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he
imagined it was sewing the gash in his skull, infiltrating the skin
around it like a glowing needle and thread.
    When he opened his eyes again a few seconds
later, he found the man’s wounds sealed, though they were still
covered in drying blood, and he was still unconscious. When a
person was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, it was
because they’d received a concussion. People were so accustomed to
watching television shows or movies in which characters were
“knocked out” only to wake up with no ill effect, they had utterly
no idea how completely wrong the medical aspect of the event really
was. In truth, the character would require immediate medical
attention and on-going supervision, or risk permanent brain damage
or death.
    But that was Hollywood for you. It would
never be a friend to reality.
    Laz could have tried to get into the
complicated workings of the man’s brain to deal with the
concussion, but he wasn’t a neuroscientist, nor was he a natural
born healer like Dannai Caige, so he didn’t want to chance it.
Instead, he pulled a cell from his jacket pocket and dialed a
number, making an “anonymous” call to the nearest police
department. Then he hung up, cast his usual “erasing” spell on the
phone so the call could not be traced in any capacity, and
stood.
    He looked over at the warlock. “Now to deal
with you and your friends.”

Chapter Eight
    Everyone is ignorant of something. What that
something is just depends on who you are and where you’re from. The
man who called himself Steven Lazarus was ignorant of something
pretty big. Bael had been assigned to rectify that, among other
things. He’d been wondering about the best way to approach the
subject. Ultimately, he’d reasoned that watching the man for a
while – figuring out his nuances, idiosyncrasies and such – before
approaching him would be best. Then it would also be smart to limit
the information he gave to Lazarus. A little at a time. That was
what he was going to do.
    And he’d been right.
Detective Lazarus was one hell of an interesting individual. It was
more than a little surprising to Bael that the man hadn’t yet
figured the truth out for himself; he was a detective , after all. But people
tended to see, hear and know what they wanted to see, hear and know, and
ignorance more often than not fed itself.
    The detective made a call on his phone, cast
some sort of basic and crude spell that wiped out the technology
capable of tracking the call, then took off at a run down the
alley. Bael waited. When he sensed the detective’s next stationary
position, he stepped back into the shadows and disappeared.
    His kind didn’t transport the way other
magic users did. It seemed the entire world of supernatural beings
used portals to send themselves from one location to another.
Whereas Bael and others like him, by comparison, would simply
vanish from one location and reappear in another.
    He wondered if Lazarus had
relegated himself to using rudimentary portals. Probably. Once
you’d figured out one way of doing something, why try to improve
upon it? People were also lazy. Even men with remarkable
bloodlines. Perhaps especially men with remarkable bloodlines.
    When Bael snapped back into existence at the
second location, he kept himself cloaked in invisibility and
watched through the murky veil of vision it afforded. The detective
had caught up with one of the escaped gunmen and he had the man
pressed up against the wall. He was grilling him for information.
When the captive wasn’t forthcoming, the detective let loose with
another string of power and extracted the information from the
forefront of the man’s thoughts.
    He then let the criminal drop to the ground.
Apparently, having thoughts ripped from your brain was rather
painful. What the detective probably wasn’t aware of was that it
wasn’t a warlock spell or warlock magic that did it. It was
something much more… special.
    Bael sighed a rather weary sigh