by Karen Lynch
If I didn’t find her first.
* * *
“No luck?”
I shook my head as I walked into the safe house control room. “They were there two days ago. Garrett told me Sara sold him some very nice diamonds in exchange for cash and weapons. Roland was with her.”
Chris spun in his chair to face me. “Where did Sara get diamonds, and how the hell does she know someone like Leo Garrett?”
“I don’t know. I’m almost afraid to find out.”
I sank onto a chair and rubbed my eyes. “Garrett’s main business is gun running, but his hobby is fencing fine art and jewels. He said a mutual business acquaintance introduced him to Sara, and that she was quite the businesswoman. He wouldn’t tell me how much money or diamonds were exchanged, but he said both parties were happy with the deal.”
Chris stared at me. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“You and me both.”
He blew out a puff of air. “I take it Garrett didn’t know where Sara and Roland are.”
“He said he didn’t, but who knows with a man like that. I asked Dax to look into him and see if he can find something to lead us to Sara.”
A phone rang. Wayne, who was sitting at another computer, answered it. He wore a puzzled expression when he came over to us.
“Westhorne just got an anonymous call from someone claiming to be a friend. He told them there is a pretty nasty gulak demon in Los Angeles named Draegan, who is running drugs and human slaves. The guy wouldn’t say how he got our private number, but he said we’d want to check it out.”
Chris and I stood at the same time. If there was one thing we hated more than vampires, it was slavers. It didn’t surprise me to hear that a gulak was involved. I’d dealt with enough of their kind to know they thought of humans as nothing more than chattel.
“Where can we find this demon?” I asked.
Wayne grinned. “I’ll tell you on the way. I’m not missing out on this one.”
Instead of riding our bikes, the three of us took one of the Escalades parked in the driveway. Wayne drove us to a tall glass apartment building in West Hollywood.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked him when we entered the pink marble lobby.
Before he could answer, a human security guard called to us from behind a desk. “What’s your business here?”
“We’re here to see Draegan,” I said in a voice that dared him to object.
He looked us over warily and nodded. “Top floor. Apartment 3010.”
An unhappy tagg demon opened the door to Draegan’s apartment as we approached it. The bald, red-skinned demon glared at us over his large nose and waved us inside.
“This night just keeps getting better,” he grumbled as he shut the door and followed us down a short hallway.
The first thing I noticed about the place was it was almost completely white, reminding me of a clean room. It was also trashed. It looked like someone had thrown a party that had gotten out of hand. Way out of hand if the dead ranc demon and two dead gulaks on the floor were any indication.
Down another hallway someone was shouting, but the words were muffled. Based on the deep guttural tone, it was the gulak we had come to see.
Aside from Draegan and the tagg demon, the place appeared to be empty. It looked like Draegan’s guests had taken off when the killing started. The question was, who had done the killing? A rival demon perhaps? Gulaks didn’t have many friends, and they were often engaged in turf wars.
“What happened to his horns?” Chris asked, drawing my attention to the ranc demon that had charred nubs where his horns should be.
“The short one did it.” The tagg demon scowled and bent to pick up an overturned chair. “I knew I smelled something off about her.”
Chris frowned. “Was it another demon?”
The tagg demon snorted. “More like a pair of hellions. But I guess you already knew that or you wouldn’t be here.”
Before I could ask what he meant by his remark, a bellow came from the other end of the apartment.
“Wilhem, you worthless piece of shit! You better not have let anyone else in here tonight or I’m going to wring your fat neck.”
Wilhelm swallowed fearfully. “I-I’m sorry, Draegan. I didn’t have any choice.”
“Like you had no choice when you let those two bitches in here?” Draegan growled. “They killed Crak and Lorne and cheated me. Cheated me! No one steals from me and gets away with it. When I find those two, they’ll wish they’d never heard my name.”
“Um, Draegan,” Wilhelm stammered, glancing nervously at us. “You have guests. You might want to –”
“Get rid of them,” the gulak roared, his voice coming closer. “I’m busy. Do you know how much I could have gotten for that blood contract? That little bitch owes me big.”
Something that sounded like a fist slammed into a wall, and then the gulak thundered into the room. Ignoring us, he picked up a curved blade from a table and strapped it to his waist.
A gravelly laugh rumbled from him. “I can’t wait to get my hands on her. She’ll pay me back every cent in my bed. And when I’m done with her, I’ll sell her to Rhys. He prefers humans, but he won’t pass up a chance to sample some young Mohiri flesh.”
Blood began to roar in my ears as a growl tore from my throat. Someone said my name, but it sounded far off. All I could see and hear was the gulak demon who would dare touch my mate. I was going to rip the forked tongue from his mouth for the things he’d said about her.
Draegan stared at me with a mix of anger and surprise. “Who the hell are you?”
The tagg demon said something that made Draegan’s scaly face turn a sickly gray. He snatched up a long curved sword and bared his teeth at me.
“That bitch…girl came in here and tore up my place,” he yelled, backing into the living room. “I didn’t touch a hair on her head. Tell him, Wilhelm.”
