Black Hole Werewolves: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Galactic Demon Hunters Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Summary

  Aaron Crash's Mailing List

  ONE_

  TWO_

  THREE_

  FOUR_

  FIVE_

  SIX_

  SEVEN_

  EIGHT_

  NINE_

  TEN_

  ELEVEN_

  TWELVE_

  THIRTEEN_

  FOURTEEN_

  FIFTEEN_

  SIXTEEN_

  SEVENTEEN_

  EIGHTEEN_

  NINETEEN_

  TWENTY_

  TWENTY-ONE_

  TWENTY-TWO_

  TWENTY-THREE_

  TWENTY-FOUR_

  TWENTY-FIVE_

  TWENTY-SIX_

  TWENTY-SEVEN_

  TWENTY-EIGHT_

  TWENTY-NINE_

  THIRTY_

  THIRTY-ONE_

  THIRTY-TWO_

  THIRTY-THREE_

  THIRTY-FOUR_

  THIRTY-FIVE_

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Other Works by Aaron Crash

  Books from Shadow Alley Press

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Special Thanks

  Copyright

  Summary

  No turning back. No way out. The Onyx Gate awaits …

  Blaze Ramirez and the crew of the Lizzie Borden have never been closer to finding the location of the Onyx Gate and saving the universe. Only one problem: Blaze’s foster father is the only one who knows the location, and being the low-down dirty drunk he is, he doesn’t want to tell them squat.

  To make matters worse, other ghosts from Blaze’s Astral Corps days have come calling, along with Nauzea—the archduchess of torture. This time, there’s no turning back, there’s no way out, and in the depths of an ocean of diabolical ectoplasm, Blaze will finally understand the true nature of the demons he’s spent his life destroying.

  The endgame has come … The question is, what will Blaze have to sacrifice for total victory over the horrors of the Onyx Gate?

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  ONE_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  “You make me so hot, Blaze,” Lupercalia Smith whispered. “Kiss me again.”

  How could Gunnery Sergeant Ramon “Blaze” Ramirez say no? Even though he should know better. When she was a werewolf, she’d like nothing better than to rip out his throat. As a beautiful woman, she licked his neck, murmuring happily.

  Cali was in her blue dress, her skin soft and pale in the dim light of one of the lodge’s private rooms. She had thick nanotech anklets around her legs which could transform into blue-fire engines. Thick bracelets circled her wrists, but they were closed, covering the Terran moon rocks inside. If the energy from the lunar stones touched her skin, she’d become an unstoppable evil werewolf.

  But she wasn’t a wolf now.

  She had a little nose, slightly upturned, and a crooked smile. Her cornflower blue eyes were half closed in lust. Nombre de Dios, she had the best bedroom eyes of anyone Blaze had ever been with. Including his current girlfriend, Trina. Damn, but this was wrong.

  The fire crackled in the hunting lodge’s fireplace while the snow outside battered the window. Blaze deactivated his nanofiber armor, so all the microscopic robots raced across his skin and his woodland cammies and back into the gauntlet on his right arm. In seconds, he was standing in his cammies, pulling Cali to him.

  She was so petite, he had to stoop to kiss her. Then she growled, her lust making her savage, as she threw him onto the couch. The pelt of a Nairobi Prime wolf-cat covered the sofa, soft and furry. Cali straddled him, grinding herself on him, kissing him like she was dying of thirst and he was a frothy mug of Clicker beer. She nipped his lips and lightly bit his tongue.

  He’d forgotten how hot Cali could be, how wild and uninhibited, full of raw sexual power. It’s what you would expect from a woman who could, at any time, transform from a shy little thing, just barely over five feet tall, into an eight-foot-tall beast feared by demon hunters across the galaxy.

  Throw a werewolf into a star? Ha, they’d laugh it off. Only silver, baby. Only Terran silver could break a werewolf’s skin. Only silver driven into its heart would put it down for good.

  Blaze knew he should keep his fusion ax and his fusion shotgun, Ugly Betty, close to him because they were on a hunt. This was the wrong time to get nasty with Cali.

