by Jack Porter
She strode out toward me with a sensuous strut that spoke of immaculate confidence, her pointed tail swishing back and forth like a whip. The look on her face was a mix of lust and vengeance, and suddenly, the Agents found themselves witnessing the world’s most majestic distraction.
I wanted to take my beautiful demoness there in the parking garage, and be damned to all those in attendance. All that mattered was me and my demon bride, and the feelings that had risen within me.
It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Stronger than lust, stronger than anything.
It was like a cosmic connection, a feeling of rightness, and I could sense Azrael’s consummate satisfaction.
I have no doubt that Rachel felt exactly the same when looking at me, and knew we would have been at it like animals right there in the garage if it wasn’t for one minor problem.
The Agents still held me captive.
But not for long. The look of horror on their faces said it all. They weren’t prepared to deal with two demons, and that’s exactly what they were facing.
While Rachel might not have been the muscular giant I was, still there was strength within her fantastic feminine form. She caught the curly haired woman by the arm and, even though the divine shield protected her from harm, it didn’t keep Rachel from jerking the woman away from what she was doing and hurling her bodily across the concrete floor.
The curly haired woman uttered a shriek as she tumbled across the ground, and I knew without even thinking about it that my captivity was over.
The blond man and the others all started talking at once, offering curses and orders in equal measure. But I was done with being their prisoner. I moved quickly, escaping the two remaining divine walls and taking a leaf from Rachel’s playbook.
I picked the other man up by the leg and swung him around in a full circle, smashing him into another of the support columns hard enough that the concrete cracked.
He uttered a yell of shock and horror, but somehow survived the impact. His personal shielding must have been formidable.
Not that I cared. He was no longer forming part of my prison, and I aimed to keep it that way. So I swung him again and again and again, with all my strength, smashing him against the column hard enough that dust rose and great chunks of concrete came flying out.
In less than ten seconds, I had demolished half of the column, exposing the steel framework within. And I learned something.
The protection these Agents wore might have been enough to stop bullets. It might have been enough to shrug off the effects of Piper’s grenades.
But the human within them was fragile.
A boxer suffered a knockout not because of the fist punching his face, but because of the way his brain rattled against the inside of his skull.
I looked at the Agent I’d been smashing into the column and knew that his days of Agent-ing were done.
He was dead.
With a sneer on my face, I cast him aside and stalked toward the remaining two, with Rachel right behind me.
“Who’s next?” I said, and that was enough. The blond man with the scar on his jaw looked at his last companion, the matronly, older woman. There was fear and uncertainty on both their faces.
The old woman turned to the man. “Get us out of here,” she snapped, and it was like she had slapped the blond man across the face. He stopped looking at me and nodded sharply.
He fiddled with the device he had taken from the curly haired woman, and shot me one final look. “This is just the beginning,” he said.
I didn’t like his tone, so I lunged at him, fully intending to treat him the same way I’d treated his friend. But before I could wrap my demonic hands around the wrist I’d been aiming for, he hurled himself out of my reach, crushing the older woman toward him as if they were lovers.
I aimed a back-handed swing in their direction, fully intending to smash them to the ground, but before I connected, they were gone.
Vanished.
The blond man had activated his divine relic, and the two of them had stepped out of danger, to somewhere else.
I was disappointed. I wanted to chase after them, to grind them into pulp. But then I felt Rachel beside me, and all other thoughts vanished from my mind. Without making any conscious decision, I wrapped myself around her, kissing her with renewed passion as I ran my hands down her back toward her completely spectacular ass.
I knew that if our instincts had their way, we really would put on a show right there in the garage, for anyone to see. But Piper, Julie, and Sandy were more rational.
They had come close and were looking up at us.
“As much as I’d like to see where this goes,” the assassin said, “we can’t stay here. The BDA know where we are. You saw them teleport away. How long do you think it will take them to come back with reinforcements?”
14
We couldn’t head back to the mansion. And we couldn’t trust any of the Syndicate holdings taken over from Dario. We didn’t know how the Agents had found us. We hadn’t checked into the Inner Sanctum or anything. But there was a connection there, and it was obvious.
Dario had said that the Syndicate had brought in Agents to help question him. That the Syndicate and the BDA were connected. So it would be foolish to risk showing up on other Syndicate grounds.
It presented a bit of a problem, and the five of us spent some minutes discussing it.
Rachel couldn’t hold her succubus form for long, and besides, it was just too much of a distraction. So she had reverted to her normal form, and I had as well. Both of us had packed a change of clothes when we’d left the mansion, and, either by chance or design, Piper’s grenades hadn’t damaged either of our cars.
We were able to get dressed as we talked.
“There’s always my apartment,” Sandy said, but the way she said it, we could all hear the doubt. And I understood why. Sandy’s apartment was nice, but small. It would do in a pinch, but it wouldn’t exactly be comfortable.
And there was another flaw in that plan.
“Your address was on the contract,” Piper reminded her gently.
