona Andrews, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Kate Daniels series

  “Nonstop action, hilarious klutziness, romance, and lethal Lotharios everywhere. What could be better?”

  —Rob Thurman, New York Times bestselling author of the Cal Leandros series

  “Makenna Fraser brings Southern sass, smarts, and charm to the mean streets of Manhattan as she battles monsters and other magical beings.”

  —Jennifer Estep, New York Times bestselling author of the Elemental Assassin series

  “An absolute must-read. Shearin’s incredible ability to combine the scary and the wacky is why she is a star on the rise!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “One heck of a series that is not to be missed.”

  —A Book Obsession

  “A wonderfully adventurous series, pairing dangerous mystery-solving with the bizarre and supernatural.”

  —That’s What I’m Talking About

  “The X-Files meets Men in Black . . . Snappy and entertaining.”

  —The BiblioSanctum

  “Shearin is a fabulous writer who draws the reader into her world.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Ace Books by Lisa Shearin

  The SPI Files Novels

  THE GRENDEL AFFAIR

  THE DRAGON CONSPIRACY

  THE BRIMSTONE DECEPTION

  THE GHOUL VENDETTA

  The Raine Benares Novels

  MAGIC LOST, TROUBLE FOUND

  ARMED & MAGICAL

  THE TROUBLE WITH DEMONS

  BEWITCHED & BETRAYED

  CON & CONJURE

  ALL SPELL BREAKS LOOSE

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Shearin

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101989418

  First Edition: February 2017

  Cover illustration by Julie Dillon

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  As always, for Derek,

  my happily ever after

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Kristin Nelson, my agent. I’m so incredibly grateful for all that you do.

  To Anne Sowards, my editor. It’s a joy and privilege to craft Mac and Ian’s adventures with you.

  To Julie Dillon, my cover artist. Your amazing talent continues to blow me away.

  To Logan Hyatt, my assistant. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you. You rock!

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the SPI Files Novels

  Ace Books by Lisa Shearin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  About the Author

  1

  I was on a date, on a yacht, surrounded by New York’s glitterati.

  It felt downright surreal. What would the folks back home think if they could see me now?

  Being on a date with Rake Danescu was getting to be a regular thing for me, but being part of a floating A-list gathering was a first. Usually when I got to go somewhere this fancy, it was entirely work related. Tonight was only slightly about my job. Rake was the one here on business. I was here mostly for fun, partly in case Rake’s business became SPI’s business.

  My name is Makenna Fraser, and I work for SPI. That’s Supernatural Protection & Investigations, to the world’s paranormal community. Humans had police, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and Interpol. Paranormals had SPI. We were all of the above rolled into one. SPI was a worldwide organization, headquartered here in New York. I was one of five seers in the entire agency.

  Criminals, supernatural and otherwise, often used disguises. Supernatural bad guys and gals used more advanced means of going undetected. “Advanced” as in magic. Any paranormal criminal worthy of his, her, or its rap sheet had an arsenal of wards, glamours, veils, shields, and various and sundry spells that helped them go undetected. A good seer could see through any and all of them. It was a talent that made us popular with supernatural law enforcement organizations—and a target of supernatural crime syndicates.

  There were high-ranking representatives of some of the latter here tonight. It was my job to know their faces without letting them know mine. But these weren’t the people who committed the crimes. Their hands were clean and their reputations pristine. Organized crime most definitely paid, and the ladies and gentlemen at the top of those organizations were especially keen to spread goodwill through philanthropy. In fact, that was the reason for tonight’s gathering on a hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht cruising the Hudson River on a balmy evening in late June.

  Some of the oldest people on board looked the youngest, and it wasn’t due to plastic surgery. Their fountain of youth was an endless series of throats and the blood that flowed through them.

  The yacht’s owner was a vampire. Bela Báthory was the nephew and presumed heir of Ambrus Báthory, the head of the most powerful vampire crime family on the East Coast.

  The yacht’s name was the Persephone. A little dose of vampire irony there. Demeter was the name of the ship that had brought Dracula to England. Persephone was Demeter’s daughter.

  The men were in black tie, and the majority of the women were wearing high heels and even higher hemlines, or flowing gowns with slits up to there. The yacht was big, but it wasn’t big enough to be stable enough for me to walk around on high-heel-elevated-tippy-toes. For me, it was lower heels, lower hemline, and Dramamine, with no alcohol. Dramamine
plus drinking would equal me falling overboard. A midnight swim was not in my plans for this evening.

