0.5 Deadly Hearts

by SM Reine

“She’ll hate you once she finds out,” Courevore said, focusing the eyeball on James. “Your heart is blacker than hers.”

  James whispered something into Rich’s ear—something too quiet for Elise to hear. But the eye within his chest rolled with shock, his lungs wheezed in a gasp, and James stepped away apparently unperturbed by the demon.

  He helped Elise stand and gave her one of the falchions.

  “Let’s finish this,” he said, voice hard.

  Elise couldn’t agree more.

  “Crux sacra sit mihi dux,” she said, stronger this time. “Non draco sit mihi lux. Vade retro, Satana. Nunquam suade mihi vana.”

  Rich screamed again, tearing at his own face with the free hand.

  Elise gathered her strength for a final push. She placed the flat of the blade against the exposed eyeball.

  “Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!”

  His cries reached a pitch. His ribs rippled, danced, shivered.

  And then his chest exploded.

  Blood showered over the room, and Elise couldn’t duck fast enough to avoid the geyser. It was hot and sulfurous and it sprayed down her side.

  James’s reaction time had been much better. He peered at her from behind the chair as a steady stream of blood drip-dripped from the seat to the floor. “Well,” he said. “That was a first.”

  Elise wiped a chunk of slippery flesh out of her hair. “And hopefully a last.”

  Rich Harris, priest of the Church of Light and soldier of God, had been split in half by the exploding demon. His pelvis was an open mess of intestine. Organs dangled from underneath the remnants of his breastbone. The rest was gone—including a couple segments of his spine.

  Elise muttered a thousand curses under her breath as she tried to wipe the blood off of her face and hands, but there was just too much of it. Her skin was slick.

  “Okay,” she said, squeegeeing blood out of her tank top. “McIntyre really owes me new clothes now.”

  James laughed as he stood. Of course he could laugh. He only had blood on his right shoe. He plucked something off of her shoulder and flung it aside. “Are you all right? Any problems breathing?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and it was mostly true. Even though Courevore was dead, she could still hear his voice echoing through her skull.

  He will never love you.

  She didn’t look at James as she peeled off her shoes and socks.

  “I think I saw clothes in Leticia’s size in the other bedroom,” James said. “Maybe a shower’s in order.”

  Elise was grateful not to have to discuss the destroyed body, or anything the demon had said. She ducked out of the room, leaving her shoes behind, and tried not to drip blood on her way to the shower.

  Five minutes and a lot of hot water later, she was dressed again in shorts and a tube top that belonged to McIntyre’s girlfriend. James was waiting for her on the top of the stairs. She sat beside him to comb out her hair.

  He was flipping through his notebook again, but he closed it to give her his full attention.

  “Breeding,” he said.

  Elise’s comb stilled. “What?”

  “You said that you thought Courevore was trying to breed.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Courevore is one-of-a-kind. He could only breed by impregnating a human woman—which obviously doesn’t work in cases of incorporeal possession—or by some other asexual method. Like eggs, maybe.”

  “Eggs,” James echoed.

  “Well, I hope not, but I think that’s how his type usually make minions. If that’s the case, they could be anywhere.”

  Elise continued to drag the comb through her hair, thinking back on everything that McIntyre had told her about the case.

  Rich Harris lived in a pay-by-the-week motel—hardly somewhere safe and secure to keep one’s offspring. The former victims’ houses had all been swept by the cops and completely cleaned out. Where could that kind of guy keep a demon’s eggs? A storage unit, maybe?

  James interrupted her thoughts by leaning forward and sniffing the air. “What is that?”

  She lifted her arms and smelled herself. “Is there still blood on me?”

  “No, it’s more like…burning chocolate?”

  Elise almost dropped the comb. “Shit!”

  She leaped to her feet and shot downstairs.

  One could never tell what might go wrong in the aftermath of an exorcism. Powerful demons had a way of leaving nasty tricks behind—booby traps, extra minions, things that could explode. When James smelled the smoke, he was certain that Courevore must have set the house on fire on his way out. What he found was a lot more shocking.

  A black haze filled the kitchen. James rushed to open the back door and turn on the ceiling fan. Elise ripped a towel off the rack and pulled the oven open, and smoke spewed into the room. It was acrid and bitter, almost as bad as the sulfur pouring from a demon’s mouth, and tears sprung to James’s eyes.

  “The hell is that?” he asked, flapping his hands in front of his face to clear a precious few inches of air.

  Elise’s lack of response was even more worrying than the smoke itself.

  She reached inside the oven and tossed a cookie sheet on the counter. Pieces of charcoal slid over the aluminum—pieces of charcoal that smelled suspiciously like Nutella. “Shit,” she said. “I ruined them.”

  They were cookies.

  His mind flashed back to Elise emerging from the kitchen with oven mitts. He had assumed that she was just trying to hide her gloves, which were a necessary but unsettling feature of her wardrobe. But she hadn’t been trying to hide anything. She had been baking.

  “You baked cookies. You actually baked cookies,” James said.

  She shifted uncomfortably on her feet and glared in silent fury at the cookie sheet.