It was a sobering reminder of how close the man had come to killing everyone.
“What if we just book a hotel?” Rachel asked. “A normal one. One which isn’t part of the Syndicate.”
I shook my head. “It would be harder to remain anonymous if we did.”
“I have a brother,” Julie said. “He doesn’t like me much, but he has a place we might be able to use.”
“Do you really want to get your brother involved in all of this?” Piper asked. Then she offered a smirk. “Or does this dislike extend both ways? Do you want to get him involved?”
Julie understood what Piper meant, and managed a smile in return, but I could see she wasn’t really that keen on the idea.
I shook my head again, but was smiling as well. I thought I’d found the perfect solution.
“What about Dario’s place?” I asked.
Sandy looked at me as if I’d gone mad, but Rachel’s expression was more curious. Julie didn’t know all the details of the situation, but she’d heard that final call, and was puzzled.
Of them all, Piper’s expression was the most calculating. “Because it’s not like he’s going to need it anymore,” she said. “And it’s the last place the Syndicate might think to check.”
I nodded. “Why would they? Sure, Dario told them all he knew. He didn’t have any choice. But why would the Syndicate even think of it at all?”
It seemed we were all in agreement. “Good,” I said. “Good, then.”
Dario Gambetti. When I had first met him, I pigeonholed him as a dry, accountant sort of a businessman who wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty. I thought he was the kind of guy who had a silver spoon jammed up his ass, and never had to work a day in his life for the privileges that came with his name.
I then found out that while he shared the Gambetti surname, he was only a distant cousin to those with rea
l power, and had to claw his way tooth and nail to the position he had when I’d met him.
He’d come into conflict with me only because I killed Megadeath #4, who just happened to be Dario’s favorite nephew.
If it weren’t for that, Dario and I might have gotten along right from the start. We both shared a certain ruthlessness and drive for success.
He was just further along the path than I had been at the time.
A lot of the Gambetti clan kept apartments within the city. A man like Dario, with the wealth that came with his status, could have been expected to enjoy fine, penthouse living no more than a stone’s throw from where he worked.
Instead, Dario had been more of a traditionalist. His private residence was a sprawling, luxurious estate in a reasonably exclusive part of the city, set on a low hill where he could look out over his domain.
In a way, it reminded me of the lawyer who was to be my third contract. What was his name? I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. In any event, it had been Megadeath who killed him, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that the lawyer had lived in an exclusive suburb as well, although his was a gated community, and Dario’s was not.
But Dario’s residence was much grander.
We all pulled up in the man’s drive, and I wondered if I was going to somehow need to find Dario’s thumb and unlock this place the same way I had unlocked Megadeath’s mansion.
But it turned out that Dario trusted his security to something far simpler. A simple deadbolt that Piper had no problem picking.
We entered, found nobody waiting for us, and spent a few moments settling in.
Dario Gambetti proved to be a man of good taste. I was sitting on the edge of his pool wearing little more than my boxers and one of Dario’s big, fluffy white robes as I dangled my feet into the water.
It wasn’t an Olympic sized pool, but it was wide and long enough to keep a man in his mid-fifties fit if he did a few lengths every day. Beyond the edge of the pool, where it seemed to disappear into the horizon, I watched as the sun rose over the city. The girls were somewhere inside, getting cleaned up for breakfast, and I’d already washed a layer of parking garage dust down the shower drain.
I was in a contemplative mood. I’d never really had much in the way of family, and as for friends–there were a bunch of people who might miss me in the Ascender communities, but that was about it. Real-life had always offered me very little along that metric.
I mean, the closest I had to a real friend in real life had been Chad, and he was a total douchebag whom I’d hated with everything I had. So, not really a friend.
I mean, I hadn’t even thought twice before sinking my runic blade into his chest.
But Dario was different.
Sure, I’d thought of killing him as well, and would have if he hadn’t been wearing his amulet when I tried. But that was a measure of circumstance more than anything else. In the weeks since his conversion, courtesy of Sarah, he had shown himself willing and loyal.
Of course, that loyalty could have been due to him being part of the legion that was Azrael, but that didn’t mean it was any less real.
And now he was dead.
My one friend, outside of the girls, and his death was very much my fault.
I wondered how many other lives I was putting in danger.
Both Rachel and Sandy had already been through a lot, having been abducted by Megadeath #4, and in Rachel’s case, barely surviving a mad dash through the city with paid assassins on her tail. Piper had actually taken a high caliber bullet because of me, and had been lucky to survive.
In fact, of the people closest to me, only Julie had yet to find herself in real danger–if you didn’t count the events at the parking garage–and that was probably because she was new to the fold.
Even as I had the thought, I felt Azrael’s complacency. He didn’t have to say anything. I already knew his perspective. From the demon’s point of view, everyone else was secondary. The only thing that mattered was staying alive, and spreading his seed as far and wide as I could.
And in some ways, he was right. I mean, really, I was already the bad guy in this story. I was the killer. The mid-level mob boss. The Ascender who had chosen the side of the devil, just because it seemed an easier option.
