Sirius Trouble: The Thomas Hunter Files: Realm Travelers, #1

By Andrew Michael Schwarz

A new Thomas Hunter adventure.

The world has changed. The Rise of the Sirius star is showering Earth in a surfeit of occult radiation, giving birth to a host of new phenomena, not the least of which is a novel strain of vampire. The Old-World Therians are in danger of extinction and a new species of bloodsucker is on the rise, and they're not interested in merely sipping blood like a fine wine.

It was business-almost-as-usual with Hunter exterminating the regular occult creepy crawlies, and the occasional wayward vamp that just had to get in his way, when a certain blondie showed up on his doorstep.

Morgan was sent by Hunter's old friend, Dax, and Hunter wasn't exactly thrilled because in addition to manifesting as Rat Therian, his new guest had one hell of a secret that could threaten a whole lot more than basic sanity. In fact, it just might bring the house down on all of their heads because Morgan had gotten herself in trouble with the vamps known as the Dark Ones who were not only poised to take over the local vampire scene, but the whole damn world.

From there it didn't take more than a few rounds loaded into the semi-auto, and his finding of a certain alchemical trinket that might be more important than the Holy Grail, for Hunter to realize they were all in Sirius trouble.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Michael Schwarz
• Release date: Apr 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201149444

Book preview

Chapter 1

I didn’t so much as enter Hell as it materialized around me.

One minute I was floating off the floor of that dingy little apartment, naked, cross-legged, index fingers touching my thumbs and hair standing on end. The next minute I was opening my eyes in a lightless place made of shadow. And, oddly enough, it was cold.

Notwithstanding the bizarre physics of the situation, the trip had been easy enough, aside from all the strange, arcane mumbo jumbo, info-dump headaches, and logical circle-jerks I’d had to wade through for the five years beforehand.

I looked around and didn’t see much, but for a host of shifting shade as though a lot of black sheets were hung on a black clothesline against a black sky.

I stood up and, to my surprise, could see my body quite clearly. Looking down at my hands, I saw them as though bathed in visible light though no apparent light source was evident.

Of course, I am oversimplifying this episode, because, in truth, I took an inordinate amount of time—who can say how much?—to acclimate. One does not travel to Hell as a living man, and yet, here I was, in a living body. It did not then take long for a certain horde member of Hell to find this new morsel of meat in its midst.

The shadows parted and from their dark confines came a horned man bare of chest and goaty of legs. He stunk bad, too, like a barnyard that had hosted a bonfire. This demon’s face held no emotion but for a kind of singular rage, as though all the universe was but an affront that must be eradicated. He was appraising me, inspecting me, sizing me up.

He sniffed me. Then, with rough and calloused hands that possessed the tactile quality of old wood, the goat-man stroked my shoulders and arms and caressed the back of my neck. He ran his hands down the length of my belly, and finally over my groin.

I tried not to flinch or squirm or get away, because I knew about—had read about—all of this.

The demon reached around and slapped my right butt cheek. It then paused in pensive momentary reflection of the satisfying sound that slap had made and gave me another sting on the other side. That burgeoning grin just under the surface of his features brimmed full and wide.

And so it begins, I thought.

From somewhere in the inky shadows above, a pair of clinking chains dropped down and hung suspended in the air between me and this demonic satyr. The chains ended in a pair of manacles. With the tap of a black fingernail, the satyr opened the manacles and without so much as a wink to me, slapped my wrists in irons.

Then, to the right of him, the blackness coalesced and from it materialized an iron crank wheel. So, I thought, that is the purpose of all this shadow. Which wasn’t shadow at all, I conjectured, but some kind of plasma. Here was matter and energy melded into one ethereal substance that this creature and presumably all the denizens of Hell could use to manipulate according to their will. I knew then that this demon, this goat-legged satyr, was simply a form created out of the swirling ether.

This demon could just as easily present itself—and probably had—as Jesus Christ, an idea that sent shivers from the nape of my neck to the very tips of my toes. For if the entire universe could be manipulated and turned on its head in such a facile and beguiling manner, how then might we find security in our own reality?

My host cranked the wheel, letting out a cacophony of ear shattering squeals, and I understood to a tee why he had chosen this particular mock-up.

Pain, that’s what this creature, and those like him, desire, want, and lust for, and nothing feels pain quite so much as a living human being.

Everything I had read, all those books, those dark secrets, all that magical lore, had made reference to this all-consuming desire for pain.

Cometh to Hell as a quickened man

and ye shall receive tortures eternal.

But escape the domain with a devil’s mark

and ye shall wield dark powers infernal.

The question that dances on every mage’s tongue is,

how exactly?

The chains tightened and as my host continued to crank that awful wheel, my arms rose up above my head.

