An Invocation of Monsters

An Invocation of Monsters The Void Book 2 Cate Corvin Copyright © 2023 by Cate Corvin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Contents 1. Elle 2. Elle 3. Elle 4. Elle 5. Toth 6. Elle 7. Elle 8. Elle 9. Elle 10. Elle 11. Elle 12. Elle 13. Elle 14. Elle 15. Kiraxis 16. Elle 17. Elle 18. Elle 19. Elle 20. Elle 21. Elle 22. Drazan 23. Elle 24. Elle 25. Elle 26. Elle 27. Elle 28. Elle 29. Elle 30. Elle 31. Drazan 32. Elle 33. Elle 34. Elle 35. Kiraxis 36. Elle 37. Elle 38. Elle 39. Elle 40. Toth 41. Elle 42. Elle About the Author 1 Elle Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d majorly screwed up by accepting an invitation from a couple of total weirdos. Maybe it was all just some sort of elaborate kidnapping or trafficking hoax. I leaned against the side of my beaten-up Crown Vic, a bursting-at-the-seams duffel bag at my feet, and raised an eyebrow at the sheer quantity of wilderness stretching out before me. They had refused to give me an address. The tiny town of Dunwich, sandwiched at the mouth of a massive, forested valley, was the end of the line for me. I had been instructed to park here on the outskirts of the forest and wait for transportation to Deepwater Lodge, my final destination. Yeah. The whole thing was definitely shady. And way too intriguing to pass up. During my mother’s funeral service six months ago, two people claiming to be old friends of hers had approached me. A man and a woman, wearing black suits that looked ill-fitted on their rather emaciated frames. They’d looked almost like identical twins, possessing the same suntanned skin, curly ash-blonde hair, and wide blue eyes. Wide, rather crazed blue eyes. A shiver trailed down my spine as I recalled the hungry look in the woman’s gaze when she saw me. Then she’d seen my cousin, Juno, coming towards us, and shoved a sealed envelope into my hands before the pair vanished. The contents of the letter, read in private later that night, had floored me. I’d always loved my mother… and I’d always been aware of her shortcomings. Gillian Gray had been a vain, rather selfish woman, but despite that, she was my mother and I adored her, so I could forgive those things. There had been a brief moment in my life when I’d wondered if I might not harbor the tiniest seed of hate for her—when Juno, freshly bereaved of her own parents, had come to live with us. I’d hero-worshipped my older cousin with a fervor that astounded Gillian. Juno had been so cool, and what made her even cooler was that she didn’t even know it; somehow she made sitting around with her nose in a book about Victorian occultism seem like such a romantic, Goth thing to do. But I’d overheard my mother complaining to my father one night about what a pain it was to handle a traumatized teenage girl, and how much she hated paying for her therapy, and that tiny pinch of hate had sparked to life. That was when I first began to really notice my mother’s selfishness. If Juno’s therapy appointments interfered with my immaculate mother’s nail appointments, there would be tiny, unhappy grooves carved around the corners of Gillian’s mouth that day. If Juno needed new clothes and it cut into Gillian’s highlights budget, my mother would have a flinty gleam in her eye when she looked at Juno for the rest of that week. Despite that, I still loved her. We all have our flaws. But every summer, my mother disappeared for a month. I’d always thought that my looks-conscious mother had gone to a day-spa, where she could pretend she didn’t have a daughter or her sister’s ward or a grueling real estate job. The letter had instead revealed that Gillian spent that month, every summer, in a lodge in these deep, dark backwoods. Not at a day spa, but as the best friend of those wild-eyed people who’d shown up at her funeral—and I was invited to come see exactly what she’d been up to. I couldn’t imagine Gillian, with her French manicures and silk blouses and WASP-y book club dinner parties, being friends with them. Something crinkled in my hand. Without thinking about it, I’d eased the letter from my pocket for the hundredth or so time. The paper was already soft and worn from how many times I’d folded and unfolded it, or run my fingers over the spidery writing. The Wendigo Society. I hadn’t found so much as a peep about them online. Whatever they were, it was locked down tight. Still, it was hard to imagine her as part of a secret cult… Okay, so my mother had been really into astrology. She’d religiously read her horoscope every day during breakfast. And she’d liked to collect crystals, too. She kept a line of amethyst chips on her office windowsill, claiming they helped her maintain the patience to not kill difficult clients. And maybe more than a few times I’d found strange runes and symbols scribbled in unlikely areas, like on the corner of a house sale sign she really hoped would go through or in the soil of her Damask rose garden. Fine. So it was actually fairly easy, in retrospect, to acknowledge that my buttoned-up mother had been into some weird shit on the side. The question was: why hide it? And who the hell were these people she had been friends with since college? It hadn’t taken much to convince me to accept the invitation. Both of my parents had passed on; the sale of my childhood home