Viper Moon Read Online Free

cat food from the gourmet section of Athena’s Prestigious Pet Emporium. The kitchen filled with the pungent aroma of prime tuna, laced with a bit of aromatic liver.
    It’s a good deal, I guess. I buy tuna and Horus feeds the girls. I suspect that the arrangement has more to do with his love of tracking and killing things than with altruism or his connoisseur tastes.
    I’m an independent soul, and I approach life with graceless enthusiasm. The nine-to-five thing isn’t for me, so I’m often impoverished, especially since I had to give up official private investigator work. I lost that thanks to one of Flynn’s fellow officers, a religious zealot who declared war on psychics and what he called their minions. A minion, that’s me.
    When the Earth Mother called me to her service, she gave me special gifts. Unfortunately, money wasn’t among them. Abby says she’s never received material aid, either; hence her psychic business. Abby offers me money and I always refuse. My parents raised me with the idea that I had to take care of myself. I do have a few hundred dollars a month from my grandfather’s trust fund, but I often have to choose between rent and other necessities—like bronze bullets.
    I don’t know the Earth Mother’s true nature. I don’t know the true nature of most of the world around me. If I had to use words to describe the Mother, I’d call her a demigod. Not the God, the all-powerful Master of the Universe, but a powerful being like the Darkness, who dwells in the Barrows.
    Nirah had ignored her breakfast offering and crawled out of her aquarium to play a game of cat and mouse with Horus, though she whipped her slender body along faster than any rodent. They’d race across the floor, over and under furniture, and Nirah would let Horus catch her every now and then to keep him interested. Nefertiti came out, too. Her mouse made a small lump four inches behind her head. She went to the windowsill and stretched out in the sun. She liked to save her energy for a swift, deadly strike.
    I went to the window, where I had a good view of the Barrows. My apartment house sits on a hill, and the land dipped lower to the south, toward river and marsh.
    Duivel, Missouri, sits on the banks of the Sullen River, a deepwater channel that eventually empties into the mighty Mississippi. Local legend among the area’s original Dutch settlers said that the devil pushed the land up out of hell. They named the city for him, the Father of Lies. Duivel—literally, the devil.
    A hundred thousand people live in and around Duivel, a city surrounded on three sides by a wet marshlike area called the Bog. The Bog is the fountain, the headwaters of the Sullen River. The ruins of the Barrows sit on a ten-square-mile hard-rock area across the river and between the Bog and uptown.
    When Detective Flynn and others refer to the Barrows, they are referring to the line of viable, if somewhat dubious, businesses that line River Street. While a few legitimate businesses struggle along the street, the tawdry, eclectic collection of flashy bars, pawnshops, cheaprent apartment buildings, and dark stinking alleys hides all manner of evil. Behind that line on the south, two to three blocks in, begins the true Barrows. The abandoned buildings and storm sewers make a perfect home for human criminals and other monsters. More important, the deeper Barrows stand as a prison for the malicious specter called the Darkness, whose will controls so many within its domain. It’s a prison with invisible bars, a prison of powerful magic.
    See but don’t see : The cloak of the invisible, one of the oldest spells in the world, holds the deeper reaches of the Barrows in a viselike grip. It’s a strange and erratic thing, that particular spell. Those who live in the greater part of the city know the Barrows exists, but they ignore it. Those who live along River Street don’t ignore the place, but neither do they speak of it, even to each other. They don’t