by Jayne Faith
Damien hitched his backpack higher on his shoulders while I checked in with dispatch to report us as responding. We jogged toward the address dispatch read off, and I noted with another flash of wonder that my feet barely hurt at all. In fact, all of my injuries were healing remarkably quickly. Inhumanly quickly. Was this an unexpected gift from the other? I wasn’t sure how to confirm that, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation.
We reached the building, a brick and cement structure with lots of tall narrow windows. The architectural style was probably the bees’ knees when it was built, but to me it just looked antiquated and institutional. Employees were streaming out and gathering on the sidewalk and lawn across the street.
“Is it really necessary to evacuate everyone?” Damien asked.
I was about to respond that they were probably just following policy when a black Supernatural Strike Team Hummer raced in, its red bubble lights twirling, and screeched to a dramatic, abrupt halt at the curb. The driver door popped open, and Brady Chancellor jumped out. I groaned loudly.
“What?” Damien looked at me, alarmed.
“Oh, it’s nothing, I just would have preferred any other Strike Team but that one.” I felt my mouth twist into a grimace. Chancellor was a mistake I’d made back in training, and I didn’t enjoy being reminded about it. He was a good-looking guy stuffed with enough ego for three people. Though admittedly, if he and I didn’t have a history, I probably wouldn’t find him quite so annoying.
“Strike is here because of the number of minor demons reported, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, angling toward Chancellor and his crew. Like it or not, his arrival at the scene meant I was under his command for this call. I tried to stifle my withering sigh. “Dispatch will send Strike if there are six or more minor demons—suspected or confirmed. Now that they’re here, they’re in charge.”
Chancellor was talking to his guys, holding his enormous combo gun in one muscled arm. The weapon looked like something out of a Mad Max movie, and it was completely unnecessary for this job, like bringing a wrecking ball when a sledgehammer would do. Strike weapons were like Demon Patrol stun guns on a truckload of steroids. The larger guns used magically enhanced supersonic blasts to temporarily confuse and slow arch-demons. Chancellor was one of those crew-cut types who seemed to think he was playing real-life G.I. Joe, and he loved to wave his oversized weapon around. Which probably was more than enough insight into what our brief fling had been like.
He caught sight of me and Damien. “Demon Patrol, wait out here on my order. Strike will enter first,” he barked. His guys turned to gawk and smirk at us.
I ground my teeth and then forced my jaw muscles to loosen so I could respond. Chancellor was showing off. There was nothing in protocol that allowed him to try to keep me and Damien out of the action. “If there are only minor demons, and according to dispatch that’s the case, we enter the building with your team. Why are we still standing around, anyway? If it were up to me, we’d have already gotten in there and fried at least three or four of them.”
His face reddened—he knew I was right—but he ignored me, and for show he spouted some unnecessarily-military-sounding tactical instructions to the rest of the Strike Team. I folded my arms, waiting for him to finish, and then beckoned Damien to come along when Chancellor finally decided it was time to get to work. Once inside, I purposely hung back a little, waiting to see which route he was taking to the basement, and pulled up when Chancellor and his team made a right turn off the main corridor from the entrance.
I touched Damien’s arm to get his attention and jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “This way,” I mouthed.
We wheeled around, and I sped up. Past jobs in this building had given me some knowledge of the layout, and based on the information dispatch had passed along, I knew exactly where the demons were and how Damien and I could beat Chancellor there.
“Grab a couple of brimstone burners off your belt and have them ready,” I said. I pulled two of my own burners, holding them both in one hand so I could remove their lids and slip them back into my burner pouch.
We pounded down a couple of sets of stairs. I sensed the presence of the demons but not their exact location.
“You feel them?” I asked, hoping Damien could better pinpoint where they were.