I stalked him. Wilhelm said something, but I’d blocked out everything except the gulak. His words about what he’d planned to do to Sara were stuck on replay in my head, and each time I heard them my body shook from the rage threatening to consume me.
Draegan’s legs hit the couch, and he maneuvered around it, never taking his lizard-like eyes from me as I advanced on him. I noticed vaguely that my vision had turned the white room the color of watered-down blood.
Metal flashed. I didn’t remember drawing my own sword, but it rose to meet Draegan’s blade in a shower of sparks.
He staggered backward from the blow, pain flashing across his face. He might be stronger than every other demon he knew, but brute force would not save him this time.
I struck before he could recover, stripping the scales from his left arm.
He bellowed and swung wildly at me. I deflected it easily and nicked his thigh, then his chest, then his ear. Each cut drew another roar of pain from him and sent droplets of black demon blood across the once pristine room.
He panted heavily, but I pushed him relentlessly, wanting him to suffer for every vile thought he’d had about Sara, wanting him to know exactly who was going to end him.
“I have money, jewels, weapons. Take them all,” he cried desperately as his strength began to wane. “I was angry about my men. I never meant to hurt the girl. I swear.”
“My mate,” I snarled, low and deadly.
“Mate?” he croaked. His eyes darted around the room, but there was no escape for him.
He let out a roar and threw his sword at me. I sidestepped it, and it sank into the wall behind me.
In the next instant, Draegan spun and ran toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, his leathery wings unfurling behind him.
My knife buried itself to the hilt in the gulak’s back, pinning one of his wings securely to his body. He flailed and tried to stop his forward rush. Too late.
Glass shattered outward as he flew through the window. The good wing flapped uselessly for a second, and then he was gone. His scream followed hi
m down, ending abruptly when he met the ground.
No one in the apartment moved for several minutes. The roaring in my ears receded, my body stopped trembling, and the room turned white again.
It wasn’t until I lowered my sword and walked to the window to look down at what was left of Draegan that Chris came over to stand beside me.
“You okay?” he asked over the wind whistling through the broken window.
I nodded stiffly.
He peered at the dark shape in the courtyard far below. “Wayne, we’re going to need a cleanup crew. A big one.”
“On it,” Wayne called from the other side of the apartment.
Chris looked at me. “I guess that’s one way to work off some of that pent-up aggression.”
I scowled, and he held up his hands. “Hey, you haven’t exactly been Mr. Congeniality for the last week.”
“With good reason.”
His hands lowered. “I know.”
I stared at the sea of lights, and felt a moment of despair. Sara was out there somewhere, and I didn’t know what she was doing or if she was safe. Los Angeles was a cesspool of vampire and demon activity. How long did we have before she and her friends ran into another Draegan or Price? How long before they found themselves in a situation they couldn’t fight their way out of?
“I have to find her, Chris.”
“We will.” He looked around the apartment. “What were Sara and Jordan doing in a place like this?”
I inclined my head at the tagg demon, who hadn’t moved from his spot. “Maybe he knows.”
Chris walked over to the demon. “Can you tell us why the two Mohiri girls came to see Draegan?”
Wilhelm gave a jerky nod. “The dark-haired one told me she was here about a debt. Draegan said it was a blood debt.”
“Blood debt? Whose?” Khristu. Sara, what are you mixed up in?
“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
Chris pointed to the three dead demons. “What happened to them?”
Wilhelm’s gaze flitted nervously to me as if he was afraid I’d blame him for whatever had gone down earlier tonight. “Draegan passed out from the Glaen, and –”
“Glaen?” Chris and I said together.
Why would a demon touch a Fae drink? It was poison to them.
“It’s a game some demons like to play,” Wilhelm explained. “They drink shots of Glaen until one passes out. The girl played Draegan for the blood debt. No one’s ever beaten Draegan, and Crak and Lorne didn’t take it too well. They tried to stop the two girls from leaving, and you can see how that worked out.”
I looked around and my gaze fell on a crystal decanter on a side board, containing a luminescent white liquid. Sara had duped a gulak demon into a drinking contest he couldn’t possibly win. And no one could have known she was half Fae and immune to the stuff.
Glaen. Jesus. If I wasn’t still wound up from my fight with Draegan, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it all.
Wilhelm cleared his throat. “What are you going to do with me?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. You can leave after you help us sort out a few things.”
Tagg demons were not aggressive, and they were vegetarians for the most part. Most of them ended up working as servants for other demons. Certainly nothing that deserved a death sentence.
He let out a deep breath. “I’ll help however I can, sir.”
“We’ll bring in some people to go through Draegan’s files. You can assist them. Any money you find here is yours as payment for your services.”
“Yes, sir!”
The way his eyes lit up told me his former employer kept a substantial amount of money on hand. I didn’t care. It wasn’t like we needed it.
“Who was this Rhys Draegan mentioned?” I had a suspicion about what he was, and it was hard for me to say the name without wanting to hit something. The thought of Sara anywhere near one of his kind made bile threaten to rise in my throat.
