“Listen to me, Jennifer. We will save your son,” Zanos-James said in the tone of a holy oath. He turned his sharp green gaze on Ulf-Mark and me. “Did you recognize that asshole?”
“Yeah,” Paladin said. “He’s a low level Valakan. They call him Tank. Human.”
“Whoever’s driving the car wasn’t,” Ulf-Mark grunted. “Not from the way he was shielding the car. Demi at the very least.”
“Moss saw Tank at Zap a lot. He was a bouncer there. He also bounced at Ringo’s, that joint on Ross Street.”
“I know it.” Zanos-James gave us a sharp nod. “Opal, Rizoel and I will take Ringo’s while you and Ulf-Mark hit Zap. If you don’t see Tank, grab the first Valakan you do see. Rizoel, let the teams know we’ve got a Demi missing. Did you get a useable image of Tank and Dave you can send?”
“Of course.” The bird nodded her head and spread her great wings. Her red eyes began to blaze as if somebody had installed LEDs in her skull. “Sending. Prepare for priority message by order of Zanos-James.” Images slammed into my mind -- Dave fighting Tank, being tossed in the car, then images of the boy, his abductor and the car, shafting between my eyes like an arrow thudding home. Being a familiar, Rizoel excelled in mind magic, which made her the perfect conduit for any message you couldn’t entrust to a cell phone.
“All right.” Zanos-James gave us a decisive nod. “Let’s get that boy back.”
I scooped up Calliope, and strode along through the woods with Opal, Zanos-James, and Ulf-Mark. In contrast with our first trip, we were all quiet, tense with the anticipation of the battle we knew was coming. The Valakans weren’t going to give that boy up without a fight.
We were damned well going to get him back anyway.
Even in my lethal preoccupation, I heard the cheerful music of the Demifair warbling tinny notes. Kids shouted, adults chatted and bartered as someone hammered something metallic in the background. The smell of roasted meat hung over the woods, homey and familiar. Yet there was a strange edge to the night, childhood memories turned to tragedy thanks to the same bastards who’d taken Dave.
This time they weren’t going to get away with it.
These were my people. These were the ones Paladin and I fought every night to protect. He was willing to die for them, and so was I. The thought was terrifying, and yet at the same time it strengthened me.
I wasn’t just a bookstore owner, or the artist who’d won Eris’s contempt. Yes, I was those things, but I was also my parents’ daughter. True, I’d said the words before, but on some level I hadn’t really believed it. Now I did, because I realized I’d fight for Dave and his mother.
I truly was a warrior.
“Of course you are,” Paladin told me.
We reached the parking lot, with its collection of family sedans, pickups, and a scattering of sports cars. Zanos-James turned to us, his gaze solemn. “Good hunting.”
“And to you, Zan,” Paladin replied. Opal nodded, a respectful tip of the chin to the two gods, then turned to follow Zanos-James to his pickup.
“Here’s ours,” Paladin said, starting toward the neon blue Kia.
Ulf-Mark eyed it dubiously. “Let’s take mine. That thing is an embarrassment.”
Paladin grinned. “Summer’s Aunt Mary bought it for her. I think she did it deliberately.”
Ulf-Mark snorted. “Mary always did have an evil sense of humor.”
I blinked, suddenly looking at the car in a new light. My aunt knew about Paladin, of course. She’d just never said anything about him to me, likely on his orders. One did not disobey a god, even if he inhabited your adopted child.
I wondered suddenly how she’d felt about my inheriting him. It was a weird situation. She’d been older than my mother, but Paladin had chosen Mom over her. That was bad enough, but to find herself saddled with me, knowing that if Valak hunted me down, she could wind up in the crosshairs with me…
“She loved you, Summer,” Paladin told me. “She wasn’t all that fond of me, but she loved you. Never think otherwise. And yes, she knew Valak might come after us, but she was ready to fight for you as if you were her own child. To Mary, you were.”
My eyes stung, and I blinked hard against the grief that suddenly felt as fresh as if Mary had died yesterday instead of three years ago.
