Warrior (Relentless #4)(158)

“My mate,” I snarled, low and deadly.

“Mate?” he croaked. His eyes darted around the room, but there was no escape for him.

He let out a roar and threw his sword at me. I sidestepped it, and it sank into the wall behind me.

In the next instant, Draegan spun and ran toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, his leathery wings unfurling behind him.

My knife buried itself to the hilt in the gulak’s back, pinning one of his wings securely to his body. He flailed and tried to stop his forward rush. Too late.

Glass shattered outward as he flew through the window. The good wing flapped uselessly for a second, and then he was gone. His scream followed him down, ending abruptly when he met the ground.

No one in the apartment moved for several minutes. The roaring in my ears receded, my body stopped trembling, and the room turned white again.

It wasn’t until I lowered my sword and walked to the window to look down at what was left of Draegan that Chris came over to stand beside me.

“You okay?” he asked over the wind whistling through the broken window.

I nodded stiffly.

He peered at the dark shape in the courtyard far below. “Wayne, we’re going to need a cleanup crew. A big one.”

“On it,” Wayne called from the other side of the apartment.

Chris looked at me. “I guess that’s one way to work off some of that pent-up aggression.”

I scowled, and he held up his hands. “Hey, you haven’t exactly been Mr. Congeniality for the last week.”

“With good reason.”

His hands lowered. “I know.”

I stared at the sea of lights, and felt a moment of despair. Sara was out there somewhere, and I didn’t know what she was doing or if she was safe. Los Angeles was a cesspool of vampire and demon activity. How long did we have before she and her friends ran into another Draegan or Price? How long before they found themselves in a situation they couldn’t fight their way out of?

“I have to find her, Chris.”

“We will.” He looked around the apartment. “What were Sara and Jordan doing in a place like this?”

I inclined my head at the tagg demon, who hadn’t moved from his spot. “Maybe he knows.”

Chris walked over to the demon. “Can you tell us why the two Mohiri girls came to see Draegan?”

Wilhelm gave a jerky nod. “The dark-haired one told me she was here about a debt. Draegan said it was a blood debt.”

“Blood debt? Whose?” Khristu. Sara, what are you mixed up in?

“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

Chris pointed to the three dead demons. “What happened to them?”

Wilhelm’s gaze flitted nervously to me as if he was afraid I’d blame him for whatever had gone down earlier tonight. “Draegan passed out from the Glaen, and –”

“Glaen?” Chris and I said together.

Why would a demon touch a Fae drink? It was poison to them.

“It’s a game some demons like to play,” Wilhelm explained. “They drink shots of Glaen until one passes out. The girl played Draegan for the blood debt. No one’s ever beaten Draegan, and Crak and Lorne didn’t take it too well. They tried to stop the two girls from leaving, and you can see how that worked out.”

I looked around and my gaze fell on a crystal decanter on a side board, containing a luminescent white liquid. Sara had duped a gulak demon into a drinking contest he couldn’t possibly win. And no one could have known she was half Fae and immune to the stuff.

Glaen. Jesus. If I wasn’t still wound up from my fight with Draegan, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Wilhelm cleared his throat. “What are you going to do with me?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. You can leave after you help us sort out a few things.”

Tagg demons were not aggressive, and they were vegetarians for the most part. Most of them ended up working as servants for other demons. Certainly nothing that deserved a death sentence.

He let out a deep breath. “I’ll help however I can, sir.”

“We’ll bring in some people to go through Draegan’s files. You can assist them. Any money you find here is yours as payment for your services.”

“Yes, sir!”

The way his eyes lit up told me his former employer kept a substantial amount of money on hand. I didn’t care. It wasn’t like we needed it.

“Who was this Rhys Draegan mentioned?” I had a suspicion about what he was, and it was hard for me to say the name without wanting to hit something. The thought of Sara anywhere near one of his kind made bile threaten to rise in my throat.

Wilhelm flinched. “Rhys is an incubus. He and Draegan did business a lot.”

My fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword. I wanted to bring Draegan back so I could kill him all over again. God only knew how many innocent human girls he had sold to the incubus, or what horrors they had suffered before they died.

“Do you know where I can find this incubus?” I could no longer take my anger out on the gulak, but I would rid the world of his incubus friend. Draegan wasn’t the only demon getting a house call from me tonight.





Chapter 30





“How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been impaled through the gut by a bloody spear,” I grumbled, rubbing my hand over my stomach. The bandage had come off two hours ago, and the wound already looked a week old, but it still hurt like hell. I reached for the can of gunna paste on the coffee table.