  Rake made sure that I could hear him walking up behind me. He didn’t want to go for a swim, either. Now that I was duly forewarned, Rake slid a hand, then his arm around my waist. My pulse kicked up for a few beats. A normal man wouldn’t have felt it. Rake wasn’t a normal man. In a satisfied response, he tightened his hold ever so slightly. When it came to Rake, my pulse—and hormones—refused to go along with my better judgment, which dictated extreme caution. They were more along the lines of tossing caution to the wind—along with my undies. For now, my better judgment was in the driver’s seat.

  Rake and I stood together gazing out across the river to the lights of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He was receptive to my offer,” Rake said. “My cards are on the table. The next move is his. Now, I wait.”

  Rake’s seemingly impromptu meeting at one of the yacht’s bars had been with a private investment banker. Rake was representing a group of entrepreneurial businessmen looking for capital. At least that’s what it was on the surface. In actuality, Rake represented his government’s intelligence agency looking to get a foothold in a new technology before the competition.

  However, none of the parties involved were human.

  Rake Danescu was a goblin. The competition was, is, and probably would always be the elves. They hadn’t been at war for several centuries, but that didn’t mean they played nice, especially not on our world.

  SPI didn’t get involved in goblin/elf politics. That being said, we’d found it prudent to know what was going on. Very often what was considered by goblin and elven governments to be a “private matter” spilled over into criminal activity affecting others. Then it became SPI’s business. Rake didn’t let us in on every aspect of his business dealings, but he had agreed to bring us into the loop when his business was about to cross the streams with our job—namely keeping the peace between supernaturals, and keeping the supernatural world secret from humans.

  The streams had been crossing an awful lot lately.

  Rake’s business was booming. Unfortunately, so was ours. Some of it was a direct result of goblin/elf dealings, but most of it was not.

  I’d been appointed by my boss, Vivienne Sagadraco, as the official go-between. She knew that Rake and I were seeing each other, so “SPI/goblin intelligence liaison” had been added to my job description—at least, as long as Rake and I were dating. If our relationship ever went down the drain, we’d reevaluate my additional responsibilities at that time. Even my boss—who was a multi-millennia-old dragon in the guise of a fierce businesswoman who reminded me a bit of Judy Dench—recognized the awkwardness of continuing to professionally liaise when a liaison of a more personal nature had gone south.

  One of the few things I’d actually managed to learn about the mysterious Rake Danescu was that you never knew which way things were going to go. Goblins were like that.

  The motives of mortal men were difficult enough to figure out. Goblins—whether involved in politics, business, or interpersonal relations—made Machiavelli look like an intrigue dilettante. When it came to supernatural beings, but especially goblins, very little was actually as it seemed.

  Like Rake Danescu’s motives when it came to me. I didn’t know what they were. Okay, I take that back. I knew exactly what they were. Him, me, horizontal. Or vertical. I didn’t think Rake was picky about the particulars.

  Rake was gorgeous, rich, brilliant, and could charm anything off of anyone regardless of sex, race, or supernatural species. I was from a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. I was human, average height, blond hair, green eyes, and I’d been told that I looked about as threatening as a declawed kitty cat. My grandma Fraser had always told me I had “little dog syndrome”—small size, big attitude, delusions of toughness. I made enough money at SPI to keep a nice East Village roof over my head, and I was pretty much immune to charm. Though that last characteristic was probably due to an excess of caution and suspicion in my nature rather than actual immunity.

  Rake was a dark mage, which meant he was absurdly talented in a type of magic most sane people wouldn’t mess with. Rake wasn’t most people, or even most goblins. Though as far as I’d been able to determine in the time that we’d known each other, he was sane, at least most of the time. He was also cunning, crafty, and conniving. In short, Rake Danescu was a perfect goblin. Anyone who looked at him—and there were plenty of those right now, both women and men—would see a tall, dark, and unwholesomely handsome man.

  As a seer, I saw past Rake’s human glamour to his pale gray skin, pointed ears, and—a goblin’s most distinguishing feature—his fangs. He was still breathtakingly beautiful, albeit in an exotic way. Unlike the vampires on board, Rake didn’t use his fangs for feeding, just defense, offense, and making women crazy. He’d slowly grazed the back of my neck once, so I could attest to that last point from personal experience. The tingles hadn’t stopped for days.

