swear I can still smell the reek of the glue Gary insisted on using to bond the photos to the fake ID cards. That smell always gave me headaches. Twelve hours a day working in a poorly ventilated room inhaling that shit? Sometimes I’m surprised I didn’t end up with serious brain damage.
Man, I hate even thinking about those days.
I finger the police badge on my belt. I’m a different person now. Not a criminal anymore. Everything I’m doing is for Saffron.
I turn down another street, wishing the knot in my belly would unclench.
He said he was my mate and master. He’ll be on my damned police force. How long before he finds another way to control me?
I rub my temple. I never should have saved him. I should have walked away that night. If he hadn’t saved my life, I would have been able to call Colburn that night the way I should have done. See, this is why I hate owing people. Being beholden to a guy never ends well.
I pull up at the address a few minutes later and blink at the place in confusion.
Where I was expecting Arcayos to live, I have no idea, but it wasn’t this. It’s a three-story brown brick building worn and leaning with age. A window on the upper floor is broken. The place was a gym once, but it’s been shut down for years. Graffiti marks the walls. The grass is badly overgrown, snarled and weedy. Why the hell is he holed up here?
I park my vehicle at the side of the building, out of sight of the street, and put The Club on the steering wheel, just in case. I hardly ever use that thing, but here, I’m not taking any chances.
No one answers when I knock on the front door, so I press the buzzer on a keypad installed beside it. There’s a short buzzing from within.
“Enter.” Arcayos’ voice crackles over the speaker on the pad.
As soon as I open the door and step in, a tingling sensation spreads from my head to my feet, making me shiver.
“What the…”
A flash of light pulses around me. I look over my shoulder. The steel door swings shut with a click and another buzz, a lock activating.
A glowing symbol appears on the door in bright bluish-white light.
I stare. The symbol is identical to the one on Arcayos’ medallion, the harsh lines, like those of a rune, shimmering with magic. “Holy shit.”
You’d think I’d be used to seeing supernatural shit like this by now.
Curious, I make my way slowly across the cement floor, looking around. This has to be the strangest place to live I’ve ever seen.
The room is massive, and he’s divided it into sections. One wide space is dominated by old workout equipment that must have been left behind when the gym closed. Across from that, there’s a section furnished with old couches and chairs, a coffee table. At the far end of the room, he’s set up a huge bed covered in furs with an old nightstand and a dresser, but little else. The arrangement makes the place look like some kind of badly laid out department store.
Clean up in aisle five.
I scan the walls. There’s no knickknacks, no pictures on the cement walls, nothing to personalize the room at all. I’ve never seen a place look so drab and uninviting. Or so lonely.
“Arcayos?” I don’t see him anywhere.
“I am here.”
I look up. My eyes go wide.
Arcayos is standing on a support beam ten feet above the floor. His head almost brushes the wooden ceiling. Stripped to the waist and barefoot in a pair of tight black pants, he’s balanced on the four-inch-wide beam with an ease as if he’s standing on a floor.
“Wow.” My voice echoes through the room.
He smirks.
The warrior leaps down, landing smoothly on the mat below him with a feline grace that would make Mister jealous. The Ak’tar clinks on its chain, bouncing onto his tanned chest.
“Be with you in a moment.” He flicks his hand, and his human features become that grayish-blue, the skin cracked and demonic, his eyes glowing. A sword appears in his grip in a shimmer of white light.
The sword spins in Arcayos’ hand. He slashes and blocks and parries, his body moving from one formation to the next with a fluidity and smoothness that looks like a dance. A dance, but far more deadly. The sword hums through the air, moving as though it is part of him. His muscles