07- Black Blood Brother Read online

  BLACK BLOOD BROTHER

  (A Demon Lord Novel)

  Morgan Blayde

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To those who helped along the way: Sally Ann Barnes, Jess Cox, Denny Grayson, Caroline Williams, Chris Crowe, Steve and Judy Prey, Jane O’Riva, Leo Little, Amy Rogers, Chris Smith, Chris Riley, and Tod Todd. Jean Colegrove.

  OFFICIAL WEBSITE:

  WWW.MORGAN-BLAYDE.COM

  © Copyright Jan 2016

  ONE

  “Popularity can be hell. Trust me, I know.”

  —Caine Deathwalker

  Rising, leaving her table, she sashayed to the bar and took a stool next to me. She was hot—scorching—her lovely curves sheathed in a thousand-dollar dress of silver scales. Her platinum hair was upswept with a crown of braids around a top knot. Her smoky eyeliner above black eyes was Goth-chic. Her full lips, tinted a creamy elderberry red, begged for ravishment. She radiated a vibe of pure danger, but I’d have thrown myself on that grenade in a heartbeat.

  She eyed the half-empty pitcher on the polished oak bar. The pitcher held half a gallon of bright, deep-red punch. My glass also gleamed red, no umbrella, just a thin slice of pineapple for garnishment.

  She said, “That looks good. What is it?”

  “Rum punch. Good stuff. Want some?”

  “Sure.”

  I lifted a hand to draw the bartender’s attention. “Another glass, please.”

  He brought it over—pineapple slice and ice included—and set it in front of the lady. I poured her drink myself. She lifted the glass to her lips and sampled the beverage. I envied her glass.

  Nodding, she smiled. “I love this!”

  “You’re welcome. I’m Caine.”

  “I’m Chrysta. You can call me Chrys with a Y.”

  “As in why not?”

  “Is that what you’re looking for? Easy?”

  “Adventurous. There’s a difference. I’m eternally searching for a woman that can keep up with me; that wants to. I find that very sexy.”

  “So, you’re a legend in the sheets?”

  “I’m why they coined the phrase “missing in action.”

  She took another sip. “So, besides rum punch, what do you have to offer besides a broken heart down the road?”

  “Memories made for forever. People have died for less.” I finished my glass and poured myself another.

  My inner dragon stirred awake. I heard the mental sound of dragon coils slithering over each other. Golden eyes opened in the back shadows of my mind. Caine, she doesn’t smell entirely human. There are multiple traces of unnatural DNA in her makeup.

  I nodded to my other self. I know. I’m a demon lord. I pick up on these things pretty fast.

  She could be working with this latest batch of assassins riding our tail.

  As long as she sleeps with me, who cares?

  For the last few months—when away from the clan house in L.A.—I’ve had to be on high alert against mass attacks. Fortunately, my wits were never dulled by my enormous alcoholic intake. I set aside my personal security after losing a few good demons. They were cut down with no effort. There are times when you have to face danger alone, or maybe run off and join the circus. Being here in Las Vegas took care of both options.

  Concentrating on protecting my people was a handicap I couldn’t afford any longer. In the past, few of the assassins I’d dealt with matched the caliber I now faced. Someone was recruiting real talent from this city. A whisper from Selene, the Red Lady—in deep cover among my father’s people—indicated my enemies had support from the Village, a secret pocket dimension with a single access portal here in Las Vegas. Facing the assassins on their own turf gave me a shot at finding their employers.

  Coincidentally, my adoptive father, the Old Man, and his dragon bride, my cousin, were coming here soon for frolicking, for their wedding, and a honeymoon. Dozens of members of my demon clan would soon be flooding the town. I hoped to have things wrapped up here before they arrived. Hope springs eternal, but I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d manage that.

  “You’ve gone quiet,” Chrys said. “Losing interest already?”

  “Hell no. I was just wondering if you were part of the attack.”

  “What attack?” she looked genuinely confused.