  Oh, and there was his vampire girlfriend to consider. Trina and Cali already didn’t like each other, and if Trina found him cheating on her with Cali, the fangs would come out and the fur would fly.

  Blaze had to push Cali away, but even so, she was panting, gasping for breath, her mouth wet and warm. “I’ve been kissing Elle so much, I’ve forgotten how much I like your scratchy beard on my face.”

  Blaze had dark hair, a little longer than he should, and a dark beard that was split by a scar that ran from his temple, across his nose, to his chin.

  “Cali, we can’t do this,” Blaze said. “I’m with Trina.”

  The Mormon girl rolled her eyes. “Trina will understand. She’s a vampire. She understands that sometimes we all have to be a little evil.”

  That sent alarm bells through Blaze. “What? No, we don’t have to be evil at all. We’re the good guys, Cali.”

  Cali laughed. Did her beautiful eyes flash black? Did he see her canines grow a little?

  The fire cracked and popped, throwing sparks up and sending shadows flickering across the mounted Terran deer heads on the wall. They were worlds away from Earth, halfway across the Huaxia Quadrant, on their way to Meelah space to find Arlo. They’d found out where the Onyx Gates would appear, but they didn’t know when. Arlo knew the when.

  Why were there deer heads on the wall? Anchorage Prime was closer, and they had mega-elk there. Shit wasn’t adding up.

  Cali kissed him, then licked her way from his lips to his ear. “We’re good guys, but we’re also bad. You know me. You know how naughty I can get.”

  He did. Cali had almost murdered him on several occasions when the beast inside her had figured out a way to keep her bracelets open. Bill, his Clicker engineer, had promised the new bracelets couldn’t be jammed. The AI in the nanotech would reconfigure the bracelets to always close. Foolproof, or so the big stick insect had said.

  They’d come to the ice world of Shenyang Prime on a hunt, to do a job for a high-ranking Union official. Blaze remembered landing the Lizzie Borden in the middle of a blizzard, on a landing pad. After that, it got kind of fuzzy.

  Why the deer heads?

  Who had started the fire? Blaze couldn’t remember.

  Why would Cali jump on him and start getting freaky? Another memory he didn’t have.

  But it was hard to think with her hard body on him like it was their honeymoon and they’d waited until marriage to seal the deal.

  A cat meowed, and there was Raziel, on top of the couch, looking at him with intense yellow eyes. She was an orange, black, and white calico, and while she looked feline, she had a way of teleporting around and showing up when least expected, either for a little tuna fish or to warn them of the Onyx-fueled demonic creatures.

  Once Arlo told them when the Onyx Gate would appear, their hope was to close
it and stop the flow of the diabolical energy. With no more Onyx, all the ghoulies would starve and disappear. Trillions in the galaxy would be saved.

  It was clear that mashing mouths with Cali was not in service to that goal. And Raziel was reminding him of it. There was disappointment in her yellow eyes. It was how Trina would look at him when she found out about his little indiscretion.

  Indiscretion? That was stupid. Blaze was cheating on his current girlfriend with his ex. That wasn’t indiscretion. That was a full-on stupid mistake he might’ve made in his early twenties. Screw that. Blaze was a man, a good man, an Astral Corps Marine and a demon hunter.

  He caught Cali’s hand and tried to push her off him. But he couldn’t. She’d become so strong. But she wasn’t wolfing out. In her Human form, Cali was just that…Human.

  Raziel hissed and spit, her back arching. The calico had gone apeshit.

  “Don’t, Blaze. I could show you a thousand pleasures this night,” Cali said. Only it wasn’t Cali.

  Whatever Onyx thing it was, it latched onto Blaze’s wrists with its fists and jammed them against the couch. Dark wings erupted from its back, and the blue dress disappeared to reveal a naked woman, bigger, bustier, with skin the bright red of cinnamon candy. Black horns rose from her forehead and she grinned, revealing black fangs. The eyes went from blue to midnight in a blink.

