Dawn of a Dark Knight (6 page)

“I’m busy. Got a lot of records to catch up on.” She waved at the pile cluttering her desk.

“Maybe afterwards? I can come over to your place.”

He looked so crestfallen, she reflexively added, “Maybe tomorrow.” The minute the words left her lips, she wanted to bang her head on the desk.
Stupid.

He smiled with relief.

“Later, then, pretty eyes.” His eyes dropped to her chest once more before he hopped off her desk. He shot her a smile as he shoved a preening hand through professionally cut, sun-kissed brown hair and exited the office.

Instantly concerned she’d knocked her contacts out of place, Kira swiveled to meet her reflection in the small magnet mirror on the file cabinet. The brown contacts were in place, completely masking the pale green irises ringed by blue. Against wavy black hair and untannable pale skin, the brown eyes were unequivocally boring. Perfect. The closeness required to perform a medical exam didn’t work well when anyone who got good look into her real irises couldn’t stop staring. Contacts prevented enthrallment.

Vance and all of her colleagues at the hospital thought she was a normal girl, gifted with an ability to solve medical puzzles, and she liked it. None of them would believe one touch revealed everything medical about a person. She had no intention of full disclosure to Vance, no matter how exhausting the effort to perpetuate the lie. Camouflage was imperative. A single slip might cause
them
to notice her.

Three years ago while on her med school emergency rotation, she’d almost been caught. In a moment of weakness, her healing power slipped out. She repaired a man’s soon-to-be-fatal car accident injuries. It took maybe a minute. Although the energy’s use had been heady and gratifying, Hashishins homed in on the “miracle” within a day. Luckily for her, the hospital’s staff barely noticed med students. They pointed the Hashishins naively toward her mentor. The poor man had no chance against them. She overheard the medical examiner say there were mysterious burns covering the body after his gruesome “suicide.” That meant black-magik torture.

Medicine had been a bad choice of careers. She should’ve chosen law school or taken the FBI up on its offer when they tried to recruit her out of college. Unfortunately, she had been compelled to choose this by the mysterious healing power within her. Most would say internal med presented the biggest challenges of all the specialties, but there were no diagnostic puzzles for her. She tried not to cheat, but it was too easy. Even so, diagnosing no longer appeased the healing power. It demanded more. It wanted her to actually heal and not simply diagnose. Over the past year, the instinct to go that one step further had become almost painful to suppress.

Kira focused on the problem of Vance. She already wanted out of their rendezvous. Knowing herself well, she would spend the next twenty-four hours figuring out how to do just that. What had possessed her to even suggest it in the first place?

Insecurity. Her fear of being alone. The problem with finding a good relationship and settling down was her fixation on fantasy-Ashor. It was a major dilemma bordering on obsession that now seemed to have gone to the next level: hallucination. Somehow she had to get beyond him. Perhaps, she should see the shrink she’d planned to visit ever since Mr. Fantasy revved up the nighttime sexy a few months ago.

Her cell beeped and lit with a text: “Phone me now. M.”

As she identified Markus’s number in her cell, she wondered what new disaster he had found to suck her into.

****

Ashor ducked, avoiding contact with the raptor-like nails of the daemon as they arched toward him. Although he avoided the nails, the daemon’s arm slammed into him. The tremendous force threw him nearly out the cathedral’s front doors. Pain exploded when his hip crashed onto the stone floor of the narthex.

This one was smart. And stronger than most.
Damn.

All daemons were viciously strong. Their addictive euphoria from destroying life became all consuming once summoned into the human realm. They would kill anything living in their path. Their history of wide swaths of devastation throughout time was easy to identify, if one knew where to look. Ashor laughed at Hollywood’s fallacy that such evils couldn’t enter sanctified land. Complete bullshit. They seemed to prefer the consecrated ground, often taking pleasure in the destruction of religious iconography.

Nearing unconsciousness, Ashor pressed his hand against chest and stomach injuries already sustained. He was bleeding inside and out.
Same shit, different day.

