Paladin (Graven Gods 1) (20 page)

Jennifer Stone, Dave’s mother, who owned one of the shops in my strip mall. I hadn’t even known she
was
a Demi, though now that we touched, I could feel the magic pulsing under her skin. “You’ve got to help me! Valak’s got my son!” Her hands clutched at my shoulders, and tears ran down her cheeks.

Dave? They took Dave
?

“What happened, Jennifer?” Zanos-James moved forward and took over, guiding her back to the clearing to sit down. Sending Opal after a soft drink, he settled Mrs. Stone into a chair.

I followed, sick anxiety surging through me. Dave, cute, puppyish Dave, with his thinly disguised crush on me and his fierce love of all things geek, from video games to comic books with a cosplay chaser.

“
And generations of Demi breeding
,” Paladin reminded me grimly. “
Jennifer’s only Demi, but his father was Ador-Gene, who fell in battle against the Valakans last year
.”

Hell. I’d been told he had a heart attack. Yet another kindly Demi lie.

But all of that was water under the bridge. The immediate issue was that Dave’s fate would be horrific if we didn’t get to him in time. The Valakans would wipe him the way you’d erase a hard drive, killing everything he was so some bastard could seize control of his body. And since he was so young, he’d burn out in weeks, dead of stroke. Or else they’d just kill him and eat his magical soul on the spot.

Either way, the kid was dead.

God damn it, no. Not Dave. “
Paladin, we can’t let them kill that boy
!”

“
Of course not
.” There was no panic in the thought. Paladin didn’t panic. No matter how bad a situation was, he’d been through worse during his long life. Up to and including earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. All of which gave him a certain perspective no mere mortal could match.

The touch of that calm, calm consciousness soothed my fear. If anybody could save my friend, it was Paladin.

Zanos-James soon got Jennifer calmed down enough to talk. More or less, anyway. Her hands still shook so badly, more of the Coke ended up on her than down her throat.

“We were on our way to the Demifair,” she managed, scrubbing at her tearstained eyes with the back of her hand. “We were closing up. I’d just walked out of the shop when I saw this avatar hit Dave on the head and
take
him!” Her voice spiraled up at the end, panic edging every word.

“And we’ll get him back, but we have to know more,” Zanos-James said, patient but firm. He was obviously as immune to panic as Paladin. “Which means you’ve got to describe them well enough that we can find him.”

Calliope jumped into the woman’s lap, and Jennifer clutched at her like a furry lifeline. The cat suffered herself to be held. A lapful of purring Cal is better than a Valium. Calliope deserved an Oscar for it, too, because I knew she wasn’t in the mood to purr. She liked Dave every bit as much as I did.

“I was running late -- customers -- and Dave was really nervous.” Jennifer paused to direct the next words to me. “He was worried about how you were going to react to him being Demi and not telling you. But Paladin had ordered us to keep our mouths shut, so he really didn’t have a choice. He’s got such a crush on you…”

“Yes, ma’am.” A fifteen-year-old in the grip of puppy love doesn’t do subtle. “Then what happened? Describe the kidnapper.”

“Dave walked out before I did -- I was setting the store alarm -- and I heard him yell. I ran out, and he was struggling with this big blond guy…”

“Can you project the memory?” Zanos-James asked her.

Jennifer paused, blinking, hands pausing in mid stroke on Calliope’s black fur. “I think so.” Her expression went set with concentration, and she gestured.

An image formed in the air, three dimensional but a little blurred around the edges. Dave, struggling with a big blond man in leather who looked vaguely familiar. The thug had the meaty shoulders of a professional bodybuilder, blocky features, and buzz cut with a receding hairline. I’d be willing to bet on steroid abuse.

The Terminator wannabe also wore an expression of frustrated surprise, probably because he was having so much trouble subduing Dave. All Demi kids had hand-to-hand training from the time they were toddlers, even if they weren’t from a warrior clan.

All of which meant Dave wasn’t going quietly.

In the memory, his mother raced toward them screaming, her hands igniting in a blaze of magic.

Cosplay Terminator looked up, saw her coming, and hit the kid hard right in the temple. Distracted by his mother, Dave failed to block. He folded, and the thug opened the car’s back door and threw him inside, leaping in after him even as the car roared off.