I had no doubt where I might end up should a stray bullet take me on that final journey. I would wake up in Hell, with Azrael’s kin all around me, and I would deserve it.
But that didn’t mean I was just a cliché, a character with a single dimension.
I was a human being. Not a demon. And where Azrael drew the line wasn’t the same place I drew it.
My people were important to me. In fact, they were everything.
And I would do anything to protect them.
Rachel, Sandy, Julie, and Piper had all made their intentions clear, as well. They were riding this rollercoaster with me, come Hell or high water. Even Sandy, who was the least physically strong. She was proving to be perhaps the most useful of all, keeping the flow of information coming from my seedlings, my generations of conquests.
They wouldn’t thank me for calling it quits and going into hiding. That wasn’t what they had signed up for.
And it wasn’t what I had in mind, either.
Perhaps there was a limit to my ambition. At this stage, I didn’t really know. But what I did know was that I hadn’t reached that limit, if there was one. Not yet.
As I sat on the edge of the pool watching the sun rise over the city, my anger grew stronger.
The BDA had taken one of my seedlings from me. They had taken Dario. In doing so, they had put the rest of us in danger and shaken the foundations of my growing empire by making it vulnerable to the Syndicate once more.
It was no longer a question of whether I was on the BDA’s radar. I was. That much was clear. And so were Rachel, Piper, and Sandy, with the jury still out on Julie.
How many others in my expanded coven had attracted their attention? How many others had Dario spoken about?
Maybe it didn’t matter. From the BDA’s point of view, I was their number one target. With the women I cared about most not far behind me.
And that made the BDA my adversary.
I was clenching my fists once again, and grinding my teeth so hard it made my jaws ache.
I’d already known I would have to deal with the BDA at some point.
I now knew that moment had arrived. We were going to clash. I had to go up against the organization designed to deal with people like me.
But they weren’t going to beat me, I promised myself. That wasn’t how this story was going to end.
The BDA, I decided, was going to be my bitch.
15
The equation was simple. There was a hidden power behind the BDA. That power was a loose alliance of individuals and organizations that had divine assistance.
The Syndicate had to be part of the alliance. If it was not, the BDA would be after them just as much as it was after me.
To get the BDA off my back, I needed to be part of that alliance at well.
Which meant I had to take over the Gambetti Syndicate in its entirety, rather than just carve off the chunks I already owned.
The only problem was that I didn’t fully understand the power structure of the Syndicate. Not really. I knew that until recently, Dario Gambetti had controlled all the Syndicate’s business in the Southside. I’d effectively taken over that operation, although now that Dario was out of the picture, true ownership remained untested.
Even if things remained as they were, there would be a war coming up between me and the rest of the Syndicate, with the winner declared the true owner.
But that was beside the point. The point was that I had no clear understanding of who he reported to, or who sat at the head of the Gambetti Empire. I’d had no reason to know, and it wasn’t exactly public knowledge. Although there were exceptions, these people tended to lurk in the shadows. They didn’t wander around
with a sign on their backs proclaiming themselves El Diablo’s most powerful crime lords.
Fortunately, in my team, I had Rachel, who could find out virtually anything via the web, and Sandy, whose network could provide the real, human side of the story.
It didn’t take them very long to find the information I needed.
“The ultimate ruler of the Gambetti family empire,” Rachel said, “is a woman by the name of Bianca Gambetti.”
We were seated in one of Dario’s expensive lounges. I was draped across a comfortable recliner chair, with my feet over the armrest. Rachel and Sandy shared a plush sofa set at an angle across from me, with Piper standing behind, looking like a bodyguard, ready for action.
It seemed that Julie hadn’t truly found her place on the team as yet. She sat by herself, on one of the footstools, seemingly between the other girls and myself. Yet she didn’t appear to be uncomfortable.
Perhaps she preferred the illusion of individuality.
I found it interesting that the head of such an organization was a woman. “Tell me about her,” I said.
“She’s in her late sixties,” Rachel continued. “And as far as I can make out, she has ruled the Gambetti clan for more than two decades, coming to power when her grand uncle died.”
“Was the position given to her?” I asked. “Or was it earned?”
Rachel grinned knowingly. “This is El Diablo we’re talking about. And the Gambetti clan is one of the most powerful families in the entire place. And Bianca is a woman. Do you think the rest of the clan would have made it easy for her?”
It was a fair point. I nodded and indicated that she should continue.
“From what I’ve been able to learn, there was a monumental upheaval when she rose to power. More than one highly favored Gambetti scion found himself with his throat cut during that time. From all accounts, it was brutal, and Bianca herself only just managed to survive.” The beautiful goth woman paused to consider. “Nor has it been easy sailing since then. Over the first decade of her rule, several of her subordinates made the mistake of thinking she was an easy target. Attempts were made. Needless to say, they all failed. And for some reason, those attempts seem to have become less frequent as time passed.”
