“We have heard that the werewolves are planning to go hunting for her tonight,” the male said, ending the awkward silence.
“Whispers are that she hunts on the south side because that is where she lives,” the female goblin added.
I dropped my hand back to my side and nodded. It was what I had been expecting. “Can you confirm her race?”
“Human,” she said firmly only to have the word whispered in an eerie echo through the building. The other goblins that surrounded us shifted, their nails scratching along the concrete as if they were circling me. The tension that had slipped from me started to return, funneling into the lights that still hovered above us. I hoped they weren’t getting into position to have another go at me. They knew I was a warlock, which meant that I could kill most of them in the blink of an eye. The only problem was that those I couldn’t kill in that breath were likely to kill me in the next breath.
“I’m confused,” Serah announced suddenly, snapping everyone’s attention back to her. “If I wasn’t grabbed by the killer, why did you grab me?”
She had a good point. I hadn’t been expecting to encounter the goblins tonight. With the police making the hunting of this killer such a priority, the goblins had taken a big risk in drawing attention to themselves by getting involved.
“We’re protecting you,” the female said. She grinned at Serah, intending for it to be reassuring, but her wide mouth of sharp, jagged teeth made her look almost like a piranha swooping in for a bite. “We can keep you safe. She won’t find you with us.”
“Fuck!” I shouted, jerking everyone’s eyes back to me. “They’re behind the disappearances!” I waved my good arm at the goblins surrounding us, disgust filling me.
I should have been relieved that the other bastard that Gideon and I had been chasing hadn’t gotten them, but this whole escapade had turned out to be a giant dead end. We went out searching for a psycho-killer bitch and instead we got a bunch of goblins snatching women so they could be locked away for safekeeping. The only thing in that arrangement that had me worried was that they might be pressuring the women they were protecting into giving up their babies as payment.
“What?” Serah gasped.
“We had to do something to keep them safe. The cops had failed,” the male goblin argued, giving Serah a little shake. “And we will keep you safe too.”
I cursed under my breath. This day just kept getting worse.
“I don’t need your protection!”
“Of course you do. The killer will get you.”
“No, she won’t. I’m not pregnant. This was all a police sting operation, and I was bait. We were trying to catch her and you grabbed me before we could find her.” To further prove her point, Serah completely opened her coat and pulled up her loose shirt up to reveal her padded stomach. The goblins looked utterly flabbergasted for a second. The male released her, shoving her away from himself as if she were diseased.
“Hand the other women over. The cops will place them in protective custody. They’ll be safe,” Bronx said, pushing to his feet to tower over the goblins that surrounded us.
“The police can’t protect them!” the female screamed. The pitch of her voice sliced through my brain so that I curled against it while clenching my teeth.
When I was sure that my ears weren’t bleeding, I opened my mouth to argue, but the words stopped in my throat at the sound of approaching sirens. The police were racing toward us and I arched a questioning eyebrow at Serah.
“There’s a tracking device somewhere in all this padding,” she said with a shrug.
The goblins took that as their cue to run. Or rather, disappear. One by one, the goblins surrounding us in the old warehouse vanished, slipping backward into the shadows as if they were made of them. The female glared at me, seeming to hesitate in decision.
“Keeping the women means that police will start to hunt you as well. Bad for business,” I said evenly.
“The abandoned Sleep Tight Inn outside of town,” the female growled at me before she disappeared.
With the immediate threat gone, the pain in my arm and ribs came back to me. I was suddenly sore, exhausted, and cold. Sighing, I dropped to the dirty concrete, too tired to keep moving. I knew I needed to use the healing spell that Gideon had taught me to fix my ribs and close the gash on my arm, but I was just too damn tired to move.
“Gage!” Serah shouted, rushing over to kneel beside me. “How badly are you hurt?”
“It’s not that bad. I can take care of it,” I said. Wincing, I lifted my right arm to look at where the goblin had sliced through my coat and shirt. Blood had soaked through the cloth, which had helped to slow the bleeding.
Bronx limped over the last few feet and dropped on the ground next to me, looking exhausted and a little ragged as well. But he graced me with a small smile and a chuckle. Yep, this was a normal night for us.
“It might be too late for magic,” Serah said against the sounds of screeching tires and slamming doors.
I cursed my luck and doused the magical lights hovering close to the ceiling. I didn’t have the strength in me to teleport Bronx and myself to another location. Between the pain and the bone-grinding fatigue, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get up off the floor. I was just ready for this day to finally be over.
“Did you hear what the goblin said? The abandoned Sleep Tight Inn,” I pressed. I knew that as soon as the cops swarmed on us, we’d be swept off to the hospital and I didn’t want the kidnapped women to be overlooked.
“Got it. I’ll tell them as they arrive.”
“Good. If anyone asks, tell them that the goblins grabbed Bronx and me too,” I whispered to Serah as the first cop burst through the door with his gun drawn.
“What?”
