by LW Herndon
Chaz frowned. His gaze followed the activity at the pool table and the man now departing from the bar.
I slipped several bills under the shot glass, slid off the barstool and walked toward the door. Several demons looked interested in the potential for trouble. Chaz’s snarl discouraged them.
I headed for my bike, my demon partner on my tail. The engine rumbled to life as I pivoted toward the warehouse district, where I could still make out remnants of the scout’s feelers flaking off in the night air. With so many people in the bar, I hadn’t been able to distinguish the scout’s underlying scent. Bound-demon or soulless-human, now only finding him mattered.
Chaz glimmered beside me. His body wavered and thinned, suspended in midair in a two-dimensional image of a six-point star the thickness of tissue paper. With a quick twist and a hard snap, the demon applied himself to my neck as a tattoo.
I gave no outward sign of the shocking intensity the connection delivered, though the charge seared along every nerve in my body, not deadly but powerful. For demons, this process was no different than giving someone a taxi ride. The connection provided immunity and transport, a privilege of demon-clan membership. My part-human physiology meant I needed to feign ignorance of the initial sensation. To show weakness flagged vulnerability, a thing I avoided at all costs among beings who fed on emotion. Even those beings who preferred their manna from pleasure.
We headed through the quiet streets, closing in on the warehouse district, while the few lights on the poles wavered in an erratic flicker. The sign provided a good gauge of proximity to the sorcerer, since power was hard to shield. The closer that scout got to his master, the more the sorcerer’s power interfered with nearby energy sources. The increased flickers signaled we were close.
Which was good, because I’d run out of road.
Ahead of me stretched fencing, several metal prefabricated warehouses, large semi storage trailers, and darkness. Beyond and out of sight were the L.A. harbor berths, evidenced by the dank smell of seawater and algae.
While most of the warehouses sported surveillance lights around the roof perimeters to discourage vandals, there was plenty of darkness left. Not a hindrance tonight, instead a necessary cover because the acerbic, rank odor of sorcerer rolled thick around us. Coupled with the copper tang of fresh blood.
Chaz detached himself from my neck. He uncoiled onto the damp asphalt at my side as I locked my bike.
“Take the outside length and find a way up to the roof,” I said.
He hesitated. “You sure we’re in the right place?”
The need to trust in my judgment grated on him. Unfortunately, demons couldn’t detect sorcerers. He had no choice but to follow my lead, and I didn’t have time to baby him. That he couldn’t seem to scent the fresh blood made me hesitate.
Then again, Chaz hadn’t been able to scent Markowski last night either, though the remains hadn’t left much blood. This blood also held no sweet essence of the teenage football player.
I turned right and walked two steps. Darkness folded around me. Not an absence of light, more a blanket of ink flipped over my body and glued tight. I couldn’t make out my own feet or hands. The visual disorientation didn’t affect my spatial perception. The warehouse stairs were roughly twenty feet in front of me behind a shielded, well-warded entrance Chaz, or any other demon, couldn’t cross. I turned back and exited from the pitch-black in front of him.
His eyes widened, but he didn’t wait for added confirmation. With a quick nod and a tight-lipped grimace, he backed away to run the building’s length for alternate access—in the relative safety of the moonlit night.
CHAPTER 2
I slipped back into the ink soup and up the concrete stairway that offered the only access I had seen to the warehouse, other than windows set some forty feet above me.
At the top step, I turned my head to listen in the unnatural silence.
Nothing.
The metal bar latch of the door lifted without resistance. No lock? The door opened, quiet and easy, but I held back, adjusting to the shift from the ink to the black and gray within the building. Strips of pale light from the high windows illuminated uneven patches over the concrete floor, packing crates, and structural support beams. The effect, creating more of a moonscape than a floor plan to help me navigate.
Steel catwalks crisscrossed the vast interior at multiple elevations. Crates and more semi-sized containers blocked the view of the walls.
I moved in silence, without disrupting the air around me. A trick I’d perfected the hard way during years of service with Shalim’s clan.
