Inner Demon Page 8

  But the Towers had ruined that, like they had ruined so many other things in this world.

  Cutting through the main room of the club, I entered a narrow hallway that had led to the washrooms. I put my shoulder into one of the blackened doors and it opened slowly without a sound. This room was untouched by the fire. The floor, ceiling, and walls of the small room were all completely done in a bright white. There was no smell of burned wood and as I walked across the floor, I left behind no sooty tracks on the perfect floor.

  This was the first time I’d visited Chang since the attack on Low Town, but I knew that he would still be here. His place would be untouched by the Towers. The man had survived too long, acquired too many things, and knew too much to ever be caught by a warlock or a witch.

  But his dogs were missing. Named Patty and Cake, the two Doberman pinschers were the most frightening dogs I had ever seen, and I didn’t even know if they were real. There was so much magic circling the old man that I was never quite sure what was an illusion. When it came to the dogs, I wasn’t willing to take a chance on their teeth.

  Pushing the call button for the elevator, I was a little surprised when the door immediately slid open. Still no dogs waiting for me. I stepped into the elevator and hesitated. One of the dogs always pushed the button, knowing exactly where to find its master at any moment. Of the four floors besides the ground floor, I usually met Chang on the third floor of the subbasement, but the last trip had taken me to the first floor, which housed a giant underground Garden of Eden. With a growl of frustration, I pushed the button for the third floor, hoping to find the old man in his usual spot.

  When the doors opened again, a familiar but unhappy sight was waiting for me. I found the dogs. They stood just beyond the open doors, their teeth bared as they growled. I stepped back until I hit the far wall of the elevator, my open hands raised before me. Every muscle in their lean bodies was tensed, waiting for a command from their owner to tear my throat out.

  “Whoa!” I shouted, already mentally pulling together a defensive spell. “What the hell, Chang? I need to talk to you.”

  To my surprise, the little old man stepped out from behind a shelf piled with his goodies. He wasn’t happy. “You’re not welcome here! Get out!” he shouted, waving his cane at me.

  At the same time, the doors started to shut. Stretching my right leg out, I pressed the “open door” button with my toe. I kept it pressed there while balancing on my left foot. The dogs flinched and my heart stuttered in my chest. Holy shit! These dogs were going straight for my freaking nuts if Chang gave the command to attack!

  “Listen, Chang. I need your help,” I said, trying to sound calm and not half as desperate as I felt.

  “Go away, Gage Powell. You’re too much trouble.” Chang gave an irritated wave of one hand before he started to walk farther into the room and away from me.

  “Damn it, Chang!” I swore as the little old man disappeared behind some shelves. I glared at the dogs, who were still growling at me while eyeballing my crotch like I was smuggling doggie treats down there. Reaching behind me, I pulled my wand out of my back pocket and waved it quickly at the dogs before they could react, inwardly praying that these were real fucking dogs and not some nasty spell. The moment the sleep spell hit them, they blinked a ­couple times, gave jaw-­cracking yawns, and then lay down outside the elevator.

  Sighing, I dropped my foot from the button and lunged forward, catching the doors before they could close. I carefully stepped around the sleeping dogs, figuring that I had close to an hour before either one of them stirred. More than enough time to talk to Chang and get the hell out of there. I had no idea what had crawled up his ass and died, but I was getting to the bottom of this. Chang had always helped me in the past and he had to know something of use now.

  Once I was past the dogs, I hurried my pace to a jog and darted around the shelves I had seen Chang cut down, but he wasn’t there. Fuck, that old man could move fast! I paused, trying to guess where he’d gone when his voice drifted above the collection of objects.

  “Get out of here, warlock. You’re not welcome here.”

  “Come on, Chang! We’ve worked together for years,” I shouted back, trying to get a fix on his location from the sound of his voice. My eyes danced over crystal prisms holding snippets of actual rainbows, treasure maps under glass, and what looked to be Excalibur half hidden under a stack of fast food napkins and ketchup packets. “I need a little information and then I’m gone.”

  “The last time you were in this part of town, the Towers burned half the neighborhood.”

  “That wasn’t my fault! I didn’t lead them to you. Hell! They still don’t know about you, old man.”

  “How do you know they’re not following you now?”

  “They’re not, Chang. They’re not interested in me anymore.”

  The old man stepped out from a shelf, his muddy brown eyes narrowed on me. “Yes, that’s because you’re one of them again. You are not welcome here, Gage Powell. Get out.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Chang!” I snarled, shoving both of my hands through my hair. “You know I’m not one of them. I had no choice but to go back to work for the guardians. They were going to kill me if I didn’t.”

  The black-­market dealer didn’t look convinced and I swore, briefly looking for something to kick in my frustration. That certainly wouldn’t have endeared me to Chang. “I’m still trying to protect the ­people of Low Town from the Towers. That’s a lot easier to do if I know what the Towers are planning, right? It’s better than working blind like I had been.”

  “I’m not convinced.”

  “Do you seriously think I would be part of a group that nearly wiped out my girlfriend’s ­people? Do you think I would willingly be part of a group that would hunt down my child if they found out about him?”