  This wasn’t Cali, clearly. It was a succubus. And it had him. From around her body, a forked red tail swept around and circled Blaze’s throat to crush his windpipe and kill him dead.

  TWO_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  The fire was gone, and the deer heads were gone with it, replaced by Anchorage Prime mega-elk heads.

  The succubus cackled as she tightened her tail around his neck.

  Memories flooded back into Blaze.

  Ambassador Rajanigandha Randhawa had called them. She was the Union ambassador to the Meelah, which was awesome, since they needed her help to find Arlo. Currently, she was in Meelah space, trying to bring the old bastard in.

  Ambassador Randi’s brother and nephews were on a ski resort planet called Shenyang Prime in the Huaxia Quadrant, but the whole place had gone silent. Half the quadrant was calling there, but no one was picking up. Ambassador Randi, for some reason, suspected it might be an Onyx event.

  Although it was an ice world, Shenyang Prime had a saltwater ocean flowing beneath its miles of ice and snow. It used to be a Clicker mining colony, though getting to the mineral rich core underneath the ice and half-frozen ocean of the planet had taken some serious feats of engineering. The Clickers, also known as the Phasmida, had risen to the occasion, however. They’d sucked out all the natural resources from the planet. During the Bug War, the Clickers lost the planet to the Union, though the Union couldn’t afford to do anything with it. They’d sold it to the IPC for a song.

  The Union was always hurting for cash, and the Intersteller Presidential Corporation knew it.

  Like always, the Union was screwed in the deal and the IPC made another galactic fortune creating a unique tourist destination. The IPC had built the ski resort over the mine, despite misgivings about the structural integrity of the ice and snow. They had star systems of lawyers to deal with that.

  When Trina, a former IPC auditor, reached out to her contacts about Shenyang Prime, the official word was that they were having a power outage and things were normal. Yeah, right.

  While the IPC didn’t believe in the existence of Onyx, the Union did. Too bad the IPC had all the power and the Union barely functioned. Money talks and bullshit walks. The IPC had all the money. The end.

  Ambassador Randi’s call had come at the perfect time. Blaze and his crew needed a job and they needed cash to resupply, fix up their battered ship, and dammit, Blaze didn’t have his own bed. Even his MH3 hammock had been destroyed. At the very least, he needed to buy a damn hammock he could string up somewhere on board his ship.

  Blaze had assured Ambassador Randi he’d get to Shenyang Prime, deal with whatever ghoulie was there, and rescue her brother and nephews. Blaze and his people aboard the Lizzie Borden had used the Spacetime Wave Drive engine to send them surfing across the galaxy from Earth in the Terran Quadrant to the middle of the Huaxia Quadrant.

  When they hit the Shenyang Star System, they hadn’t been too surprised to see an Etrusca ruin orbiting the ice planet. The Etrusca had been an advanced spacefaring civilization six million years ago. Then they’d vanished. Their relics, however, littered the galaxy, like walking around Greece and seeing ancient columns everywhere.

  But recently, Blaze and his crew had discovered that unlike Greek columns, the Etrusca ruins could be triggered to come alive.

  The Etrusca ruin was about the size of Australia, a big hunk of square metal orbiting Shenyang Prime. The system’s sunshine struck the perfectly flat surface of the ruin. The sunlight glittered off the metal as well as the chunks of ice in the rings around the ice planet. Ice planet, a ring of ice, and the cold metal of the Etrusca structure.

  After hailing the planet and getting no response, Blaze and his landing party set out from the star port connected to the resort. The Lizzie Borden’s sensors detected Onyx energy right off. Something was in the ski resort, and that something was pinche nasty.

  Next thing Blaze knew, he was kissing Cali. Before she turned into the red-skinned sex demon strangling him to death.

  The sexy-kissy glow of the fire had vanished along with the heat. The lodge room was frigid. The whole thing had been a trick. Succubi had powerful telepathic powers, even more dangerous than vampires’, and once they tapped into a person’s libido, man or woman, they could control every one of your senses. Their endgame was sex, where they sucked your soul out of your naughty bits.

