Claimed Read Free

speak.
    * * * *
    Creed Davies woke with an agonized cry, sitting bolt upright in bed and drenched in sweat despite the air conditioning chilling the room to refrigerator level. He’d had the dream again, the memory he’d forbidden his conscious self. The quiet night was giving way to the brilliance of another day. He tossed off the thin cotton sheet that covered his naked body and headed for the shower.
    He didn’t bother with a light. He knew where everything was. Some might call his tiny apartment Spartan. He preferred the phrase minimalist. What did a man need, anyway, except a bed to sleep on, a chair to sit in and a cabinet to hold the liquor that dulled the pain inside him?
    The water drilled against his back like fine needles, a sharpness he welcomed. Hands against the tiled wall, he leaned forward to let the water sluice across his head and down his body.
    If it wasn’t for the dream, he could almost forget his wife had disappeared on a night like this, hot and sticky and so black it was as if a veil covered the sky. Could almost forget he’d slipped up and lost everything he cared about.
    With that mistake, he’d been damned. He’d lost all that mattered to him. He had committed the unforgivable sin of drawing innocent blood and mortgaged his very soul.
    Creed stepped out of the tub and dried himself in front of the door that still had the holes from a full-length mirror. He’d busted the mirror one night when the agony in his soul had been too much to bear and never bothered replacing it. He knew what he looked like.
    Broad-shouldered and muscular, he had the kind of build that made people wonder if he used to be a pro football player, and if they ought to know him. Scars that served as souvenirs of his many assignments decorated his flesh, paralleling the wounds on his soul. Just under his shoulder blade was the tattoo of his calling, the flaming sword and skull, hiding the chip that would send out a signal when he eventually got killed.
    He was almost dry when he heard his cell phone through the closed door. His first response was to ignore it. No one called him to chat about the weather or ask if he was busy on Saturday night. He’d deliberately narrowed his life to work and sleep, and if he could get away without the latter, he would.
    Work he needed. Working as a free agent for Guardian Protective Services was perfect. No one told a free agent what to do. They told them when and where, and backed off until the job was done.
    He strode naked across the small living room, grabbing the phone on the fourth ring with a terse “Yo.” After that he listened.
    “You know where to send the money,” he finally said. “Half now, half after.”
    Creed’s days as a husband and father might be over, thanks to his carelessness, but he believed in living up to his responsibility. The money would go to a lawyer and on to a trust fund for his family, one that continued to draw interest and remained unclaimed. Someday, maybe, his wife or daughter would be desperate enough to take it.
    Shaking away thoughts of everything but what lay ahead, he quickly dressed. Color coordination was easy. Every piece of clothing he owned was black. The wife-beater he wore beneath his body armor, the tee he pulled on over it, the commando pants that had a place for his knife, his gun and the blowgun with specially tipped darts.
    Once dressed, he yanked his weapons bag from under the bed and began a mental inventory. Some of its contents were standard fare. A half-dozen guns, knives with a variety of blades, military-issue grenades, pepper spray, Tasers.
    Then there was the stuff the agency provided. The special bullets for use on demons and goblins. The half-dozen vials of holy water, stakes for vampires, chemical sprays to subdue a variety of imps and other hell rats. He might not need any of it. He might need all of it. He leaned toward being over prepared when he was walking in blind.
    Creed closed the bag and lifted it from the