Inner Demon

 

Dedication

To All My Personal Demons

We've made some good books together.

 

Contents

 

Chapter 1

T
hey were waiting for us.

Darkness blotted out everything when Bronx and I arrived at what I thought was Serah's final destination. Before I could summon up a light spell, they were on us. Pain slashed across my arm as if someone had taken a knife to my flesh. A blunt object crashed into my side with an ugly cracking sound indicating that a ­couple of my ribs had broken. One of my assailants jumped on my back, wrapping his long, thin arms around my throat, cutting off my air supply.

Over the screeching of my attackers and skittering of claws across pavement, Bronx released an eardrum-­shattering roar followed by the sickening thud of his fists pummeling soft flesh. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could start to make out the troll as he picked up his smaller adversaries and threw them across the room.

Sucking in a slender thread of air as I tried to fight my way free, I tapped the energy in the air and sent it out in a raw, angry blast. Some small part of my brain prayed that Serah wasn't in the direct path of the energy, but I was too oxygen starved to give it much thought. I just knew that Bronx would be able to survive it.

Panicked screams filled the air as my enemies scampered away. Someone new shouted above the din and the screams immediately stopped. I didn't recognize the language that was encased in the howl, but it didn't sound friendly.

A twisted spell glowed in the forefront of my mind. I didn't know if I had glimpsed it in a book or if it was the conjuring of my own panic, but the feel of it was dark and violent. My stomach churned at the thought of letting this loose, and yet I still gathered together the energy. I wanted the death and destruction to stop. I wanted the violence to end. I might not have started this fight, but I was ready to fucking finish it.

“Stop!” Serah shouted somewhere to my right. “Everyone stop! It's a misunderstanding!”

“Light!” I barked, throwing out my right arm. The only sound in the suddenly dense silence was the soft patter of my blood raining from my arm as I moved it.

Several balls of white light jumped from my fingertips and elegantly floated upward until they reached a ceiling two stories above us. A quick glance around revealed that we were in an old theater and surrounded by goblins. Fuck. This wasn't good at all.

Serah was being held by the back of her thick coat by the tallest of the goblins, his orange eyes reflecting with a sickening menace as he glared at me. The TAPSS investigator didn't look as if she had been harmed. Only her knit cap was a little askew.

Bronx was leaning on one knee to my left. His heavy wool coat had been shredded by the goblins and there were several cuts on his body that were slowly bleeding. Looking over at me, he gave me a small nod to indicate that he was okay. Trolls could take a beating, but no one wanted to take on a horde of goblins. They weren't strong or even particularly smart, but they had numbers on their side. Take out one, and three more were waiting to take his place.

“It's a misunderstanding,” Serah repeated, trying to keep her voice calm now that we were no longer trying to kill each other.

“What's going on?” I demanded.

Another goblin stepped forward, slighter in build with long, stringy black hair. I had a feeling that this one was a female, though there was still nothing attractive about her appearance. However, she quickly settled all doubts when she opened her mouth, revealing a hauntingly melodious voice. “You're hunting the pregnant women of this city.”

I had to give my head a little shake as if to clear it before I could bring myself to respond. Her voice was so strangely contrary to her appearance. It was like listening to a nightingale's song leap from the snout of a warthog. “I'm not. I'm trying to protect them.”

“Lies,” the goblin holding Serah shouted. “You attacked us! Set our home on fire!”

“I didn't! You attacked us first!” I yelled back. It was much easier to argue with this asshole. He sounded like he was aching for a fight and I was more than ready to give it to him.

“You lied to enter our home,” the female pointed out.

The next words died in my throat. There was something about the sound. I didn't want to argue with her. It was almost a compulsion. This goblin could have given the sirens a lesson or two about control.

“We tried the truth, but your ­people kept slamming the door in our face,” Serah explained while I fought to untangle my tongue. “We came to discuss the murders with you. We wanted to know if you had heard or seen anything.” She unzipped her coat and reached into an inner pocket to produce the little leather wallet that held her TAPSS badge. “We're trying to catch the killer.”