  “There’s magic in the air, and I don’t mean romance. The dimensional walls are weakening.” I eyed the mirror behind the bar. It gave me a view of the lounge behind me, including the front door. A group of men loitered just outside, about to come in. They wore black slacks and shirts, with black, oversized coats to help hide shoulder harnesses. The guns they carried would have magic-enhanced ammo.

  The same kind I often used.

  She looked in the mirror. “Someone’s after you?”

  “Someone’s always after me. You get used to it after a while, and actually start to look forward to it.”

  I love a challenge. It gets the blood pumping, makes me hard enough to fuck a rock.

  “What do they want?” She sounded puzzled and interested. Maybe she wasn’t part of things.

  “Look,” I said, “if you’re not part of the setup, it’s time for you to walk away and save yourself.”

  She finished her drink, put the glass down and slid off her stool. “Thanks for the drink.” She left me, heading toward the hall with the restrooms, and maybe a back alley exit. I watched the delightful wiggle of her retreating ass, hoping I might one day see it under less clothed circumstances.

  My gaze went back to the mirror as the front door opened. Four men came in. I smelled magic even stronger. Multiple scents suggested that a few of them weren’t human, and were hiding it with spells. One particular smell—like burnt hazel wood—was part of the room now, tainting every breath I took. I knew this smell. It had preceded the past assaults by these guys like these ones. The room was about to be bent away from itself. The evil mastermind behind these attacks liked to surround his prey with a pocket of altered space so there was no escape. Such pockets operate by their own rules; cutting off access to most of the magic I used. That handicap was why they were so hard to deal with.

  I grinned. Any second now…

  The air in the room took on a garish yellow-green glow. The bartender vanished, as did the few other customers in the place. My lethal buddies and I were now in a very private universe. Whatever damage occurred here would not be reflected in the real world when the barrier fell and this pocket collapsed. Everything here was just a quantum reflection now.

  Keeps thing neat.

  I reached out and picked up the pitcher. A doppelganger or not, one doesn’t waste alcohol. Of course, whatever I did with this one, the real pitcher would still be waiting for me back in the reality I’d just left. I just had to survive to get to it.

  I turned from the bar and walked toward the assassins, pitcher carried in both hands like a sort of shield, or maybe an offering to the Fates.

  Two of these guys I knew from the last attack. One was Team Leader, ex-special forces with an eclectic fighting style and a fondness for kicking you while you’re down. The other familiar face smelled of wolf. Werewolf, to be precise. He had the best qualities of a wolf and the worst ones of a human. That put his aggression level through the roof. I figured he’d be the first to pounce.

  The third and fourth guys were new hires, replacing two men I’d killed rather thoroughly. I wondered if they’d been told just why they’d been brought in so suddenly. I also wondered what their magical specialties would turn out to be.

  The one I really needed to take out was the fifth man, the magic user still outside the altered space, maintaining it while out of reach. So far, I’d only seen him from a distance, running off as I shot at him. I’d fondly named him
Chicken Shit.

  Wolf-boy sneered, his brown eyes warming to amber. “Going to offer me a drink?”

  “Rum punch would only be wasted on you,” I said. “You can’t have any.”

  His voice got really soft. “No?”

  “Absolutely not.” Hell yes, I said that to provoke him.

  He blurred with wolf-speed. His hands gripped the top and bottom of the pitcher.

  I took my right hand off the pitcher, turned my forearm, and made a fist in order to trigger the device strapped on there under my coat sleeve. Spring-loaded, a bayonet emerged from my sleeve as I took a small step forward. The triangular silver blade buried itself in his guts, detaching from the launch device. The unseen mechanism automatically rotated a new bayonet into position for launching.

  The wolf fell dead, his human form twitching, his skin blackening from silver poisoning.

  I pivoted and ducked with the pitcher as the two newbies pulled guns from their jackets, extending their weapons, tracking me. They wouldn’t fire. There was too great a chance of hitting the field commander. If they took him out with friendly fire, they wouldn’t get paid.