“Yeah, there’s one close, heading right—”
He cut off and I swore, dropped my burners, and reached for my stun gun as a bat-like creature swooped toward us. It abruptly halted mid-dive and let out its eerie demon screech. I shuffled forward a few steps, trying to provoke it into charging me so I could shoot it down when it got within range of my gun. But in a move that reminded me of what happened with the demon at Roxanne’s place, the creature backpedaled. My brows raised in surprise.
My skin prickled as a current of magic flowed past. Behind me, Damien was gathering his power. Like before, he trapped the demon in a sphere of magic. I quickly holstered my gun, grabbed another burner off my belt, opened it, and set it on the floor. While Damien moved the trapped demon down to the burner, I retrieved the other traps I’d dropped when I’d reached for my gun.
I heard the sizzle of the trap as it captured and fried the demon and squinted in the sulphurous puff of smoke it emitted. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.
“It was afraid of you,” Damien said.
I coughed. “What?”
“The demon. It didn’t want to get close to you. I haven’t seen many of them in real life, but in training they showed us dozens and dozens of videos of demon encounters. None of them ever behaved the way that one just did.”
I considered brushing off his observation, denying it, but he was right. Maybe he could help me figure out why demons seemed to be afraid of me. I scooped up the warm trap, slapped the cap over the charred demon remains, and set off at a jog. There were more demons ahead.
“You seem to like theories,” I said as he caught up and drew even with me. “Got one about what happened back there?”
He skidded to a stop and swore. “Incoming.”
He hadn’t fully released the magic that filled him, and I watched as he raised his hand and two thin glowing green lines shot from his palm like arcs of electricity. The lines angled away from us, into the gloom of the poorly-lit basement, and around a left turn up ahead. He was going to trap a couple of demons that were completely out of his line of vision. That was almost as cool as seeing through walls. I shot him an impressed look, but his focus was elsewhere.
“Stay right there,” he said. “I’m going to bring them close to you before we fry them. I want to see what happens.”
“Uhh . . .” I took an apprehensive step back.
“Don’t worry, they’re contained and won’t be able to get at you.”
Two greenish glowing orbs, each with a demon inside, appeared from around the corner. I clutched a burner in each hand, noting with some irritation the nervous sweat dampening my palms. Before my accident, a couple of minor demons wouldn’t have made me blink twice. Logically I knew they weren’t capable of doing much more than scratching the hell out of me, but I’d just as soon see them fried as quickly as possible. I planted my feet and held my ground as Damien drew the spheres closer. When they were about ten feet out, the demons went berserk, squealing and ramming against the back walls of their magical containments. He moved them a couple of feet nearer and the demons’ panic intensified.
“Whoa,” he breathed.
I set the brimstone burners down and backed away, eager to see the creatures safely disposed. Not that I didn’t trust Damien, but as he’d admitted himself, his experience with demons was limited at this point.
We caught one more, bringing our total catch to four, by the time Chancellor and his team figured out where we were.
He stalked toward me. “You should have stayed with us.”
I gave my head an innocent little shake. “We’re only Demon Patrol, so you know, we’re not that bright. We got lost. Couldn�
�t keep up with all you Strike Team badasses.”
When we all emerged outside, the discovery of Devereux on site didn’t even dampen my glee over Damien and me catching one more demon than Chancellor’s team. Strike operations always required a sergeant on site as well as official statements and paperwork, so we ate up the rest of the morning at the scene. Smaller incidents kept me and Damien busy in the afternoon, and the day passed in a blur.
After my shift, instead of heading home, I exchanged my Patrol shirt for a light blue fitted t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a local brewery and got in my truck and went south away from the heart of the city. With Damien and Johnny following me in Johnny’s black Mustang, I left Boise city limits. My stomach clenched as the heavy, almost impossibly high fence surrounding the Gregori Industries campus came into view. I eased up to the security gate and waited. A glance back showed that Johnny had pulled to the side of the road right next to the entrance. He gave me a little wave.