He didn’t stop there but grew ever-more zealous in his cranking until my feet lifted off the now visible stone floor, causing a tense muscular pain in my shoulders and neck. My feet rose about a foot off the floor at which point my gracious host locked the wheel and came to examine me.

The pain in my neck and shoulders was quickly turning to burning agony and given another thirty seconds, I was pretty sure my fun meter would be pegged for a lifetime.

My host knelt down below my range of vision. After a moment, I felt the cold metal again, this time around my ankles. My host stood and crossed the small chamber, now lit and visible. The ethereal plasma had coalesced enough to present as a medieval torture chamber. Reaching the other side of the room, my host began cranking on yet another rusty wheel.

I screamed, and I’m not gonna lie, I cried a little, too. The combination of ears, arms, shoulders, neck and legs, i.e. my whole body, being stretched was pretty damn miserable.

The stretching didn’t end. In fact, it got a lot worse. I stopped crying because I couldn’t cry through my screams. Then came the whips, the cuts, and the blood drawn out by slow and tedious incisions as precise as any modern surgeon.

They say, the horrible books I read, say that in Hell there is no time. That made good sense to me now.

In our world, time ticks in accordance with the infinitesimal changes of all things. A body grows, a celestial body orbits, a sun sets, and hair turns gray. But here in this dark place with these dark energies and degraded creatures, time is only a thing by which to count your screams.

The brand came like everything else in that place: with maximal pain. The satyr plucked a red-hot iron from a swirl of ether and brought it to me with as lusty a grin as ever he had worn, for here he was marking me as a prized possession worthy of much pain production. Such a brand would serve to link me to this one particular devil and, in theory, protect me from the tortures of other wicked creatures. Practically though, it just meant that my devil could charge a premium for his pals to take a poke at me.

He swooned when he stabbed the red-hot brand into me. I screamed, my racked body jerking against the chains and numbing pain of my limbs. I heard the sizzle and smelled the sickening sweet stench of charred flesh.

Oh, the pain, so very deep because this was no ordinary brand. This was no mere rancher’s scar. This particular tattoo went deep enough to mark a man’s soul. I felt it everywhere at once, the ultimate shock. The devil’s mark.

I had come to Hell as a quickened man and I had, indeed, received torture. I had also been marked. So far so good with sticking to the ancient texts. Now, for the exactly how part. Most magicians, if I can claim the title, would likely try to invoke the same black magic that got them here in the first-place thinking, quite logically, that what was good for the first trip would serve for the way home. I knew better. Once the mark was installed, the magic reversed, thus trapping a man for eternity.

But I had a psychical ace in my astral back pocket, for only a man with two bodies could use the mark against itself and thereby reverse its polarity and make not a curse, but a pact.

As the pain took me over the edge, and I felt my consciousness fade, my lips turned up in a lopsided grin.

I have…the answer…to…the riddle, I rasped as unconsciousness claimed my mind.

My captor paused and canted his head while staring into my eyes, displaying disbelief that I would dare make such a claim.

A man…with two lives… I said, is hard…to control…because…when you trap one body…you free the soul…go fuck yourself, pal.

***

I woke up, or shall we say, came to consciousness, in that same crummy little apartment where I’d opened the gate originally. All was the same as I had left it but for one minor detail: my position in the room.

From the couch where I lay, I sat up and looked across the apartment to that spot below the window. I found there the bamboo mat sitting in the center of a masking-tape drawn pentacle. The five candles on the corners of the star guttered, but still burned. From this observation I learned two things: I had not been gone longer than candles could burn down, and I had left this plane of existence over there, on that mat, and returned to it over here, on this couch. So far so good.

I remembered well, how, just a few units of time before, I had floated off that mat and cast the spells that had opened the gate to another realm. Yes, I remembered every detail, another favorable indicator, for it meant I had suffered no amnesia from the journey.

Next, I looked down at the spot on my midriff that was still burning and saw a wound there. It was hot, but not open, a pulsing scar. It was, some medicos might say, a sympathetic psychosomatic reaction. But those medicos didn’t deal with people who owned two bodies and made pacts with devils, so how would they know what to call the Line of Connection between bodies in separate realms?

The mark mirrored the brand I’d acquired in Hell. And just to prove to myself that it was not the same mark, healed, I reached under the couch and picked up the mirror I had stashed there.

This last observation would confirm or deny the final proof that the things I had experienced and done prior to waking up on this couch had occurred, or not. Was I losing my mind, or had I wielded a clever magical trick in the style of the greatest wizards in known history?

My hand shook as I brought the mirror to my face, both afraid and excited of what or who I would see staring back. I searched the image in the glass. Then I smiled.