  Team Leader sighed at his dead wolf while drawing his weapons, a pair of colt .45s with pearl grips. The sides of the handguns were etched with occult symbols. The muzzles became ringed with red disks of magic energy. Within the disks, multiple bands rotated, each one holding a different spell. The magic transmuted the rounds he carried as they were fired. He’d fire of course. He’d consider the new hires to be expendable.

  Lucky them.

  I heaved the pitcher so its red liquid slopped all over Team Leader’s black suit. The pitcher fell and shattered, littering the speckled tiles with broken glass. He didn’t flinch, just shifted his stance, trying to line his weapons up on where he figured I’d move to.

  Predictable.

  Normally, I could invoke a magic tattoo to summon my own Beretta PX4 Storms and shoot back, but this altered space suppressed my magic while enhancing theirs.

  Totally unfair.

  Making sure I was outside the spill of rum on the floor, I reversed direction, sweeping my lighter low to the floor as I clicked it. Igniting with a whoosh, the spilled liquor burned a path to Team Leader. His suit became a bonfire.

  Instead of screaming—like a little girl—he shot himself, a few flesh wounds he could easily survive. The magic discs around his gun muzzles had shifted to blue. The rounds that hit him covered him with hard frost, most of the cold going inside his body. Deprived of air, the flames on him went out, though the floor still burned. He crumpled and the fire began to melt his icy exterior. I figured I had maybe three minutes before the tough son of a whore was back in the fight.

  Newbie One said, “What the fuck.” He only had one semi-automatic. He emptied its magazine at me. Fortunately, I managed to use my dragon strength to hoist the dead wolf and let his corpse take the shots.

  I love inhuman shields.

  Newbie Two put one of his guns away, held the other at his side, and turned to face the far area of the bar where tables and chairs gave way to an ivory piano with its lid propped up by a stick. He wore a turban with an oval ruby pin, reminding me of a grown-up version of Hadji from the old Jonny Quest cartoon series. He lifted a hand, palm directed at the piano. His hand flared with purple mystic energy. The piano gave off the same glow. It shivered, lurching into the air, hovering.

  Newbie One ran out of bullets, which was good because they had been transmuted into something highly explosive, blasting hell out of everything near me. I had little of my wolf shield left. He was in pieces, and I was cut by bone chips, splattered with blood, and was soon going to bruise from the concussive blasts going off so close.

  I hurt like hell, had a headache, and was going to be deaf for a while, but I wasn’t down and out; being half-dragon from my mom, and half Villager through my Slayer father’s side of the family, I was tough.

  But that didn’t mean getting slammed with a flying piano didn’t take its toll. The piano carried me across the room to a far wall. Most of the piano stayed there. I, of course, got the joy of being punched through dry wall, shattering a strut, and almost my back. I crashed to the floor of a closed storefront, a hotel gift shop, and skidded into some steel racks holding clothing. A faceless mannequin toppled over me, going for a kiss.

  “Not now.” I batted her off me and lurched to my feet, staggering a little. “Okay, no more fooling around.”

  I had a special little tattoo that I seldom used. I thought it might still work. The tatts I could use were those that only affected me, nothing else. The ones I couldn’t use in this altered space were offensive in nature. Using my half-dragon magic while in human form had always required a price in pain. This was no different. Except it was. The flip of natural laws in this tailored dimension changed the pain I should have felt into an orgasmic rush. I came in my pants, pleasure spiking in my brain from an endorphin rush.

  My inner dragon said: Didn’t see that coming. Get it. Coming. Cumming.

  My eyelids fluttering, my ass clenching hard, I rode out the effect, not even bothering to tell my other self to shut the fuck up. My bi-location spell activated. While my physical body—and part of my awareness—stayed in the storefront, something like an astral image of myself drifted free. A phantom, I hovered in the air a moment, and then directed that part of myself further away from the bar. At a certain distance, my physical form would have hit the boundary of the altered space and been stopped, trapped inside it. I hoped that in an intangible state, part of me might break through and reach Chicken Shit, the key to the trap.

