Paladin (Graven Gods 1) Read Online Free Page B

it had terrified her. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe. I just want to…” But when he took a step in her direction, the girl cried out, jerking into a ball on the filthy pavement, both arms over her head.
    He sighed. He was bone tired, but it would probably take him twenty minutes to talk her out of that fetal curl of terror. He would give her every second of whatever time she needed. She’d suffered enough.
    He owed her justice, or he was nothing.
    * * *
    I sat back from my keyboard and pushed a strand of peacock-tipped hair out of my eyes with a shaking hand. This had been a particularly bad one. Not that they were ever any fun.
    When Paladin had touched Moss’s fetid brain, I’d seen the killer’s crimes just as he had. It hadn’t seemed like imagination or clever turns of phrase. I’d felt Moss’s sick excitement, the sense of power killing gave the revolting little fuck.
    Gerald had been thoroughly powerless in the rest of his life. His jobs, when he’d had one, had always been for minimum wage, flipping burgers and delivering pizza.
    Valak had given him magic and sent him out to kill.
    He’d dragged the souls out of his victims’ eyes and gulped them down, collecting them for his master.
    Paladin had made Gerald pay, shown him just how it felt to have the life burned from his body. It still wouldn’t bring any of the women back. Their children, their husbands, their parents and their friends would still grieve. The killer’s death would be a chilly consolation at best.
    Still, Paladin had balanced the scales. And unlike the justice system, he never convicted an innocent through error or prejudice or a witness’s lies. He learned the killers’ crimes from their own corrupt brains or their victims’ ghosts.
    Never mind the cost to Paladin himself. That didn’t matter to him.
    I blinked back to myself, throwing off the story’s spell again. Then I caught a glimpse of one particular line, and a memory ambushed me with sick horror. I jumped up and raced to the bathroom in the back of my shop. Calliope followed, meowing in distress.
    Falling to my knees before the porcelain god, I vomited up every last bite of Oreo and sip of coffee. When I was done, I braced shaking hands on the toilet seat, almost as battered from the memory of what I’d written as the violence of my heaving.
    “ Why do you do this to yourself ?” Paladin asked roughly. “ Every time you write it down, you live it all over again. And it was ugly enough the first time .”
    “ If I don’t write it down, it’ll stay in my skull and rot. I tried it the other way, remember? I almost ate Mary’s gun .”
    He growled, sounding pissed. I wasn’t sure if he was mad at me or the situation, but either way, I was too busy yarking to care.
    Calliope rubbed her way around my kneeling body, meowing plaintively.
    “I’m all right,” I lied to the cat, and pushed to my feet. I almost fell, managed to catch myself against the wall, and reeled to the sink. Plucking my spare toothbrush out of the water glass beside the basin, I started scrubbing out the nasty.
    Calliope jumped up on the minuscule vanity. “Rrrooow.” Which was probably Cateese for “You’re bugfuck crazy.”
    “Thank you for that news flash, Captain Noshit.”
    Compelled in the same masochistic way you probe an aching tooth, I returned to the desk where my phone lay. A glance at the grandfather clock told me it was three in the afternoon.
    It had been 10:30 when I sat down.
    I groaned. “Fuck, I hope nobody came in while I was lost in my own head. Assuming they didn’t steal me blind, they’d think I was the rudest shop keeper on the face of the planet.”
    This was why I locked up anything more valuable than a dog-eared paperback. Otherwise a shoplifter could come in and clean me out, and I’d never know it was happening.
    I picked the phone up and read a line at random. Murders, rapes and beatings battered his consciousness until he shuddered in