With little more than pain and purpose, Ashor got his feet beneath him. The narthex area of the cathedral was as humid as the Louisiana air outside during the record-high heat wave. He swatted sweat from his eyes and forced his feet to carry him back into the main hall. A quick scan to locate either of the other two magi that had joined him for this fight found that only Ethan remained conscious.

Ethan sat propped against a column, cradling a fast-bleeding gash in his side. The guy looked like pulverized camel shit. His lengthy brown hair was wildly askew from its normal, impeccable confinement at his neck. Bloody streaks painted his cheeks and streaked through his goatee, suggesting he’d tried to confine the untamed strands behind his ears. Their gazes met across the cathedral and each reflected the other’s pain.

The six-foot-tall daemon stalked toward Ethan like a sadistically playful cat hunting injured prey. Spittle glistened on its chapped, black lips, distinguishing them from the rest of its hairless, gray, leathery skin. The thing looked like an Orc on steroids. It wore a tattered navy military uniform of ill-defined origin, a remnant of his human life, when he’d been a black-magik dabbler.

The daemon halted to stretch as if it knew there was no rush to end the game. It picked at its nails. A slow smirk exposed razor-sharp teeth. The muscles of the daemon’s sculpted shoulders rippled with amplified strength as it drew power from Ethan’s pain.

The pupils in the daemon’s ice blue eyes dilated to a black shield, obscuring the colored irises and sclera. Playtime was over.

Ashor leaned weakly against a pew, fighting to stay conscious. Exhaustion pressed at his brain.

He reflected on the futility of his job. Daemons couldn’t be killed permanently. Slaying in this realm only sent them back to their own purgatory in the Middle Realm where they waited to be summoned again. That meant there had been a few repeat customers over the years. The dispatching had to be done right—decapitation with a specifically engineered scimitar and then a mid-chest hit.

His body demanded he pass out and he was tempted to give in.

The daemon’s pace picked up as it beelined for Ethan. Really, there wasn’t a choice. Ethan was a worthy magus who wasn’t ready to die. And they needed him with only eight of them left. Time to kill the daemon or die trying. He dared not use any more of his rage-power today, even though it was his best bet to beat this thing. The threat of losing control permanently, of Turning…not an option.

Blocking out the pain, he focused to call forth all he had left,
seichim.
It enabled him superhuman precision and strength. Although not as strong as the rage, after years of practice he could use
seichim
to enhance his natural physical and mental abilities.

Everything around him slowed into exacting focus.

To engage the daemon and distract it, he yelled, “Ethan. Move.”

The daemon whipped around and zeroed in on him. It launched into a high-speed sprint down the cathedral’s long main aisle.

Ashor raised his sword, two-handed, high over his head and readied for a killing blow. Seconds before reaching the killing zone of the sword’s downward arc, the daemon hit terminal velocity and morphed into an ephemeral red mist.

Oh, shit.
This one must be desperate. They rarely chose to possess.

If they had an active
akhrian
, the healer could exorcise the daemon. With no
akhrian
, the fast approaching mist was a definite
game over
for him. Once it possessed his body, a fellow magus would be forced to execute him.

In a surreal moment of suspended reality, he considered the mist of death. He wanted this life to end. Maybe this was the gods granting his wish.

Seconds before the daemon impacted, survival instinct took over. There was no way this evil shit was getting the best of him. He needed her help.

He gasped as the painful mist tunneled into his chest. The clang of his sword as it hit the stone floor echoed through the cathedral. Cold pain, like none he’d ever experienced spread through every cell in his body. He fell to his back on the floor.

“Is there anything I can do, Ashor?”

Fighting the slow-onset paralysis and pain, Ashor rolled his head to meet Ethan’s gaze. He battled the evil freeze to speak.

Ethan whispered, “I’m sorry it must end this way.” He raised his scimitar in preparation to execute.

Ashor felt the hazy cloud of impending blackout. He choked out, “Stop. Find doctor...Kira Hardy. She can help.”

Chapter Five

“Want to make it a happier New Year, darlin’?”

“Since when am I your
darlin
’?”

“Kira?”

“You texted it was important, Markus. Don’t you even check caller ID before you answer?”