  In the middle of the gift shop, my ghost self found the barrier, and was slowed. The yellow-green glow of the air snuffed out as I broke through. I could no longer touch thoughts with my physical self. It was as if that part of me had been amputated. Without that link, I wondered how long this part of me could maintain ectoplasmic cohesion.

  Better hurry this up.

  I flew out of the shop, seeking Chicken Shit. I didn’t think he could expend this much energy from a distance. He ought to be close by the hotel that housed the bar and other distractions for hotel guests.

  I found him out by the hotel pool. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt with palm trees and grinning Tiki idols printed on it. His shorts were khaki, and he sat on a lounge chair with an umbrella drink in one hand. His other hand clutched a necklace with a gold wire pattern hanging on it, some kind of complex geomantic weaving. To my spectral eyes, the necklace gave off a yellow-green glow.

  Approaching him, I saw no sign of surprise. His eyes never turned my way, focusing on me. It didn’t seem like he knew I was there.

  Too bad for him.

  Through the magic link that connected me with my armory back home, I summoned my demon sword. The armory paid the price of magic from its store, so I felt no pain doing this. A length of black steel appeared, the sword shimmering in red energy. I held the hilt, but to Chicken Shit, the hexenmeister, it must have looked like the sword had popped out of thin air floated on its own.

  The aura the sword bled into the air was one of eternal hunger and savage need. It shivered through me painfully, distorting my astral image.

  Confusion left the hex master’s face as I stabbed him through the heart. The sword drained his screaming soul, adding it to a storehouse of similarly consumed spirits.

  The sword said. That’s good.

  As the owner of the sword, the demon blade kicked back a little of its new energy into me, stabilizing my ghostly form a little more. Before the sword could think about eating my incorporeal self as well, I distracted the blade with its own relentless hunger.

  “There’s more of these guys close by. Want to eat them too?”

  Fuck yeah!

  “Great. Let’s go get them.” The barrier would be down. My magic tatts would all work now. The mercs were going to get hurt. Badly. It was a promise I made myself.

  TWO

  “A chick is the best way to kill time,


  when there’s no one around to kill.”

  —Caine Deathwalker

  The altered-space was down due to the caster’s death. This was going to tip-off Team Leader and the newbies that they needed to retreat and regroup. I needed to get back to them before they escaped. Floating, I dragged the demon sword hilt-first in my wake. I went through the glass door, into the shop, without a problem. Being material, the sword broke the glass. An alarm sounded.

  I had two mental images: one of me in the middle of the store, and one of me floating toward myself, still gripping the sword. My astral form sank into my body, bringing the sword into my physical hand. Two separate perspectives on the room fused into one.

  I magically reached to my armory and pulled a Storm PX4 semi-automatic through the ether. The handgun popped into my left hand. Doubly armed, I stomped toward the hole in the wall. It was blocked on the other side by the broken piano. I kicked the shattered thing out of my way, and rushed through, gun extended, ready to fire.

  I didn’t need to. All the mercs looked dead. Not just dead, but ripped to pieces, battered, and flung joyously about. Blood was everywhere. Broken tables had fallen over. Chairs were scattered everywhere. One of them had broken the mirror behind the bar and still had its legs embedded in the wall. I saw no sign of the bartender. With the barrier down, this place should have been normal, with no damage. I attributed the current state of things to the suddenness of the pocket’s collapse. The spell hadn’t been shut down the normal way, but had died with its owner.

  I walked to the bar and stood behind Chrys. She was sitting on a stool, back where she’d been before. There was a dark green bottle of champagne capped with gold foil in front of her. She still looked perfect. Not a hair out of place, not a drop of blood or gore on her tight dress.

  The voice of my sword stabbed into my mind. Hey, you said I’d get to eat some more souls. What the hell!