“Just do it,” I replied, tucking my right arm against my chest while trying to find a position that didn’t make the pain in my side worse. I hadn’t yet had the chance to fill her in on what I’d done to Eddie and how I’d gotten there. She was going to have to do some quick explaining about how we’d managed to beat the cop and I didn’t want anything too sketchy to come out of her mouth. There wasn’t enough energy left in me to erase any more memories tonight.
In the next couple of minutes, close to thirty cops poured through the various doors spread around the building. Some quickly ran over to us while others conducted a search of the old building. They weren’t going to find the goblins. They were long gone now. Years of surviving in the shadows had taught them how to effectively elude the law.
Of course, they’d had their own troubles with the Towers, but then so did everyone. Many of the warlocks and witches didn’t care for their ability to travel via shadow across vast distances. According to the history I studied while I was an apprentice in the Towers, a large number of goblins were tortured by being kept in a constantly sunny room. Death by dehydration and sunburn was not an enjoyable way to go.
Serah, Bronx, and I were questioned by Detective Curtis about the incident. I’ll admit that I managed a small mind-reading spell just so I knew what Serah and Bronx told him. My story needed to be pretty damn similar. I used the same spell on Eddie when he wandered over, looking a bit uneasy when he stared down at me. The prick didn’t remember my using magic on him, but he also didn’t remember my getting grabbed by a goblin. He was also feeling unclear about how he got knocked out in the first place. It certainly didn’t recommend him to his superiors, when he was supposed to be protecting Serah. Regardless, my secret was safe from this asshole.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help me when it came to the goblins. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The leaders of the local goblin clan knew that I could use magic. Sure, an ogre from the local mafia might have mentioned it, but it didn’t mean that they had to believe him. All doubt had been wiped away when I starting tossing around spells like party favors.
While I didn’t th
ink that they were going to link me with the Ivory Towers, I was worried that they might try to leverage that valuable information, much like a dark elf that was now dead. And what was my answer to this new problem? To kill them? To kill all the goblins that that been present? Or to kill all the goblins in Low Town?
God, this was really starting to feel like an unending cycle of death, spiraling down the toilet that was becoming my life. I tried to help the people that I cared for, I tried to save a few lives, and what did it get me? More trouble. More death. If anything, today had proven to me that it would have just been better if I hadn’t bothered to get out of bed.
And to add to my fun, I was now being forced to go to the hospital so I could get stitched up. I’d rather the goblins come back and rough me up some more than go to the hospital, where I could wait under the glare of blinding white lights in a too-cold room.
There had been no hiding my bloody arm when the paramedics arrived. Gritting my teeth, I let them help me to my feet while shooting a glare over at Serah. They hadn’t discovered my broken ribs and they weren’t going to. It was one thing to get a few stitches and maybe a nice painkiller. I wasn’t going to wait through a bunch of X-rays that my shitty HMO wasn’t going to pay for in the first place.
At the same time, Bronx was carefully helped into another ambulance. After making a loud fuss, I got them to promise that Bronx and I would be taken to the same hospital. I’d gotten Bronx into this mess and I was going to keep an eye on him, even if I was forced to do it from a hospital bed. One look from Serah made it clear that she thought I was being a big baby. I didn’t care. I was broken, bleeding, exhausted, and no closer to finding the killer.
Damn. I needed a drink.
Chapter 2
In my first trip ever to the emergency department of a hospital, I discovered that blood makes a difference in how quickly you are taken to see an actual doctor. Apparently, moaning and whining about the pain will get you triaged and sent back to the waiting room until a doctor is available. Dripping or gushing blood will get you ushered back with a bevy of nurses, physician assistants, and even a doctor or two will poke his head in while people with mops remove the trail you’ve left on their nice clean floor.
I was covered in blood, not all of it mine, but I didn’t need to explain that. They were content to deal with all the blood that was still leaking out of me. Happily, it was a flesh wound that just needed a bit of stitching up. While I was being bandaged and hooked up to an IV that unfortunately didn’t contain painkillers, another person was asking me a barrage of questions that were all necessary for billing purposes.
With a bit of a struggle, I handed over my insurance card, though I had no idea why. My insurance wasn’t going to cover a goblin attack. At least I’d taken the time to use what little energy I could pull together while in the ambulance to mend my fractured ribs. This little production was already taking long enough.
On the plus side, I got to close my eyes and relax a bit when someone finally gave me a painkiller. Muscles all over my body relaxed and my eyes slid shut on a sigh. The past several days had been hell and they didn’t look to be improving anytime soon. I was tired down to my soul. Sleep sounded so good. And not just a good night’s sleep. I wanted to sleep for months. I wanted the world to drift away and I wanted to float in a black blanket of silence that covered everything.
“Gage?” A soft, tentative voice drew my eyes back open to find that the doctor who had been stitching me up had left and Ellen, Gideon’s wife, was standing in the open doorway. A look of concern furrowed her brow as she took in my disheveled appearance.