The female frowned at the badge. I couldn't tell if she just wasn't impressed with it or if she was more concerned about the fact that Serah represented an officer of the law. TAPSS might not have any kind of jurisdiction over the kinds of illegal activities that they were involved in, but goblins didn't care for anyone within the law-­enforcement field.

“And you are working with a warlock?” she inquired after a moment of silence.

Serah sighed, shoving the badge back into her pocket. “It's complicated.”

No shit
.

“We're just trying to track down the person who has been killing pregnant women.” Bronx broke in, once again sounding like the voice of reason. “Do you know anything? Have you seen her?”

I wanted to smile at my old friend. His questions, at least briefly, distracted them from the guy performing magic who was clearly not a part of the Towers regime. I'd already been blackmailed by one bastard who knew my secret. I had no intention of going down that road again.

At this point in our investigation, I'd take a good description of the woman. With all my spells and Gideon's, we hadn't even managed to get a good look at this bitch. Our big breakthrough was that the killer was a woman and likely human.
Fantastic.
That only narrowed it down to a few thousand occupants of Low Town.

“We've not seen her that we know of,” the female said, lifting her angular chin a bit. “The killings have scared the women we have working for us. Two have left Low Town, threatening to break their contract with us.”

“Wait! You hire women to have babies for you?” Serah demanded. She struggled to twist around so that she could look at the pair of goblins beside her, but the male was still holding her slightly off the ground by the back of her coat.

I groaned and rubbed my temple with my left hand. We didn't need to get into this now. The ex-­cop was well-­informed when it came to many things about the occupants of Low Town, but apparently there were holes in her education.

“Where did you think they got the babies?” I murmured.

The look she gave me made it clear that she thought they had been stolen from their cribs. While that was their old way of doing things, the result was that they had the cops hunting them down, which was really bad for business. Now the goblins just hired poor women with few options when it came to making any kind of good income. When it came to the actual conception of the babies, that's where my own knowledge fell short. I didn't see these guys paying women to go to a sperm bank for artificial insemination.

“We have heard that the werewolves are planning to go hunting for her tonight,” the male said, ending the awkward silence.

“Whispers are that she hunts on the south side because that is where she lives,” the female goblin added.

I dropped my hand back to my side and nodded. It was what I had been expecting. “Can you confirm her race?”

“Human,” she said firmly only to have the word whispered in an eerie echo through the building. The other goblins that surrounded us shifted, their nails scratching along the concrete as if they were circling me. The tension that had slipped from me started to return, funneling into the lights that still hovered above us. I hoped they weren't getting into position to have another go at me. They knew I was a warlock, which meant that I could kill most of them in the blink of an eye. The only problem was that those I couldn't kill in that breath were likely to kill me in the next breath.

“I'm confused,” Serah announced suddenly, snapping everyone's attention back to her. “If I wasn't grabbed by the killer, why did you grab me?”

She had a good point. I hadn't been expecting to encounter the goblins tonight. With the police making the hunting of this killer such a priority, the goblins had taken a big risk in drawing attention to themselves by getting involved.

“We're protecting you,” the female said. She grinned at Serah, intending for it to be reassuring, but her wide mouth of sharp, jagged teeth made her look almost like a piranha swooping in for a bite. “We can keep you safe. She won't find you with us.”

“Fuck!” I shouted, jerking everyone's eyes back to me. “They're behind the disappearances!” I waved my good arm at the goblins surrounding us, disgust filling me.

I should have been relieved that the other bastard that Gideon and I had been chasing hadn't gotten them, but this whole escapade had turned out to be a giant dead end. We went out searching for a psycho-­killer bitch and instead we got a bunch of goblins snatching women so they could be locked away for safekeeping. The only thing in that arrangement that had me worried was that they might be pressuring the women they were protecting into giving up their babies as payment.

“What?” Serah gasped.

