There was nothing I could do for the man, so I held his hand as he died. I doubted it was much of a comfort, but I figured it was better than nothing. The crimson rune flared brightly for a moment, boiling the man’s brains before it died off. The young thug shuddered one last time and went forever still.
I closed my eyes and bowed my head. No matter what I thought in the heat of the moment, I believed in preserving life. James was another body to lay at the feet of my unknown perpetrator. A dark part of me regretted not marking him for Alastor. Now, I’d have to track down another soul later.
“Hands in the air,” came a woman’s voice suddenly. The command told me she was some kind of cop. Nobody else talked like that.
This can’t look good.
Chapter Seven
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I tried to lay eyes on her.
Though no actual light emanated off of the woman, I squinted against the sight of her. She was manifesting some major angelic fury and I got a bad feeling I was the subject of her anger. It was like staring at the sun, making my eyes throb angrily.
Maybe I can talk my way out—
She drew a goddamn hand cannon from a shoulder holster.
I threw up my hands. “Now wait just a minute!”
“Shut up!” she yelled, the moderate volume of the command reinforced with a supernatural power. I winced from the discomfort, but resisted putting my hands over my ears.
“Officer, it’s not—” The roar of her Desert Eagle drowned me out. I dove for cover on sheer reflex. Warlock or not, I was one well-aimed bullet away from a morgue… and Hell. The sobering thought kept the panic at bay.
I managed to crawl for cover behind a cement divider. As I leaned back against it, I called out, “Just stop shooting for chrissake! This is not what you think it is!”
I got no response, neither by word nor gunshot. Was that a good sign? Had she even heard me? I could barely hear myself after the report of her obscenely large gun.
What do I do?
What options did I have? I could try to fight, but I wasn’t exactly packing a lot of firepower with a patron like Alastor. Warlocks were supposed to be subtle and our powers fell in line with that. I had my gun, but I wasn’t about to open fire on a police officer, especially not on one of the Chosen—which she certainly was. They were the angelic counterpart to warlocks. All I needed was her Guardian Angel showing up and tearing me a new one.
I settled on a brilliant tactical move.
“I give up!” I shouted, putting my hands up above the barrier in plain sight.
A moment later, I felt the cold steel of the barrel pressed against my temple. Despite my lack of practice with such maneuvers, I considered trying to disarm her of the weapon. I bet she’d really like it if I did something that stupid. I’m a math geek for God’s sake. How do I end up in these situations?
“You think you can talk your way out of this now? You can’t. I know your kind.”
I didn’t dare move, but I glanced sideways at her. It felt like she’d burn my eyes out. The same antithetical energy emanated from holy ground, though never so powerfully. I managed to spot a badge on her belt. She is a cop. My saving grace. “So, you’re just going to kill me, officer?”
“To stop you? Absolutely.”
“Stop me?” I barked a laugh. “You think I’m the one who did that? If I had that kind of magic mojo, why are you still standing?”
A slight tremor in the gun told me she had a doubt. I went on. “I’m a federal agent. I’m working a case.”
“You’re tainted. You’re a sell-soul,” she snapped, reapplying the pressure of the gun.
I sighed heavily. She had me there. “Yeah, that too. I have a badge and as for the other thing… that’s a long story.”
“I don’t care to hear it,” she said, but the gun came away. “Show me the badge. Slowly.”
“Lady, if I was fast enough to draw on you now, we wouldn’t be having this pleasant conversation.” I pulled out the badge, opened its jacket, and handed it to her.
“FBI huh?” she said disdainfully. “I suppose the Fallen want their lackeys everywhere.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I would have been an accountant if not for Alastor’s insistence. Maybe an actuary. Nice, cushy, safe job analyzing other people’s risks. “So what now?”
“Well, Agent Landon Graves, tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.” The blinding aura abated enough that I could get a look at her and that was a good sign that killing me might not now be foremost thing in her mind.
