Demon Unbound Read online

  Most of the time, Cedo looked like any of the other hard-eyed gangbangers that bit into the heart of south Compton like a twisted coil of barbed wire. Cedo’s eyes were slightly crazy, sure—but that went with the territory. Every once in a while, though, if Maria looked at him the right way, she could see something more in Cedo than simply wild eyes. The rippling of his face, the shimmering of his skin. And it was those times that she remembered what Cara had whispered to her, the “terrible truths” she’d seen: men who weren’t men at all, but howling monsters with elongated snouts and hands that erupted in claws and—

  “Maria. Good. I’m glad you’re here.” Maria yanked herself back into focus as Cedo grinned, then handed her a gun. She knew without asking it was clean, stolen, its serial number filed off. It’d probably be sold after she did what she needed to do.

  “We got us a special treat today.”

  Cedo stepped back, and a murmur of laughter snaked through the room. Several of the men along the far wall shifted their position to reveal what was hidden behind them.

  Maria froze.

  Standing in the opening was one of the club’s dancers, her eyes half-closed, her limbs loose, her mouth slack. Unbidden, Maria’s hand stole to the cross around her neck before she ruthlessly dropped it again.

  She couldn’t stop the words from springing to her lips, however. “Sword of God, hear me, I pray,” she muttered automatically. As if Cara was right in front of her once more, bleeding, dying, her cousin’s whispered, anguished prayer flashing easily into Maria’s mind, all these years later.

  Cedo probably couldn’t hear her words, but if he did, good. If he thought Maria was squeamish about shooting a helpless woman, it’d add weight to her act of pulling the trigger. But the dancer wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was that Maria knew the man who held the dancer. She was almost certain of it. She’d seen him fifteen years ago, lurking in the crowd of bystanders as Cara had bled out in her lap.

  A man whose eyes had looked a little too crazed, a little too wrong, staring at Cara. A man whose eyes looked a little too wrong, now.

  “Sword of God, defend us.” Maria breathed again, staring at him. She lifted her left hand once more to the cross, clutched it tight. Because the man’s eyes weren’t simply crazy…she’d almost swear they were glowing. A faint, indisputable green. “Defend us all.”

  She raised the gun.

  Warrick jerked his head up, the call so urgent, so visceral, it penetrated his killing fury. He spun to his left, his blade cleaving the nearest demon from shoulder to spleen. Blood geysered out, coating the floor, the wall, far too much for any normal human. It also immediately coalesced into a sooty black slime that would leave the human crime techs unsure, aptly enough, of what the hell had happened in this place. Because for all the residue, there’d be precious few bodies left behind when the Syx were done.

  Warrick’s gaze swept the dance floor, his ears picking up the sound of the not so distant sirens. Time to go. There wasn’t much left for them here anyway. As planned, Hugh and Gregori had hit the room first, their daggers gutting the demons who’d held two of the captives, exploding them into sooty black sludge before they could get their bearings. Then the remainder of the Syx had crossed the threshold of the night club, and with a low command, Raum had dropped all the humans in the room flat. That’d left the Syx squaring off against the Fuerza Negra—forty of them.

  Ten-to-one odds, at least until Hugh and Gregori had recovered the second set of hostages. But that was okay. They’d needed the exercise.

  And in the end, the Fuerza Negra hadn’t been the pushovers Warrick had been expecting. Their humans fought alongside them, bullets ripping open skin and shearing bone, but ultimately not harmful to the Syx. But they were distracting, and that made fighting the horde more challenging. More, the Fuerza Negra battled with a frenzy he normally didn’t encounter in his own kind. Something here was different. Dangerously different. Different in a way he’d have to figure out before too much longer, though not in a way that mattered for this particular horde.

  But now—

  The call came again. “Sword of God, defend us—”

  The words were ancient, arcane. And he could no more ignore them than he could stop breathing in this plane.

  Lots of people prayed for deliverance from the hands of their oppressors. Most of the time, it did them no good. Death dealt by the hands of the children of God unto their own kind was their own problem. But for Warrick to hear this call meant there was a demon in the mix, a demon who was either in the process of killing a human or who’d brought one to harm. And that was all the requirement needed.