  But with Raziel’s help, Blaze had seen through the charade and now the demon was just going to squeeze the life out of him. Where was the rest of his crew?

  Most likely, they were under the spell of the demon. The telepathic tart was probably seducing them with hallucinations at that moment, and she’d pick them off one by one after she drained Blaze of his life’s essence.

  Why Cali? Why had the succubus used Cali to seduce him and not his vampire girlfriend?

  It wouldn’t matter in a second if Blaze didn’t figure out some way to escape. And quick. The cartilaginous rings in his neck were creaking and popping, and he was close to blacking out. Black dots peppered his vision.

  Raziel leapt from the couch, raked her claws down the beautiful if bestial face of the demon, and then darted off. The tail around Blaze’s throat relaxed just enough.

  The gunny triggered his ocular implants, micron-thin pieces of technology on the surface of his eyes. Not only did they give him a display of his ship’s controls, relative speed, and major functions, he could see icons for his crew on the right side of his vision. He could keep track of their VHI, or vitals and health indexes, and right now, all of them were fluctuating around fifty percent. His crew was in trouble.

  The other thing he could do was activate his nanofiber armor. The nanotech in his gauntlet spread the microscopic robots back across his body, from his feet to his head, including his neck, which pushed the demon’s tail away from his windpipe.

  He could breathe, but the succubus still had him around the wrists. She was drooling black acid, and it splashed onto his armor, eating through it, but the nanotech was smart enough to compensate.

  The succubus went to bite through his throat, but he dodged, bashed the thing in the head with his helmet, and bashed it again. Black blood covered his visor, blinding him. But he was able to throw the thing off.

  Rolling to his right, he seized the three-foot-long metal haft of his fusion ax. The hydrogen shell in the handle powered the two half-moon blades made of star-fire energy. The golden glow of the blades wiped every shadow out of the hunting lodge’s main room. At the same time, the microscopic robots sloughed off the blood on his visor. He could see again.

  The succubus spun around, s
aw him with the ax, and flew off on her dark wings, then banked around the room and soared through an open door.

  Blaze scooped up his shotgun and stuck it on his back. The nanotech held it in place. He then charged down the hallway, which was still decorated like it was a house in Vaspenil right in the middle of the Utalorado Rocky Mountains. An imitation grizzly bear rug covered the floor.

  The succubus flew down a wide staircase and Blaze followed. Into comms, he yelled, “Ling! Trina! Cali! Fernando! Report!”

  Fernando’s voice burst through. “Oh, Elle, you have never been more beautiful. I can’t believe this is happening again.”

  A couple of years ago, his sister had gotten drunk and spent a weird night with Fernando, their Clicker doctor and part-time Onyx witch. While Fernando wasn’t sexual at all, he had witnessed Elle’s inner freak and had been obsessed with her ever since.

  Of course, it wasn’t Elle with Fernando right then, but clearly the work of the succubus. Elle was back on the Lizzie Borden. After her last evil goddess episode, they had removed her from active duty. Now Fernando was their Onyx witch, though the Clicker doctor didn’t have nearly the power of Blaze’s sister. That was a drawback. One of the benefits, though, was they didn’t have to worry about the Clicker doctor going dark side on them and becoming an unstoppable demonic goddess.

  “Trina?” Blaze called out. He was taking the stairs two at a time, running down deeper, deeper, deeper toward the Clicker mines.

  “Oh, Blaze, yes, do that thing with your tongue again, the thing I like.”

  Okay, so their resident vampire was out of action, but Blaze was kind of happy the succubus was using him to trick Trina. Of course, he then felt guilt set in. Why Cali?

  Both Fernando and Trina were in trouble. They had to get to the succubus and kill it before it telepathically ravished then murdered the Clicker doctor and the Irish vampire.

  Blaze didn’t even bother to contact Cali. In his combat display, he activated his Cali Bad Dog command. Wherever she was in the sprawling ski resort and attached hotels, her bracelets clicked open, flooding her system with the Terran lunar energy.