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I glare at it, resisting the urge to kill him straight away.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” I trace the lines of the ‘A’ with the tip of my blade, turning the color from faded black to bleeding crimson, and then repeating the same with the inverted pentagram. All the while, I can feel a familiar darkness moving below my surfaces, its icy fists punching at my skin. “Are you moonlighting on me, Franco? Has someone been subsidizing their earnings by selling cut-price Meth for the enemy?”
My words seem to shake him up, not beat him down. I watch in mounting fury as his head lifts with a jerk and a nasty smile starts spreading across his face.
Our gazes lock again.
That’s when a cold chill hits my spine and starts crawling in both directions. When I walked into this warehouse, this fucker’s eyes were green. What’s staring back at me right now is black.
“You can’t win this, Grayson,” he rasps, his voice so low only I can hear it, while that smile keeps on spreading into a joker’s grin. “Kill me all you want, but you’ll never kill your past. Didn’t the oldbrujatell you as much? He sees you constantly. His spies are everywhere. He’s biding his time, and then he’s coming for you,andwhat you promised.”
“I’m growing tired of your master’s coded messages,” I grit out, wrenching his head back again. “If he wants me so fucking badly, I suggest he comes and gets me.”
I pause.I never pause. And then I’m slitting his throat from ear to ear.
Silence falls over the warehouse as Franco gargles out his last breath. I can feel twenty pairs of eyes burning into the back of my head as I wipe my knife clean on his t-shirt.
The Devil made me do it, too, Franco.
Once done, I turn back to Sam. “Burn the body.”
His face creases up in annoyance. “Can’t we just—”
“Do it. Don’t argue. Take him a couple of hours upstate. Find a crematorium. Hold a gun to the owner’s head until Franco’s dust and ash, and message me when it’s done.”
“If you say so.”
Stepping out into a ripe and pleasant afternoon, I tip my head back and close my eyes—filling my lungs with the salty odor of the ocean to offset the most poisonous parts of me.
Sam follows me out. I can sense him and his questions hovering behind me.
“What was all that about?”
“Murder. You should try it sometime. It’s bad for the soul.”
“I was referring to the freaky comeback of the near-dead son-of-a-bitch. If we need an exorcist, I know a guy down in Brooklyn who can cut us a deal.” His joke has a shaky undertone. Sam’s spooked, while I’m just mad and frustrated. “What the hell did he say to you anyway?”
“He asked me for a quick death, and I obliged.”
“Are you lying to me, or to the both of us? I saw the tattoo.”
“He was anotherEl Alquimistarat as well as a pervert.”
Sam blows out a breath as he glances around the port. He knows this is more than a turf war, and that it’s somehow personal to me, but I’ve been refusing to confirm or deny it for months.The less he knows the better. I want his gun, but I don’t want his death on my conscience.
I open my mouth to give him a bland response to make his curiosity go away when there’s an angry roar from the trawler moored alongside us, followed by a volley of desperate barking.
Sam curses. “The Lopez crew must be importing dogs for their fucking rings again.”
“That’s unfortunate,” I murmur, pulling out my gun and checking the clip. “Didn’t I tell them I’d put a bullet in their skulls if they ever brought that kind of shit back to my city?”
Moments later, we’re strolling aboard a ship calledThe Persephone, ready to send the vessel back down to hell. The deckhands scatter when they see us coming. The cartel scorpion motif holds more sway over these parts than the port authorities.
In the hold, we discover three men trying to force a huge gray dog into a metal cage using metal rods and violence. The animal’s not having any of it. It must sense what’s in store for it. It’s digging its claws into the metal floor and leaving jagged white tracks in its wake, snapping and snarling with its teeth bared and eyes rolling.
I watch as one man brings his metal rod down on the dog’s back, and its howl of pain flicks a red switch inside me. The next thing I know, my bullet is putting Pablo Lopez down, right between the eyes.
“Do they really eat dogs in China?” I ask Sam as the other men drop their rods and stumble backward, gibbering in fear and surprise.
