Demon's Vengeance The Complete - Jocelynn Drake Page 0,3
as he knocked a second time. No one answered the door. There wasn’t even a sound from the interior of the apartment. Either no one was home or they were hiding in hopes that the local Tower thugs would go away. Not likely.
Gideon stepped back, his smile gone. “Open it.”
My mouth fell open with a bitter protest on the tip of my tongue, but I quickly closed it again. Arguing with him was a waste of time. It wasn’t going to get me out of entering the apartment. The sooner we went in, the sooner we could get our answer and leave. I started to lift my wand to the lock on the door and stopped myself. The urge to break something still throbbed in my chest and I was potentially missing a great opportunity.
Taking a step back, I kicked the door as hard as I could right next to the doorknob and deadbolt. The door vibrated and rattled loudly in its jamb, but didn’t budge. The jolt jumped up my leg and hammered my knee with pain. Frowning, I stepped back to regain my balance.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” I murmured. “They make that look much easier in the movies.” Gideon rolled his eyes at me and let out a sigh. Grinning at him, I kicked the door again. This time, the doorjamb splintered as the deadbolt broke through the wood and the door swung open, slamming against the wall. The heavy scent of death surged out of the apartment, sending me reeling back several feet as I gagged.
“I guess the person didn’t survive whatever spell they had cooked up,” I said as soon as I could draw a breath of clean air.
Gideon cautiously stepped into the apartment. “We should be so lucky.”
Pulling the handkerchief from my front breast pocket, I pressed it over my nose and mouth before stepping over the threshold. A glance in the tiny kitchen revealed bags of rotting takeout along with jars of bloody animal parts that looked as if they had been pulled from the creatures rather than cut.
I continued down the hall, stepping over nasty, charred globs of flesh that I didn’t want to identify as I made my way to the living room. The only furniture was an occupied chair. The place had been run-down and grimy before the addition of the headless corpse. The body sagged, held in place by the limbs bound to the chair. The head looked as if it had been blown off the body, whether by small explosive or a giant gun at close range, I didn’t know. The only positive was that it was likely a quick death.
My eyes were drawn to a backpack leaning against the wall. It was relatively clean and looked out of place among the carnage. The worn brown carpet crunched with dried blood as I crossed the room and picked up the bag. Unzipping one section, I found chemistry and pre-calculus books along with a couple spiral-bound notebooks.
“Fuck!” I dropped the bag with a heavy thud while shoving the useless handkerchief in my pocket. It was doing little to block the smell. “The killer grabbed some high-school kid either going to or leaving school.”
“Interesting,” Gideon murmured.
“Interesting?” I repeated, swinging around to see the warlock inspecting a pile of small dead animals rotting in the corner. “Some kid gets snatched and violently killed, and all you can say is ‘interesting’!”
Gideon turned and glared at me. “Allowing emotions to cloud my mind would not help us to locate the killer faster. In fact, it would slow us down as we would likely miss important details.” He pointed to the animal corpses spread about the room in various stages of decomposition. “Such as the fact that the killer practiced, working up to something as large as a human.” When Gideon looked up at me again, there was a hard glint to his eyes, giving me a glimpse of the rage that he was fighting to hold in check.
I should never have doubted Gideon. Polished black ice. Cool. Smooth. Dangerous.
“Sounds like some psychotic serial killer who accidentally got a blast of unexpected energy. That’s the realm of the police—not the Towers.” I frowned, trying to look anywhere but at the dead body, but the death-strewn apartment wasn’t giving me a lot of options. My only recurring sane thought was that I was a tattoo artist, not one of those hot-shot CSI detectives with their dark sunglasses and latex gloves. Next Gideon mission, I was stuffing some