Sacrifice (#1 Twin's Service series) UNEDITED

Chapter 1

POV: (Sloane)

It was late October, Halloween and Samhain were only a week away. I sat behind my desk trying to pay attention to the woman in front of me. She was human and wanted to hire me to find out if her husband was cheating on her. If we weren't so hard up on money, I'd have probably told her that it would take until the beginning of November for us to fit her in. Unfortunately, with the increase in employee's, the money also began to be more tight for our budget.

Dimitri, the Master Vampire of the City, had agreed to let two of his flock to work for my company on the basis that I paid them normal employee wages. They also would have to be worked into a schedule that included night shifts. Since they'd be indisposed during the day with their Death Sleep. Cane, the Alpha Werewolf of the largest and only pack of our city, had also agreed to let two of his pack members to work with Jared and I. I'd told him that I'd provide decent pay since they wouldn't be able to hold another job while working for us.

They'd agreed to working together after a ShadowMancer had killed a couple Vampires and Werewolves. I had suggested in my injured state, that it would've been easier to find her and take her down had we all been providing information to one another. Twin's Service, was the private investigating business my twin brother Jared and I had opened up, but now it wasn't just us twin's working here. I wasn't going to change the name though, so they'd have to deal.

"You'll take my case though, right? It doesn't bother me when you get the evidence to me. This has been going on for years. I think I can wait a few more weeks for results that I can take to my lawyer," Mrs. Hendrick insisted as I got up to lead her back into the front office to where Celise was.

"Yes, Mrs. Hendrick. Celise will take down your information and I'll give you a call when I find anything. You won't need to pay our fee until I actually provide photo proof of anything though. The only thing you need to pay now is the deposit."

"Oh please call me Cathy or at least leave off the Mrs. Henry has been unfaithful for so long that I hardly count myself as his wife."

I'd have wondered why she would hire me if she knew he was cheating but I had my mind elsewhere. After packing her off I went back to my desk to pull out some ancient scrolls I had in my desk drawer. After nearly dying, I'd unlocked an old power among the Mage's. Each Mage usually had a 'Calling' and I had been under 'undecided' for a long while. Which usually was reserved for children. Jared actually had two 'Calling's'. One was Fire and the other was Spirit.

Currently my brother was doing practically the same thing I was doing except his research involved ways to unleash the Wolf spirit inside of himself. He'd told me that his skin was itching with the need to shift and since he technically wasn't infected with lycanthropy all of us were kind of at odds about what to do. Cane had actually suggested he try to get infected purposefully but we were all scared that it would react badly with his Vampire and Mage blood. It sounded like way too much power to try and thrust into one body.

The scrolls were written in a language so old that I had only found one old book in my Aunt's library that was barely 30 pages long of translations and descriptions about what the writing was saying. It wasn't any known language found on the internet so it must've predated any scientific knowledge or findings. At first I thought it may have been written in the Fae language but Auntie B assured me that it wasn't anything so simple. She'd also told me that she'd go to the Coven's personal collective Library to see if she could find anything else on "The Curse of Blood". Which was apparently my 'Calling'. It didn't sound like a nice Calling, for sure.

I'd been trying to decipher one of the scrolls for the past week and had only understood bits and pieces of the first paragraph. It was a kind of journal entry written by a woman named Malaka. Or that's what I was guessing it was. As I pointed out before, the translations and descriptions of the language were very confusing. What I had gained from what I could put together though was that the curse of blood was an old magic that usually stayed dormant until god's walked the earth. Or at least the journal entry said something similar to that.