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  BRIGHTBLADE

  Book One of the Morgan Detective Agency

  By C. T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2019 C. T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus

  Cover art by Melody Simmons

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Authors

  C. T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.

  Bibliography

  The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)

  The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)

  The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)

  The Kingdom of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #4)

  The Tournament of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #5)

  The Future of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #6)

  I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)

  An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)

  Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)

  Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)

  Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)

  Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)

  Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)

  Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)

  The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)

  Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)

  Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)

  Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)

  100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)

  Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)

  Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)

  Michael Suttkus, II, lives in Leesburg, Florida, with three cats, one of which actually likes him, and his family, with whom he fares better. When not working at a game store, he's playing games, reading science books, or otherwise being incredibly nerdy. Also writing! Because he has to feed cats whether they like him or not.

  Bibliography

  I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries #1)

  An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries #2)

  Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star #1)

  Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star #2)

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  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Ashley Morgan is one of my first creations. Well, not quite. She’s really the product of Michael J. Suttkus’ brilliant imagination. Well before Jessica Jones made the premise of a burn-out superhero turned private detective a popular premise, he was toying around with the idea of the character in the long-ago time of 2001.

  Michael and I have been friends and roleplaying game buddies since even before then, throwing ideas off one another and seeing what we could develop together. Ashley was the star of several proposed books that just never quite came together. Which means, among other things, she predates Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless the Supervillain without Mercy™ by over a decade and most of my other creations.

  Why did it take so long to bring her to the page? Part of it was due to the fact Ashley is a complicated character who needs a complicated world to bounce off. She came fully formed to Michael Suttkus’ mind as a woman who had been trained as a spy, worked as a hero, and then ended up being able to do neither because the world punched her a few too many times for trying to do the right thing. She depended not only on the concept of being a person who lived in a vibrant, fully formed world but also someone who had tried to make her mark, only to fail.

  So why is she in the United States of Monsters universe? Well, part of that is since the universe of the Red Room series, Straight Outta Fangton, and the Bright Falls Mysteries is developed enough for Ashley to live in. The world of Derek Hawthorne, Peter Stone, and Jane Doe was settled enough that you can imagine a hero emerging into this world and failing—only not completely.

  Also, it’s two decades from when Ashley was first conceived and that has led to a deluge of urban fantasy heroines whom Ashley can play off. It was our mistake assuming only a superheroine world could allow someone like Ashley to thrive, but worlds of vampires, werewolves, and wizardry are just as good. Even better since superhero deconstruction has been done many times in the past but not so much supernatural heroes.

  This book was also an excellent chance to tie together multiple plot threads and shine a light on some less established characters I love. Characters like Alexander Timons (The Bright Falls Mysteries), Samvrutha Mitra (100 Miles and Vampin’), Ashura (Straight Outta Fangton), and a couple of others you’ll need sharp eyes to recognize. The cast for the USoM has grown so wide and fascinating that everyone demands page time, so this was an excellent opportunity to shine a light on them.

  For those picking up Brightblade as the first novel of the shared universe, a short summary of the world: It is the year 2018 and the supernatural has been out for roughly ten years. Vampires, shifters, fairies, and more are known to the public with the state of Michigan being where the majority have congregated.

  Detroit has been rebuilt with vampire money into the Las Vegas-esque tourist trap New Detroit (original, I know). It isn’t a paradise, though, because the supernatural factions behind the scenes are always scheming against one another while t
he government debates revoking the citizenship of its inhuman citizenry. You can read about the adventures of characters during this time period in Straight Outta Fangton as well as the Bright Falls Mysteries.

  Prior to the Reveal in 2008, the supernatural was kept hidden from the public by an alliance of wizards and secret agents called the House. Their activities were ruthless, duplicitous, and ultimately doomed. A prequel trilogy of books detailed the slow revelation of the supernatural, despite the House’s efforts in Esoterrorism, Eldritch Ops, and The Fall of the House. These are collectively known as the Red Room series.

  Confused yet?

  I hope not.