While the gun in her hands commanded a fair majority of my attention, I did look up past it to get an idea of who I was dealing with. She held the gun steadily pointed down in the Weaver Stance which told me that she was familiar with gunplay. I began noting other details.
The woman wore no make-up and had her long brunette hair pulled back in a simple pony tail. Under a shoulder harness, she had a dark gray sweater that was neither loose nor tight. Like every other Coloradan, she wore blue jeans like they were business casual. Judging from the badge and her attire, I assumed she was a detective.
I decided to answer her question honestly. “Because if you kill me, the perp I’m after might succeed in opening a Gate for one of the Exiled and its armies.”
She let out a sound very like a growl and shoved her pistol back into its holster. “I knew this was something bad. Tell me what you know and you might walk away.”
I took it that she was done fighting. A groan escaped as I stood. I wiped the blood from the corner of my mouth and spat some more onto the pavement. “You come on kind of strong, don’t you? I suppose you have to in this field.”
She gave me a death glare, but my pounding head lowered my give-a-shit factor. I straightened my suit out of habit, though it was hopelessly torn on both shoulders and one elbow. “And you owe me a suit.”
“Get bent.”
“I am bent,” I shot back. “Now, since you asked so nicely, I’ll let you in on the investigation. I take it you’re a detective. Which precinct?”
“The third.”
“Alright then.”
I briefly told her about the fire, murder, and the scrap of paper I found, explaining part of my theory that some rogue wizard compelled the dead man to take me out. She seemed genuinely surprised by what I had to say, but I didn’t rule her out as the arsonist. The Fallen weren’t the only ones who used fire as their weapon of choice.
As I spoke, I also wondered if she was feigning ignorance. As an angelic player, she might have crashed the last ritual in the hopes of stopping my perp. I didn’t dismiss any possibilities yet. Her timely arrival could have been divine providence. All I could do was keep track of the details I gave her and see if she let anything slip.
“So, what’s the next move?” she asked as I finished, offering me a handkerchief for my oozing lip. “You look like shit by the way.”
I gave her a flat look and refused with a wave of my hand. I might have been a terrible bluffer, but I didn’t want to tip my hand to her just yet. It always seemed like I was the one with the least amount of information. I decided to mix a few half-truths into my response to cover my ass in case she was just playing me.
“I need to find out who could possibly open a Gate and what they’d need in order to do it. I’ve got a few contacts working on it, but I’m not holding my breath. Autopsy and lab reports should be good to go by Monday.”
“You’ve got nothing then?” The disappointment rang in her tone.
“Nothing yet.”
“I suggest you leave before my uniforms get here,” she offered as she turned to inspect the fresh corpse of the wannabe hitman.
It was a small miracle that I got to walk away after everything that had just happened. It seemed that both of us were willing to bend the rules to keep the normals safe and ignorant of the supernaturally weird things in the world. Her words carried with them an implicit agreement. She wouldn’t expose me if I didn’t expose her.
I guessed I’d find out if she was going to stab me in the back soon enough.
“So, are you going to tell me your name, miss?” I said at her back.
She stopped and turned her head. “It’s ‘detective’. Detective Mendoza.”
“You got a card?”
“Call my precinct.”
That was cold.
Chapter Eight
After getting beaten up by James Thompson, I wanted nothing more than a hot shower and ten hours of sleep. Instead, I got in my Buick and went for a drive to the address listed on the dead hitman’s ID. I was sure I’d get an ear-full from Detective Mendoza when she realized I’d lifted the driver’s license, but I had more pressing concerns to worry about.
My nose throbbed steadily, making the organization of my thoughts difficult.
I knew I was taking a big risk. The dearly departed James probably had a car parked nearby. When Mendoza or her uniformed brethren searched the body and found his keys, it would only be a few short minutes before they found his vehicle registration. I doubted the Chosen detective would stall them for my sake.
I had one chance to search his place for a useful lead before the police locked it down as part of a murder investigation they had no chance of solving.