We followed Ulf-Mark across the gravel parking lot to his sleek black Ford Mustang, which looked like a speeding ticket waiting to happen. It beeped as he unlocked it with his key fob, and I started to get in on the passenger side, Calliope in my arms.
“Wait a minute,” the cat said. “There’s something I need to do.” She gathered herself, which I recognized as a signal she wanted to get down. I obediently dropped her.
Calliope began to change before her paws even hit the ground. Her body stretched, elongating and expanding, her outline dissolving into a brilliant magical sparkle. When the effect faded, a fifty-pound mini-panther crouched at my feet.
I jumped back. “What the fuck?”
Cal’s blue eyes flashed up at me. “Do you honestly think Paladin would have made me your bodyguard if all I could do was chase canaries?”
“But you didn’t shift when those Valakan thugs jumped us!”
She snorted and sat back on muscular haunches. “Paladin was still firmly in the closet. He’d have turned my ass into a throw rug if I’d outed him.”
“Pretty much,” Paladin agreed.
“Good point.” I opened the coupe’s front passenger door, groped for the handle to flip the seat forward, and watched her worm into what passed for the back seat.
“Don’t you have any friends, Ulf?” Cal bitched. “A hamster would need a shoe-horn to fit back here.”
“My friends trend toward female,” he drawled. “And I ride with one at a time.”
“You never did have any imagination.”
“Barbara never complained.” He shut his mouth with a snap, apparently realizing a little too late that bringing up my dead mother was a great way to kill the conversation. Shaking his head, he started the car, which gave a leonine roar and slung gravel on the way out of the parking lot.
As the Ford’s tires hummed over the pavement, my thoughts went back to Dave. The kid must be terrified. “How long do you think we have before they start doing…” I gestured, grimacing. “Whatever they’re planning to do to him?”
“If we can get him back before the end of the night, he should be all right,” Paladin said, my voice dropping as he spoke, just as my mother’s had before me.
Then the implications hit me, and I grimaced. If we failed to find Dave…
We drove through the darkness, the car’s headlights sweeping over the moonlit woods to either side. There was no sound except for the Mustang’s feral growl. Paladin’s consciousness radiated a cold, predatory intensity, an emotion I wasn’t used to feeling from him.
“Of course not. I’ve never taken you hunting before.”
“What if I fuck up and get both of us killed?”
“You won’t. You handled yourself pretty well in that fight with those six men in the parking lot.”
“Yeah, but I got my ass handed to me when I went up against Valak.”
“You still survived, Summer. Anyway, your body is a combat veteran even if your mind isn’t. And I sure as hell am.”
Mark spoke up suddenly, his voice a little higher than Ulf’s usual growl. “I was nervous too, the first time we went into battle. Then Ulf took over, and all I had to do was sit back and watch the ass kicking.”
I glanced over at him and asked dryly, “You’re reading minds now, Mark?”
“Nope, I just know all your tells. As I damned well should, since Ulf changed your diapers.” He wrinkled his nose. “Which, considering I just asked you out, makes me feel a little pervy.”
I laughed, only to break off as I remembered what Paladin and I had done immediately afterward. Speaking of pervy…
Not thinking about that, I told myself firmly. At all.
Zap was a
long low one-story building located on a street packed with restaurants and shops. A crowd had lined up outside the club waiting to get in. As we slowly drove past, Paladin searched the crowd with his magical senses.
Ulf-Mark frowned. “I’m not sensing anybody with magic at all. You?”
“Nothing,” Paladin said. “But I’m not surprised. Zanos-James was probably right about them realizing I’d killed their pet serial murderer.”
“Even if they hadn’t, this is a bit too public a place to take a kidnap victim,” Calliope commented from the back, her voice sounded deeper than usual, given her bigger body. “Some good Samaritan would call 911.”
“Couldn’t they just shield him?” I asked.
