Demon's Vengeance

by Jocelynn Drake

  Power, the demon whispered with a gleefulness that bit at my nerve endings like a jolt of electricity. You wish to take down the Towers. You wish for control and power. You wish for protection.

  “Yes.”

  Two books slid partially out from there they had been shelved, one at chest level and the other on the very top shelf. Grabbing both, I took them over to the table and looked at them. The first looked to be a spell book, but upon flipping through it, the spells all appeared to be extremely aggressive and lethal. The book was old, older than even my former mentor. Simon had either taken this from the library or stolen it from a colleague many years ago.

  The second book was the disturbing one. It was all about demons.

  “Why this one?” I looked up in the direction that I felt the demon hovering even though I couldn’t see it. “More information will give me the ability to control you better. Improve my edge over you. Wouldn’t that make it harder for you to eventually kill me?”

  The demon’s amusement increased and it was like I could feel it smiling at me. Its presence drew closer so that it was surrounding me, but I didn’t feel crowded.

  It is like a chess game.

  “And I’m a pawn?” I growled.

  No, in this case, I am the pawn.

  “What?”

  I have allowed myself to be taken so that greater things can happen in the future.

  My heart started pounding as some part of my brain desperately scrambled to find a way out of the mess that I had created. “What are you talking about?” Had my attempts to ensnare and control the demon gotten me into an even bigger mess that I couldn’t escape? It was a hidden skill with me to constantly make things worse when I got involved.

  She will claim her time with you soon. And if you’re not prepared, she will break you.

  Lilith. When I’d encountered her in the Underworld this past summer, she’d been adamant about my being able to free her so that she could wreak havoc on the rest of the world.

  “Why me?”

  You have potential.

  “Fabulous,” I muttered, suddenly feeling bone weary as hope of getting to the bottom of this dilemma quickly deflated. This conversation was getting me nowhere. I already knew that Lilith wanted to use me. I could only assume it was because she saw some kind of weakness within me that she could exploit.

  Yes, it is. But as you will learn when you read, demons can read the future in the waves of magic.

  “The future?”

  Possible futures, it corrected, with a hint of amusement. And there is one that I have seen with you that interests me.

  “And what is that?” I asked, though there was a part of me that didn’t want to know.

  The one where you defeat Lilith.

  My blood ran cold at the demon’s words and my eyes dropped back down to the book before me. I could defeat the Queen of the Underworld. But to do that, I was going to need the help of the demons. What the hell had I gotten myself into?

  Chapter 6

  Morning came too damn early. I groaned and rolled over onto my stomach, trying to escape the sunlight pouring through my open curtains. I forgot to shut them before falling into bed last night. No, this morning. The sun was already tinged with sunlight when I stumbled across the threshold.

  Gideon and I spent hours digging through the archives of the library for books on Death Magic. There hadn’t been a lot there, but what we found was not reassuring. The books made no mention of the creatures that first used magic, but it had been linked to several groups over time. Of course, all those groups had been wiped off the face of the earth by time and war, so we couldn’t point fingers in their directions for our killer. Gideon had also been right in that the magic was only good for raising the dead, though most of the time the dead returned zombie-­like rather than having any real resemblance to their former selves. I wasn’t sure if Death Magic could be used to free Lilith from the Underworld, but it was the only logical reason I could come up with for someone playing with it.

  All in all, my trip to the Dresden Tower proved to be a waste of time when it came to the investigation. But in Simon’s rooms? Now in the bright light of day, every instinct screamed that I should have locked down the demon and destroyed the symbol etched into the floor. And when I was done, I should have gone straight to Asylum and destroyed the symbol there.

  Did I?

  No.

  I was playing in something just as dangerous as the Death Magic killer.

  But what if I could use it to protect Trixie and the baby? What if I could use it to stop the Towers and protect the world? Wasn’t something like that worth the risk?

  Closing my eyes, I started to drift off again when a persistent ringing forced my eyes open again. It was my cell phone, which explained why I had woken up in the first place. Some asshole was calling at this ungodly hour.

  “What?” I barked after fumbling to answer the call. My fingers weren’t working yet. I needed more sleep.

  “Gee, you’re a cheerful guy in the morning,” Serah said.

  Twisting around and propping myself up on my side, I looked at the alarm clock on my cluttered nightstand and groaned. “It’s eight in the morning. I’ve been asleep only two hours. What the hell do you want?”

  “The cops found another body.”

  “Fuck,” I whispered, flopping onto my back. I was definitely awake now. Rubbing my eyes with my left hand, I tried to order my thoughts, moving them away from demons, Trixie, and even the psychopath with his army of the undead vampires. I needed to catch this bitch before Low Town fell apart. “How long ago?”

  “The victim was found about an hour ago in an alley behind a Dumpster. Her husband reported her missing last night.” Serah paused. I could hear her breathing and she sounded tired. I wasn’t the only one losing sleep. “I talked the cops into letting us see the scene before the coroner takes the body, but we have to get down there now.”

  Which meant that I needed to move my ass now. “Yeah, I’m moving. Where?”