James Thompson lived in a rundown one bedroom apartment near Speer Boulevard and the highway. In fleeting glimpses of the alleys, I saw the homeless in their cardboard lean-tos as I strode down the sidewalk. I cautiously avoided the cones of light cast by the streetlights, seeing with ease thanks to my pact-tainted sight.
Despite the cover of darkness, I got the paranoid feeling that someone watched me. Assassination attempts had that effect on me, I could say with confidence after my run-in with James. If the amateur wizard whammied one guy to follow me around, there might be others out there somewhere.
Inside the tenement, the hallway fluorescents flickered sporadically. I crept up the two flights of stairs and approached Thompson’s door. I had no idea if he lived alone or if there was some kind of trap—magical or mundane—waiting for me.
Frozen with indecision, I stared at the door. If I had been acting with the authority of an FBI agent, I would have called a tactical team and hoped there were no magically triggered nasty surprises. In that situation, I’d be risking other people’s lives in a situation for which they couldn’t have been trained—unless SWAT has some counter-arcane course I’d never heard of.
I could risk my own life much more easily, hoping that my perp simply didn’t have the time, resources, or inclination to conceive of every possible scenario. Between my gun and the Voice, I was confident I could handle any normal threats I found. I ignored the fact that I was bordering on exhaustion and that there was a high likelihood of abnormal threats.
With no idea how far behind me the police were, I kicked open the cheap door and hurried inside before anyone came into the hallway to investigate. I shut the splintered door behind me, hoping it would disguise the damage I’d done. There was no immediate response to my entry, so I proceeded assuming that Thompson had no live-ins or roommates.
While I had little practical experience in such matters, my training covered conducting efficient searches. In a matter of minutes, I pulled a manila envelope out of a vent, ignoring the baggies of heroin and cocaine. Nothing else seemed out of place for the small-time hustler. I looked quickly at the envelope’s contents and found a stack of cut-up newspaper bound with Scotch tape—not money, but a stand-in. Something with the right shape and feel.
“A damned focus?” I muttered. As I understood that type of magic, the physical object served as a mystical anchor for an illusion spell, making it even more potent since it had fewer senses to fool.
There had never been any money. Poor James had probably run into my perp and had the whammy put on him. Compulsion, illusions, and summoning… complex magic to be sure. At that point, I was sure the guy was an expert magician despite the amateur circle at the scene. Something must have interfered with the first ritual. Or someone.
Things were growing even more convoluted. Or maybe I was overcomplicating things. Ugh, my face hurts. At least my nose had stopped bleeding.
I discovered nothing more of note in the apartment of James Thompson, so I didn’t hang around. The police could have shown up any minute and I didn’t need to spend a day in jail sorting out a misunderstanding. I was more than ready to turn in and start fresh tomorrow.
I wiped Thompson’s ID free of my fingerprints and dropped it on the floor before heading for the door. My eyes froze as I spotted the active magic sigil above the doorframe. A miniscule amount of arcane energy pulsed in the figure, apparent only to my pact-enhanced sense of sight.
The latent magic was the only reason I could see the design at all. The symbols were drawn in blood which managed to blend into the shades of red I saw in place of shadows and darkness. It seemed my paranoia about traps had been well founded. I wished I knew when I could trust my pact-tainted instincts.
I carefully noted a number of things. First, I wasn’t dead, so whatever the rune set above the door did, it wasn’t immediately fatal. Next, it was still doing whatever it was. I had so little working knowledge of magic that the various symbols meant almost nothing to me, but I focused on the one in the center.
The design reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphs, in particular the Eye of Horus. I doubted the person who had inscribed the spell actually read or wrote the language, but the similarity was there. Despite my distaste for my bedeviled instincts, I had to agree with them this time. Someone used magic to set up a mystic security camera… that I turned on by walking into the room.