A metallic clang drew my attention forward again, and I watched the security gate pull to the left. My heart stuttered as I lifted my foot from the brake, and my truck rolled forward into the no-man’s-land of Gregori Industries.
Chapter 12
THREE GUARDS MANNED the security booth, and they looked more like ex-SEALS than mall cops. They were dressed in smart dark gray uniforms with the Gregori logo on the breast pocket, which made me wonder if Jacob’s little pseudo-nation did indeed have its own military. One of the men actually gripped an intimidating automatic weapon, as if this were some war-torn country instead of the outskirts of a mid-sized Northwest U.S. town where most people considered it impolite to use a car horn.
“Welcome to Gregori Industries. Please shut off the engine, ma’am.” A muscular, tawny-skinned guard—not the one with the assault gun—had approached my open window. I twisted the key in the ignition and the motor died. “Identification, please.”
Digging into one of the pockets of my cargo pants, I pulled out a little foldover wallet that held some cash and my essential cards. I slipped my driver’s license from the clear pocket.
“Here you go.” I passed the card to the guard’s waiting hand.
Without a word, he took it into the booth. One of the other guards picked up a chunky walkie-talkie and muttered a few words into it, while the guy who had my ID stood at a laptop typing. I watched him hold up my license to the computer’s camera presumably to snap a picture of it. The third guy came out and went to the front of my truck, where he took a picture of the license plate with his phone.
The guard at the laptop finished his typing and stepped out of the booth, and I glanced at the Sig holstered at his side. He returned my license and then looked ahead and gestured with his hand outstretched, pointing in a sharp, precise motion with his thumb tucked against his palm and his fingers straight out. Yeah, he was definitely ex-military or SWAT or something.
“You’ll proceed to the white building fifty yards ahead. There you’ll relinquish your phone and any weapons and go through a scanner.”
My brows lifted. “Like at the airport?”
“Yes, ma’am, the security scanner is similar to the devices you see in airport security.”
Great, then Gregori Industries would have a nice semi-naked X-ray style shot of me on file. It seemed like a violation of privacy, but what could I do? The corporate campus was outside the city and outside the law. With an uncomfortable lurch in my chest, I suddenly wondered what happened if someone died on the property.
I gave the guy a little salute. “Okay, thank you.”
I started the truck and rolled forward on the paved road. When I neared the squat cube-shaped white structure, I noticed a row of half a dozen white vans identical to the one that had hauled the gargoyle away. Another guard emerged to direct me into one of the handful of marked parking spots. He had the same build and mannerisms as the ones at the front gate. Orange-red crew cut, fair skin, serious weight lifter. He looked around my age, maybe a year or two older.
I parked and got out, not bothering to lock my truck. If they wanted to search it while I was with Jacob, I had no doubt they’d do so whether it was locked or not.
“Good evening, ma’am. Come on inside and we’ll get you processed. Any weapons?” He let me go in ahead of him.
“Nope,” I said. I’d left my service belt behind.
Inside, the climate-controlled air hit me like a cool splash. The building was mostly one big room, with only a little windowed office at the back where another guard watched us. In the middle stood the security scanner, along with a few folding tables. At the wall was a row of about twenty full-length lockers.
The ginger guard walked backward, beckoning me with his fingers toward the scanner as if he were lining up a hundred people to process instead of just me. I fought the urge to snort a laugh. He pointed with his index and middle finger at one of the tables. “Please place your phone, any jewelry, magically charged items, and all the contents of your pockets on the table.”
I did as he asked, briefly wondering how he’d react if I said I had a nipple ring. I didn’t, but it almost would have been worth it just to see whether Gregori Industries had a policy for them. Once I’d relieved myself of everything I carried—I wasn’t wearing any jewelry and didn’t have any magical charms or amulets on me—he directed me into the scanner. I stood in the requisite legs-spread, arms-raised position while the mechanism whirled around me, checking for any weapons as well as scanning for certain types of magical items. When I exited the device, he handed me a clear plastic bag from a stack on the table.