Light gained over darkness in pockets as I made my way through the obstacle maze. The air hummed and pulsed, yet no sound escaped. However, vibrations resonated in my chest, in my hands, and in a steady drone through the base of my skull, amplified by the scent of blood, thick and cloying.
Damn it. Don’t let me be too late.
I jumped atop the nearest box and sprang to grab hold of the catwalk above me. I pulled up slowly, flipped onto the walkway, and waited on my stomach for any sign of presence. Hearing nothing, I moved on.
Audible mutters accompanied a stronger vibration that washed over me the closer I got to the walled platform at the top of the warehouse. The platform, a tree house buried in steel branches of the catwalks that fanned out toward the edges of the building. Light flickered from slits in the metal fabric of the walls.
I inhaled, holding the air in my lungs. A dark and rancid scent clogged my senses, a disgusting combination of fresh asphalt and burned chocolate, more tar and less sugar, distinctively dark magic.
This blood I couldn’t place any more than Markowski’s. It was different: heavier, spicier, and without the rotted quality of sorcerer stench.
Gauging from the intensifying level of vibration, I was out of time. At a full tilt, I reached the last ladder to the platform. Hand over hand, I climbed. Not bothering to hide the noise as I pulled onto the platform that provided the floor for the prefab office. I palmed two small silver daggers from inside my boot and moved to the open doorway.
The man inside had his back to me. Several thick black candles on a cloth-covered altar illuminated his body’s outline. With a wave of his hand, the sorcerer acknowledged and ignored me at the same time. “You’re too late. I can’t use the vessel now.”
He’d luckily mistaken me for his scout. Risking a few precious minutes, I took in the two steel tables between our positions. Two young male bodies—shirtless, pale, and unconscious—lay bound by their wrists and ankles. Rivulets of their blood gathered at the corners of the tables and drizzled into pails below.
At the snap of the sorcerer’s fingers, the utility lights above flicked to life, rendering a harsh and cold scene. Raw plywood and steel presented a stark contrast to the fragile bodies and garnet pools of blood.
Still assuming his scout waited behind him, the sorcerer reached for one of the pails and filled a chalice on the altar.
I glanced behind me, calculating the odds that Chaz had taken out the scout. Frankly, I didn’t feel that lucky. My back to the wall and away from the door, I inched closer to the steel tables. If I could free them, perhaps we would have a chance before the sorcerer-in-training turned around. I had been able to figure out that much about him. He wasn’t young. Not like the children on his tables, although the essence of his power was uncomplicated, infantile. And he was sloppy. Not a mistake made by a seasoned sorcerer.
To this guy, the scout had been a tool he killed and reprogrammed, nothing more. An instrument beneath his notice, his casual ease with me in the room based on an assumption that no scout could attack his master. Sorcerers didn’t attain longevity making such stupid mistakes.
I didn’t move. The scout’s faint scent I could detect, but no vibration accompanied the odor. Chaz had stopped him. Luckily for me, he hadn’t destroyed him. However, I wouldn’t put it past my sidekick to make this more challenging for me. Demons mistake their twisted sense of humo
r for camaraderie.
The connection between master and scout still existed, or the sorcerer would have known something was wrong. Unfortunately, even with a neophyte, this oversight would last only a few more minutes.
I approached the boys, touched an ankle, and got a better look.
Shit. Maybe twelve years old, if they were lucky. I choked down a quick surge of regret and fanned the rush of anger. Only rage held the power I needed.
The first boy produced neither breath nor heartbeat, his skin and muscle tone all wrong for his age. His blood’s scent was discernible and fresh. The aroma indicated someone young with the electric mobility of the red blood cells still high. But the rest of his body—instead of supple, fleshy skin, dry brittle parchment layered in wrinkles over his bones, a replica of a ninety-year-old, weathered hermit. His mouth hung open, emitting a smell of progressing decay.
What the hell had this sorcerer done? The effect had more than just drained the boy’s body. It had squeezed out every last bit of life.
From my analysis of their blood’s scent, neither boy shared Markowski’s lineage. Yet their lives had ended in the same violent manner.