“We had to do something to keep them safe. The cops had failed,” the male goblin argued, giving Serah a little shake. “And we will keep you safe too.”

I cursed under my breath. This day just kept getting worse.

“I don't need your protection!”

“Of course you do. The killer will get you.”

“No, she won't. I'm not pregnant. This was all a police sting operation, and I was bait. We were trying to catch her and you grabbed me before we could find her.” To further prove her point, Serah completely opened her coat and pulled up her loose shirt up to reveal her padded stomach. The goblins looked utterly flabbergasted for a second. The male released her, shoving her away from himself as if she were diseased.

“Hand the other women over. The cops will place them in protective custody. They'll be safe,” Bronx said, pushing to his feet to tower over the goblins that surrounded us.

“The police can't protect them!” the female screamed. The pitch of her voice sliced through my brain so that I curled against it while clenching my teeth.

When I was sure that my ears weren't bleeding, I opened my mouth to argue, but the words stopped in my throat at the sound of approaching sirens. The police were racing toward us and I arched a questioning eyebrow at Serah.

“There's a tracking device somewhere in all this padding,” she said with a shrug.

The goblins took that as their cue to run. Or rather, disappear. One by one, the goblins surrounding us in the old warehouse vanished, slipping backward into the shadows as if they were made of them. The female glared at me, seeming to hesitate in decision.

“Keeping the women means that police will start to hunt you as well. Bad for business,” I said evenly.

“The abandoned Sleep Tight Inn outside of town,” the female growled at me before she disappeared.

With the immediate threat gone, the pain in my arm and ribs came back to me. I was suddenly sore, exhausted, and cold. Sighing, I dropped to the dirty concrete, too tired to keep moving. I knew I needed to use the healing spell that Gideon had taught me to fix my ribs and close the gash on my arm, but I was just too damn tired to move.

“Gage!” Serah shouted, rushing over to kneel beside me. “How badly are you hurt?”

“It's not that bad. I can take care of it,” I said. Wincing, I lifted my right arm to look at where the goblin had sliced through my coat and shirt. Blood had soaked through the cloth, which had helped to slow the bleeding.

Bronx limped over the last few feet and dropped on the ground next to me, looking exhausted and a little ragged as well. But he graced me with a small smile and a chuckle. Yep, this was a normal night for us.

“It might be too late for magic,” Serah said against the sounds of screeching tires and slamming doors.

I cursed my luck and doused the magical lights hovering close to the ceiling. I didn't have the strength in me to teleport Bronx and myself to another location. Between the pain and the bone-­grinding fatigue, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get up off the floor. I was just ready for this day to finally be over.

“Did you hear what the goblin said? The abandoned Sleep Tight Inn,” I pressed. I knew that as soon as the cops swarmed on us, we'd be swept off to the hospital and I didn't want the kidnapped women to be overlooked.

“Got it. I'll tell them as they arrive.”

“Good. If anyone asks, tell them that the goblins grabbed Bronx and me too,” I whispered to Serah as the first cop burst through the door with his gun drawn.

“What?”

“Just do it,” I replied, tucking my right arm against my chest while trying to find a position that didn't make the pain in my side worse. I hadn't yet had the chance to fill her in on what I'd done to Eddie and how I'd gotten there. She was going to have to do some quick explaining about how we'd managed to beat the cop and I didn't want anything too sketchy to come out of her mouth. There wasn't enough energy left in me to erase any more memories tonight.

In the next ­couple of minutes, close to thirty cops poured through the various doors spread around the building. Some quickly ran over to us while others conducted a search of the old building. They weren't going to find the goblins. They were long gone now. Years of surviving in the shadows had taught them how to effectively elude the law.

Of course, they'd had their own troubles with the Towers, but then so did everyone. Many of the warlocks and witches didn't care for their ability to travel via shadow across vast distances. According to the history I studied while I was an apprentice in the Towers, a large number of goblins were tortured by being kept in a constantly sunny room. Death by dehydration and sunburn was not an enjoyable way to go.