Raw Power: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Demon-Hearted Book 1) by Ambrose Ibsen Page A

could be the kind of remote facility where terrorists got spirited away to. Am I about to get water boarded for busting out of here last night? I wondered shudderingly. Kubo let go of my arm and took on a slightly more relaxed stance as he led me out of the lobby and down a narrow hall, accessed by-- you guessed it-- another long sequence of numbers.
    “Is this some kind of FBI holding facility?” I squeaked as he started down the meandering hall. Like the lobby, this space was done up in a greyscale color scheme. The carpeting was a faint black color, the walls were slate and the ceiling a very light grey. The doors, of which there were several along the way, were of a dark black coloration; some kind of thick wood, stained with a rich varnish. The fluorescents were harsh, made the place feel sterile, and even as we turned a corner there wasn't a single window to be seen.
    “No,” said Kubo. “We're not FBI, though we sometimes lie to law enforcement just to speed things along. It's easier to lie than to tell them the truth.” He charged ahead, picking one of the countless unmarked doors and pushing it open. A light came on automatically and he waved me inside. “We do have some members who are employed by the FBI, however. It helps us grease the wheels on those rare occasions when we have to deal with the feds.”
    By the looks of it, it was a conference room. Looking and feeling like utter shit, I couldn't help but laugh. What, we were going to sit down and talk business with me looking half-dead and still damp with piss? It was ludicrous. I took the seat that was offered to me, a firm, leathery chair of which there were several, all arranged around a solid grey table. There were screens on both sides of the room and a massive projector bolted into the ceiling, with lenses on both sides. It reminded me of a lecture hall, and was every bit as stuffy. Not a hint of outside air had ever touched this space.
      Well , I thought, setting my hands on the table and staring down at the cuffs that were still locked around my wrists, It's not the first time you've shown up for a lecture feeling like crap . I remembered my college days, stumbling into Monday morning classes after weekends of hard drinking. Looking back on it, it was a miracle I lived, much less graduated. Kubo plucked me from my reverie as he dropped down into a chair of his own and cracked his big, beefy knuckles.
      The guy looked Japanese, and with a surname like Kubo he almost certainly was. He was bigger and stockier than any Japanese guy I'd ever met, though; a bit taller than me and far more muscular. I made my living roughing people up, but this guy walked on higher ground. Power radiated off of him in great peals like invisible thunder. Just sitting across from him was enough to get a taste.
    Kubo tugged at the collar of his shirt and yanked off his jacket. Then, rolling up his sleeves and revealing forearms of incredible thickness, he glanced me over narrowly. “You remember anything about last night? Where you went, what you did?”
      I pursed my lips, shaking my head. I couldn't remember a damn thing, though if my run-in with the cops that morning had been any indication, then I'd gotten up to something mighty bad. Up to that point I'd only ever been arrested once. Bought some weed in high school and got picked up by a family friend who was a cop. They threw me in the county lockup overnight to try and scare me straight. It didn't work; if anything else, it only taught me to act more discrete when making transactions of that kind. My encounter with the police that morning, however, had been completely different. Those cops hadn't planned to just arrest me, to take me downtown and let me sit in a cell with a bunch of other criminals. They seemed like they'd been planning to gun me down on the spot, put me down like a rabid animal. I got shivers just thinking about how close I'd walked that line. Shit, I still do, to this day.
    “The demon in you