Demon Unbound

by Jenn Stark

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Other Books by Jenn Stark

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Demon Forsaken

  Acknowledgments

  About Jenn Stark

  Demon Unbound

  Demon Enforcers, Book 1

  JENN STARK

  Copyright © 2018 by Jenn Stark

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943768-36-3

  Cover design and Formatting by Spark Creative Partners

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase/Download only authorized editions.

  Other Books by Jenn Stark

  The Demon Enforcers Series

  Demon Forsaken - coming July, 2018

  The Immortal Vegas Series

  Getting Wilde

  Wilde Card

  Born To Be Wilde

  Wicked And Wilde

  Aces Wilde

  Forever Wilde

  Wilde Child

  Call of the Wilde

  Running Wilde

  Wilde Fire

  One Wilde Night (prequel novella)

  For Linda,

  Who helped me shine the light.

  Chapter One

  “Welcome to be-a-utiful Acapulco!” The game show announcer’s self-satisfied voice crackled in the hot, humid darkness, barely audible above the rap music that cranked out over the now-empty beach. Along this stretch of sand, however, no one sang, no one danced. The scent of blood hung heavy on the air, thick enough to taste.

  Demons had been here, Warrick knew. Demons who’d murdered God’s children.

  So, of course, Warrick and the Syx were here too.

  “Shut off your phone,” he snapped at Finn. “If I can hear it, so can they.”

  Warrick stood evenly balanced on both feet, fists clenched, head cocked, as if he could smell the very night to find what he sought. Which, of course, he could. Every demon horde had its own particular stench, and Warrick had already come to know the Fuerza Negra’s too well.

  “It’s not like they don’t already know we’re here.” Finn, the Syx’s youngest and newest member—which still put his age at right around six thousand years—crouched beside Warrick. He smirked as he pocketed his phone, then stood as well. With one thick-soled boot, he toed aside the spent rounds of ammo that littered the beach. “Looks like they’ve been busy too. Normally, we just have claw marks to go on.”

  “Raum?”

  The third member of their team stepped forward, his face as bleak as winter, his eyes distant. Of all of them, Raum was the best at identifying the dead. He’d also always felt the weight of his sin the heaviest. But they’d each come to their present roles through their own disgrace, each with their own burdens to carry.

  “Seven killed,” Raum said, in a voice that had once made angels weep for its loss. “All males. All human.”

  “Seven.” Warrick scanned the barren coastline. “I thought you said this cartel left their kill behind as a message.”

  “That’s their standard MO, yup,” Finn agreed reasonably enough. “Up to now, though, we haven’t been the ones getting the message. They may be trying to hide.”

  “Or they’re making a stand,” Raum offered.

  Warrick growled, the sound rolling dangerously over the quiet beach. “That’d be a bad idea.”

  Demons had lurked among humanity since the dawn of creation, the ragged remains of Fallen angels who’d been cursed by God for their sins. Most of them, however, were smart enough to stay hidden. If they kept to the shadows, they could survive—some even thrive—cheek to jowl with the sort of despicable humans who could give them a run for their money in a race to the bottom. Those demons spent their twisted existence on the fringes of society, victims of their own insatiable habits.

  There was a catch, however. Demons couldn’t kill a human, couldn’t even harm one of God’s children, and expect to avoid His divine wrath. That was where Warrick and the Syx came in.

  Though they were themselves demons who’d been damned beyond the veil for their own sins, trapped in a bolt-hole created at the fall of Atlantis, Warrick’s crew of enforcers had earned some measure of reprieve from their condemnation through their ability to rout out the worst of their kind. They’d spent millennia at the beck and call of humans who cried out for their aid. Now, that aid was in epically high demand, for two very good reasons:

  One, it took a demon to banish a demon, and nobody was better at it than Warrick and the Syx.

  And two, a shit ton of the bastards had just been set free to roam the earth. Again.

  Not since before the fall of Atlantis had the world teemed with so many of the damned. Warrick had felt their return like a physical blow, a howling in his bones. But so far, this new influx of demons hadn’t bubbled up to the top of the Syx’s hit list.

  The Fuerza Negra had.

  “Four women were with the male victims,” Stefan said, his voice floating through the darkness, rich and indolent. He didn’t mean to sound like a hustler on the make, but old habits died hard. And of all of them, Stefan was most attuned to the females of God’s chosen. He could beguile and be beguiled by them in equal measure.

  “Not dead,” Stefan continued. “Not hurt, at least not much. Scared, though. They know they will be hurt, probably killed, but they are brave.” He sighed. “Very brave. They have expected such a death all their lives.”

  “How long ago?” Hostages, then. Distractions. The Fuerza Negra were making a stand, even after the Syx had been called. They had to know the reputation of Warrick’s team—all demons did. And still they stood fast. Challenging Warrick. Disrespecting him.

