Paladin (Graven Gods 1) (3 page)

“
You’re good, Summer. Ignore the trolls
.”

“
You’re not exactly objective, Paladin
.”

He snorted. “
And you can spot a single cloud -- complete with silver lining -- and imagine it’s a hurricane
.”

“
Of course. Being neurotic is as much a hazard of the writer’s life as carpal tunnel
.”

While the coffee pot hissed and burbled, I opened a package of cookies and arranged them on a delicate china plate painted with peacock feathers. Not that I’d see anybody until school let out that afternoon. But I was an optimist -- and I liked cookies. Luckily, I had a fast metabolism, or Google Earth would carry pictures of my ass.

Munching happily --
Mmm, Oreos
-- I sat down at my desk and pulled out my phone and its small Bluetooth keyboard. I hate thumb typing. I like using all ten fingers when I write.

Opening the
Paladin’s Quest
file I’d stowed in Dropbox, I sipped my coffee and let my eyes slide out of focus.

Some writers know exactly where their books are going. They create plot outlines and fill out character sheets listing everything from their hero’s eye color to his favorite ice cream flavor. I envied people like that. I also hated their hugely organized guts, since I never have any frickin’ clue what I’m going to write until I write it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried plotting my books. Unfortunately, the results ended up sucking like a Dyson. I finally gave up and went back to writing my old disorganized way.

So I sat in my bookstore inhaling the scent of other people’s words and staring at the screen until I could see him, and he was as real and solid to me as any other human.

“Hello, Paladin,” I murmured.

“Hi, baby,” he replied, in his deep, demon lover croon.

It was too damned bad he wasn’t real.

Richard Paladin sat with his feet up on his desk, his chair balanced on two legs, his hands laced over his flat stomach. Watching me watch him.

I loved watching him.

Paladin was not a very big guy -- about a foot shorter than Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, maybe 5’10” or so. He was also built like a mixed martial arts ass kicker -- powerful shoulders, rippling biceps, and big callused hands with scarred knuckles. Magical sigils marked his palms, and tattoos swirled up his brawny forearms, channels for his magic.

His face went with the bruiser build: broad and harshly handsome, with a crooked nose and the pale, icy gaze of an arctic wolf. Dark hair hung to his superhero shoulders, thick, curling and unfashionably long.

Dangerous as he looked, though, Paladin lived up to his name. In between investigating insurance scams and trailing cheating husbands, he worked pro-bono for every crime victim with a sob story. The man was a sucker for a crying woman or a pitiful kid.

Paladin’s Quest
was an illustration of the kind of trouble his soft heart could get him into. A twelve-year old girl named Chantel Brown had hired him to find out who’d really killed her mother. The cops thought it was her father. Chantel was just as convinced Daddy had nothing to do with it. She’d paid Paladin one hundred bucks in wrinkled bills, the sum total of all the Christmas, birthday and good-grade money she’d accumulated in her decade and change on the planet. Being Paladin, he intended to give it back once the crime was solved. He’d taken it only because the money let him tell the cops he was investigating on behalf of a client.

And yeah, that storyline probably was wish fulfillment on my part. I’d have loved to hire Paladin to solve my mom’s murder when I was a kid. But at the time, he’d been busy being my personal Peter Pan -- the boy who encouraged me to do battle with my collection of bullies.

By the time I’d grown up, so had he. One day I turned around and there he was. Professional ass-kicker, knight in black leather, distilled sex on the hoof. I’d started writing about him because he’d seduced me into it. I had to know about the life he led, had to share his adventures.

My then-boyfriend Ronnie Gordon had seriously hated my fledgling writing career. He’d had reason, since Paladin interested me more than he did. Not only was Paladin more heroic, he was better in bed, if only in my vivid fantasy life.

“
That’s not saying much. The kid couldn’t find your clit with GPS
.”

“
He didn’t care enough to look
.” And he’d had gall, bitching about Paladin as an indicator of my shaky grasp on reality when he’d been jealous of a guy who didn’t even exist.

Hi, Glass House, my name is Brick.

Sitting down at the desk with a mug of coffee and a cookie, I contemplated the phone’s little screen. Tension coiled in my stomach as I put my hands on the Bluetooth keyboard. I wanted to find out what happened next.