Screaming, Jennifer hurled a series of spell blasts after the car, but somebody threw up a spell shield. Her attacks hit the shield like confetti snowballs, exploding into harmless sparks.

Jennifer ran after the car, throwing spells and shrieking obscenities, but the shield didn’t give. The car disappeared around the corner with a squeal of tires and a deep engine roar as it accelerated away.

The memory spell dissolved and Jennifer collapsed, panting, clutching her temples. I knew she’d just given herself a hell of a headache, on top of whatever aftereffects she had from throwing all that magic around. “Get him back,” she moaned, her voice aching with desperation. “You’ve got to get him back before they kill him…”

“Listen to me, Jennifer. We
will
save your son,” Zanos-James said in the tone of a holy oath. He turned his sharp green gaze on Ulf-Mark and me. “Did you recognize that asshole?”

“Yeah,” Paladin said. “He’s a low level Valakan. They call him Tank. Human.”

“Whoever’s driving the car wasn’t,” Ulf-Mark grunted. “Not from the way he was shielding the car. Demi at the very least.”

“Moss saw Tank at Zap a lot. He was a bouncer there. He also bounced at Ringo’s, that joint on Ross Street.”

“I know it.” Zanos-James gave us a sharp nod. “Opal, Rizoel and I will take Ringo’s while you and Ulf-Mark hit Zap. If you don’t see Tank, grab the first Valakan you do see. Rizoel, let the teams know we’ve got a Demi missing. Did you get a useable image of Tank and Dave you can send?”

“Of course.” The bird nodded her head and spread her great wings. Her red eyes began to blaze as if somebody had installed LEDs in her skull. “Sending. Prepare for priority message by order of Zanos-James.” Images slammed into my mind -- Dave fighting Tank, being tossed in the car, then images of the boy, his abductor and the car, shafting between my eyes like an arrow thudding home. Being a familiar, Rizoel excelled in mind magic, which made her the perfect conduit for any message you couldn’t entrust to a cell phone.

“All right.” Zanos-James gave us a decisive nod. “Let’s get that boy back.”

I scooped up Calliope, and strode along through the woods with Opal, Zanos-James, and Ulf-Mark. In contrast with our first trip, we were all quiet, tense with the anticipation of the battle we knew was coming. The Valakans weren’t going to give that boy up without a fight.

We were damned well going to get him back anyway.

Even in my lethal preoccupation, I heard the cheerful music of the Demifair warbling tinny notes. Kids shouted, adults chatted and bartered as someone hammered something metallic in the background. The smell of roasted meat hung over the woods, homey and familiar. Yet there was a strange edge to the night, childhood memories turned to tragedy thanks to the same bastards who’d taken Dave.

This time they weren’t going to get away with it.

These were
my
people. These were the ones Paladin and I fought every night to protect. He was willing to die for them, and so was I. The thought was terrifying, and yet at the same time it strengthened me.

I wasn’t just a bookstore owner, or the artist who’d won Eris’s contempt. Yes, I was those things, but I was also my parents’ daughter. True, I’d said the words before, but on some level I hadn’t really believed it. Now I did, because I realized I’d fight for Dave and his mother.

I truly was a warrior.

“
Of course you are
,” Paladin told me.

We reached the parking lot, with its collection of family sedans, pickups, and a scattering of sports cars. Zanos-James turned to us, his gaze solemn. “Good hunting.”

“And to you, Zan,” Paladin replied. Opal nodded, a respectful tip of the chin to the two gods, then turned to follow Zanos-James to his pickup.

“Here’s ours,” Paladin said, starting toward the neon blue Kia.

Ulf-Mark eyed it dubiously. “Let’s take mine. That thing is an embarrassment.”

Paladin grinned. “Summer’s Aunt Mary bought it for her. I think she did it deliberately.”

Ulf-Mark snorted. “Mary always did have an evil sense of humor.”

I blinked, suddenly looking at the car in a new light. My aunt knew about Paladin, of course. She’d just never said anything about him to me, likely on his orders. One did not disobey a god, even if he inhabited your adopted child.