“Yeah, but most of the Valakans don’t have the juice to keep me from sensing them,” Paladin said. “Valak or his elder priests might be able to, but not anyone with less power.” He frowned. “Let me search Moss’s memories, see if there are any other possibilities.”
I grimaced in distaste as he picked through the mental sewage that was the dead thug’s memories. Finally an image floated to the surface, and Paladin locked onto it. “There’s a warehouse they use, over on Industrial Avenue.”
“Yeah, I think I know the one you mean. Used to be Bomar Manufacturing, right?”
“That’s the one.”
“Uh.” A contemplative silence ensued before Ulf-Mark observed, “Strikes me it would also make a dandy place for a trap.”
“If they’re there, it probably is a trap. But unless they’ve got a hell of a lot of manpower, it won’t do the bastards any good against the two of us.” And if the Valakans did have enough manpower -- or priests with the juice to do the job -- Paladin would be able to sense them.
“Unless it’s Valak himself,” I pointed out.
“We don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, either way,” Calliope replied, hanging her big black muzzle over my shoulder. “They’ve got the boy. If we don’t get him back, they’ll wipe his mind so one of their bastard gods can seize control of him.”
“But he’s only fifteen. Wouldn’t that burn out the body?”
“Depends on who they put in it,” Paladin said. “Somebody with my power level, yeah. A low-level godling in a body without that much talent might consider the kid a trade up.”
“Either way, Dave is just as dead,” Ulf-Mark said grimly.
I remembered the boy’s incandescent joy when I’d presented him with that Vampire Nighthawk Magic card I’d found at a flea market. Then there were those fun nerd arguments, like who’d win a fight, Batman or Superman, or who was the better Enterprise captain, Kirk or Picard. Sometimes I took the opposite position just for the pleasure of listening to his passionate arguments. He was just so bright and funny.
And those bastards intended to snuff out his humor, intelligence and joy. His loss would gut his mother. Though I’d never been a parent, I knew all too well the agony of losing those you loved.
What’s more, the same fucker was responsible. I’d be goddamned if Valak was going to get away with it. Not this time.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“We’re going to kill him,” Paladin corrected coolly.
Valak had destroyed my life. It was time I returned the favor.
Chapter Eleven
Up until the Nineties, Graven had been a textile town, as so many in the South had been. Then the entire industry had pulled up stakes and headed to China, leaving the city gutted of jobs and hope. But in the past decade, manufacturing had begun to trickle back into the town as auto manufacturers discovered the South’s low wages and nonunion work force.
Those businesses tended to locate out beyond the city limits, where property and taxes were cheaper. The city’s industrial heart had been left to fall into decay, helped along by vandalism and arson. Nothing burned like a textile mill; airborne cotton dust is almost as explosive as gunpowder.
Once the old warehouse had been filled with thousands of bales of locally manufactured fabric. Now its windows were boarded up and sprayed with gang tags.
We drove past the warehouse in eerie silence, thanks to the shielding spell Paladin had cast to mute the sound of the Mustang’s distinctive rumble.
“Yeah, they’re in there,” Paladin said. “I can feel them.”
“How many?” Ulf-Mark asked. “I make fifteen.”
“Yeah, that’s about right. One higher-level priest. The kid’s not there, though.”
I felt my stomach knot. “How the hell are we going to find Dave?”
Paladin’s grin stretched my lips. The expression felt more than a little vicious. “I’ll just grab one and jerk the information out of his skull while I kill his ass.”
Ulf-Mark parked the car around the corner in an alley, close enough that we could get to it quickly in the unlikely event something chased us.
It was more likely we’d be chasing one of the Valakans.
I opened the door and got out, flipping the seat down for Calliope. She leaped out, soundless as a feather. Ulf-Mark joined us, and we ghosted out of the alley and back around the corner to the warehouse.
Paladin led the way to a fire escape Moss remembered as a possible way in. He gestured up its rusting length to cast a muting spell before reaching up to pull the ladder down. Encased in Paladin’s magic, the fire escape descended smoothly instead of shrieking and rattling.