  “Actually, it’s not far from your apartment. I’ll swing by and pick you up. Be there in ten.” Serah ended the call before I could reply, officially starting the clock.

  With a sigh, I swung my feet to the floor and sat up. I was still in clothes I’d worn to work the previous day. The only thing I’d managed to do when I came to bed was kick off my shoes and drop my wand on the nightstand. I felt grimy as hell and would have killed for a shower, but there wasn’t time. Pulling the shirt I was wearing off over my head, I grabbed a semi-­clean shirt off the floor and a fresh pair of socks. The jeans would have to do for another day.

  In the bathroom, I inspected the three long cuts on my left cheek while I brushed my teeth. Both Gideon and I had tried a number of healing spells to remove them, but nothing worked. In the end, the warlock gave me a worried look before he walked silently away. He likely suspected what had caused the cuts and that wasn’t a good thing.

  A car horn beeped twice from the parking lot while I shoved my shoes on. On an impulse I grabbed my wand before pulling on my coat and heading out the door. The world was falling apart around me. It was best if I didn’t step out the front door without being armed.

  As I fell into the passenger seat beside the TAPSS investigator, she held up a large cup of coffee from the gas station about a block from my apartment complex. I felt a lump grow in my throat at the sight of that glorious container of hot liquid caffeine.

  “You know, you’re going to make some guy an amazing girlfriend,” I murmured before sucking down a quarter of it.

  “Awww, you’re making me teary,” she sarcastically said, pulling her gaze from the three long gashes on my cheek. She kindly didn’t comment as she pulled the car out of the parking lot. “I need you focused and awake. The cops are getting edgy about letting us play in their sandbox so we’re not going to get much time to l
ook. We’ve got one shot at this.”

  “Got it, boss,” I murmured between sips of coffee. Serah sent me a dirty look as she paused at a stop sign, but otherwise she kept her comments to herself.

  The coffee was going a long way to getting my brain functioning, but it would only last a ­couple hours. I needed sleep desperately, but it looked like I wasn’t going to get it since I needed to be in the parlor by noon to open up. This was going to be a really long and ugly day.

  The crime scene ended up being halfway between my apartment building and Asylum. When we arrived, the cops had the street blocked off with cars and yellow tape, keeping the few gawkers a good distance off. I scanned the ­people gossiping and straining to see the body, but there wasn’t anyone there who I thought could be our killer, not that I was sure what I was looking for. I just thought there might be something powerful buzzing in the air when she was close or an ugly redness to her aura. Of course, I could be wrong about that.

  When we walked under the yellow police tape, the officers were far less accommodating than the men we’d encountered outside of Kyle’s shop just a few days earlier. Either Serah hadn’t worked the day shift or these guys were just assholes by nature. I was leaning toward the latter.

  A large man in a wrinkled button-­down shirt and stained brown tie glared at Serah as we approached. He hefted his large bulk in front of the mouth of the alley, a toothpick clenched between his teeth. “Moynahan,” he growled, trying his damnedest to be intimidating.

  “Curtis,” Serah replied, looking completely unmoved by the man’s attempts.

  “You know TAPSS doesn’t have any jurisdiction here. This is a police matter. You need to let the real authorities handle this.”

  “I thought the police would be smart enough to accept help from an expert since this perp has slaughtered three women and one man on your watch. Last I heard, you didn’t know shit about who was doing it.” She gave him a sweet smile that only made me think that she was looking for an opportunity to rip his eyeballs out of his fat skull.

  “Expert? Him?”

  “Gage Powell, owner of Asylum Tattoo parlor,” I introduced, not caring about the fact that the man was looking at me like I was a bug he’d just scraped off the bottom of his shoes.

  “Yeah, well the victim didn’t die from a shitty tattoo.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I muttered under my breath, already wishing that I was back in Serah’s car rather than standing in the frigid air that was already biting through my jeans.

  “Look, Curtis. It’s fucking cold and I’m sure the meat wagon would like to pack up so everyone can get out of here,” Serah broke in. “Let us have a look and then we can all get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  “Ten minutes,” the fat detective snapped before stepping out of the way of the entrance.

  Serah snarled something softly to herself that I didn’t quite catch. She was a feisty little thing who didn’t take shit from anyone, even me, which was more than a little surprising since she knew exactly what I was. I was beginning to think that Low Town had become a poorer place when she left the police force. TAPSS would never be challenging enough for her. It was just one of those moments when being a barely above five foot adorable woman was a hindrance in this world of chest-­beating, hairy monsters.

  My mind quickly shifted from thoughts of Serah’s rough lot in life to the crime as we walked up on the corpse. My heart broke a little at the sight of the woman carelessly slumped against the Dumpster. There was a hole in her chest where she had been stabbed in the heart, while a second slash had partially opened up her stomach. Her hands were still pressed to her abdomen as she had tried to protect her baby in her last seconds of life, but her attempts didn’t save either of them in the end. Her head lolled to the side and her eyes blindly stared straight ahead with a yellow tint to them.

  “Fuck,” I murmured, shoving one hand through my hair as I paced a ­couple feet away.