  “Defend us all.”

  Warrick burst out of the gore-soaked Mexican nightclub and shot through time and space toward another pit of death, this one a cramped room crowded with men who stank of adrenaline, their bodies decaying with booze and drugs. There was nowhere to hide in this room, so Warrick poured himself into the thin air behind the summoner.

  Demons could change their appearance at will, adopting whatever façade, or glamour, worked best for the situation. Right now, what worked best was for him to be invisible. Further, the bright light of the mortal soul who’d called Warrick blocked his shadow from his own kind; as long as he was with his summoner, demons couldn’t see him.

  But he could see them.

  There were two demons standing in close proximity, but only one that he had the right to obliterate this night. Warrick narrowed his eyes, took in the other details of the room. The woman in front of him—her head coming up to his chin, her long hair smelling of sky—held a gun in a rock-steady hand, her aim unflinching. Warrick sighted it, saw the trajectory. He’d assumed she was going to kill the bound human, but she wasn’t aiming at the human. She was aiming at the demon.

  That wouldn’t do her any good. The demon wouldn’t fall. Wouldn’t die. Would barely notice the impact.

  “Sword of God, defend me—” The words rang in Warrick’s mind, demanding. He didn’t know what this woman was doing in this cesspool, or why she had the gun. Everything about this felt wrong.

  He reached out with a flick of his senses, touching the mind of the shooter—and was instantly rebuffed. She was shielded from him, the cross at her neck an effective ward. Still, because she’d summoned him, he could see at least snatches of her thoughts. This club, this room… It was a cesspool of humanity, not just drug runners but drug manufacturers as well, creating some new flavor of poison to unleash on the world.

  The shooter’s mind held other memories too, vivid enough to leak through. A girl bleeding to death in her arms. Fear, loss…shame. So much shame that she hadn’t done what she could have—what she should have—to save someone she loved.

  And, Warrick realized, this was why the summons had come to him, not the others. Because he also should have done more to save someone he loved, six thousand years ago. He hadn’t. Instead, he’d committed the sin that had damned him for an eternity as a demon. Which made this call a brutal, mocking reminder of his failure that night so long ago.

  Rage crackled through him.

  “Go ahead, shoot,” the demon to his right said. He was watching the human hungrily. Eagerly almost. He wanted her to commit the sin of murder. Wanted it bad enough that he was vibrating with the desire. He was smart, clearly. More than that, he was ancient. He’d learned how to avoid harming humans directly. Instead, he’d yank them all the way up to the brink, then let them damn themselves. Smart.

  But the woman… Warrick focused on her. Her hand didn’t shake, but her stomach roiled. She was no stone-cold killer. She didn’t know she couldn’t harm the demon in front of her; she was going to take the shot anyway. And she was going to fail.

  But he wouldn’t.

  Warrick lifted his own arm, wrapped his hand around the woman’s as she took final aim. A hard grin flashed across Warrick’s face as the demon across the room blinked, surprise touching his flickering green eyes—

  Th
ey fired.

  Chapter Two

  Maria almost jumped out of her skin, but though she hadn’t fired the first shot—knew she hadn’t—she saw the bloom of blood at center mass of the man’s chest. She shot again, twice, in quick succession, both shots deliberately high and wide. Partly in reaction, partly to discharge the firearm so it wasn’t cold when Cedo took it from her. But as the man collapsed, the dancer he was holding screamed, abruptly coming out of her drug- or alcohol-induced haze, some feral instinct toward self-preservation finally kicking in.

  As the members of the Guardia standing near the woman grabbed her and surged back, not expecting the cascade of bullets, Maria spun. She caught sight of something hazy shifting quickly between her and Cedo, glowing amber lights flashing bright. Then that was gone too, and only Cedo remained.

  Cedo, for his part, was staring dumbfounded at the hole in the man’s chest. Then he snapped his gaze to Maria. “Who are you?” he asked, though his tone was more surprised than accusatory. He shook his head, hard. “You can’t do that.”