I touched the second boy’s chest. A thready pulse and an erratic heartbeat registered as he clung to life. His body didn’t resemble his companion’s carcass, but he wasn’t conscious either. Cooperation, definitely ruled out. On the other hand, he wouldn’t fight me.
“You will dispose of the one. When you return, I’ll be done with the other,” said the sorcerer, still shuffling through his procedure before the altar.
I shifted closer, and he turned. Five-eight and stodgy, the sorcerer had an underwhelming presence compared to the horror he had rendered. His gaze flickered over me as he corrected his initial assumption; then his eyes narrowed.
“Who are you?” The chalice clutched in his fingers, he retreated. I advanced on him until only twenty feet separated us.
“You weren’t expecting me?” I closed the gap, though not before the sorcerer tipped the chalice to his mouth and sloshed more blood down the front of his khaki shirt than he managed to drink. Then he scuttled behind one of the steel tables.
He gripped the four-inch gold amulet at his neck with a smirk. “Whoever you are, it won’t matter.”
“I disagree.” I flung one knife. It glanced off the man’s shirt as if hitting a steel breastplate, not human flesh. One option down, I needed to try something else.
My quick kick at the altar tipped the remaining pail. Blood flooded across the altar’s surface, winding its way through the bowls, crystals, and candles. The table rattled and swayed, sending bits of debris to the ground, enough to distract my opponent.
I launched myself at him, but he jerked aside at the last second, and I crashed to my shoulder on the floor. Twisting into a roll at his feet, I moved in time to avoid his athame’s swipe and rebounded, snatched a cloth from the altar, and wound it around my free hand. We circled each other, knives ready, my gaze riveted to his blade, his fixed on my remaining knife.
He sucked in a ragged breath—power he had aplenty, good health, evidently, not so much. He glanced to the door and back to me, seeming to debate escape versus revenge for the loss of his prizes. Anger and his ego got the better of him. He straightened, his glare growing malignant as he raised a clenched fist over his head. A silver sheath spread to cover his middle three fingers in a thick cuff. The metal sparked and glowed with a peculiar obsidian sheen. Mist steamed from his clenched fingers as his tense lips moved in a rhythmic litany.
His actions sped so fast I didn’t have the option to attack him and also safeguard the remaining boy. Not that I deliberated, in spite of Shalim’s mandate that I eliminate sorcerers whatever the costs. I braced myself before the boy, prepared to defend him.
The overhead lights flickered once, then exploded, leaving only the three candles from the altar to illuminate the scene. A crash of warehouse windows coincided with a twist of the sorcerer’s mouth into a victory sneer. “You were a fool to come here.”
I made a lunge for him and swiped—too short a reach for his body—he disappeared in a crack of gray space and a wisp of smoke.
Okay, I had lost the sorcerer. I glanced down at the cloth in my hand. The amulet I’d severed from his neck and retrieved from his feet glimmered with, hopefully, a source of his power. Planning had afforded me an edge. Whether it would be enough remained to be seen.
A high-pitched screech and the stench of manure dispelled my brief illusion as I glanced over my shoulder. Assaulted by a scorching breeze and a metallic whine, I winced at the sight of black claws the size of large combine blades tearing open the wall. Red, glistening eyes surrounded by iridescent black scales stared at me from behind a shiny, twelve-foot beak. The room’s jerking motion brought me face-to-face with the huge beast.
Too close. I refused to go as a dragon’s appetizer. Trying for backward movement, I slipped on the bloody floor, almost out of reach of the claws. One tip nicked through my jeans to my thigh. The jagged rush of pain hurt like a son of a bitch, but it was great for my focus. I tipped a candle on the altar, then ripped the ignited cloth from the table and swung the flaming mess at the creature. He backed away, one eye on me while the other swept the room.
The independently functioning eyes brought a new definition to creepy. It also gave the creature better odds. Not that he needed better odds.
Claws swept aside the steel table with the dead boy. With a leap, I slammed against the other table. The momentum shoved me, with the remaining boy, to the opposite side of the platform and through the door.
