attempted to access information, but Thomas only allowed it into certain areas. He was afraid without that small bit of defiance he would lose himself completely.
Even now the demon tortured, endlessly tormented those around him and there was nothing Thomas could do. Not that he tried. No, as much as he hated what the demon was doing, he needed to save his strength, use it to save Juliana if he could. He only hoped he would be able to when the time came.
“I think it’s time to invite the Walker to play,” the demon said, confusing its current victim. It pulled out Thomas’s phone and called Juliana. “Let’s end this, Hound. I’m at the Den of Iniquity. Come get me if you think you can.” The demon hung up before she even had time to respond.
A sensible woman would call the Agency for help. She would have the building surrounded and come in with a tactical team to destroy him and the demon with him. But his mate was not a sensible woman. She was headstrong and impulsive and entirely too self-sacrificing. If she died trying to save him, he’d never forgive her. Even if she did come back from the grave.
Michael and Juliana parked down the block from the Den. She called both the vampires and the Agency only to be told by both the bar was clean, that they’d checked it out and no one was there. They also said they weren’t going to waste any resources helping her out. Since the demon said he was there, she was fairly certain they didn’t know what they were talking about. Besides, it was odd that neither the vamps nor the Agency had felt the need to leave anyone here to watch the building. And they were absolutely vehement in their refusal of aid. The whole thing reeked of magic.
Michael looked at her. “This is a horrible idea. You know that right?”
“Yes.” She opened the door. “Just like I’ve known it the past four times you told me.”
He put a hand on her arm. “So let’s come up with a different one.”
“We’ve been through this. All the plans sucked. This one just sucked the least.” Michael didn’t like the plan because she was putting herself at risk. Since it was the plan most likely to keep Thomas alive, however, it was the one they went with.
Ben wasn’t going to like it either since it didn’t involve killing her mate. Michael was going to let her boss in on it in about ten minutes. That was if Catalina didn’t get to him first. The vampires had a plan, a marvelous, eleventh-hour plan they had their lawyers working overtime on to keep the Agency from killing Thomas. All this meant nothing if the demon wasn’t actually here.
“I’ll be fine,” she told Michael, hoping he didn’t pick up on the utter lack of confidence in her voice. She slid her glasses on and headed toward the bar as she fired up her gift. A hot shaft of pain jammed itself through the base of her skull and she was surprised when her nose didn’t start bleeding. When she finished this job she wasn’t using her cursed gift for a week.
She stopped directly across the street from the Den and studied the spell shimmering in the air in front of her. Black mixed with lavender-blue, just like at the crucifixion. Demon magic. She raised a hand to signal Michael so he’d know the demon was there. He pulled away in the car, heading to the Agency to take care of his part.
She took a deep breath and stuck her hand out, touching the spell. The thought that no one else was there, that she should just go away and look somewhere else, anywhere else, and never come back planted itself in her brain. It was so subtle that if she hadn’t seen the magic with her own eyes, she would have thought it her own.
Knowing the spell was there made it possible for her ignore. She stepped through. The moment she breached the barrier, hoarse masculine screams reached her ears. She drew her sword with one hand and her phone with the other.
She called Michael. “He’s not alone.”
“Like he has help?”
Another scream cut through the night. “I’m going to go with no.”
“Was that a scream?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it that your plans always involve screaming and death or destruction?”
“This isn’t part of my plan,” she told him. “I’m not even in the building yet.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“Just have a medical team ready to send through once I’ve got it out of here.” She put the phone back in her pocket. She shut down her gift and put her glasses away.
She paused with one hand on the door of the Den and glanced down to make sure the ring she’d slipped on earlier was still in place. Taking a deep breath, she braced herself. She could do this. She had to do this.
She eased the door open and slipped inside. The sour metallic smell of blood hit her the moment she stepped over the threshold. She glanced around the club and grimaced. The bar was a slaughterhouse. Blood spared no surface. Pools of it covered the dance floor, arcs of it covered tables, chairs and walls. Even the six human employees sitting along the far wall had been sprayed. They seemed unaware that she had entered the bar. Either their eyes were closed or they were looking down at their laps trying to ignore the four figures in the middle of the room.
One of the bouncers, whose name escaped her, knelt on one side of the floor. His hands hung limply at his sides as he stared straight ahead at the massacre before him. Words poured from him in a mumble that were probably a prayer to whatever god he worshipped.
Lying across from him on the other side of the floor was a mutilated form. A body that was nothing more than bleeding, raw, exposed muscle. Her stomach protested and she forced herself to swallow the bile. It burned her throat and made her eyes water. The poor bastard was breathing. It had to be Altered to still be alive after torture like that. There were some distinct disadvantages to being harder to kill. She didn’t turn on her gift to see who it was. At the moment, she was better off not knowing.
Tony sat on a chair in the middle of the floor receiving the demon’s attentions. Neither he nor the bouncer were restrained in any way. The demon must have been using their bloodties to Thomas to keep them where he wanted them. It took a long thing blade and sliced a wide strip of flesh from Tony’s chest.
“I’m sorry, Master,” he screamed, a hoarse guttural sound interspersed with sobs. Her heart ached. As much as she wanted to, she didn’t look away. If Tony had to live it, she could watch it. His arms and most of his chest were nothing more than raw open wounds. She wondered how long this had been going on. From the looks of things, the demon had come here immediately after escaping the office building. He had to have if he’d taken the time to carve one strip at a time from the other victim the way he was doing Tony.
“What’s he sorry for?” she asked, making her way down the stairs.
The snarling demon spun to look at her, its face transforming into a smile when it saw her. The smile was worse. Out of place in the carnage. Thomas was fully vamped out with eyes black as pitch and fangs fully extended. Blood dripped from strands of his hair and ran down his face. He was barefoot and every movement left footprints in the crimson pool at his feet which were then slowly filled in by the ever-pooling blood. The front of his shirt and jeans were so soaked in the liquid, it looked like he’d bathed in it. “How nice of you to join us, Hound,” it said in Thomas’s voice. “I was beginning to think I was going to have to call that Spanish whore again and tell her to drag you here.”
The news that Catalina had gotten her intel from the demon directly and she hadn’t bothered to tell them pissed Juliana off, but it didn’t surprise her. Typical vampire bullshit. Thomas probably wouldn’t be so understanding when Juliana told him when this was over, though.
The demon walked over to a nearby table, grabbed a bag of blood, ripped the top off and handed it to Tony. “Drink.” Its voice was heavy with compulsion.
It was keeping Tony fed, making sure he didn’t lose enough blood to fade out. It explained why there was so much of it on the floor. It kept filling him up and he kept leaking it out. The demon kept its eyes locked on hers as it lifted the strip of flesh to its mouth, stuffed it in and then pulled it out slowly, sucking the blood from it. She clenched her jaw, willing herself not to get sick. Not to even show the revulsion she felt.
It slid the strip from its mouth with a slurping sound and tossed it onto a pile in the shadows. What she had dismissed earlier as a pile of rags was now evident as the discarded skin from its victims. Why didn’t Thomas stop this? If he kept the underlings alive at the office building, surely he could keep the demon from doing this. Maybe he was losing the little bit of control he had. She was running out of time.
She tore her eyes away from the gruesome pile and focused once more on the demon inhabiting her mate’s
