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Magic Monday · Aug 18, 2026

Some witches have bad days and...

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Chris Lowry · Magic Monday

Some witches have VERY bad days.

Imagine discovering that magic is real.

Now imagine discovering that someone wants what you’ve got.

Or that an ancient relic has been stolen.

Or that demons are involved.

Or that your coven has a problem.

Or that you’re suddenly expected to deal with supernatural trouble because apparently nobody else is available.

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OLD MAGIC

STOLEN RELICS

GUNS AND MAGIC

WITCH BLUES

BIG EASY WITCH

VIVA WITCH VEGAS

RULES FOR FIGHTING DEMONS

And plenty more supernatural chaos.

The complete bundle contains 250,000+ words of urban fantasy adventure delivered immediately.

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Just remember:

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Fortunately, this bundle comes with a LOT of reading.

NOW HERE’S CHAPTER TWO from GRAVE ERRORS

The crypt squatted at the top of the hill like it had something to prove.

Everything else in St. Jude belonged to the dead in a gentle sort of way—weeping angels gone gray with lichen, iron crosses bent soft by a hundred years of hurricane wind, headstones leaning on each other like drunks at closing time. This thing didn’t lean on anybody. Brutalist granite, sharp-cornered, squared off like a bank vault built by a man who didn’t trust his own tellers. Somebody had spent real money making sure whatever went into that crypt stayed there.

Somebody else had spent real effort making sure it didn’t.

The chain that should’ve held the doors shut lay coiled in the wet grass, its links fused into slag at the break point. Not cut. Not pried. Melted, clean and fast, the kind of heat that leaves an edge like a razor instead of a mess.

“That’s new,” Elvis said, drifting down beside me, his jumpsuit throwing off a faint white shimmer against the dark stone. “I don’t recall ghouls carrying blowtorches.”

“They don’t.” I crouched, holding my palm an inch above the ruined links without touching them. Residual heat rolled off the metal, but it wasn’t fire-heat. It had a wrongness to it, a texture like running your hand through cold dishwater and feeling something move in the sink. “This wasn’t fire. This was will. Somebody burned through case-hardened steel with pure intent and didn’t even breathe hard doing it.”

“Fantastic. So we’ve upgraded from bottom-feeders to somebody with actual talent.”

“Maybe.” I stood, wiping my palm on my jeans like that would get the feeling off it. “Or somebody desperate enough to punch above their weight.”

Elvis floated up to the archway, peering at the old ward-stones set into the granite on either side of the door. Three of them, each carved with a warding sigil worn soft by weather, the kind of protection a family pays a hedge-witch good money for a hundred years ago and then forgets to maintain. “These look shot to me. Even I can tell that, and I flunked Intro to Wards for skipping class to work on my hip thrust.”

“You never took a class in your life, Elvis.”

“I took the metaphorical class of Being Extremely Talented Naturally.”

I ignored him and put my fingers against the closest ward-stone, letting my will slide into the old grooves the way you’d run a hand along a fence to check for loose boards. Wards work like spiderwebs. You build the threads pointing outward, a warning system strung tight so that anything breaking free from the inside snaps a line and screams before it clears the property. Good wards tell you which direction the trouble came from, same as a shattered window tells a cop whether the burglar came in or the homeowner tried to climb out.

These threads were bent the wrong way. Snapped inward, toward the crypt, not away from it.

“Well?” Elvis said. “You’ve got that face.”

“Wards are broken from the outside in.” I straightened up. “Nothing walked out of this crypt on its own tonight. Somebody walked in, and they brought company.”

“The ghoul that ran.”

“The ghoul that ran.” I looked at the ruined chain again, then up at the black doorway, and felt the old familiar hum start low in my spine, the one that meant my night wasn’t close to over. “Cletus’s monster wasn’t a monster hunting on its own. Something’s using it.”

“You know I hate being right about things being worse than they looked.” Elvis crossed his translucent arms. “Last time I had a hunch like this, it ended with a coven of witches deciding the best way to deal with a nosy Watcher was to nail my hands to a church door in Memphis and set the place on fire around me. I still don’t love the smell of a burning building. Kind of a permanent character flaw now.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“I mention it because it’s relevant, Marshal. Forgive a dead man his trauma.”

I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I didn’t try to give him one. Elvis didn’t want comfort. He wanted somebody to nod along while he made a joke out of the worst night of his life, and I’d learned a long time ago that letting him do that was worth more than any amount of sympathy I could offer a ghost who couldn’t feel a hand on his shoulder anyway.

I planted my boots in the soft dirt at the base of the door, drew a breath, and shoved.

Not with my hands. With will, gathered tight and low in my gut and driven forward through my palms like I was pushing a stalled truck out of an intersection. The iron doors blew inward with a shriek of protesting hinges, slammed flat against the interior walls, and sent a hundred years of dust boiling out into the humid dark.

The stench hit next. Rot, same as the ghouls down the hill, but laced with something sharper underneath it. Ozone. Burnt copper. The particular metallic tang of somebody bleeding for a purpose.

“Oh, goody,” Elvis said. “Basement time.”

A staircase cut straight into bedrock dropped away in front of us, and from somewhere down there a sick green light pulsed against the walls, breathing in and out like something alive. Chanting drifted up with it. Latin, badly mangled, strangled through a Southern drawl and a voice that kept cracking on the harder syllables.