I wondered suddenly how she’d felt about my inheriting him. It was a weird situation. She’d been older than my mother, but Paladin had chosen Mom over her. That was bad enough, but to find herself saddled with me, knowing that if Valak hunted me down, she could wind up in the crosshairs with me…

“
She loved you, Summer
,” Paladin told me. “
She wasn’t all that fond of me, but she loved you. Never think otherwise. And yes, she knew Valak might come after us, but she was ready to fight for you as if you were her own child. To Mary, you were
.”

My eyes stung, and I blinked hard against the grief that suddenly felt as fresh as if Mary had died yesterday instead of three years ago.

We followed Ulf-Mark across the gravel parking lot to his sleek black Ford Mustang, which looked like a speeding ticket waiting to happen. It beeped as he unlocked it with his key fob, and I started to get in on the passenger side, Calliope in my arms.

“Wait a minute,” the cat said. “There’s something I need to do.” She gathered herself, which I recognized as a signal she wanted to get down. I obediently dropped her.

Calliope began to change before her paws even hit the ground. Her body stretched, elongating and expanding, her outline dissolving into a brilliant magical sparkle. When the effect faded, a fifty-pound mini-panther crouched at my feet.

I jumped back. “What the fuck?”

Cal’s blue eyes flashed up at me. “Do you honestly think Paladin would have made me your bodyguard if all I could do was chase canaries?”

“But you didn’t shift when those Valakan thugs jumped us!”

She snorted and sat back on muscular haunches. “Paladin was still firmly in the closet. He’d have turned my ass into a throw rug if I’d outed him.”

“Pretty much,” Paladin agreed.

“Good point.” I opened the coupe’s front passenger door, groped for the handle to flip the seat forward, and watched her worm into what passed for the back seat.

“Don’t you have any friends, Ulf?” Cal bitched. “A hamster would need a shoe-horn to fit back here.”

“My friends trend toward female,” he drawled. “And I ride with one at a time.”

“You never did have any imagination.”

“Barbara never complained.” He shut his mouth with a snap, apparently realizing a little too late that bringing up my dead mother was a great way to kill the conversation. Shaking his head, he started the car, which gave a leonine roar and slung gravel on the way out of the parking lot.

As the Ford’s tires hummed over the pavement, my thoughts went back to Dave. The kid must be terrified. “How long do you think we have before they start doing…” I gestured, grimacing. “Whatever they’re planning to do to him?”

“If we can get him back before the end of the night, he should be all right,” Paladin said, my voice dropping as he spoke, just as my mother’s had before me.

Then the implications hit me, and I grimaced. If we failed to find Dave…

We drove through the darkness, the car’s headlights sweeping over the moonlit woods to either side. There was no sound except for the Mustang’s feral growl. Paladin’s consciousness radiated a cold, predatory intensity, an emotion I wasn’t used to feeling from him.

“
Of course not. I’ve never taken you hunting before
.”

“
What if I fuck up and get both of us killed
?”

“
You won’t. You handled yourself pretty well in that fight with those six men in the parking lot
.”

“
Yeah, but I got my ass handed to me when I went up against Valak
.”

“
You still survived, Summer. Anyway, your body is a combat veteran even if your mind isn’t. And I sure as hell am
.”

Mark spoke up suddenly, his voice a little higher than Ulf’s usual growl. “I was nervous too, the first time we went into battle. Then Ulf took over, and all I had to do was sit back and watch the ass kicking.”

I glanced over at him and asked dryly, “You’re reading minds now, Mark?”

“Nope, I just know all your tells. As I damned well should, since Ulf changed your diapers.” He wrinkled his nose. “Which, considering I just asked you out, makes me feel a little pervy.”

I laughed, only to break off as I remembered what Paladin and I had done immediately afterward.
Speaking of pervy
…

Not thinking about that
, I told myself firmly.
At all
.

Zap was a long low one-story building located on a street packed with restaurants and shops. A crowd had lined up outside the club waiting to get in. As we slowly drove past, Paladin searched the crowd with his magical senses.

Ulf-Mark frowned. “I’m not sensing anybody with magic at all. You?”

“Nothing,” Paladin said. “But I’m not surprised. Zanos-James was probably right about them realizing I’d killed their pet serial murderer.”

“Even if they hadn’t, this is a bit too public a place to take a kidnap victim,” Calliope commented from the back, her voice sounded deeper than usual, given her bigger body. “Some good Samaritan would call 911.”