I grabbed the kid around his waist seconds before the table tipped over the edge of the platform and plummeted to the warehouse floor some four stories below. Hefting him over my shoulder, I raced along the catwalk toward a freight elevator now visible at the far wall of the warehouse. The hard beat of leather wings, a gust of hot breath, and an earsplitting screech followed me. Flame dusted the backs of my legs as I slammed the elevator door shut and pressed the Start button. Airy and constructed of metal slats with a solid floor, the elevator wasn’t anyone’s idea of salvation, but it moved. Slow and steady, it chugged along inside the steel-columned tube.
The talons followed me, grasping the outside of the shaft as the elevator descended. Luckily, the steel bars of the shaft deterred the claws from gaining purchase on my car. Our slow progress also bought me time to rip off my T-shirt and tear off strips to bind the boy’s open wounds.
The kid was alive, but he would bleed out if I didn’t get him to safety. He needed time, and I couldn’t count on Chaz or any of Shalim’s crew to get here fast enough or have the motivation to help me. My priorities were shifting from minute to minute since the sorcerer had made his escape, leaving behind one pissed-as-hell beast and me with one unconscious kid.
Said clever beast had managed to work at the opening at the bottom of the elevator shaft, enough to fit its can-opener beak inside the shaft’s base.
I hit the Stop button at the second-level exit. A small covered alcove shielded this exit from the walkway and from direct view of the warehouse. It wasn’t going to fool the dragon for long.
I had seen a fair number of creatures conjured from the bowels of hell. My preference wasn’t to tackle this black-clawed, scale-beaked, and fire-breathing concoction without demonic backup. Chaz would get here, sometime. I hoped.
The elevator shaft around me rattled hard enough I dropped to my knees. My big pet had decided on the higher ground, shaking the elevator shaft above my alcove. Unfortunately, we could see each other.
Okay. Help wouldn’t get here fast enough—time for Plan B. I moved the boy to the farthest corner and reached into my jeans pocket for the amulet. The disc fit in my palm with uncomfortable familiarity.
Dark magic vibrated from the gold. I could feel it pulse and thrum, stimulating nauseous bile in my throat. The thing about evil is that it’s infectious. Not the magic itself, rather the hold it takes on your soul. No soul is p
ure enough to tune out the call. However, giving in is usually a choice. No matter how strong the pull, there should be an option of freewill. This amulet stripped one of freewill. It would strip the will from me as it had stripped it from the creature. His spirit, now embedded in the object, forced compliance to the command of the amulet’s owner.
Bad situation and I’m not without compassion. Though not being the object of ravenous rage comes first in my priorities.
A strong tempting pull issued from the enchantment within the golden disc. While I wasn’t bound by its spell, the big lizard boy on the outside of the elevator cage was. I met his angry glare and held the amulet up by the broken chain. One red eye fixed on the glittering gold. With a scream, he shook the cage again and watched me without blinking.
I took the risk. Releasing the door, I left the elevator, cleared the alcove, and moved farther out on the catwalk. I faced the monster, amulet suspended in my hand, and maintained the connection of my gaze to its blood-red one.
He let out a phlegmy rattle and a stench so strong I covered my nose and mouth with one arm to keep from choking on the noxious fumes. My other hand moved the amulet. Like a pendulum, the heavy weight swung from left to right without further impetus from me. The creature’s head followed in a mimic of the motion. The beak swayed closer to my hand, the head twitched, and a cluck issued from deep in its throat, its focus on my hand unnerving.
“Go fetch.” I swung back my arm and pivoted, flinging the amulet toward the middle of the warehouse. The gold glittered through the shards of silver moonlight and disappeared with a clatter as the amulet bounced between crates onto the warehouse floor.
The creature flapped its wings, struggling to launch. Talons skimmed the top of my head as it pursued, desperate to catch the object of torture. A large crash echoed from its landing, followed by splinters of crates and boxes spraying in a path of destruction as it searched.
That should give me a minute or, with luck, two.