Calliope scrambled up, paws hooking over the rungs, me at her furry heels. I’d be worried the rickety thing would collapse, but Paladin’s spell reinforced the rusted steel.
Reaching the top, we scrambled over the parapet and moved quietly across the flat roof to the access door.
It was locked of course, but Paladin traced a spell over the knob. It turned in my grip, and the door swung wide. The corridor beyond was pitch black, and I froze for a moment. He gestured, and it seemed the area ahead of me was lit up by an invisible flashlight.
“They won’t sense us?”
“Not until we’re ready to kick some ass that desperately needs it.”
“Unless Valak is here.”
“Unless, then. In which case, the ass kicking will be a bit more difficult.”
“Just a bit.” My mouth filled with metallic saliva. I clenched shaking hands.
“Shhh.” Paladin spilled calm through my body, quieting my anxiety. My fears slid away, leaving the god in all his icy glory. Ready for combat.
“Yes, I am. Now quiet down, Summer. You’re distracting me.”
No wonder, given the way my mind kept skittering in panic.
“Summer. Shut up.”
How the hell was I supposed to do that? It was one thing to stop talking, but how could I avoid thinking?
“Focus your attention on sensory impressions.” The calm of his mental voice was a sharper admonition than cutting words. “We need to do that anyway.”
I forced myself to stop skittering and focus on the dark stairwell leading downward.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s it exactly.”
His praise gave me a warm glow. I paced down the corridor, the others moving like shadows behind me.
We reached a hallway scarcely wider than my shoulders. I looked back to see Ulf-Mark angling his shoulders to walk down it.
We slipped around one corner, then another, alert for any sign of the enemy. My magical senses insisted no one was there, but Paladin’s spell was a vivid illustration of how little that kind of thing meant.
We reached another door, which opened with the same eerie silence. A metal catwalk stretched in front of us most of the length of the building. I stepped silently onto it, and looked down over the railing, scanning the warehouse floor below us. A group of men stood in a rough circle around someone, but Paladin was right, it wasn’t Dave. The Valakans must have him somewhere else.
Fuck. Oh, fuck. Had they started abusing him yet?
“They haven’t, or these bastards would be there instead of here,” Paladin told me.
I slipped forwa
rd, counting silently. Thirty men knelt in a circle around a thirty-first. Probably the priest in charge of collecting tribute from this lot -- the life force they stole from their victims, human or Demi.
Cold anger iced my veins, and this time it was as much mine as Paladin’s. He turned and shot the others a quick hard look and threw up three fingers for a countdown.
“Three…” Calliope gathered herself, and Ulf-Mark braced a hand on the rail. I did the same as the countdown continued.
“Two…”
“One!”
We threw ourselves over the railing and plummeted, firing magical blasts as we fell. Five Valakans died before I even hit the ground.
A week ago, I would have expected my legs to break from a fall like that. Now I knew my bones, muscles and ligaments -- my very skin -- was denser and stronger than any human’s. I was Demi, bred for combat.
Around me, our enemies leaped to their feet and charged, moving a hell of a lot faster than you’d expect from guys taken by surprise. Almost as if…
This is a trap!
“Fuck!” Ulf-Mark and Calliope shouted with me in a chorus of We’re-up-shit-creek!
But there was no time to look around for Valak or any of the elder priests. I had my hands full as it was. Magical blasts sizzled through the air around us as we blocked and dodged. “Fuck, these guys are a hell of a lot more skilled than your average rent-an-acolyte!”
“It won’t do them any good,” Paladin told me. And then there was no more time for anything but staying alive.
I lost track of which of us did what. The world exploded into a blur as I tossed magic with my right hand, shielding with the left, and beating hell out of any target I could in between.
Spinning, Paladin slammed an elbow into one punk’s face so hard, his skull cracked in a crunch of shattering bone. We ducked a knife attack, whirling into a kick that sent another thug flying to land with a boneless thud, dead of a broken neck.
Paladin (Graven Gods Book 1) Page 16