  For the first time since I’d met him, Chang looked surprised, but that was understandable since the man made it his business, a very lucrative business, to know everything that was happening. “You’re having a baby?” he whispered.

  “Trixie is, yes,” I said in a sigh, my shoulders slumping under the weight of the thoughts as well as the renewed ache at her loss. My anger flashed to life again in the next heartbeat. “And if you tell a goddamn soul I swear I’ll give you something to fucking worry about.”

  Chang’s dark expression eased a little as he stared at me, possibly weighing what he knew of me. I had been going to Chang for several years after being introduced to the old man by my tattooing mentor Atticus Sparks. It should have been no surprise that I would end up with a tattooing mentor who liked to color outside the lines of what was legal from time to time. And Chang’s goodies definitely wouldn’t have been on TAPSS’s list of approved ingredients for potions.

  I never said one word to Chang about being a warlock. He’d sold me things to get past suicidal vampires and crazed warlocks. He’d even helped me escape the Grim Reaper once. I thought we had a good understanding, but the fact that he believed I could willingly return to the Ivory Towers hurt. It hurt more than I would have thought it could.

  “Come on,” he grumbled, motioning for me to follow him as he shuffled along a winding course through his massive warehouse of unique goods. I smiled faintly when we walked over the flying carpet still pinned down on each corner by a stack of books. Apparently Chang hadn’t been successful in getting rid of it yet.

  As we walked, I filled Chang in on what had happened in the Towers that saw me returning to the fold, as it were. He nodded, his free hand absently touching his various treasures as he passed them, as if their presence comforted him. Chang moved a little slower than he usually did. He looked older too, as if he’d aged a few years since my last visit, at the end of summer.

  On the last turn, we stepped into a large open area that had a little kitchen setup, with a refrigerator that looked like it was straight out of the fi
fties. Off to one side sat a small dinette set with four chairs arranged around it. A heavy sigh slipped from Chang as he sank into one of the chairs and stretched his legs out in front of him.

  “You doing okay, Chang? You’re not looking so hot.”

  The old man snorted and looked me up and down once. “You’re not looking so hot yourself,” he said irritably.

  “Trixie left,” I murmured as I sat in the chair that put me on his left.

  Chang nodded. “Not surprised. It’s dangerous up there,” he said, motioning toward the ceiling. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a slightly crumpled packet of cigarettes. While not a smoker, I was surprised that I didn’t recognize the label on the front. The picture was of a woman who looked like a Bettie Page pin-­up girl holding a cigarette and smiling. But instead of perfect white teeth, her mouth was full of sharp fangs. Holding one cigarette between his thin lips, Chang started to pat down his pockets as he searched for either a lighter or matches.

  With a little grin, I snapped my fingers on my right hand, creating a teardrop of a flame on the tip of my index finger. As I held it out to him, Chang leaned forward and took a ­couple draws, getting the cigarette lit. Satisfied, the old man leaned back and smiled at me. “How long have you been waiting to be able to do something like that in front of me?”

  “I haven’t been,” I said, waving my hand to extinguish the flame. “Smoking is bad for you.”

  “Not as bad as you’d think,” he murmured cryptically. We sat in silence for a ­couple minutes as he puffed pensively on his cigarette while I tried to ignore the acrid smoke hovering in the air around us. I appreciated the companionable silence. Too much had happened recently to fill the void with needless chatter. Chang also knew that he wasn’t going to be able to sell me any of his random knickknacks today.

  When he was half finished, Chang ground out the cigarette in a little black plastic ashtray in the center of the table and pushed to his feet. “More is wearing on you than your girlfriend troubles.”

  “There’s this crazy bitch killing pregnant women for a reason I can’t even guess,” I said, watching as he pulled open the yellow door of the rounded refrigerator and started digging through the drawers. “And then there’s this other psychopath. He’s killing kids and . . . and . . .”

  “Death Magic,” the old man murmured. He straightened, holding oranges held in either hand.

  Chang handed me one of the oranges before easing back into his chair. I smiled as I turned it around in my hand. It was a sanguinello, a blood orange; the same type that Chang had sold me a ­couple years ago when I had been trying to help my vampire ex-­girlfriend out with a problem in her nest. It was the same time that I met Trixie.

  “You do have a way of getting yourself into trouble,” Chang murmured, slowly peeling away bits of the thick orangish-­red rind.

  “Tell me about it.” I put the orange away from me, setting it against the ashtray in the center of the table so it wouldn’t roll around. “I think we’ve got a good lead on the woman. She’s human, with an Alpha Conversion tattoo. It’s made her insane, but in the end, she’s still just a human. My problem is the other asshole. I have no idea how to catch this guy. Fuck, Chang, I don’t even know what he is! How am I supposed to stop him if I don’t know what he’s capable of?”

  “He is the one who is using this Death Magic?”

  “Yes,” I sighed. Jumping out of my chair, I paced into the kitchen area and turned back, running my hands through my hair. “When we started tracking the guy, he was putting all this strange writing on the wall, like he was experimenting. Gideon seems to think that he didn’t quite know what he was doing. But as he moved farther north, he got better at what he was doing. He slaughtered vampires and brought them back as zombies.”

