Demon's Vengeance The Complete - Jocelynn Drake Page 0,4

gloves in my pockets.

“This wasn’t an accident.” Gideon called from the next room.

Shaking my head, I tried to brace myself for whatever new horror he had found. I wasn’t ready, but at least it wasn’t another decapitated teenager. The tiny bedroom was empty of furniture, but the overhead light glared down on the four white walls completely covered in strange writing scrawled in black magic marker.

“What does it say?” I whispered. There was something ominous about the writing, as if the script itself could be evil.

“I can’t read it.” Gideon replied with some frustration. He walked over to a part that had been scratched out and rewritten slightly different. “But I think these are notes. Trial and error. Look here,” he said pointing to a series of symbols that had been drawn, scratched out, and redrawn over and over again before the killer had decided on a final version. “Methodically experimenting.”

“At what?”

“I don’t know, but I think the person achieved the desired results because all personal items are gone. The killer is done with this location and this part of his experiment. He’s moved on to his next target.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, my eyes locked on the symbols as my brain strained to put some order or definition to it all. “I’ll give you this is bad, but does it involve the Towers?”

“I thought you’d jump at the chance to help your fellow man,” Gideon smirked.

“Yeah, well my life isn’t so great right now and I really don’t need to add this kind of fun to it.”

Gideon arched one eyebrow at me and I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it since it was the usual shit, just more of it. We were busy at the shop, Low Town was getting dangerous as the local mafia thugs continued to fight it out after the death of their leader, Reave—not that any of them actually missed the dark elf. On top of that, Trixie was giving me the cold shoulder, hiding something from me. Of course, I hadn’t told her about the whole Towers/guardian thing, so I wasn’t feeling so hot about that as well. I needed to tell her, but it was a conversation I was dreading since it was something I was just getting a handle on myself.

“It involves magic so this is a Towers matter,” Gideon said, drawing my thoughts back to the problem at hand. “We need to discover who the killer is and what they are attempting to do.” He stepped up to one of the walls and ran his fingers over the surface. A frown creased his face as he drew his hand back and rubbed his fingers together.

I took a step closer, looking at his fingers. “What is it?”

“Soot.”

“Huh? Phoenix magic is the only one that creates soot.”

“This wasn’t a phoenix. Different feel entirely.”

I could almost hear the wheels turning in Gideon’s head as he tried to puzzle out the writing, soot, and the dead.

“Take pictures of all the walls,” he said with some frustration, and then marched out of the room.

Grabbing my cell phone, I quickly snapped pictures of each wall before heading back into the living room, but Gideon wasn’t there. I poked my head into the main hall to find the warlock descending the stairs with a look of intense concentration. Stuffing the phone in my pocket, I followed.

“Should we call the police?” I asked as we reached the first-floor landing. The warlock halted sharply and looked at me over his shoulder like I had lost my mind. “Right. Towers. Who cares about the rest of the world?” I muttered.

“We have enough problems.” Gideon continued down to the main floor and out the front door. “The killer is just getting started.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because he’s still experimenting, working toward his ultimate goal.”

“Which is?” I demanded, getting more frustrated by the second.

“Nothing good.” He stopped suddenly and turned to look at me. “I need to think. Send me the pictures. Show them to no one else.” And then he disappeared.

I groaned, feeling tired and dirty. I had no idea where I was and there was a lunatic on the loose who was killing people for some magical purpose that I was tasked to uncover for the Towers. But what bothered me the most was that the longer I stood in that apartment, the more the magic started to feel familiar to me. I couldn’t place it yet, but I would, and, as Gideon said, it was