  “What?” Serah demanded, grabbing the sleeve of my coat to stop me.

  “She was a shifter, probably werewolf. You’re going to have a war on your hands soon if this bitch isn’t caught soon.”

  “Fuck,” Serah whispered. She looked over her shoulder at the woman, her wide brown eyes looking teary.

  With a deep breath, I turned back to the body and knelt down a few feet away. The pool of blood had spread far from the body and had frozen on the dirty asphalt, keeping everyone a distance from her as if a moat had been erected in her final defense. A pair of forensics detectives was still collecting bits of evidence while another was photographing the scene. Several more ­people stood near the mouth of the alley, discussing the case or maybe just what they planned to do later that night. Regardless, there were just way too many ­people around for me to do any magic and that was all I was good at. I had no special forensics training that would give me insight into this crime scene.

  What I needed was someone who could do magic out in the open. But he was going to be pissed at being called so early after the late night we had.

  Jumping to my feet, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed it to my ear like I had just gotten a call. I quickly walked toward the entrance of the alley and shoved past the fat bastard who had given us shit when we arrived.

  “I need you here,” I said aloud, even though there was no one on the phone. What the world didn’t need to know was that I had used a little spell that had connected telepathically to Gideon. It was something that I had very rarely done with Gideon and only after I’d returned to the Towers as a guardian. As I had expected, I woke the warlock up and he was not happy with me.

  And what’s to keep me from killing you when I get there? Gideon growled in my head, sounding as if he was still half asleep.

  “I’ve got a body left by the Low Town killer that you need to run a ­couple spells on,” I said in a low voice so I couldn’t be overhead while still trying to keep up the pretense that I was on an important call.

  Do it yourself.

  “Too many cops here. Come be your charming self and do the spells. It could help us catch up with at least one of these damn psychopaths.”

  I could both feel and hear him sigh. I’ll be there in a few.

  “Now!” I nearly shouted before shoving my cell phone in my back pocket again. Gideon was going to make me pay for this later, but someone needed to use a spell or two to track down this killer before it was too late.

  “What the hell?” Serah hissed at me as she gave my shoulder a hard shove so that I was now facing her. “Why’d you walk away to take a phone call? This is a little more important!” What she wasn’t saying was that I had made her look bad in front of the police who were closely watching us.

  “My girlfriend is pregnant. I just needed to check on her,” I said loudly so that anyone listening in on our conversation heard me.

  “Oh,” Serah said, instantly deflating. “Sorry. I—­I . . . we need to get back there.”

  I forced a little smile, trying to show that I appreciated her concern. I didn’t want to think about Trixie while I was dealing with this mess. Shoving my hands into the pockets of my coat, I started toward the alley with the intention of trying to find some way to stall being kicked out of the crime scene by the cops, but I didn’t even get that far. Detective Curtis stepped in front of the alley, an ugly grin splitting his face.

  “Time’s up,” he announced.

  “It hasn’t been ten minutes,” I growled, resisting the urge to shove the man out of my way. Yeah, the Towers were having a very bad effect on my ­people skills and how I handled confrontation. At least I hadn’t reached for my wand, but I figured that it was only a matter of time.

  “You walked away. We thought you were done with your little investigation,” the man continued in a condescending manner that had me grinding my teeth. “Now why don’t you run along back to your tattoo parlor and let th
e big boys deal with this.”

  “Cut the crap, Curtis,” Serah snapped, shoving past me to get in the man’s face. It wasn’t the easiest of tasks since the tub of goo in the rumpled clothes had a good twelve inches in height on her, but she got an “A” for effort. “We’ve got work to do. I’d hate for my boss to call your boss. You know how fucking grumpy vamps are when you wake them in the day.”

  Curtis flushed bright red and opened his mouth to start railing at her, but the sound remained trapped in his throat when a loud bang of thunder broke across the city. Everyone froze, their eyes jumping to the clear blue sky overhead.

  “Shit,” the detective hissed, his face going from tomato red to snow white in a heartbeat. It was lucky that an ambulance was sitting nearby because this man was going to have a heart attack any second.

  A second crack of thunder tore the sky and Gideon appeared in the center of the street, looking dark and sinister. Even I gave a little shiver at the sight of him, but then I knew he was pissed at me for dragging him from his nice warm bed where he had probably been wrapped around the soft body of his wife.

  The warlock didn’t look directly at anyone as he strode wordlessly across the street toward the alley. Everyone scrambled to back away from him, while those standing by the police tape ran for the safety of their homes. As Gideon entered the alley, the cops that had been left with the body ran out the other end of the alley, probably heading down the street to circle around. That or they were just going to run back to the police station several miles away.

  From where I stood near the mouth of the alley, I could see Gideon looking over the corpse before turning back. He looked significantly paler than when he’d first appeared, but I doubted that any other bystanders noticed it. They were too busy being scared shitless. Standing at the edge of the sidewalk, he finally looked over the surrounding ­people as if suddenly noticing that he wasn’t alone. Using all his imposing height, the warlock stepped close to Curtis so that the man was nearly curled into a ball of quivering fear while still standing.