  “You wanted me to shoot, I shot. You didn’t say who,” Maria said, pitching her voice loud with a bravado she didn’t feel. The man on the floor writhed in what seemed like real agony, but no one leapt to his aid. No one got close, in fact. What the hell? “Who is he?”

  Cedo’s lips twitched into a grim smile, but his skin stayed firmly on his face, thank God. “Not one of ours, not officially. He latched on to the boys, wanted in on the party. Even picked the girl.”

  The dancer was being hauled out of the room, passed out. Whether she got that way on her own or someone helped her, Maria wasn’t sure.

  An unholy gargle of pain came from the floor. Maria looked back, then stared. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Cedo snapped some sort of order, his voice harsh in her ears, but Maria was no longer focused on the lieutenant. Instead, her attention was arrested by the guy on the floor. The guy who would be dead if no one did anything about it. But nobody was moving toward him, the other men hanging back, all of them staring with the same level of confusion she had. Confusion and horror, really, which made Maria want to sag in relief. She wasn’t the only one seeing what was happening to this guy, at least. Watching the blood that spouted from his chest turn black and strangely…thick.

  Another man burst into the room, ran right up to the injured guy, knelt down. But he didn’t touch the guy either. A few of the Guardia’s lower-ranking thugs slipped out the door. Cedo didn’t make any move to leave, and Maria couldn’t leave if she wanted to. She was frozen in some kind of thrall.

  “What in the…” Despite herself, Maria edged forward, closer to the fallen man, her hand stealing once more to the cross around her neck. As the man twisted and writhed on the floor, his pain obvious, his skin didn’t just shift, it seemed to evaporate for whole seconds at a time, leaving the body beneath it exposed. A body that was far more monster than man, withered, white, covered in scars, with three sets of arms and two sets of legs and—

  Focus!

  Maria ruthlessly jerked her attention back in line, and the man once again appeared human. A human in grave condition, which put Maria in a bad position. Even if she couldn’t admit to it, she was a cop. She couldn’t let this man die on the floor, no matter how much of a scum sucker he was. But she also couldn’t help him, not without Cedo’s tacit permission. Otherwise, this entire charade would be for nothing.

  She turned to the Guardia lieutenant. “You want me to finish him off?” she asked, pointing to the gun he’d pulled out of her hand.

  “Yeah. No need for that, I’m thinking,” said the guy crouching beside the bleeding man. “Son of a bitch.”

  Maria glanced back, then stared. The injured man had stopped moving, but that didn’t mean he was done changing. Something dark and foul rose up out of the blood that had spewed from his body, as toxic as city smoke. It shuddered in the air, then dissipated—but it left something behind too. A thick black stain now surrounded the man, as if he’d fallen in tar.

  Maria recoiled. “What in the hell…?”

  “Hey! I’ve seen that before.”

  Pablo, the overeager recruit, was one of the few men remaining in the back room. He stared, wide-eyed, at the corpse on the floor, and his mouth started going a mile a minute. “Down on Seventh, at Jackal’s, there was a big fight two, three days ago. Bunch of new guys hit the bar, acted like they owned the place, only, you know, that’s already the Cinquo’s turf. And they didn’t appreciate the competition, took ’em out cold. That—that stuff that’s on the floor there? That shit was everywhere at Jackal’s. The next day, it was still there. Took all weekend to get cleaned up, and the guy at Jackal’s said it wasn’t because they found something that finally worked. They’d simply shut up the bar for a couple of days, locked the doors to let things chill out. When they came back, it was gone.”

  “They know what it was?” Maria asked. She edged forward, dragged her boot across the thick puddle of residue. It left an oily streak across the floor.

  “Not a clue.” Pablo shrugged. “Maybe there’s something’s in the water.”

  She snorted and could feel Cedo’s gaze on her. She needed to play this cool, but she was mostly confused. Between what she’d seen and how she felt about killing, if she’d actually shot the guy, Maria was pretty sure she’d be throwing up right now. She hadn’t shot him, though. She hadn’t pulled the trigger the first time, no way. Someone else must have shot the guy at exactly the same time.

  But who?