  Warrick felt the familiar fury lick through him. He had old habits too. And he wasn’t about to let them die.

  “A half hour. No more.” Stefan turned toward the music, frowning. “Something’s not right, though. The research we’ve done—the Fuerza Negra cartel does its work and leaves, going to ground before the guns stop smoking. That’s not what happened here.”

  Finn snorted. “If we’d been tapped earlier, it wouldn’t have happened at all. Everyone waits until the last second, and by then, it’s too late. Stupid.”

  The demon’s phone was back in his hand. Since the Syx had been unexpectedly pulled free of their prison beyond the veil most recently, Finn had immersed himself in the technology of the current time. Before, they’d never been on this plane long enough to explore the technology of the era. Now Finn couldn’t let the small device out of his sight.

  But phones
had nothing to do with the summoning of the Syx. That was a call in the blood, their bodies wrenched out of wherever they were holed up, their spirits bound to answer, however many the job required. For this task, on this beach, only four of them had been considered necessary, four of them dropped into the heart of this godforsaken—

  “Welcome to be-a-utiful Acapulco!” Finn’s phone chimed again.

  Warrick hummed another warning, certain Finn was triggering the thing himself, but he kept his eyes on Stefan. “What is it?”

  “They’re still in there. The women. They—” He scowled, glancing back to Warrick. “They’re being held. Drugged, now. Put on display.”

  “Maybe they figure we won’t strike with so many humans around,” Finn put in. “Social media puts this party as a gig of Manuel Duarte’s. According to what I’m reading, you get invited by Manuel, you’d best plan on coming to the party. You don’t show up, it’s a slam that he and his boys don’t overlook. This time, though, I’m thinking Manuel should’ve double-checked the guest list.”

  “They invited the Fuerza Negra.” Warrick was facing the hotel now too, its doors flung wide, bright light spilling out into half-moons on the sand.

  “Yup.” Finn nodded. “Someone apparently got cocky. Then someone got dead.”

  “Finn.” Raum’s voice was soft. “Respect for God’s beloved.”

  “I know what they are,” Finn shot back, his words now clipped, though his easy smile never wavered. “I was beloved once too. We all were.”

  “Where are the women?” Warrick asked Stefan.

  “Where you’d expect bait to be,” Stefan said grimly, pointing to the bright lights of the hotel. “In cages above the dance floor, each with a claw around her throat. We go in, they die. We stay here, they die. It’s all the same to the Fuerza Negra.”

  “Three hundred people are packed onto that dance floor, my brother,” Finn said, scrolling through his phone. “Dancing like there’s no tomorrow.” He cocked a glance up to Warrick. “We go?”

  “We go,” Warrick said, the usual heat spreading through him hard and fast. “And not alone. Summon Hugh and Gregori…right into two of those cages, I’m thinking.”

  Finn grinned. “It’ll be a tight fit.”

  “They won’t be there that long.”

  The youngest of the demon enforcers snickered, and a second later, his phone’s tinny speaker flared again to life. “Welcome to be-a-utiful—”

  The grab happened so quickly, Finn barely had time to blink. Warrick wrenched his phone away and crushed it into sparkling shards, dropping it to the ground like so much sand.

  Then, silently, they all started running toward the bright lights and music.

  The hand on Maria Santos’s arm was thick, heavy. It squeezed with the kind of coiled-up violence that’d always meant trouble, long before she’d become an undercover cop for the LAPD. In this dump of a strip club deep in south Compton, that trouble could be anything, but Maria had no doubt about what had Pablo so keyed up tonight. After five months of infiltrating the Guardia gang, Maria’s test to become its newest member was finally here.

  Pablo’s eager words confirmed it. “C’mon. The lieutenant’s ready for you.”

  The second newest member of the Guardia, Pablo was barely twenty, all arms and legs and manic nerves. He tried to play it cool, but there was no missing the excitement in his voice, the blood lust. They’d picked someone for Maria to kill. She’d have to make it look good too, if she wanted to remain in place on this op. It was either that or consent to something far worse. And while she loved her job with the LAPD, she didn’t love it that much.

  There’d be a hell of a lot of paperwork to process for discharging a weapon, though, despite the number of times they’d gone over it in advance, or how many approvals she’d gotten. It’d be worse if the Guardia didn’t give Maria some dirtbag to shoot, but instead a civilian. That had been her biggest dread on this job from the beginning. Not getting killed. Not even getting raped, though she had a healthy fear of that with these assholes. But being asked to prove herself by taking a shot at some innocent bystander? Maria steeled herself for that, knew it was coming. Because it’d be exactly like the lieutenant of the Guardia to do that to her.

  “Move it.” Pablo’s voice kicked up a notch, his excitement palpable.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Maria peered past the thug’s shoulder and into the darkness of the back room, where she was pretty sure associates of her primary target were holed up, that target being Takio Soldaro, head of the gang for which the Guardia served as production hub—pulling in supplies, cooking drugs. A gang that made the Guardia look like a bunch of Cub Scouts. Takio was the whole point of this op, and Maria was so close—so damned close to nailing him. So close, after fifteen years of waiting.