  It hadn’t gone beyond that. Yet.

  All I wanted was a nice guy. At least I used to think I did. Now I wasn’t so sure. There was a lot to be said about a brilliant, fascinating, inter-dimensional goblin spy of mystery with tingle-inducing fangs.

  I was being cautious. Rake was being respectful of my caution. So, that was where we were. Also, we’d both been busy. Time together hadn’t been easy to come by. And SPI had been busier than normal since the first of the year, and we thought it had everything to do with what had happened a couple of weeks before Christmas, when an enterprising demon lord and his elf dark mage partner had come entirely too close to creating a direct flight from Hell to New York.

  Some people would argue that it already existed. The demon-and-elf diabolical duo had opened a Hellpit directly under Bacchanalia, which had been the crown jewel of Rake’s business and spy empire and the city’s most exclusive sex club. Yes, I said “had been,” as in past tense. Bacchanalia didn’t exist anymore. It had collapsed into the sinkhole created when we essentially slammed the gate to Hell.

  Yep, Rake had run a sex club. In fact, that was where we had met on my first night on the job—at SPI, not Bacchanalia.

  Never one to lament losing one of his crown jewels, Rake had thrown himself into rebuilding the intelligence-gathering web the demon lord and elf dark mage’s activity had damaged, and was playing catch-up with a vengeance.

  The yacht had been moving at a leisurely cruising speed up the Hudson—then it wasn’t.

  The engines had stopped.

  I glanced at a now frowning Rake. “Are we supposed to stop?”

  “No.”

  The yacht slowed its forward motion, but didn’t come to a complete stop. The Hudson was a tidal river, or to be more exact, an estuary. The Hudson had two high and two low tides within each twenty-four-hour time frame. The tide’s rise and fall actually changed the direction of the flow. Not that we needed to worry about that. At least I didn’t think we did.

  That thought had no sooner crossed my mind when the yacht shuddered beneath our feet. It didn’t simply stop, it was jerked to a stop, and I was grateful not to be wearing high heels. I grabbed the railing. Rake grabbed the railing with one hand and tightened his grip on me with the other.

  Then the lights went out, immediately followed by screams and shouts.

  Rake pulled me away from the railing, but not before I saw a long, dark shape knife through the water.

  I’d been out on deck long enough that my eyes were already adjusted to the dark. Those inside the salon had gone from bright light to no light. Those below decks were in total darkness until the emergency lights kicked in. Even the vampires and goblins would need time for their night vision to adjust.

  It stayed dark.

  Rake pulled us over against the salon windows to keep us from being trampled by
panicked passengers.

  I tried to further flatten myself. “Doesn’t this thing have emergency lights?”

  “Yes.”

  That one word told me what I didn’t want to know.

  This was no accident. And when your host was near the top of the supernatural crime food chain, any non-accident could be very bad for anyone unlucky enough to be around him. I had no intention of going from party guest to collateral damage.

  A dark column as big around as a power pole and nearly as long rose out of the water and fell across the railing not twenty feet from where we stood. The tapered tip crashed through a salon window, then withdrew and flailed blindly until it found the railing and coiled around it, getting a good grip.

  Power poles weren’t in the middle of rivers, and they definitely didn’t have suction cups.

  It was a giant tentacle.

  2

  THIS was one of those times when even I doubted what I was seeing. I felt like I’d just been dropped into the middle of a B movie creature feature from the 1950s.

  Part of my agent training when I started working for SPI included watching more than a few of those movies for educational purposes. You’d be surprised at what some of those low-budget Hollywood filmmakers got right. Still, I couldn’t believe what was less than twenty feet from us.

  “Is that what I—?”

  “Kraken,” Rake confirmed. In one smooth move, he released me, raised his now red-glowing hands, and launched an incendiary spell.

  Other than giving us a better look at what was about to drag the yacht to the bottom of the Hudson River, the spell did nothing.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Rake said mildly.

  “I think we all are.”

  As a seer, my job was to point out the supernatural bad guys, then get the heck out of the way so they could either be taken into custody or, if necessary, taken out. I was presently on track to become SPI’s longest surviving seer. My three predecessors had met with on-the-job accidents that had turned out to be not so accidental. Some unknown entity was trying to keep SPI without a seer. I was trying to live long enough to qualify for retirement. Lately, I’d been glad just to survive until my next paycheck.