“Hey.” I smiled, extending my good arm to her.
Closing the door, she quickly crossed the distance between us, taking my hand in one of hers while her other gently brushed back the hair on my forehead. She was a natural mom.
“Are you okay? I heard someone say your name and I had to check. I hope you don’t mind.”
I squeezed her hand and let my eyes drift shut again. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have been brought in, but there were too many people about.”
“Of course you should have been brought in. You’re covered in blood.”
“It’s not all mine.” A lopsided smile lifted my mouth as I opened my eyes again to look up at her. Yeah, this was a great painkiller the doc had finally given me.
“I’m not surprised.” A frown replaced her smile.
“I’ve been through worse.”
“It doesn’t mean you don’t need help every once in a while,” she said tartly. I wondered if she ever used that tone of voice with Gideon.
“Thanks,” I sighed, letting my eyes drift shut again. With my wounds taken care of, they were likely waiting for the painkiller to wear off a little more before finalizing my discharge. Not much more time to enjoy this relaxed feeling before reality came crashing back in.
“Gideon told me your news,” she started, her voice dipping to a whisper as if she was afraid someone else might be listening even though we were alone in the private room. “I’m so sorry, Gage.”
A different kind of pain intruded on my blissful, relaxed peace. Being on the run, chasing after one killer or another had helped me push back my troubles with Trixie and our baby. But it all came crashing back with Ellen’s sweet concern.
“Why did you stay?” I asked when I could swallow past the lump in my throat. “Particularly when you were pregnant with Bridgette? What did he do to make you feel safe? To protect you?”
Ellen regarded me silently for a minute, her hand gently brushing my hair back in a soothing caress. “I stayed with Gideon because I loved him and I thought he was worth the risk. I knew the dangers and there is no protecting against all of them. You take your chances. I’m grateful for the time we’ve had together. It could all end tomorrow or we could have another fifty years ahead of us. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we appreciate the time we have right this second.”
“But you’re not scared?”
“Of course I’m scared.” She shook her head at me, making feel as if I had asked why the clouds couldn’t be covered in purple polka dots. “Only a fool wouldn’t be scared. Even after all this time, I still wake up some nights, terrified that something has happened to him. I can’t count the number of times I’ve run to Bridgette’s room; sure that someone has stolen her from us. But then I reassure myself that we’re as safe as we can be in this world and we just trust that God is watching over us.”
“Do you feel guilty for risking Bridgette’s life by staying with Gideon?”
“Guilty? No, I’d feel guiltier for denying them the right to be together and know each other. Gideon loves his daughter and will give his life to protect her. What more can I ask for?”
“Safety? A long life.”
Ellen gave me a sad little smile. “I understand Trixie’s reservations. I really do. But I’ve worked as a nurse for a long time. I’ve seen countless people die. I’ve watched patients who lived nearly a century waste away in pain the last few years, their memories a blur. Was their life better for having lived those last years in pain? I’ve watched children die far too young, but happy for the joy they experienced in their short time. I’m a firm believer in quality over quantity. Bridgette’s life is better for knowing her father, even if it means that it could be shorter for it.”
I squeezed the hand I was still holding. “Thank you for your honesty.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have the answers you’re looking for. I do understand her point of view and can’t fault her for it, though I wouldn’t wish this pain on you.” Giving my hand a gentle squeeze, she released it and stepped away. “Get some rest tonight. I’ll go check on your discharge. They should have you out of here soon.”
“Thanks, Ellen.”
She reached for the door and paused before turning back to look at me. “All that being said, I do want my daughter
to live a long life. If the quality Gideon provides stops outweighing the potential quantity, I would take her from him. Bridgette’s life and happiness are my first priority.”
I smiled at her, once again impressed by her quiet strength. Ellen was a fierce woman and Gideon was a damn lucky man. “I never doubted it.”
Serah peeked into my room after Ellen stepped out, her arms wrapped around my coat, which she was holding to her chest. She looked pale and worried when she had to no reason to be. Sadly, all I could think was that I had all these women looking after me and worrying about my health, and not one of them was the one I wanted most to see pass through the door. But I appreciated it nonetheless. A warlock could do worse.
“They’re discharging Bronx now. He just needed a few stitches,” Serah reported. I’d sent her to track down the troll as soon as the doctor arrived. I wanted to be sure he was getting the care he needed. Some people were anxious around trolls when they were injured—they weren’t the most tolerant patients. “I also just got a call from a friend on the force. He said all the missing women were discovered safe and unharmed at the inn, like the goblins said. After some questioning, they’ll be headed home.
“Glad to hear it.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, holding up my bandaged arm to her. “A few stitches and a prescription for some decent painkillers. Not the good stuff, but then you can’t hand out the good stuff for a minor goblin attack.”
A reluctant smile briefly tweaked the corners of her mouth as she stepped into the room. “I know. I just don’t handle hospitals too well. I’ve known too many people who went in, but never walked back out again.”
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