“
No, you really don’t
,” Paladin told me grimly. “
But you’re not going to be happy until you do
.”

Calliope leaped weightlessly onto the desk and eyed me with feline disapproval. I ignored both of them and got to work.

* * *

Gerald Moss was a couple of inches taller than Paladin, wiry rather than muscular, with long, ropy arms and hands that looked almost feminine. If he had power tatts like Paladin’s, they were concealed by the windbreaker he wore over his dirt-encrusted jeans.

His narrow face was fringed with a scraggly beard that did an inadequate job of camouflaging his thin mouth and crooked teeth. His red hair was buzzed short enough to show his sunburned scalp.

Moss’s eyes were the only thing about him that wasn’t standard issue redneck. His lashes were as long as a girl’s, and his large eyes were a clear, lovely blue. Unfortunately, their expression was pure addict: flat and calculating, as if he went through life looking for his next fix.

Except what he was addicted to wasn’t crack or meth. He was one of Valak’s acolytes, and he was hooked on killing people.

Killing women, to be exact.

Women like Jamella Brown, whose daughter, Chantel, had hired Paladin to solve her murder. Valak’s spells had convinced the cops her father was the culprit, but Paladin wasn’t so easy to fool.

He found Gerald Moss feeding his addiction at Diamond Don’s, a strip club on the outskirts of Graven. It was four in the morning, early enough that a woman’s screams might not attract attention in time to do her any good.

The killer had pinned his latest victim to the cracked pavement behind the cement block building, not far from the dumpster he probably intended to throw her into. The air stank of rotting garbage and rang with her shrieks.

Paladin headed for them, rage lengthening his strides.

The little blonde flailed and bucked as Moss held her down, jerking at her short pleather skirt. Her face was white with terror, eyes wide and crazed. She’d managed to claw his face with her leopard-print manicure, and he cursed her with blood rolling down his cheeks.

Power burned from the base of Paladin’s brain, sizzling down his neck and into his arms, spilling along the amplifying channels of the tatts. Magic exploded from his right palm with a hissing crackle. It was no sparkler spell, either. This was a merciless hammer that slammed into the side of Moss’s face. He went flying to hit the strip club’s wall so hard, his head thumped like a melon against the cement blocks.

Unfortunately, Moss bounced back to his feet almost immediately, blood pouring from his nose and a howl twisting rat-thin lips. He punched the air, clawed fingers glowing bright blue, as if his bones were flashlights.

Paladin’s left hand shot up, and the attack exploded in a rain of impotent sparks off the protective spell tattooed on his palm. He needed good magical shields, given the many murderous fucktards he was always pissing off.

Moss didn’t get a chance to try again. Paladin went after him, mouth tight and blue eyes burning.

The killer threw up both hands, palms burning bright enough to make even Paladin wince. “Get back, you fucker!”

“Yeah, no.” Paladin drove a vicious right into Moss’s jaw, sending him reeling. Paladin kept after him, ramming punch after punch into his head and gut, relentless as a jackhammer.

Which nearly got him shot when Moss pulled a gun.

Paladin threw up a hand to shield, sending the bullet ricocheting. He smacked the weapon out of Moss’s hand and buried a fist in his gut. When Moss bent, gagging, Paladin grabbed the back of his head and jerked it down to meet the knee he rammed up into it. Cartilage crunched, blood flew, and Moss shrieked a nasal curse. He staggered back, hand cupped over his broken nose. “Mothafucka!”

“That’s just an appetizer, asshole. You’re not going to kill any more women in my town.” Pitiful bodies littered his memory, leaking psychic impressions of pain on dirty pavement or bloody floors.

The cops had taken away the bodies, but the victims’ anguish had burned Paladin’s fingers when he’d touched the places they’d died. His head rang with their ghostly cries for justice. They had been strippers, hookers, and addicts. But also mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. And no one deserved what had been done to them.

The scales had to balance or there was only chaos.

Paladin grabbed Moss’s throat and slammed him against the strip club wall. The killer’s fingers started to burn blue, but Paladin clamped a hand over his hard enough to crush bone. Moss howled in pain as his palm went dark again.

