Southwest Nights (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 1) Kal Aaron (best book club books for discussion txt) 📖

the only light in the yard was spilling out from under the closed kitchen blinds.

“You can go first,” Aisha whispered.

“Oh?” Lyssa asked. “Giving me the glory?”

Aisha smiled. “I’m using you as bait.”

“Whatever gets you through the night.” Lyssa inclined her head toward the door. “In that case, you blow the handle, and I’ll go in first.”

“That’s acceptable to me.” Aisha lifted her palm and stepped a couple of yards away from the door. “Get ready, Hecate.”

Lyssa expanded her batons before adding the strength and knockout spells. “By the way, it takes special training to reach the levels of pure bitch you do. You should be proud.”

“From you, that’s a compliment. And I know you’re not so incompetent as to let a handful of Shadows with toys seriously injure you.”

Lyssa grumbled under her breath, unsure of how to take the compliment. “Be careful with your heat shield here. We don’t want to burn this place down.”

Aisha smiled. “Then we need to make sure we use overwhelming force to subdue them.”

“Let’s try to keep this from being a massacre. These guys might be scum, but think of the paperwork for the EAA.”

Lyssa moved behind Aisha’s shoulder and examined the door. It was wood, not metal, and not all that thick from what she could tell. Chad Sellers was relying on his reputation and location to protect him from serious threats.

Her breath caught. “You know what I don’t sense?”

“A future life of honor and respect?” Aisha asked.

“Very funny.” Lyssa patted her chest. “Nothing other than your spells, and unless I’m wrong, the doll.”

Aisha stared into the distance. “You’re right. If they have any shards here, they’re well-hidden or inactive. That’s convenient.”

“This is one time they should have kept more of their product. This is going to be easy.” Lyssa chuckled. “On three. Ready?”

Aisha gave a curt nod. “Just so you know, if they attempt to fight seriously with shards, I won’t hold back. I don’t care about EAA paperwork.”

“Try not to kill everyone until we get more leads.” Lyssa tapped her batons together once before pulling them apart. “One, two, three!”

A blinding white fireball burst from Aisha’s hand and blew the lock and handle apart. Burning wood and red-hot metal shrapnel blasted in all directions. Lyssa didn’t wait before kicking in the damaged door.

“Bounty hunters, everyone on their knees with their hands behind their head!” she shouted and charged into the kitchen.

Open chip and pretzel bags covered the table. Empty beer bottles filled the trashcan in front. Although the living room was blocked by a wall, the dining room was visible from the kitchen, as was a man on the phone. He dropped the phone and reached to a table that Lyssa couldn’t see, bringing up a gun.

Aisha launched a marble-sized fireball over Lyssa’s shoulder. The spell missed Lyssa by inches but was close enough that she could feel the heat before it traveled through the kitchen and struck the man’s arm. It burned through his sleeve and scorched the flesh underneath. He screamed and dropped his gun.

Another man ran around the corner from the living room, gun in hand. He raised it but hesitated, his eyes widening in panicked recognition. “They aren’t boun—”

Lyssa cracked him across the head. He smacked into the wall and fell to the floor. Two other men rushed around the corner, also armed. She was already near the end of the hallway when they made their appearance.

Her sweeping strikes knocked their guns out of their hands. A follow-up kick sent one man flying before her batons propelled his friend through the drywall in the hall.

“What the hell is going on?” shouted someone from the living room. “Waste those assholes!”

Heavy footfalls sounded from the opposite end of the house. Sellers wasn’t among the men she’d taken down. That might be a problem.

Glass crashed. More footfalls followed

“Runners,” Lyssa shouted. “It might be him.”

“You’ve got this,” Aisha called. “I’ll handle the cowards.”

“Works for me.” Lyssa waited near the front of the hall.

A turn to the left would take her into the living room, and a turn to the right would send her to the other side of the house and the bedrooms. She didn’t have time to consider her choices when more men boiled around the corner, not having learned the lessons of their silent friends.

She jabbed a man in the throat with a baton before knocking him back with a kick. He crashed into another man, and they both tumbled to the floor. There weren’t many left, given those she’d counted earlier through the window.

Lyssa crouched and took a couple of steps back. She tossed a baton into the air and pointed her hand at the main hallway light above her while imagining crashing inky waves. Shadows spread out like a time-lapse image of fast-growing slime, coating the light and darkening the hallway. She caught the baton.

Low whispers came from the living room, then gunshots shattered the quiet. Bullets ripped through the wall but missed her.

Lyssa continued backing away before tossing her baton into the air again and smothering another light with darkness. Light from the kitchen and living room spilled in from either end and from the holes in the wall, producing an unnaturally gloomy tunnel in the middle of the house. The remaining survivors continued firing and blasting new holes.

“So much for cowing them with force,” she muttered.

“Excessive beatings were also mentioned,” Jofi replied.

“True.”

Lyssa tucked her batons into her pockets, their extended forms protruding, before coating her hands with an impenetrable dark cloud. She jumped onto the far wall and scuttled along like an angry, vengeful ghost from a Japanese horror movie. At the corner, she jumped off the wall toward another wall in the living room and pulled out her batons mid-flight.

Three men remained in the living room, including Chad Sellers, all cowering on their knees behind an overturned card table. They shot at the leaping Night Goddess, but they didn’t land a hit. She kicked off another wall to hurl herself over and past the table,