by Laken Cane
She held up her palms when her father stomped into the living room. “We’re fine, dad.”
He pulled her and Maggie into his arms. “That bastard has hurt my girls for the last time.”
Maggie’s cell rang and she pulled away. “It’s Sara.” She gave John a kiss on the cheek. “We’ll be okay, Grandpa.”
“I know, baby,” he said. “Go on upstairs and talk to your friend.”
She was already talking to Sara as she jogged from the room. John waited until she was gone before he dropped his smile.
“I’m going to go after him,” he said.
“Asa is taking care of it,” Beth told him.
“Good man.” He shook his head as he looked at his daughter’s face, then at her wrapped hand. “You give as good as you got?”
“Better,” she said. “But I’m worried about Maggie.”
“Yeah. It’s awful for her. She doesn’t want to see her dad hurt, but—”
“He’s dead to me,” Maggie said, coming back into the room. “I don’t want to hear his name again. Can we please stop talking about him now?” She looked around at their worried faces. “Seriously. I’m going to be fine. I have a lot of people who love me. I’m not wasting another moment being sad because of someone who doesn’t. He was a sperm donor. Nothing more.”
Krista held out her hand. “Mags…”
Maggie sighed as she took Krista’s hand. “All right, Ma. I’ll go to talk to someone if that’ll make you feel better.”
“It’ll make us both feel better,” Krista told her. No matter what she thought, Maggie was going to need help dealing with shit.
John pulled his cell from his pocket.
“Who are you calling?” Beth asked him.
“Asa. I’ll find out where he is and join him. I’m in the mood to go hunting.”
Beth nodded. “Krista is going to work, so I’ll take Maggie home with me.” Before Maggie could argue, she added, “We’ll stop at Sara’s and see if she’d like to spend the night. I’ll take you both to school in the morning.”
Krista hugged the three of them goodbye, spending a little extra time holding Maggie. “I love you, Mags. So, so much.”
Finally, she left the house and called Stella on her way to the city.
“Let’s do it here,” Stella said. “It’s more secure and there won’t be any annoying humans to interrupt us.”
“Thanks, Stella. I’ll let them know. See you around midnight.” She hesitated. “Are you doing okay?”
“I am.” Stella ended the call without another word.
She called Luke and brought Talon in on the call. “Where are you guys?”
“I’m just leaving Millie’s,” Talon said.
“I’m on Lawson Street,” Luke told her. “You coming to the city?”
“Yes. Talon, go home and get some sleep before tonight. Stella said we can do the ceremony at her place.”
Talon had missed the most sleep, so he needed to get a couple of hours before they had to spend half the night painting a veil with human blood.
“No sign of Vogdris,” Luke said. “Where are you, Kris?”
“Almost to Lawson Street. Hang on and I’ll ride with you.”
“I’ll go get some sleep,” Talon said. “Give me a wake-up call, Krista?”
“Will do, hon. Sweet dreams.”
She pulled in behind Luke’s car a few minutes later. He was leaning against his car, gazing into the distance as he waited for her. She stared at him through the windshield, her heart stuttering at how utterly perfect he was. His stillness, his blankness—which hid his passion from those who didn’t know him—and the slow, sexy smile that slid across his face when he came to get her out of her car.
A smile he dropped as soon as he saw her face. He opened her car door and leaned in to study her. “What happened to you?”
“I got into a fight with an asshole,” she said.
“Who?”
She hesitated. “Michael.”
He nodded slowly. “Where’s Asa?”
“Looking for Michael.”
He touched his lips gently to hers, then straightened. He walked back to his car, pulling his cell phone from his pocket as he went.
“Where are you going?” she called.
He stopped and turned to face her. “To make sure he never touches you again.”
She simply watched him.
“You belong with us now,” he continued, his voice hard. “And we will defend you.” Finally, he softened. “We’ll take care of you, Kris. Get used to it.”
Talon called her five minutes after Luke had driven away. “Pull over and I’ll ride with you.”
“Dammit, Talon. I’m perfectly capable of slaying demons alone. Get some sleep.”
“Pull over. I’m right behind you.”
She sighed and pulled off the street, watching through her rearview as he drove up behind her, then left his car and jogged to hers.
He got in, fastened his seatbelt, then stared through the windshield for a few long seconds, his body stiff, before finally turning to look at her.
“Asshole,” he said, almost too low for her to hear. Then, “Are you okay?”
She pulled onto the street. “I’m fine. I don’t know why you guys are so upset that I got a bruise or two from a fight. I get worse than this every day I face the demons.”
“It’s the last straw,” he told her. “The man who should have protected you and Maggie has done nothing but neglect and hurt you both. We shouldn’t have left it for so long. It won’t happen again.”
“You should be sleeping,” she said sternly, because she didn’t know what else to say.
He put his seat back, stretched his legs out, and smiled. “All right.”
Talon didn’t smile very often, and it took her breath. A blast of a horn made her swerve back to her side of the street. “Shit,” she muttered.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Bloodspeller,” he said, and his smile widened.
She cleared her throat and did as he suggested. Talon was entirely too distracting, and he absolutely knew it.
