Zanaikeyros - Son of Dragons (Pantheon of Dragons #1)(96)
And that’s why Axe was at the bank.
That’s why he was carrying a large box of chocolates, stuffed with Dr. Kyle Parker’s right hand, and wrapped in pretty gold paper, secured by a bloodred bow (truly, the bow had been dipped in blood), and the accompanying card was simple, elegant, and to the point: For Drak; the best-laid plans of mice and pagans often go astray.
The king would get the message.
A young African-American security guard rounded the corner in a rush and called out to Axe—the greeter must have tipped him off. Axeviathon spun around, lowered his shades, and gave the youngster a clear, up-close-and-personal view of his sapphire irises and his jet-black pupils, his otherworldly dragon eyes, and he smiled. “Go back to your post, son, and stay there.” His words were laced with an implicit compulsion, and the human stopped dead in his tracks. He blinked three times, scanned the hallway in confusion, and immediately turned on his heels.
Good human, Axe thought.
He continued to saunter down the hallway to the last door on the right. Then he reached for the handle, turned it clockwise, and strolled into the room. Warren Simmons bolted upright, stepped back from his desk, and immediately reached for the fly on his pants. A skinny female companion, who didn’t look a day over seventeen years old, reached for the sides of her skirt, yanked it into place, and shimmied off Warren’s desk.
Both of them looked ashamed.
Axe snorted and shook his head.
Well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Warren’s sin of entry, how he had exposed himself to the pagans.
So the man was a pedophile…
Disgusting, but whatever.
The Dragyr did not get involved in human affairs, at least not beyond any direct or interlocking business with The Pantheon.
They did their masters’ bidding.
It wasn’t an optional clause.
And that, as they say, was that.
As the short blonde female scurried around Axe and headed for the manager’s door, Axe tapped her on the shoulder. “Sweetheart,” he said in a husky voice, laced with lethal intention. “You never saw me, okay?”
Her light-green eyes grew cloudy, and she slowly nodded her head. “Yeah,” she whispered, “okay.”
“Oh, and one other thing.”
She shifted back and forth, nervously, as she waited.
“This old piece of shit—the one you were about to get it on with, on the desk. That’s finished. Find someone your own age.”
She drew back in surprise, but she nodded. Then she hurried out of the room.
Warren’s face flushed red. “Who the hell are you? And what makes you think you can just walk into my office without an appointment?” He reached for the intercom on his phone and grunted into the speaker: “Jackson? Jackson! Get in here.”
Jackson must have been the African-American security guard, and if so, he wasn’t coming. Axe’s compulsion would hold—probably for the rest of the day. But just to be safe—and to make sure Warren didn’t reach out to anyone else—he flicked his pinky in the direction of the intercom, sent a slender electrical flame through the air, and blew out the internal wiring. “Sit down,” he barked.
Now, there was no point in going into Pantheon business with this pitiful Cult of Hades’ sycophant. Truth be told, the low-level human had probably never even met Lord Drakkar, and he likely never would. He was just a pawn on a chessboard—a na?ve, corruptible mind that the pagans could use until they were finished with him—until they had sucked all the anima out of him or left him on the sidewalk for dead. The leeching could take a day, a year, or a lifetime, depending on how much sin they consumed from Mr. Simmons—and at what rate they consumed it.
“You got a tattoo on the back of your neck?” Axe asked.
The human’s eyes narrowed. He looked instantly guilty, and he reached up to scratch his nape. Yep, he was sporting a medieval sword with a witch’s pentacle etched into the pommel, on the back of his neck. Sure as shit, he was. And that meant that somewhere in the underworld a demon was watching, listening, and tuning into Warren Simmons several times a day. They would read his distress, catch the disruption in his sin, and eventually come to investigate. Hopefully, the hand wouldn’t stink too badly before they found the box of chocolates.
Axe figured he’d better speed things up.
He dropped the “gift” on Warren’s desk, planted his forefinger in the center of the bow, and seared his gaze into Warren’s. “You leave this right here until someone…important…comes to get it. You don’t open it; you don’t talk about it; you don’t mention it until then. We copasetic on that?”
The man looked decidedly pissed off, like he wanted to rip Axe’s head off—good luck with that one—but somewhere deep inside, where predators recognized prey and quarry hid from hunters, his common sense kicked in. “Yeah,” he mumbled in a surly tone, “we’re copasetic.”
“Good,” Axe said.
He was about to pull a disappearing act, simply vanish from the bank, when he thought better of it: He should make one last pass through the lobby, make sure nothing had gone wrong—make sure no humans had been tipped off—before he made his way back through the portal. His muscles bunched and contracted in the lithe, smooth gait of a hunter—it was the animal nature of a dragyri—as he sauntered out of the office, headed back down the hall, into the lobby, and quickly checked all human eyes for signs of awareness.