Sin nodded. "Well, I won't keep you. I know you have a lot to do, and I have a casino to run and a wife and toddler to see to."
Yeah, but Jess envied him that last bit. A lot. However, he wouldn't begrudge Sin his good fortune. It was nice to know that life worked out for some people, and since Sin had been a Dark-Hunter, Jess knew the man must have suffered greatly in his first life. It did his heart good to see someone happy, even if it wasn't him. "Give the missus my best."
"Will do."
Jess went back for his coat while Sin took his leave. He glanced around at the remains Sin had burned and let out a tired breath.
New rules. New playing field. The gods must have gotten bored with them all. In the back of his mind, he could picture these new Daimons spreading like in a bad SF movie. Hell, he could even see the map with a superimposed image of a red horde spreading out like an epidemic.
And somewhere out there was a human playing vigilante on them.
Yeah, it was a good time to be in Vegas. He was so happy Acheron had reassigned him, and that was said with all due sarcasm.
He shrugged his coat on and returned to the street to continue his lonely patrol. As he walked among the crowd, he tried to imagine what it would be like to be one of them-an innocent person going about completely ignorant of the preternatural around him. A part of him had forgotten what it was like to be human.
Another part wondered if he'd ever really been human at all. His enemies and victims would definitely deny it. And he'd been nothing more than an animal.
Until Matilda.
"Gah, I'm maudlin again." Must be his lack of horses. Riding always made him feel better, and he'd been away from them for way too long.
Soon though, they'd be here and he'd be back to normal. At least as normal as an immortal could be.
Hours went by as he searched and found no target. It amazed him that the nightlife in Vegas didn't let up. The crowds did thin, but still ...
Totally different world from what he was used to in Reno.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, letting him know it was time to head back so that he'd be home a few minutes before dawn. When it came to that, he never liked pushing his luck. No one wanted to spontaneously combust into flames, especially not in traffic. The thought of going Johnny Blaze just didn't appeal to him in the least.
He headed back for Sin's casino to collect his ride.
Jess hadn't gone far when a flash across the street caught his eye.
It was two Daimons pulling a woman into a storm drain. Jess sucked his breath in. Underneath the city was approximately a five hundred mile maze of drainage systems. It wouldn't take much for the Daimons to lose him down there.
He bolted across the street, hoping to catch them before they killed their prey or lost him.
The minute he was inside the drain, he all but let out a sigh of relief from the soothing darkness.
After removing his sunglasses, he slid them into his pocket and made his way through the smelly tunnel, which had about an inch of standing water in it. He curled his lip at the rotten garbage and other things he didn't want to think about. There were a number of homeless people who called these tunnels home. Some of them were every bit as dangerous to the average human as the Daimons he was after.
"Please let me go! Please! Please don't hurt me!"
He followed the sound of the woman's petrified cries. It didn't take long to find them.
Only it wasn't what he'd expected.
It was a trap, and he'd just barreled right into it.
Abigail had spent her entire life bracing for the moment when she'd see Sundown Brady again. Over the years, when she wasn't training to kill him, she'd played every imaginable scenario through her mind. Them meeting by accident. Her breaking into his house in the middle of the day to murder him in his sleep. A smoky, crowded bar where she walked up to him and then stabbed him in the heart and watched him fall to her feet as he died in utter agony. Even an abandoned movie theater where she trapped him inside and burned it to the ground. All to the tune of him begging her for mercy.
Yet none of those imaginings had prepared her for this.
For one thing, he was a lot larger than she remembered. Not just tall, which he was, but wide and extremely well muscled in a way very few men were. It was the kind of build that said he could snap her in two if he got close enough. His dark hair fell just past his ears and was a bit shaggy, as if he'd missed a haircut appointment. Two days' growth of whiskers shadowed a face that was so perfectly formed, he didn't look real. His eyes were black, and the intelligence there said nothing, absolutely nothing, escaped his notice.
Even with her new powers, she swallowed at the thought of fighting him. He wouldn't go down easy.
He'd probably take her with him.