“You seem…easier,” she said a few minutes later. “More relaxed.”
“Around you, you mean,” he said.
“Maybe. And in general.” He seemed less angsty. Less darkly anxious. She thought she understood. He was finally part of a family. He was cared about, protected, and he belonged. And he was beginning to accept that.
It was the same way she felt.
Then her first call came over the radio and the job commanded her attention as the day slid toward night. She checked every reported sighting of Vogdris, but they were all false alarms.
No one was seeing the soul-stealer, because he was holed up somewhere regaining his strength. But then a call came in sending her and Talon into the woods of Edgefield. Vogdris hadn’t stopped his evil ways—he was simply being sneakier about it. Quieter.
When she reached the scene, human law enforcement and paramedics were already there. A policeman was waiting to lead them through the woods, and as they left the path and picked their way through tangled vegetation, he told them it was hard telling how long the victims might have remained there if a jogger’s dog hadn’t slipped his leash and found them.
“Victims?” she asked. “Plural?”
“Yeah. Three of them. Children. All dead. The soul-stealer took their souls, then broke their necks.”
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “Fuck!”
He nodded. He handed them off to the lead on the case, a hard-faced woman named Opal Spence.
She lifted the tape and invited them in. “We don’t know why he’s started killing their bodies. Two of them are siblings, the third a friend. They were discovered missing yesterday morning when the mother went to wake them for breakfast. He went in through the window.”
She and Talon knelt beside the bodies, and Talon reached out to rest his fingers on the waxy cheek of one of the children.
Her chest was so tigh
t she could barely breathe, and all she wanted to do was jump up and run away. There was nothing harder to look at than brutalized children.
Talon took his hand away from the corpse and stared at his fingers. “I feel them,” he whispered, then looked at Krista.
Krista nodded. “I figured.”
“What?” the detective asked them.
Krista stood and faced the cop. “Vogdris wouldn’t go through a window. He wouldn’t carry children off. He wouldn’t break their necks. Someone murdered these kids, but it wasn’t the soul-stealer.” She glanced at the frozen girls, then away quickly, but she knew that scene would play out in her nightmares for a long time to come. “Talon felt the…” She waved her hand, trying to find the words to describe something the detective would not understand. “The lingering essence of the child he touched. Their souls were not taken. Vogdris didn’t do this.”
Detective Spence stared at her. “You’re saying…” She pressed her knuckles to her stomach, then clenched her fists. “We have another asshole on the loose, killing children? Nonhuman?” She looked at Talon when she asked the question, rage, disgust, and hatred in her stare. It wasn’t directed at Krista and Talon, exactly, but she had to put it somewhere. “A demon did this?”
“Maybe human,” he said, “but I don’t know. Could have been a demon, maybe something…” He shook his head, his stare on the children. “Else. Something else.”
Krista and Triganoth had pulled the demons through. Lots of them. The killer could easily have been one of them. If she was to blame for those children losing their lives, it was not going to be something she could get past.
“I’ll call the CIA.” Krista pulled her phone from her pocket as she stepped away. “They’ll send their investigators, and…” But there was nothing else to say. It was a fucking tragedy, and it was horrifying, but it was not the work of Vogdris.
She and Talon walked back to her car in silence, but once they were inside, Talon spoke. “You know I have a certain sensitivity.”
She nodded.
“There was something at that crime scene. It was worse than any demon I ever felt.” He looked at her. “I couldn’t tell the detective because I don’t know what it was. I’ve never in my life felt something so bad. So dark. Never.”
Suddenly, she saw it in his eyes. Something terrible. He was barely holding himself together. And as soon as she noticed, he lost control of the horror inside him.
She reached across and pulled him to her, wrapped her arms around him and held his trembling body. Even his breath trembled, and as he exhaled on her arms, gooseflesh arose on her skin. His breath was cold. Cold as death.
It was as though whatever horror had lingered at the crime scene had found its way inside him. She realized that was how he “felt” things. Everything left an impression, and Talon was unlucky enough to be able to absorb that shit. No wonder he was so messed up. She wasn’t sure how he was sane.
“It’s bad,” he whispered. “And it has come to Edgefield.”
Then a call came over the radio.
Two more bodies were found in those woods. Not children, but two adults.
She closed her eyes, then took a deep breath. “One monster at a time,” she murmured. “We have to handle the soul-stealer. The council and the humans can handle whatever shit is going on in those woods.”
Talon straightened, at last. “For now,” he murmured, his voice thick with emotion. “Soon, we won’t have a choice but to face it.”
She started the car just as the first CIA van rolled up behind them. “Then we’d better find Vogdris, because I can’t handle anything else right now.”
“No choice,” he whispered, staring out his window.
She pretended not to hear him as she drove away from the horror in the Edgefield woods.
24
When she and Talon arrived at Stella’s house before midnight, Asa and Luke were already there. They stood at Luke’s car talking, and as soon as she could, Krista slammed on the brakes, jumped out of her car, and raced toward them. They were like an addiction, those men, and she had been having withdrawals all damn day.
