Blood Pact (Darkling Mage 7)

Sterling watched them over the menacing ember of his cigarette as he took one long, deliberate puff, his eyes burning. Sterling, being Sterling, sauntered up to the man who spoke, blowing a heaving chestful of smoke in his face. The man blinked, eyes stung by smoke, but otherwise did not flinch.

“Or what?” Sterling said, pressing one finger into the man’s chest. “What’re you gonna do about it, sweaty?”

The man’s fist crashed into the side of Sterling’s face, the crack of bone on bone whipping through the empty parking lot. Sterling, being Sterling, barely flinched. He spat his cigarette onto the ground, then grinned, his fangs on full display.

“I wonder if you know who we are.”

Banjo started growling. The man reared back for another punch. His fist never landed.

In a blur of silver and leather, Sterling streaked through the darkness. The man screamed, his hand broken at the wrist, bent in ways that human hands aren’t supposed to bend. My stomach roiled. No big deal, I reminded myself. I’d seen grosser things. Way grosser. Sterling blurred again, his ridiculous vampire speed taking him behind one of the other attackers. The man wailed as his leg cracked, splintered at the shin.

“We’re not giving up Banjo,” Gil growled. “Doesn’t matter who you people are.”

The injured men were kneeling on the pavement, clutching their broken limbs, groaning, sweating more than ever. Sterling held the last man by his hair. The man’s eyes bulged with fear.

“We need the dog,” he blubbered. “Please.”

“No,” Sterling said coolly. “And you know why? Because we’re the bloody Boneyard, and whoever your masters are, you can go back and send them this message. Nobody fucks with – ”

Banjo barked, just the once. The man’s head exploded in a spray of brains, blood, and broken skull. Sterling yelped, letting go of what used to be a man and dropping his lifeless corpse to the ground, where it made a meaty, wet thud.

“My hair,” he screamed. “My jacket. No!”

Good old Sterling and his priorities.

The other two men hissed at each other in a bizarre, guttural tongue, their eyes huge as they sprang to their feet, desperate to escape.

Banjo barked again.

Two more heads exploded, splattering more gore and brain matter all over the asphalt. Gil pulled on Banjo’s leash, more than strong enough to keep the corgi under control, but his eyes were huge, uncertain. Terrified.

“What the hell just happened?” I shouted. “Holy shit. Holy shit, we’ve got to clean this up.”

“We’ve got to clean me up,” Sterling said. “This is leather.”

“We didn’t see this happen,” Gil growled, scooping Banjo up in his arms. Banjo licked at his face happily. “We were never here.”

“But those men,” I said. “They were terrified of the dog. They knew it could do whatever the hell it just did. We could have questioned them, gotten information.”

“Hello,” Sterling cried out, kicking his booted foot into one of the headless corpses. “Do you want to interrogate them? Because I’m pretty sure we need tongues and, oh, I don’t know, an entire fucking head to get a confession out of one of these meat sacks.”

My hands shook as I reached for my phone, my glance flitting nervously between the corpses and the little corgi in Gil’s arms. Banjo blinked at me with his innocent black eyes. What the fuck was this thing?

“Asher,” I said. “We can get Asher down here, and he can communicate with the souls from these corpses or do whatever it is he needs to do to squeeze something useful out of them. I’ll just call him and – ”

That was when the hissing started. It was the sound of the corpses dissipating, flesh and skin and bone bubbling and smoking, as if touched by an incredibly powerful acid. Within seconds, all three bodies had turned into sludge. I stared, mouth agape, as what remained of our attackers trickled into a storm drain.

Sterling pushed his hands into his waist, glaring at me accusingly, his face coated in bits and pieces of dead guy. “Got any more big ideas, genius?”

“This isn’t my fault,” I said. “How the hell is them melting my fault?”

“Shut up,” Gil growled. “The two of you. Don’t you smell that?”

Banjo growled as well, a tiny, adorable, yet ultimately super dangerous echo of his werewolf master.

It took a moment for me to register the smell, but with the rank odor of it wafting off of three disintegrating bodies, it was brutally overpowering by the time it fully assaulted my nostrils.

“Rotten eggs,” Sterling said, wrinkling his nose and spitting onto the ground.