Wilhelm flinched. “Rhys is an incubus. He and Draegan did business a lot.”
My fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword. I wanted to bring Draegan back so I could kill him all over again. God only knew how many innocent human girls he had sold to the incubus, or what horrors they had suffered before they died.
“Do you know where I can find this incubus?” I could no longer take my anger out on the gulak, but I would rid the world of his incubus friend. Draegan wasn’t the only demon getting a house call from me tonight.
Chapter 30
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been impaled through the gut by a bloody spear,” I grumbled, rubbing my hand over my stomach. The bandage had come off two hours ago, and the wound already looked a week old, but it still hurt like hell. I reached for the can of gunna paste on the coffee table.
Tristan’s chuckle came out of the phone. “You’re on the mend, all right. Although, Chris told me he almost called for a healer.”
I swallowed some paste and scowled at the ceiling. “Chris is as fussy as an old nursemaid.”
“He was worried about you. We all were.”
“Thanks, but you can stop now.”
To prove my point, I sat up, stifling a groan as the movement pulled at my sore stomach muscles. Son of a bitch. I planted my feet on the floor and leaned back against the couch cushion, waiting for the gunna paste to do its job.
Tristan’s voice grew serious. “I don’t remember the last time you were injured this badly. You need to be more careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“Not last night. You went in there distracted and nearly got killed.”
I started to argue, but he cut me off. “Chris told me what happened with the gulak. You should have taken more time to cool down from your rage before you went after the incubus.”
He was probably right, but I was glad I’d gone after Rhys when I had. If I’d waited until today, the human girls he’d been feeding off would have been dead. Two human lives were worth a few hours of pain. So was seeing that bastard’s lifeless eyes after I’d killed him.
If I’d been thinking clearly instead of being so focused on taking out the incubus, I would have noticed the booby traps he’d set up in his lair. I was carrying one of the girls through the living room when I heard a click and a whirring sound. It was sheer luck that the spear hit me and not the girl. A few inches higher and she would have been killed.
“Here’s something that might improve your mood. Nate and I talked to Sara this afternoon, and she sounded tired but good.”
“She’s okay?”
I sat up straighter, ignoring the pain in my stomach. She hadn’t called last night or today, and I’d been scared something had happened to her after she left Draegan’s. Or that she’d been hurt in the fight at his apartment. I’d gotten so used to her calling every night. Not hearing from her left me unsettled. That was the reason I’d been distracted when I got to the incubus’s place.
“She’s fine. She said she knew we’d be upset if she didn’t call today.”
I racked my brain, trying to remember the date. I’d lost track of the days since I left Westhorne. “What’s special about today?”
He let out a laugh. “Oh, my friend, you are a mess. How could you have forgotten Sara’s birthday?”
I stared hard at the far wall as I worked through the days in my head. “It’s her eighteenth birthday.”
Eighteen was a special age for us because it marked our transition into adulthood. It was also the age when most of us became warriors. Before the awful thing with Nate and the attack on Westhorne, I’d planned to take Sara to town for a special birthday dinner, just the two of us.
Regret pricked my chest. I’d be with her right now for her birthday if I hadn’t driven her away.
“You’re sure she’s okay?”
“Yes, from what I could hear. We tried to get her to tell us where she is, but she still won’t say.” He paused, and I heard him take a breath. “Have y
ou heard about Orias?”
“What about him?”
“I just got word his place was attacked by vampires last night.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “Was it payback for Stefan Price?”
“They were asking about the girl who killed him. No one could tell them who she was so they destroyed the place and started killing. I heard Orias killed two vampires, but he couldn’t save his receptionist. She and two vrell demons were killed. Orias got away.”
I swore and got to my feet. “Paulina was the one who told us Sara might be in Los Angeles. If she told the vampires that, they could be on their way here. I have to find Sara before they do.”
“Jesus.” It took him a moment to continue. “I’ll call the San Diego team and have them head to LA to help with the search.”
“Good. Tell them to let me know when they get here. I’m headed out now to start looking again.”
“Are you well enough to go out?” he asked in a concerned voice.
“Yes. I’ve been in worse shape.” I’d been down long enough. It would take more than a little stomach pain to keep me in this safe house any longer.
“Be careful out there.”
“I will.”
I looked around the living room for my gear and keys, but they were nowhere in sight. I was sure I’d left them here last night before we went to Draegan’s.
The door to the control room opened, and Chris came out, holding his phone. He walked over and held it out to me.
I gave him a questioning look, but he said nothing. As soon as I took the phone from him, he left the room.
Scowling, I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hi.”
My heart thudded.
“Sara,” I breathed, almost afraid I’d imagined her voice. In the next instant, alarm shot through me. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”
“Chris?” she asked, sounding confused.
“The gulak demon.” I clenched my free hand into a fist at the thought of Draegan or one of his cronies laying a hand on her.
“He didn’t touch me.”
My body relaxed. “You didn’t call last night. I didn’t know what to think.”