Maybe she should have held back and played it cool, but she didn’t see the point. Why not show them how she felt? They weren’t going to take that information and hurt her with it.
They turned to watch her—Luke’s smile flashed wide and white, but Asa remained sober and intense. Both men were fierce, and beautiful, and hers.
Hers.
There was only one way she could have felt more excited or more joyful at that moment. Only one thing that could have made her full heart overflow.
Her missing demon lord. Trig.
I miss you. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I miss you. I need you.
I love you.
She wished she would have told him that, because what if she never saw him again? She flicked her thumb over the ring embedded on her finger and shuddered as her joy dimmed. But then she forced the sadness away and flung herself at the two men who were there.
They wrapped their arms around her and buried their noses against her skin to inhale her scent, and she had no doubt at all that they were devoted to her. They loved her. They belonged together, and there wasn’t a feeling in the world more perfect than that one.
She leaned back in their arms to look at them. “I love you both so fucking much. I just…” She shook her head and looked from Luke to Asa. “I wanted to make sure you knew.”
And even Asa smiled. “We know.”
She turned her head at a noise behind her and saw Talon standing awkward and wanting, his arms crossed, head down, pretending hard to be studying something interesting on the ground.
“Talon,” she said. “Come here, honey.”
He looked up, surprised, and she took her arm from around Asa’s waist to gesture at him. “Come on.”
But he couldn’t. He wasn’t there yet. He walked away and they let him go. He’d come around when he was ready.
Luke shrugged. “More for us.”
She grinned, then watched with them as two cars drove toward the house. “Your friends, Asa?”
“Yes.”
Just that quickly the lovefest was over, and it was time to work. There were men to bleed and a veil to paint and, she hoped, a soul-stealer to trap.
She didn’t want to ask about Michael, not then, so she didn’t. “There’s something new on the loose,” she told them, as they watched Asa’s men climb from their cars.
“I heard,” Asa said. “Any ideas?”
“No. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s not Vogdris. Talon thinks it’s something even worse.”
“Worse than a power-hungry soul-stealing baby-killing demon lord?” Luke asked. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Yeah,” she said. “So do I. But I saw the bodies. I saw Talon’s face. And whatever it is, we’re going to have to deal with it.”
Rachel opened the front door. “Come in, everybody. Stella is waiting in the garden.”
“Where’s Henry?” Krista asked, as she always asked.
“He’s in the garden as well,” Rachel said. “He has gotten quite attached to the comforts of being an inside…hellhound.”
Krista laughed. “As long as he doesn’t want to eat any of us, I don’t mind him sitting in on the ceremony. He did save my life.”
“Stella believes he only eats the bad guys,” Rachel said, smiling.
“If Stella hadn’t sent him after the demon lord, I’d probably be dead right now.”
“She didn’t send him,” Rachel said. “He attacked the soul-stealer all on his own.”
All six men followed them silently through the house, awed by their surroundings. Talon was already waiting with Stella when Rachel showed them into the garden. Her laughter rang like crystal clear bells at something he’d said, and there was an openness to his face he didn’t often show.
When he caught her gaze, he smiled, and she sent him a tiny wink. He’d figure out
eventually that they cared about him. That they wouldn’t hurt him. That as soon as he was ready, they were waiting.
What happened to you, Talon?
Maybe someday he’d give her the answer to that question.
Henry the enormous hellhound was sprawled out by the pool, as though he’d just finished a midnight swim and had decided to take a nice nap. He didn’t so much as twitch when they entered the garden.
Asa’s four friends hung back, unsure. “Don’t worry,” Krista told them. “He’s a big sweetheart.” Complete lie, but they didn’t need to know that.
Luke snorted.
Asa’s friends looked at each other, then shrugged and decided to believe her. She hoped Henry wouldn’t eat them.
Stella floated toward them all, looking like a fairy princess in her long, dark green dress with her curly red hair flowing over her shoulders. She took Krista’s hand, her stare lingering on Krista’s battered face. She didn’t ask what had happened. More than likely, she already knew. “Follow us, please,” she told the men. “I have a spot all set up.” She practically danced with excitement.
As they walked farther into the beautiful, lush garden, Krista probed the shadows at the border, and finally saw what she was looking for. Stella’s security team watched unobtrusively from the shadows, just in case there was trouble.
Though Stella knew and trusted Asa, she didn’t know his friends. Also, she was probably not too sure the invocation wouldn’t bring forth something evil from the darkness. Not that her team could do much against evil magic, but if that happened, Krista, Luke, and Talon would handle it.
The clearing they stepped into held only a small, gnarled tree, a carved bench, and a gleaming wood altar. Soft, artificial lights created a gentle glow, spotlighting the clearing. The ground was washed with silver light and soft shadows, and the songs of mockingbirds, whip-poor-wills, and even the eerie hoot of an owl made it seem like they stood in the deepest forest.
There was magic in Stella’s clearing, sweet, subtle magic, and Krista let herself relax and sink into it. She slipped her fingers into Asa’s hand, reluctant to bring him into the ceremony, but happy he was there with her.
To her surprise, Talon took her free hand. She squeezed his fingers and glanced at him, but he stared straight ahead.