  Despite its connections to other novels, Brightblade stands on its own. It is my hope it’ll be at least a trilogy of novels but like the other books in the series, may be many more. New Detroit is a city of adventure and it’s my deepest hope you’ll continue exploring its characters with me for many years to come.

  Chapter One

  All According to Plan (Yeah, Right)

  “I’ll never get used to seeing that.”

  Bryce was a trainee, fresh faced, with dark, curly hair and light brown skin that hinted at a biracial lineage I was too polite to ask about. He was dressed in a rental business suit since he didn’t have the knack with a sewing machine that I did.

  It almost fit right. Bryce had recently moved up from the wilds of central Michigan and was entirely too impressed with the Big City. It was funny because he wasn’t that much younger than me at the old and haggard age of twenty-eight. But as Indiana Jones said, it wasn’t the years but the mileage.

  “Seeing what?” I asked, following the trainee’s gaze out the front window of the car up into the sky.

  High above, there was a short, rapidly fading contrail following a black man in a jean jacket from the Nineties. It made him look like a comet, except for the blue part. “Oh, one of them.”

  “How can you be so blasé about that, Ashley?” he asked. “There’s a man flying out there.”

  “There have been vamps showing off for a decade,” I replied, trying to pretend seeing a flying vampire wasn’t the least bit exciting. “Usually young ones but sometimes the Old Ones do too. They go around punching other people with powers and occasionally flattening the odd city block just to show they don’t have to hide anymore. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

  Bryce looked at me like I was kicking his puppy while telling his daughter that there was no Santa Claus. Not to imply that he had a daughter or a puppy (or some combination since werewolves were real too). We were about ten miles away from Bright Falls. That was the werewolf capital of the world. It was about twenty minutes from New Detroit, the vampire capital of the world. Ten years ago, they were just a podunk lumber town and Motor City. Now, virtually the entire state of Michigan was supernatural, or at least it felt like it.

  “Yeah, but not flying ones,” Bryce muttered.

  “Spoilsport.”

  Ten years ago, in the mystical year of 2008, I’d been a newly graduated student of Solomon Academy. It had been a secret government(ish) facility designed to teach psychics (called “brights”) how to be good little spies who would work against the covert supernatural threats that imperiled humanity.

  Solomon Academy was part of a paramilitary organization called the Red Room that obeyed an Illuminati-esque group of mages called the House. Confused yet? Don’t be, since they’re both kaput. It was our job to make sure the threats to reality were contained and no one knew the supernatural existed. The aunt I was named for used to tell me that the House and its cronies were pure evil, and she eventually fled from them. But I’d always believed in the Mission. Mission with a capital M. Me, my brother Arthur, and my sister Anna were going to be the next generation of monster hunting badasses out to save the world.

  Yeah, it didn’t work out that way.

  Before I got my first assignment, the supernatural came out and I was suddenly out of a job. Not much point in covering up the supernatural if everyone knew about it. No point in hunting the creepy-crawlies if they paid taxes. I was now an overqualified as well as underpaid bounty hunter as well as private eye. Because, really, what other jobs did you pursue when you were a trained spy and the government wasn’t hiring ex-wizard minions? I’d even tried to be a superhero, no joke, but the less said about that the better. It hadn’t ended embarrassingly; it had ended tragically.

  “Morgan is just upset that a vampire once smashed her car,” Jack Peters said through the comms we were wearing. He was an older bounty hunter that had shown me the ropes after I’d decided to try my hand at the private sector of ass-kicking.

  “He picked up my car and hit a werewolf with it!” I snapped angrily. “The vamp was damn near invulnerable, so he is made out of harder material than my car; therefore, it would hurt the puppy worse if he just punched the thing and didn’t ruin my goddamned car doing it!”

  “Told you,” Jack said smugly.

  “Just don’t ever get into a fist fight with a vampire, okay?” I suggested to Bryce.

  “I’ll try not to,” Bryce replied. “Or any supernatural for that matter.”