Paladin’s lips curled off his teeth. He had the bastard now, and there was only one way this was going to end. His tatts glowed, pumping magic into the fingers wrapped around his foe’s throat. The spell shot into Moss’s brain, seeking out a ball of magic brilliant with the life force he’d stolen from his victims. Snaking black streams of parasitic magic wrapped around that energy: the spell Valak had planted to collect it.

When Paladin’s probe touched the energy, the spell struck at him like a rattlesnake. Grimly, he peeled the dark magical strands away from the captive life force. As Paladin tore it apart, Moss shrieked, bucking in his grip.

“Cry a river, motherfucker,” Paladin snarled, and kept ripping. With each tendril he shredded, he freed another kidnapped spirit to stream into his keeping.

Unfortunately, he paid for that magical contact with the killer’s brain. Foul memories of rapes and murders battered his consciousness, images of Moss’s crimes that made him shudder in revulsion.

Ignore it. Concentrate on the job
.

He had to rescue every shred of innocence. If he left any of it behind, Valak could drink it from Moss’s corpse.

The last wisp of light streamed into Paladin’s flesh. He peeled his aching fingers from the killer’s throat, and Moss hit the ground, lifeless. An autopsy would show only that he’d died from a stopped heart; the beating he’d suffered at Paladin’s hands hadn’t been bad enough to kill him.

But when the cops checked the cell phone in the dead man’s pocket, Paladin knew they’d find the photos Moss had taken of his victims before and after death. Including the picture of Jamella Brown, whose daughter, Chantel, had hired Paladin with her birthday money.

Paladin climbed to his feet, feeling battered. His stomach twisted with nausea as his brain seemed to shudder in his skull. The foul magic he’d absorbed from the killer poisoned his soul. He’d need to pour it into a storage gem until he could find someone to cleanse it. But there was no time to worry about that now; he had one last duty to perform.

Spreading his big, scarred hands, Paladin closed his eyes, murmured a prayer, and released the spirits of the murdered women back into the care of the All. With psychic cries of gratitude, they poured into the light.

He let his hands fall and slumped, opening his eyes.

Gerald Moss’s last victim stared at him, pale and shaking. One of her eyes was wide with terror, the other swollen shut. Her scraped, shaking hands shielded her bruised face. “Don’t hurt me! Please… I won’t tell anybody! Just… Just don’t hurt me!”

Paladin grimaced, realizing she’d been too close. She’d experienced the magical backwash of Moss’s punishment, and it had terrified her. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe. I just want to…” But when he took a step in her direction, the girl cried out, jerking into a ball on the filthy pavement, both arms over her head.

He sighed. He was bone tired, but it would probably take him twenty minutes to talk her out of that fetal curl of terror. He would give her every second of whatever time she needed. She’d suffered enough.

He owed her justice, or he was nothing.

* * *

I sat back from my keyboard and pushed a strand of peacock-tipped hair out of my eyes with a shaking hand. This had been a particularly bad one. Not that they were ever any fun.

When Paladin had touched Moss’s fetid brain, I’d seen the killer’s crimes just as he had. It hadn’t seemed like imagination or clever turns of phrase. I’d felt Moss’s sick excitement, the sense of power killing gave the revolting little fuck.

Gerald had been thoroughly powerless in the rest of his life. His jobs, when he’d had one, had always been for minimum wage, flipping burgers and delivering pizza.

Valak had given him magic and sent him out to kill.

He’d dragged the souls out of his victims’ eyes and gulped them down, collecting them for his master.

Paladin had made Gerald pay, shown him just how it felt to have the life burned from his body. It still wouldn’t bring any of the women back. Their children, their husbands, their parents and their friends would still grieve. The killer’s death would be a chilly consolation at best.

Still, Paladin had balanced the scales. And unlike the justice system, he never convicted an innocent through error or prejudice or a witness’s lies. He learned the killers’ crimes from their own corrupt brains or their victims’ ghosts.

Never mind the cost to Paladin himself. That didn’t matter to him.

I blinked back to myself, throwing off the story’s spell again. Then I caught a glimpse of one particular line, and a memory ambushed me with sick horror. I jumped up and raced to the bathroom in the back of my shop. Calliope followed, meowing in distress.