Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,5
the open here. I could stop a damn bullet without risking harm. He couldn’t.
“I don’t think so,” said a calm, irritated voice over the din. The gun exploded in the man’s hand, leaving behind a bloody stub. He screamed, clutching his wrist as he fell to his back in the grass. The guard stood beside him, frozen and white-faced as he stared over my shoulder.
I didn’t want to look, because I knew who I would find. There were things in this world worse than a pissed-off dark elf and his Mafia thugs. Like an irritated warlock with a chip on his shoulder.
Gideon stood behind me, glaring at the moaning man. Reaching into the left sleeve of his shirt, he pulled out a wand. With a quick flick of his wrist, the night was filled with an ugly gurgling before becoming completely silent. The man was dead and I was definitely fucked.
2
“TWO MONTHS,” GIDEON muttered, shoving his wand back up his sleeve. “You couldn’t go two full months before I had to track you down again.”
“I missed you too,” I said with a nervous smile. Mocking and irritating Gideon was something that I specialized in. However, he had never approached me before when others were around—the world wasn’t supposed to know what I was. With Gideon’s attention now on me, the surviving guard ran into the house and slammed the door shut, leaving us alone with the pissed-off warlock.
“Gage?” Bronx said softly.
I moved in front of the troll, not that my smaller body offered much protection. I didn’t have a wand on me, which made any type of magical protection shaky at best, but I’d protect Bronx from Gideon the same way the troll had intended to protect me from the gun.
“It’ll be okay. I’ve got this.”
Gideon stopped in his pacing and arched one eyebrow at me. I didn’t mean it to sound so challenging, but I needed to try to reassure my friend. Gritting my teeth, I tried to think of some way to placate Gideon. It was as if I was standing in quicksand, the earth slipping away from my feet the more I spoke. A smart man would keep his mouth shut. I wasn’t always a smart man.
“This is a surprise,” I started again, trying desperately to think of a way to defuse some of Gideon’s anger. His mouth firmed into a hard line, proving that I was failing miserably. Warlocks and witches were a testy lot in the best of times. Gideon had proven that he was a good guy, or at least as much as a warlock could be, but he hadn’t batted an eye at killing that fix producer. I didn’t know whether it was because the dealer pulled a gun or because Gideon had been annoyed by the man’s screams. Either way, dead was dead and I wasn’t about to let that happen to Bronx.
“Two months, Gage,” Gideon said, picking up his earlier thread of conversation, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Bronx and I were standing there waiting to see if our lives were about to come to a messy end. I watched, barely breathing, as he tugged on the cuffs of his blue, collared shirt within the dark gray business jacket he was wearing. He could have been a banker by all appearances, with his shiny shoes, Rolex, and blue-and-gray-striped tie. The only thing missing was the wedding band on his left hand, but then warlocks and witches weren’t permitted to marry. I wondered if the missing ring bothered him, or his hidden wife.
“I seem to have fallen into a bit of trouble,” I admitted.
Gideon’s gaze drifted over to the house I had protected, his face expressionless. The occasional pixie slipped from its hiding place in the eaves to the nearest tree, thick with leaves that were only now starting to show the colors of autumn. “So I gathered. Your new job involves freeing pixies?”
“Not quite.”
“I gathered that as well,” he muttered, turning to walk toward Bronx’s Jeep. “Come along. I’m not going to kill you or your troll.”
I sighed, my shoulders slumping. Motioning for Bronx to accompany me, I walked over to where Gideon was standing beside the Jeep. It was somewhat larger than many of the vehicles people drove simply because it was one of several styles that had been enlarged to accommodate large creatures like trolls and ogres. The warlock peered into the passenger-side window, seeming curious about the interior.