  One of the things I’d learned at the Solomon Academy was that undead weren’t like the ones on Buffy. They weren’t easily disposed of with a pair of crossed fingers or a sharpened wooden spoon. The older the vamp was, the stronger he was, and some of them were more like the Incredible Hulk than Dracula. It didn’t help the cops in the city were firmly under the vamps’ thumb. The thousand-year-old monster had beaten the poor puppy to death and then walked off to reporters taking his picture. None of them bothered to record the fact the puppy turned into a sixteen-year-old girl after her death. That would ruin the story of “heroic vampire defeats rampaging.”

  Some days, I just wanted to stake them all and leave them out for the sun. I had issues regarding vampires. It wasn’t just because of a vampire smashing up my car once, either. I’d been trained to hunt and fear them. Hell, Solomon Academy had even done experiments on me and my siblings to bring our speed up to vampire levels. Now, I was expected to treat them like any other citizen. I just couldn’t—even if they were the ones in charge of my hometown.

  “Does she always refer to werewolves as puppies?” Bryce asked.

  “Yes,” Jack replied, nonchalantly. “She refers to vampires as vamps, werewolves as puppies, fairies as Tinks, mages as wands, and psychics as brights.”

  “That’s kind of racist,” Bryce said.

  “Supes are not a race,” I said, dryly. “Or group of races. Powers are like a skill. You wouldn’t call mechanics a race.”

  “The Supreme Court disagrees,” Jack said. “We also make our fortune because they do. The courts charge much more for super bail and that means they must borrow more money from us. Which means more interest. Money, money, money.”

  Jack was following us with the van, while we drove toward the target’s house. Bounty hunters who showed up in vans tended to, shockingly, look like bounty hunters. It’s amazing how many people won’t open the door to someone who looks ready to cart them off to jail.

  “What money?” I asked, smirking. “Am I getting a raise?”

  “You’re part owner, so no,” Jack said.

  The Jones, Peters, and Morgan Bail Bond Agency (yes, technically it was JP Morgan, but we never called it that) was one of sixteen bail bonds agencies that operated in New Detroit. It was also the only one that brought in lowlifes that had connections to the Supernatural World. Most individuals with powers preferred to handle things “in-house” and avoid the mundie courts.

  That ticked me off to no end and part of the reason why I worked at JPM was that I liked dragging supes before the law. It didn’t usually do any good but sometimes, it meant that they served the same sentences as the rest of us. Even if the rest of us didn’t include me as far as the law was concerned.

  “I’ve never even seen a supernatural up close,” Bryce said wistfully. “I mean, I see them at the casino shows and so
metimes with crowds gathered around them but that’s just tourist stuff.”

  “This is why you still have a car,” I said, bitterly.

  “You have powers,” Bryce continued. “You can’t really hate supernaturals.”

  “Well, for one thing, there is a difference between having powers and running around in your Goth fetish wear pretending to be oh so much better than other people. That’s what I hate. The arrogance and showmanship. If you want to be a celebrity, learn to play the violin. Don’t just think the world will love you because you’re special. You know who are the real heroes? Firemen! Police! EMTs!”

  “Because you have such a great relationship with the police,” Jack said. “Of course, if you believe the rumors, our own Ashley Morgan used to be a superheroine.”

  “No!” I snapped sharply. “Do not start up that nonsense again!”

  Everyone knew about my past, but I was still in denial. I didn’t need Jack to go spreading around old news.

  “Really?” Bryce asked, looking at me with his eyes widening.

  “They say she was the Red Widow, and she wore a bloody harem girl outfit and ran around New Detroit asking criminals nicely to give up, and they did!”

  “Really?” Bryce asked again.

  “No,” I lied. “Not a chance in hell. Don’t believe all the conspiracy website garbage. The Red Widow had, what do you call them, empathic powers, messing with people’s emotions. I have telekinesis. Completely unrelated. And stop imagining me dressed like that.”

  I’d been able to pull off a superhero outfit back then. That didn’t mean I should have. There’s way too many pictures of my twenty-two-year-old self in way too many geeks’ private folders. The things you don’t think about when you’re young(er).

  “Oh, sorry,” Bryce said, turning a bit red. I swear the kid was easy to read, even without the emotion sensing powers I was pretending I didn’t have. “I mean, I’ve seen pictures online, but you wore a veil—”