“You want more?”he bellowed.
The crowd roared and stamped their feet.
“Would you pay double?”
The screaming grew in intensity, the buzzing lights mounted high above trembling from the force.
“DO I HEAR TRIPLE?”
The building nearly came down from the barrage of noise the crowd made, the ground beneath his boots rumbling.
Darien stalked back up to the bouncers; they were seconds from wetting themselves at the mere sight of him. “Radio Perez and tell him Darien Cassel needs another demon.Now.”
—
It took Darien nearly twenty minutes of scrubbing to get all the demon blood and bits of flesh off his skin. He welcomed the icy temperature of the water spurting from the shower in the changerooms; it helped him not to think.
But as he made his way through the gates out front of the building that housed the Pit, to where he’d parallel parked on the dark street after speeding through the city to get here, he found that all his efforts not to think about Loren were shot to hell as he retrieved his cellphone from the pocket of his hoodie.
It was past three in the morning. He figured she would be sleeping, but he scrolled through his list of contacts anyway, searching for her name. Little did she know he’d put her into his Favorites category weeks ago; he also had her on speed dial, but for that moment in which he hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen as he warred with himself about whether he should call her, he took the slower route to finding her number instead.
But those extra seconds did nothing to change his mind; to stop his thumb from tapping the call button.
The phone rang several times. He’d almost made it to the car when the answering machine picked up, and her bubbly voice drifted through the speaker. “Hey! You’ve reached Loren—” He hung up, gripping his phone hard enough to nearly crack the screen.
A warm gust of wind blew down the street, carrying fronds of palm trees and a scent.
Slowly, he turned.
A rabbit messenger stood several feet away, the dips and grooves in that horrible mask carved deeper by the shadows of the night. He recognized her build, the small scar on her jaw.
It seemed he had a fresh problem on his hands.
“Your boss isn’t any more patient than the other people who are looking for this target,” Darien observed. He slid a hand into the front pocket of his jeans and clicked the ON button on the side of his flash drive audio recorder. He would’ve scanned her aura, would’ve gotten a precise read on it so he could track it later, if he wouldn’t have run the risk of having his eyes give him away.
“My boss,” the messenger countered, “would like to know what he needs to do to convince you to close this mission.”
“More mynet,” Darien said. “Word on the street says another bounty hunter has been offered more than what you and I negotiated. Knowing someone else was promised four million when I was only promised three doesn’t sit well with me, Long Ears.”
“He figured you might say something like that,” she replied. Darien waited. “He’ll pay five million gold mynet, Slayer. And you’ll get every last copper the moment you turn in what he wants.” Those words made him want to throw up. If Loren wanted nothing to do with him after tonight, she would soon find herself in the middle of a gods-damned warzone of cash-hungry, coldblooded killers again. The magic of the latest talisman he’d bought her would run dry sooner rather than later.
“Tell him this job comes with a few complications,” he said. The rabbit cocked her head, the mercury vapor streetlamp turning those bulging eyes an eerie green. “I have a pretty solid idea where she is, but I need his patience. And I’m not interested in wasting my time explaining why. He needs to trust me.”
For a moment, he wished he could rip himself apart the same way he had those demons in the Pit. The hatred he felt for himself for having pushed Loren away ran deep.
“Find her before anyone else does, and any of the days or weeks you’ll need will be forgiven, bounty hunter.”
Darien clicked off the recorder. “I’ll find you.”
He certainly would. In fact, he had plans to follow this messenger as soon as he got back in his car.
He kept his eye on her as they parted ways, walking opposite directions down the shadowed street. He hurried to his car and unlocked the doors, being careful not to look away from her for too long, though the night was threatening to swallow her up fast.
But Darien’s plans to follow the rabbit were shot to hell when his phone starting ringing with unknown caller identification.
Darien swore as he debated what he should do. A part of him—the pathetic, broken part—hoped it was Loren on the other end of that call. But he wasn’t so much of an idiot as to think she would be calling him from another phone, let alone calling him at all. For one wretched moment, he allowed himself to believe it might be her, and then he stamped out the flame of that hope until not a single spark of it was left behind.
He swiped right to answer the call as he got into the driver’s seat, closing the door on a gust of wind that carried the stench of blood and the musky water of the Angelthene River. Blinking the Sight into his vision, he glanced again at where the rabbit was walking, and he was not surprised in the least to see that her aura was being concealed. He was getting quite used to this garbage. What was the point in having the Sight if it rendered him so painfully blind?
