Bad Grace (Watcher Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free

Southside and pretend it isn’t even there. It’s just the dark place across the river you tell your children never to go near. Except the children don’t listen and venture over anyway looking drugs, maybe even a little fearful adventure. Some of those kids never make it out again.
    Frank hated the Southside as much as anyone else. He even rightfully feared it. What he didn’t do is allow himself to be afraid of it. He had a job to do. If that meant entering Hell and consorting with the inhabitants, so be it.
    He took it slow when he came off the bridge and started driving through the streets of the Southside. It wasn’t like he had a choice. Almost every street in the place was swarming with people as they hung around outside the scummy tenement buildings where they lived. Half the buildings didn’t even look like they had electricity going to them. The dim light in most of the streets came from the few lit windows in the tenement buildings and what street lamps were still working.
    Frank drove the black Chevy through the grim streets, the Beretta in his lap where he could get to it quickly. If he was carjacked, it wouldn’t be the first time. For the most part though, the residents of the Southside ignored the car as he drove. A few times people walked out in front of him, forcing him to slow to a stop. When that happened, he waved his gun through the windshield at the invariably drunk or high individual standing there. They would laugh or sneer, maybe even slam the hood a little, but they never caused any real trouble. The gun and the look on Frank’s face—the one that said move or I’ll shoot you—was usually enough to send them on their way.
    The address Frank was heading for was in the center of the Southside, where most of the business where, if you could call them that. A grocery store, a liquor store, a betting office and a fast food joint, plus the bar Frank was heading to. Not much of a business center. The only two places open at such a late hour where the bar and the liquor store, which should tell you all you need to know about the residents of the Southside. Frank parked the car in the small lot in front of the bar. A few drunks hung around outside but they didn’t seem to represent much a threat. As far as Frank could tell, none of them were demons or anything else supernatural.
    He put the Beretta in the back of his jeans and got out of the car. When he slammed the door, the drunks—five of them—all looked at him like he had no business being there. Frank ignored them and walked to the liquor store, which was next door to the bar, next to another store that looked to have been recently firebombed. Clearly someone didn’t pay their dues.
    A young guy in a dark suit stood behind the counter in the small liquor store. Frank didn’t know who you would expect working in such an establishment in such a fine upstanding area, but it sure wasn’t a guy in a suit. Frank paused for a second as he closed the door behind him so he could take the guy in.
    Straight away he knew something wasn’t right.
    The clerk (if that’s what he was) was taller than Frank’s six feet and had at least a hundred pounds on Frank’s one eighty, all of it muscle by the looks of it. His face was clean shaven, with just enough lines to put him in his late twenties, and his mousey hair was cropped short. The guy looked more like a security professional than a clerk in a liquor store. His gray eyes locked on to Frank as he walked in.
    Before Frank even got to the counter, he knew the clerk was a demon, which set all sorts of questions firing of in his brain, chief among them being, why is a demon manning a liquor store unless they are guarding something more valuable? It was a question Frank really wanted to know the answer to, but first he asked the question that brought him into the store in the first place. “Got any Jack?”
    The demon clerk regarded Frank with cold eyes. He was definitely hiding something, the door