Maybe it was meant to watch James or maybe it was meant to spy on anyone who tracked his whereabouts to the apartment. Whatever the case, I thought it boded poorly for me. It was high time I beat a hasty retreat.
My Buick was still where I’d parked it. Finally, some luck. It would have been easy enough for a thief to steal it. The only light came from a flickering streetlamp a dozen yards away.
My gaze drifted across the mostly-empty lot and I noticed I wasn’t alone. Sitting on the roof of an old Cadillac on cinder blocks was a guy in a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and construction boots. He didn’t look up at first, but was alerted by my footfalls echoing off the brick walls of the adjacent Laundromat and liquor store.
The hooded figure laughed in what would be a menacing way if he’d been a movie villain. I supposed that he thought he was standing in the dark, but for my eyes there was no such thing anymore. All in all, I didn’t react quite the way he wanted.
“You want to think twice about what you’re about to do here,” I said as I pulled my coat back and reached for my gun. “I’ve had a bad night. Show me your hands. Slowly.”
The man tilted his head as if he didn’t understand me. I drew the Glock to clarify any misconception. He snorted a laugh as if I was holding a toy. My first thought was drugs… But I really should have known better.
“Your senses betray what you are,” the man said with a slight lisp. “It seems a hound of the Fallen is the one that caught my scent. I can’t have that now.”
At first, I thought this to be another victim of the rogue wizard, another James Thompson, but the way he spoke was just too clear, too certain. I was dealing with the actual summoner—my perp. He must have been watching me in Thompson’s apartment, waiting for me to emerge so he could eliminate the threat. He knew I was FBI and didn’t care.
I was unsettled by the thought, but I focused my attention on the problem at hand. I’d puzzle out the implications later—assuming I had a later. With my gun drawn, I wasn’t exactly harmless, even if he was some kind of magician. It would’ve been nice if he hadn’t instantly recognized me as a warlock. How did they keep doing that?
Pulling his hands from the pockets of the hoodie, my perp started twitching as his fingers elongated. Knuckles popped, audible even from such a distance. Dark talons split the flesh between his fingernails and fingertips as they erupt
ed.
Well, I’d gotten what I wanted. He’d shown me his hands. I didn’t feel any safer.
His jaw jutted out and dropped, a long forked tongue rolling out over a dozen sprouting fangs. He grew maybe a foot taller, his legs and arms lanky enough to show wrists and ankles in what had been loose clothing only moments before. Six or so more eyes opened around his forehead and temples, black orbs that I somehow knew focused on me.
“Oh,” I said eloquently, my voice not trembling at all, not even a little. “That’s how it is.”
A demon. One of the Exiled. My perp was a freaking demon. No, that’s not right, my rational mind corrected. I shook off enough of my fear to think it through. This guy wasn’t a demon. He was hosting one. It went beyond mere possession into… well, into a territory that I was uncomfortably familiar with.
Maybe it was the adrenaline pumping into my blood or a perk of my pact that I was unaware of, but my fatigue faded to a mere hindrance. I felt my body heating up, my skin burning. Subconsciously, I’d already decided to fight. Knowing what this thing had done to James Thompson had made my decision for me.
As much as I hated the primal urges given to me by the pact, they were exactly what I needed right then. I knew I’d regret it later, but I didn’t resist them. I wanted to be alive later and I wanted to punish this creature for killing people in my town.
The gun was no longer my best option, so I put it away. My mind began calculating the threats and weaknesses of my foe. He had reach with natural claws, deadly compared to my bare hands. I doubted his steaming spittle would feel good in a wound created by his vicious maw. But the physical threat was only one part of the equation. He’d already proven to have some penchant for spellcraft. What would he bring to bear against me? What could he do?
I seethed with anxious energy. The fear, an emotion that was completely my own, got buried beneath the anger and exhilaration boiling up. As a warlock, I had my own supernatural weapons and I couldn’t wait to use them against this vile creature.
Graves Pact (Landon Graves Book 1) Page 5