“Place your possessions in here and then lock them in one of the lockers.” He nodded at the wall behind me. “Set the lock by pressing your thumb on the blue pad.”
By the time I’d finished, the guard in the office had emerged. I must have passed the scan because he handed me a generic visitor badge on a lanyard.
“Keep this visible at all times,” he said.
I settled the cord around my neck. “Will do.”
“Mr. Gregori will meet you just outside the door,” the ginger said. He flicked his eyes to the exit, indicating I could escort myself out.
“Alrighty, thank you, gentlemen.”
I sauntered casually off, but a sheen of clammy sweat coated my skin. It felt like I’d entered a maximum security prison. Gregori Industries had such a legacy of secrecy and skirting the law I might as well be on another planet. Memories of Mom’s and Grandma Barbara’s anger toward Jacob rippled through my mind. They’d clearly believed he was dangerous and dishonest and hardly hid their suspicion that he’d had a hand in my father’s death. I’d been thinking that surely I was safe, as his own flesh and blood. But maybe my confidence was misplaced.
I tried to shake off the dark fears curling around my heart and bring my focus to the task at hand. I had to get Nathan released. I needed to bring Roxanne’s brother back to her. She and Nathan had become too entwined with my guilt and regrets about Evan, and I couldn’t accept another failure.
Outside, the sun sat at a low angle above the western horizon. Days were long this time of year, and I really hoped I could finish my business before sunset. The idea of being on Gregori property after dark gave me the willies. The evening sun glinted off the lens of a camera mounted on the side of a building a few dozen feet away. It was pointed straight at me. A sweeping glance showed there were at least half a dozen cameras within view, and I guessed there more were hidden behind the tinted windows of nearby structures. I suspected drones were circling high overhead as well.
A soft electric whirring noise drew my attention, and I took a few steps away from the security building for a better view down the paved road leading into the heart of the campus. A golf cart with a man behind the wheel approached. Even from a distance, I recognized Jacob. His face appeared in the news every so often, but he was familiar for more personal reasons, too. I swallowed hard as he drew closer. My memories of my father were faint, but photos of him that I still had a
nd remembered well reminded me that he and his brother bore a close resemblance.
Jacob stopped the cart a few feet away from me, pulled the hand brake, and stepped out.
“Ella.” He greeted me with a broad smile. He was slim and stood over six feet—I’d gotten my height from the Gregori side—with slightly stooped shoulders that made him look studious, especially with his wire-rimmed glasses.
I nodded but didn’t move toward him. “Jacob. Thank you for seeing me.”
To my relief, he didn’t attempt to hug me. He tipped his head at the cart, still smiling. “Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”
I stayed where I was. “I don’t have a whole lot of time, actually. I’m here on behalf of Nathan and his sister, and I need to know when we can expect him to come home. I’d like to see the gargoyle and proof that he’s okay.”
His smile faltered but only by the tiniest fraction. He gave me a slow blink and a little bow of his head. “I understand. Forgive me, I was excited to hear from you and have the opportunity to spend a few minutes with my niece.”
That made me feel like kind of an ass for being so abrupt, but I also saw through his welcoming veneer. I’d spent some time around him before my dad died, but I didn’t really remember it and didn’t know him well enough to understand what was lurking behind his apparent warmth. But perhaps indulging him just a little would give me an opportunity to figure him out.
I gave him a tight stretch of my lips that I hoped resembled a smile. “Why don’t we compromise? We can take the long way to where Nathan is being held.”
I faltered a little on the last couple of words, realizing too late that they sounded more accusatory than I’d intended. Jacob either didn’t notice or hid his reaction well. I swung onto the golf cart’s passenger seat.
“I like that plan.” He took the wheel, and I peeked at him out of the corners of my eyes. His profile was distinguished—solid nose, full mouth, slightly slanted forehead with a hairline that hadn’t begun to creep backward.