  From all she’d seen during the past four months, Takio and his goons rarely emerged from the hellhole that she and the other members of her police squad called the Citadel, four cinderblock-apartment high-rises that were proud to lay claim to one of the darkest patches of south Compton. Takio’s top lieutenants worked almost nonstop, rumor had it, cooking something special inside those walls that Maria was desperate to uncover—some new strain of drug that she was sure would spiral the world even faster down the drain.

  When Takio and his men did crawl out of their pit, though, it was to check out the wares at this club.

  According to the whispers of the dancers, Takio liked his women soft, pliable, and above all, ghostly pale. So that avenue was out. No amount of cosmetics would take away Maria’s dark features and muscular build. Most of the time, she had no problem with that. But when it came to taking down a bastard like Takio, it would’ve been a lot easier if she looked the part of one of the spun-sugar playthings that tripped his dick.

  She’d done her best, though, with what she had to work with. Takio might like them young and blonde, but the lieutenants of the gang that served as his secondary muscle didn’t so much care. After a quick recon of the Guardia’s top personnel, she’d latched on to Jack—a one-time thug but currently more the brains of the operation. Three days earlier, however, Jack had been taken into protective custody, part of the longer-term sting that would place Maria at the heart of the Guardia operation. Without him, phase two of the operation could swing into gear.

  Maria couldn’t walk away from the gang, after all. She knew and had seen too much. That meant she could either hook up with another gang member, or officially become one of them.

  She’d immediately chosen the latter. All of it part of the plan.

  But the plan could go sideways in a heartbeat, depending on who they had waiting for her to shoot tonight.

  Maria and Pablo moved casually down the hallway, the throbbing beat of the house music shaking the walls. The gold cross hanging in the hollow of her neck seemed to burn against her skin. It wasn’t hers, of course. But it had brought her here.

  Even as a little girl, Maria had never had much reason to believe in God. However, Cara, her cousin, had not only believed in Him, she’d believed that if someone pure and true begged it of Him, He would come and save Cara, no matter her own sins. And it’d been Cara who’d pressed the necklace into Maria’s hand, beautiful Cara, wild-eyed and dying on the broken asphalt of the 7-Eleven parking lot, in her soft flowered dress and black patent leather Mary Janes, the hummingbird tattoo on her collarbone fluttering as frantically as her heart had been. She’d begged Maria to call on divine aid to save her—save her or find her killer right then, that night, that moment, because she did not deserve to beg God herself. But Maria, ten years old and nearly hysterical with fear, hadn’t understood a word her older cousin had been saying. That night, Maria could do no more than hold Cara close, her own hands wet with blood as Cara had whispered deliriously of the terrible truths that God had shown her. Truths only she could see… truths that had gotten her killed.

  No, Maria hadn’t turned to God that night or any night after. Because even at the age of ten, Maria had know
n that God didn’t give a shit about people like her and her cousin. God couldn’t save her cousin from a knife wound to the abdomen. He couldn’t make the blood go away. He couldn’t ease the guilt Maria carried with her for not doing enough to protect Cara, either. No one could do that.

  Instead, Maria had waited, watched. And above all, she’d forced herself to get stronger. She’d run. Lifted weights made out of bricks or milk bottles filled with sand. Picked fights with kids bigger than her. She’d even tried trolling the gangs, and those run-ins had left both permanent scars and lasting lessons. Eventually, she’d grown up and gotten out of Compton, become a cop far north of the heart of the city, done her time. And all the while, she’d tracked La Noche, Takio Soldaro’s gang, her cousin’s killers. She’d watched them for fifteen years, until she knew everything about them and was in a position to do something about it. When the undercover job in her hometown neighborhood had come up, as she’d known it one day would—she was more than ready to take it.

  And she was so close.

  Maybe now, she’d be able to finally get justice for Cara…maybe now, the nightmares would stop.

  Maybe.

  Pablo stepped aside, then shoved Maria into the room, hard enough to send anyone else sprawling. Instead, she took his momentum, went with it, then drew up tight and ready.

  “Maria,” the lieutenant said, nodding to her.

  “Lieutenant Cedo.” Maria kept her expression flat, not betraying her instinctive reaction to the man. Tall and burly, he was just going to fat, but there was enough muscle layered over his frame and enough precision to his manner that she figured he had to have military training. Add to that his endless supply of guns, not all of which were street weapons. Unfortunately, the LAPD couldn’t get a fix on how connected Cedo was because no one knew where he came from. His background had proven impossible to track down. The name Cedo was obviously an alias, but there was something more to Guardia’s top lieutenant, something she couldn’t quite track…something that legitimately unnerved her.