  “Death Magic is very old,” Chang said slowly, nodding. “I don’t even remember the last time it was used. The Ivory Towers destroyed all the spell books years ago. This man would have to experiment if he was to accomplish what he was seeking.”

  “Yes, but who or what is he? Who used the Death Magic in the first place?”

  “Humans.”

  “What?” I said, stopping sharply. “That’s impossible!”

  “Why?”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. These crimes were so horrible that I didn’t want to think about my own ­people being responsible for them. But then, the Towers were still humans and they were responsible for all kinds of atrocities. I guess I just didn’t want the humans to be responsible this time. I needed it to be someone else.

  “It was a very long time ago. They were a sect splintered off from either the Picts or the Vikings that had settled in the region. They were fighting very bad wars and had lost many ­people. They wanted a way to raise their dead so that they could continue to fight. They started stealing the children of their enemies and killing them so they could bring back their dead.” Chang sighed, staring down at the orange in his hands. “They had some help. Goblins stole the children. There were also some Dark Elves who helped to twist the magic.”

  “But as you said, it’s been a really long time. Who the hell remembers?”

  “There would be a few. Not many. What did this man look like?”

  I frowned and resumed my pacing. “Tall and thin, he had white hair and large black eyes. There was a kind of . . . luminescence to him. It reminded me of the fey, but he was . . .” Turning back to face Chang, I stopped and stared at the old man. He was sitting perfectly still, his head down so that I couldn’t see his face, but there was a new tension in his lean frame.

  “You know,” I said in a low voice. “You know who this bastard is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you working with him? Damn it! Are you what he is, Chang? I know you’re not human. You’re too damn old and know too many damn things. You do magic. Are you one of these things?”

  “No!”

  “Then what the hell are you? You seem to know all my secrets.”

  When Chang looked up at me, his dull brown eyes were gone, replaced with bright red eyes. The irises were narrow, vertical black slits like those of a cat. The old man smiled, revealing a row of sharp, pointed teeth, while a thin stream of smoke curled out of the corner of his mouth. I took an unsteady step backward away from Chang as he smoothly pushed out of his chair, displaying an ease of movement that I’d never seen in him before. He waved a hand at me that was now covered in red scaly skin and tipped with black talons.

  “You would put me in league with that creature?” he growled. His voice had become deeper as if his chest was massive. “Have I ever done anything to make you believe that I would kill the innocent for my own gains?”

  “No, Chang, but we’ve both got our secrets.”

  His smile widened and he gave a little shake of his head as if he pitied me. I was beginning to feel like I deserved a little pity but that thought was lost to me in the next second as the air tingled with a rush of magic. A bright light engulfed Chang like it had the white-­haired man, and my heart stopped for a second in my chest.

  Where the other man had transformed into a large white owl, Chang was larger and far more frightening. When the light waned, I blinked my eyes, trying to get them to adjust to the normal light levels of the room, but I immediately wished I hadn’t. Standing before me was a dragon.

  I tried to take a step backward but I simply fell on my ass, staring up at the massive creature. He was huge in the small, confined space. His wedge-­shaped head nearly brushed the two-­story ceiling and his long tail was wrapped around his body to keep it from crashing into any of his shelves of treasures. His entire body was covered in dark red scales and his black-­and-­red wings were folded against his back. Lowering his head to me, he cocked it slightly to the side as if to say “Happy now?” No. No I wasn’t. I was so much better off in the fucking dark on this one.

  “I thou
ght all the dragons were gone,” I said in a rough voice.

  It was probably the most inane comment I could have made, since Chang really didn’t need to be reminded that all the dragons had been killed by the Towers, but then my brain wasn’t working properly. There was a voice in the back of my head screaming for me to attack or at least put up some kind of defensive spell, but I couldn’t. And it wasn’t because I was faced with a dragon, one of the most magically powerful creatures in the world. It was because this dragon was Chang. I’d worked with Chang for years. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a friend, but I had never gotten the impression that Chang hated me either.

  “No, we’re not all gone,” he replied, his voice a deep rumble that shook the ground beneath me. “But our numbers are very few.”

  Chang exhaled and a cloud of smoke swirled around me. I coughed and waved one arm in the air before me, trying to clear it away. When the smoke finally thinned, I found that we were no longer in Chang’s underground warehouse of goodies. Now we were in the middle of a green field with snowcapped mountains rising up in the distance against a pale blue sky. At first I thought it was all an illusion because it didn’t feel as if we’d traveled across any great distance, but I could feel the warm sunlight on my face, and the sweet breeze ruffled my hair.

  I looked over at Chang to ask him where we were, when he lifted his head toward the sky. Following his gaze, I gasped and nearly fell back against the ground to see dozens of dragons soaring across the sky, their massive wings spread on the wind and their brilliant scales reflecting the sun.

  “There was a time when our numbers were great. We filled the sky and made the earth tremble with our roar.” Chang’s voice was a deep rumble as he watched his brothers and sisters pass overhead, swooping and circling in a beautiful dance. “And when we wished to watch the other creatures of this world, we changed shape and walked as humans. Despite our new forms, some humans knew what we were. They recognized us.”