  The man on the floor leaned back. Then he raised his head, his gaze shearing off Maria’s face to focus on Cedo. “You see it happen?” he asked, as if anyone could’ve missed it.

  The two exchanged a look that Maria couldn’t interpret.

  “I saw it,” Cedo said. “And I want to understand it.” He reached out and grabbed Maria by the arm, yanking her around to focus on him. “How the hell did you do that?”

  She stared back, fresh panic knotting in her gut. She couldn’t tell the story of a second gunman. That would make her sound insane. But Cedo wanted an answer, and for once, his eyes weren’t wild—merely furious.

  “What are you talking about?” Maria blustered, to buy herself time. “You gave me the gun. What did you think I was going to do with it?”

  “I thought you were going to shoot the girl.”

  “Well then, you should have told me that. This guy looked like the bigger scumbag, and I didn’t recognize him. He’s not one of yours, you said.”

  Cedo scoffed a short laugh. “He sure as hell isn’t. But he also isn’t one to be dropped easily.”

  “He shouldn’t have been dropped at all.” The other man was still on his knees, but he’d scooted at least three feet away from the wounded man, probably to avoid the spreading black stain. He glanced back at Cedo. “This ain’t gonna look good, if we get asked.”

  “We’re not going to get asked.” Cedo’s voice had abruptly shifted into tones of cool calculation, the mark of a practiced problem solver. “If we do, you’re the one who took the shot. Say the guy was spilling his guts to the wrong people.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “He had to be on something,” Cedo mused, shaking his head. “Only way it’s possible. If he was high…sick…”

  “That’s gotta be it.” The guy on his knees now stood, his voice taking on an eager edge. “No way to explain it otherwise. Gotta be it. Sampling the merchandise.”

  Maria shifted her gaze between them, utterly lost at their byplay. “Look, um, I’m sorry I shot the wrong guy.”

  “Don’t be,” Cedo said, turning to her. By some miracle, he’d lost the scowl, though his gaze remained far too curious. “Bonnie was an asshole. And, bottom line, you took the shot. You passed.”

  Maria felt an almost queasy sense of relief spill through her, and she offered up a grateful smile of her own before remembering to shutter her face. Too late, she caught the flare of interest in Cedo’s eyes. Uh-oh.

&nb
sp; “If you’re done with me, then, I’m out,” she said. “You need me, you can find me at the gym.”

  The subtle reminder wasn’t lost on him, she knew. Lucy’s gym was where she’d met Jack. Jack, her boyfriend, as far as Cedo knew. But of course, Jack was gone, picked up by the cops. No one was worried he’d spill, given the number of times he’d gone to jail and the number of years he’d been with the gang, but no one expected him back anytime soon either. Which changed things.

  “I’ll find you at the gym,” Cedo said, and his smile had morphed into a slow grin now, slow and a little too meaningful. Great. “And you better believe we’re going to need you. But for the next few days, you watch your back. You see anyone following you, you let me know. I’ll put some guys on you to watch.”

  Maria frowned. That was an unusual display of camaraderie, even if she had just shot at someone to prove her worth. “Why?”

  Cedo nodded toward the guy on the floor. The guy who was no longer moving, Maria tried not to notice. “Because like I said, Bonnie here, he isn’t one of ours. He belongs to La Noche. And even though I’m willing to bet he was doped up on something, you did drop the guy, and you shouldn’t have. If Takio asks the wrong person about it and gets an answer he don’t like, he might come looking for you.”

  Excitement and panic squirreled through Maria at the sound of Takio’s name. “Maybe, um, maybe this Bonnie guy wasn’t expecting the bullet.” She shrugged, trying desperately to sound calm, controlled. “He zigged when he should have zagged.”

  “Don’t matter what the reason is so much as what Takio believes the reason is.” Cedo said. “We’re gonna let everyone know the story, but that’ll take time. Until then, watch your back, yeah? And I’ll watch your front.”

  Cedo’s gaze dropped to Maria’s chest, lingered there for a long moment. Beside her, Pablo snickered loud enough she wanted to punch him. Cedo had three or four girlfriends already on his string…but it certainly looked like he was about to go fishing again.