yanked back into the yawning darkness.
I gasped as her fear flooded my veins, blocking out everything else. For a second, I couldn’t think. There was only her terror and my own fear for her drowning out all rational thought. Sucking in a deep breath, I felt my heart start again as Eddie gunned the car out of our parking spot. He clipped the bumper of a parked car and cut off another as he raced down the two blocks. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a large, black mass charge out of the shadows toward Serah’s location.
Serah’s terror quickly became replaced with anger and I found that I could breathe again. Centering all my powers on her location, I started to form a protection spell for her in my mind and then she was gone.
Poof.
Gone.
As if she had never existed.
I jumped out of the car before Eddie brought it to a screeching halt. He was shouting into his radio for backup as he followed me. Bronx was only a half step behind us. We stood gaping into the darkness, but there was no one there. Swearing softly to myself as my breath broke from my throat in hard gasps, I conjured up a ball of light and threw it into the alley to try to push back the darkness. In my desperation and haste, I’d forgotten about Eddie, the magic hater.
“Fuck!” he shouted, followed by a loud clatter.
Twisting around, I found that he’d dropped the radio on the concrete and was now holding his gun on me with both hands while backing himself against the wall. In the thin light I’d cast, I could see that his face was now ghostly white.
“Y-You’re one of them,” he said. “You’re one of them fucking warlocks!”
“Yeah, but I don’t have time for you,” I said.
Before he could squeeze the trigger of his gun, I sent a little pulse of energy into his brain. The man collapsed, falling to the ground like a wad of dirty laundry. I wasted another second wiping his memory of the past ten seconds so that the last thing he remembered was racing to this alley with me.
With the cop taken care of, I turned my attention back to the alley and Serah’s disappearance. This wasn’t the work of the killer who had been stalking pregnant women the past several days. Could it be the asshole who was working the Death Magic? God, I hoped not.
After a couple steps inward, I spotted the button I had given to Serah lying on the ground. If it hadn’t fallen partially on an old piece of paper, I would never have spotted it against the black asphalt. Whoever had taken her had been smart enough to remove the charmed object that was tracking her.
“Who took her? The killer?”
“No,” I whispered, my mind turning over my options.
Bending to pick up the button, I froze as a whiff of magic drifted to me. Not the same as what I sensed with the Death Magic user. This was a different kind of magic, smelling of stagnant water and mold. It made me think of dark, damp places hidden from the sun. This was a different creature entirely. I wasn’t quite sure what had grabbed Serah, but I was starting to get a pretty good hunch. But that didn’t matter. The important thing was that the magic had left a trail I could follow.
Taking one last look back at the bastard on the ground, I grabbed Bronx’s arm and we winked out of sight before the next cop appeared around the corner. We had a friend to save.
Part 3
INNER DEMON
CHAPTER 1
They 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