Payment had been given. Both ways. The body swap was complete; the pact sealed. I was secured in the body of my other self, Eddie Bradshaw.

Chapter 2

I awoke in a church, as I did every day, lying on my back comfortably nestled in the double bed of my monkish cloister. I gazed, as a man who wakes from sleep sometimes does, at the ceiling, and found in its little stucco patterns, a barrage of meaningless forms. I idled for a moment, there in my groggy but well-rested state, until I let my gaze drift to the top of the early twentieth century antique armoire, where sat a monster of some twenty-five pounds.

The Maine Coon was named Nicodemus, or Nick, and had been so named by me. Nick and I’d had quite some adventures together and had made a few arrangements. He agreed to be my roommate as long as I would allow him to hunt and kill all the mice. And I agreed to feed him canned tuna whenever and wherever he wanted it.

Nick beamed me with some kind of disapproval from atop the wardrobe.

Oh what, a guy can’t sleep in? I said.

The cat said nothing being far guiltier than I of such indiscretions.

I sat up and rubbed my face before putting in the effort to stand. My brand still burned, and I was beginning, after four months, to think this was an intended effect. I winced a little when I came to my feet and turned to the Coon. I know what you want, buddy.

Nick did not otherwise move but for a solitary swish of his tail.

From a single arched window—no stained-glass in this room—I could see it to be a sunny day. The pale-yellow light of Earth’s first sun had found its way around the clouds. I could also perceive it to be an occult sunny day, if you hold with the view that the Sirius star is Earth’s second sun. Which, of course, I do.

The proverbial dog days of August come from that. Mundane folks think that two weeks of oppressive heat at the end of summer is named for that heat. They equate that smothering humidity with the panting, stale breath of a dog. Well, I’m afraid that one is right up there with why they call Chicago the Windy City, and it ain’t because of the wind.

The dog days of August are named after the dog star, aka, the Sirius star, and its appearance in the sky just before dawn. The morning star as it were.

I stood before the bronzing mirror and examined my physique. I did a visual self-examination, what we call a VSE. I do them quite regularly now because if something is going to change, I really want to catch it as soon as possible. Not that I could stop it if something were brewing, of course, and there’s ten to (at least) two that no doc out there would know what the hell was happening, let alone what to do about it.

I was, truth be told, still getting used to my new look, which is odd, since I had been born into this body. My time away from it had been, however, a time of adjustment, and I had come to identify myself with the other body, the one I’d left in Hell. Weird business, for sure.

Staring back at me in the mirror was my familiar face of old, dark-blue eyes, wavey brown hair and an angular face with high cheekbones and a somewhat prominent chin.

Though the body I had stashed in Hell was of the same familial patterns, it was not and had never been a twin. The history of my two bodies is long and complex but suffice it to say that there are some tricks—or spells, if you wish—that can be worked to turn a body, any body, into what the Catholic religion calls Incorruptibles. Dead but without decay. Or, perhaps, alive but not moving. Either way, such a condition of a non-corpse, allows for the spiritual entity connected with that body, what we call the person, to return to said body at some unspecified date and pick up where he or she left off. Amnesia, however, is a pesky side effect.

Of course, I didn’t always have two bodies. Once upon a time I only had one—the one I saw now in the mirror—then many adventures, misadventures and switcharoos later, and well, now I had two. Except not anymore since one resided in Hell. Ah, how the rabbit hole keeps getting deeper.

I reached for a T-shirt and pulled it down over my rather well sculpted chest and abdominals. Blush, I don’t usually brag, but I am proud of these abs, because not that long ago, in another life, my abs had resided under a very obstinate layer of whale blubber and try as I might, I just couldn’t melt it off.

Well, I found out how to handle this issue regardless of which body I wore, and it has nothing to do with melting fat and has a whole lot more to do with black magic.

I knelt beside my bed and felt underneath for what I like to refer to as Tommy’s Little Helper. TLH is a Glock 20. She’s a 10-millimeter semiauto that carries sixteen rounds if you count the one in the chamber, and she could stop a moose at close range, or a bear, or a vampire.

I keep her honest with her original factory sites. Some folks think I’m crazy for that, but I figure if I can’t shoot a gun with the sites that came with it, I need more practice.

She’s not the only firearm I carry on the job, far from it, but she is always at my side, as well as my top choice for lounging at home. I pocketed TLH inside my waistband where she rides nice and snug against my skin.

I found my way downstairs, into the quasi-modern spacious kitchen in the basement. Though the upper floor hosts all the traditional churchy spaces, with the cloister rooms on the third floor, the basement was built out long ago, surely to accommodate Sunday potlucks and holiday cook-offs. I liked it because it was what made it so I could live here.

I opened the big double-door refrigerator where I keep