“That is truly terrible pronunciation,” Elvis said. “Even I know Latin isn’t supposed to sound like a man arguing with a drive-thru speaker.”

“Get down here and quit critiquing.”

“I’ll hover at a respectful distance and provide moral support from the rear.”

I went down first, boots quiet on stone worn smooth by better men carrying worse things. My precog buzzed low against the back of my skull the whole way, a warning without a direction yet, just a sense that violence was somewhere close and getting closer. The green light got brighter with every step until it washed the walls in something that looked less like a color and more like a bruise.

The chamber at the bottom opened up wide, lined with burial niches long since emptied of whoever used to rest there. In the middle of the floor, a kid knelt in a circle of crushed chalk and something darker, something that smelled like copper and dog. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, swallowed whole by an oversized black hoodie, sweat cutting tracks down a face gone pale as the granite around him. A canvas tarp lay inside the circle with him, wrapped tight around a shape the size and weight of a person.

Crouched just outside the chalk line, low to the ground like a dog waiting on a whistle, was the ghoul that had run from me down the hill.

It wasn’t attacking. It wasn’t even snarling. It sat there, black ichor dripping off its jaw, milky eyes locked on the kid, patient as a leashed dog waiting to be told which way to run.

I let my sight slip sideways, the way you’d squint to see a word hidden in a puzzle. Thin gray tethers ran from the kid’s shaking hands straight into the ghoul’s chest, thrumming with a low, greasy current. He wasn’t fighting the thing off. He was steering it. Feeding it commands the way you’d walk a dog on a leash too short for its own good.

Missing pets. Missing possums. A pitbull torn off a heavy chain. Not hunger. Chores.

Off to the side, propped open against a chunk of fallen masonry, sat a grimoire the size of a phone book, its pages the color of old teeth, its spine bound in iron clasps somebody had gone to real trouble filing down to fit a teenager’s grip. A ring of black candles guttered around it, half of them already drowned in their own wax. Cheap gas-station chalk. A mason jar of something that had gone tacky and dark, sitting open next to a steak knife with a hardware-store price sticker still curling off the handle.

Not a coven. Not a cult. One scared kid, working alone, with a stolen book and a shopping list from the Dollar General.

“Your Latin needs work,” I said, loud enough to bounce off stone, “and your circle’s lopsided. You’re going to blow out the western quadrant before you finish the invocation.”

The kid flinched so hard he nearly smeared his own chalk line with his elbow. He spun around, hands coming up, already lit with an ugly, unstable purple glow crackling between his fingers like a bad extension cord about to spark.

“Who the hell are you?” His voice cracked halfway through the sentence. “You can’t be here! Get out!”

I let my jacket fall open enough that the star on my belt caught the green light.

“Marshal of the East.” I kept my voice level, the way you talk to a man standing on a ledge, not the way you talk to a threat. “You’re sitting on a violation of Section Four of the Accords. Necromancy, blood magic, and thralling a Class Two scavenger without a license. That’s not a fine, kid. That’s a conversation with the Judge, and the Judge doesn’t do second chances the way I might.”

“The old laws are garbage,” he snapped, but his eyes kept jumping to the canvas shape at his knees. “They don’t understand. I can bring her back. I’ve done the work. I mapped the leylines, I studied the—”

“How’d you even find me?” His voice climbed half an octave, panic starting to elbow out the anger. “I warded this place. I checked.”

“You warded the door. You didn’t ward your errand boy.” I nodded at the ghoul, still crouched patient in the shadows. “I fought that thing and two of its friends at the bottom of the hill an hour ago. It ran, I followed the blood trail, the blood trail led to a melted chain and a crypt that smells like a science project gone wrong. Wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes work, kid.”

“Nobody comes back,” I said. “Whatever you pull through that circle isn’t going to be her. It’s going to wear her face for about thirty seconds before it remembers it’s hungry.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know a hollow shell from a person, and so do you, somewhere under all that grief you’re currently mistaking for a plan.” Something twisted behind my ribs, quick and familiar, the shape of a bed with one warm side going cold every night for ten years. I shoved it down where it belonged. Not tonight. “Cut the ghoul loose. Kick the circle. Walk out of here on your own feet instead of mine.”

For half a second I thought he might do it. His jaw worked, his hands wavered, the purple light guttered like a candle in a draft. I watched him do the math a scared kid does when a stranger with a badge tells him the truth—weigh it, hate it, look for the loophole anyway.

“You don’t get it,” he said, quieter now, almost pleading. “I heard her voice. Two nights ago. Just for a second, through the chalk. She said my name.”

“I know what you heard,” I said, and meant it. “I know exactly what you heard, and I know exactly how bad you want to believe it was really her. That’s how they get you, kid. Whatever’s on the other side of that circle isn’t stupid. It knows precisely what to sound like to keep you digging.”

Then his eyes dropped to the canvas tarp one more time, and whatever was left of his good sense went out with the light.

“I’m not leaving her,” he said, and slammed both palms flat against the chalk.

The circle flared white-hot, and the tether running into the ghoul’s chest snapped taut like a fishing line hooking something big. Down in the dark of the burial niches lining the walls, shadows that had been sitting patient and still all night started to move—not one shape, not two, but a whole ragged line of them, drawn out of the black by the sudden surge of raw, ugly power flooding the room like a dinner bell nobody asked to hear.

“Marshal,” Elvis said, all the joke gone out of his voice for the first time all night. “You’re going to want to look behind you.”

I already was.

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