“Sorry, thought you were someone else. I met this woman last night on the plane and...never mind. I need your help. There’s an item I want you to validate.”

“You’re kidding. After that fiasco yesterday, I’d expect you to lie low for a while.”

“It’s a real simple one that I’ve been setting up for weeks. This guy’s selling an amulet and I found a buyer. I need to know it’s authentic. Should be a pretty low risk situation. We meet. You look. We get and we’re outta there.”

“You said the last one would be simple and I’ve got a knife wound on my thigh to prove it wasn’t.”

“Don’t be dramatic. It’s little more than a graze. You probably won’t even get a scar. There are no Koreans in on this deal.”

“Then exactly who is in on this one? I need details before I commit.”

There was a long pause before he said quietly, “All right. This guy is selling a family heirloom.” He paused and then said the next part hastily, “He called it the magi
Anukrati
amulet.”

“Did you say
magi
? Did the word actually come from your mouth?”

Silence was all that came back from the other end.

“This is priceless. I can’t believe you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in another deal involving these guys. Believe me, this not going to be simple. I guarantee Hashishins are involved somehow.”

“Kira, you need some help. I don’t think this has anything to do with your imaginary magi. You really lost it yesterday.”

“We barely escaped last night. Why won’t you believe me when I tell you Hashishins are after these items?”

“I saw no evidence of hocus pocus yesterday. There’s no secret dark-magik cult in on this amulet deal.”

“You don’t want to screw around with these guys. Did you research the seller and the buyer?” She hated the shady nature of all Markus’s deals. Sure, Kane had drilled both of them relentlessly on self-defense, be it armed or hand-to-hand. The sad part was they had to rely on that training a little too often.

“All involved seem fairly legit.”

“Terek Nadir seems legit to the outside world.” The name, itself, brought on a shiver of revulsion.

Markus said softly, “Duckie, he can’t hurt you. He’s gone. Disappeared. And maybe his weirdo cult is disbanded.”

“He was there last night. Why won’t you believe me?”

“I didn’t see him. Look, I know you blame him for your mother’s death, but since you moved in with us after she died everything has been all right, hasn’t it?”

“My mother was murdered! By
him
.”

“There was no proof. The guy had an airtight alibi out of the state. I know he and his weirdo group lived just up the road and they must’ve scared the hell out of you at some point, but it was a couple of escaped convicts that beat both of you up.”

“Bullshit. I was there, remember?” Arguing was pointless. Why wouldn’t he take her word on this? They were family, for God’s sake. As calmly as she could manage, she asked, “What’s so special about this amulet?”

“No clue. I just help people sell their stuff.”

“Don’t you want to give the magi a buzz and ask?”

“Oh, come off it, Kira. They’re nothing more than an Egyptian fairytale. With your obsession for them, I expected you to be all hot to trot to see this thing. You know, now that I think about it, this is a bad idea for you to come. You’re getting stressed out. I’m sorry I asked.”

Kira sighed loud enough that she heard the echo in her phone. “I’ll go, but only because I’m worried about you doing this alone. I do want you to recognize this residency is important to me. This will be the third time in the past two months and twice in the past week that I’ve called in sick to go on one of your deals. I’ll be lucky if they don’t kick me out of the program at this rate.” Maybe if she went along she could steer him clear of danger. Unlikely, but there was always a first time.

“Thanks. I really need you on this one.”

“Tell me where to go. And please tell me Kane is with us this time. We need him.”

“You think I can’t handle it? We’ll be fine. Kane is busy. Fly into LaGuardia tomorrow as early as you can. Email me your itinerary and I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“I’ll get back to you on the flight info. Is Kane around?”

“Hang on, I think I saw him tinkering with his car.”

A few seconds later Kane asked in his characteristic precise, clipped tone, “How ya doing, Kira? Happy New Year and all that jazz.”

“He tell you about last night?”

“No. What happened?”

“He said nothing? Typical. We had ourselves a little shoot-out and then chase.”

“Goddamn it!” There was some rumbling as if the phone was being tossed around. “Markus, you little ass, what’d you get her into last night?”