  “The Packards left the ingredients out and the cookbook was open on the counter. I thought…I don’t know. I’ve never tried to bake before.”

  Elise didn’t hesitate to punch her hand into a man’s chest to pulverize a demon eyeball, but a batch of burned cookies could bring her to her knees. Kind of cute, really—not that James would ever tell her that.

  He tried to smother his laugh. She wasn’t fooled.

  “You don’t have to pick on me,” she said.

  Oh, and now she was pouting. That just made it harder not to laugh. He finally gave up the ghost and slung an arm around her shoulders as he chuckled. It didn’t brighten her mood at all. “I would never dream of picking on you. Look, they’re not that bad. I can just break off the burned portion.” Which was the entire cookie. But he had to make up for laughing at her somehow.

  “Wait,” she protested, holding out an arm, but James was tall and her efforts to fend him off were halfhearted at best. He snagged a cookie off the sheet and bounced it between his hands while it cooled. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Of course I don’t,” James said.

  The center of the cookie wasn’t quite as destroyed as the edges, so he crumbled off the blackest parts and popped it into his mouth.

  He tried not to make a face. He really did. But Elise knew him too well, and whatever minute change in expression sneaked through was too much. Disappointment crashed over her features.

  “I told you they were bad,” she said, stomping the trash can lever to lift the lid. She tossed the entire sheet in. As soon as her back was turned, James spit the cookie into the sink and wiped off his tongue.

  She turned back, and he composed himself again.

  “It’s really not that bad,” James said, fishing the cookie sheet out of the trash. The Packards were going to be distressed enough to see what had happened to their bedroom. They didn’t need to lose kitchenware to Elise’s bad mood, too.

  “Screw it,” Elise said. “I don’t even like cookies.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone likes cookies.” James’s lips spread in a devilish smile. “There are more ingredients, you know. We could try again.”

&nb
sp; “Try to…what, bake another batch? Seriously? The Packards are going to want their house back eventually.”

  “They’re in a hotel for the night, and Lucas will have to clean up the bedroom before they can return anyway,” he said. “Come on, let me teach you. Your cookies spread out too much and were a bit, uh, salty. Those are both easy fixes.”

  Elise rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t keep from smiling. There wasn’t much James wouldn’t do to make her smile like that.

  “Fine,” she said.

  By the time they stuck the third batch of cookies in the oven, the jar of Nutella had been licked clean, the sun was falling toward the horizon, and the issue of Courevore’s offspring still hadn’t been resolved.

  “He would have to be keeping his eggs nearby,” Elise said, sitting on the counter by the sink while James leaned at her side. “It takes a lot for his ilk to breed. Good thing it’s easier for humans.” Elise toyed with one of the cookies from the second batch. They hadn’t spread as much as the ones she had burned, but she had no appetite for them.

  Malformed hermaphrodite, Courevore had said.

  “Most humans,” she added, tossing the cookie back onto the pan.

  She could feel James watching her, but she didn’t want to see his pity. She pushed the cookies around the pan with a spatula like it was the most interesting thing in the world. “You can’t take anything he said to heart,” James said. “Everything that comes from a demon’s mouth is a lie.”

  She stabbed a cookie with the end of the spatula. “What did you say to him?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You whispered something to Courevore when he tried to talk to you. It looked like it surprised him. What was it?”

  “Oh, I can’t even remember now. Just an idle threat,” James said.

  “Must have been pretty good to mess with his head.”

  An engine rumbled up the street, then stopped by the window. She pushed one of the flowered curtains aside and peered outside. The noise had been McIntyre’s pickup arriving—not the cops—but his car wasn’t the only one on the street. Rich’s beater was parked at the opposite sidewalk. There was a ticket flapping underneath his windshield wiper.

  “I might have an idea about Courevore’s offspring,” Elise said.

  The front door opened, and McIntyre and his girlfriend walked in carrying duffel bags. Leticia wore rubber gloves that covered her to the elbow. It was hardly the first time they had cleaned up such a scene, and they came well-prepared.

  “How did everything go?” McIntyre asked.

  “Perfect,” Elise said, popping the last of a cookie in her mouth. James was right. Even she liked Nutella cookies. “The Packards are going to need new flooring in the master bedroom.”

  “And groceries,” James added helpfully.

  Leticia laughed and headed upstairs.

  “This is going to take a while,” McIntyre said. He tossed his keys to Elise. “Why don’t you guys go get some grub?”

  “An excellent idea, but I think I’m full on cookie dough now,” James said.

  Elise hopped off the counter anyway. “No, dinner’s a good idea. There’s still one more batch in the oven, and they’ll be done in five minutes. Don’t forget to grab them when the buzzer goes off, McIntyre.”

  He threw an ironic salute at her.

  But when James and Elise stepped outside, she didn’t head for McIntyre’s truck. She went to Rich Harris’s car instead.

  The pavement was hot under her bare feet as she crossed the street, even though the light of day was fading rapidly. The driver’s side window was open a crack. Elise wiggled her arm inside. It was hard fitting her bicep in deep enough to reach the lock, but she managed to flick it with her middle finger.

  She opened the door, and the smell of sulfur seeped out—along with the distinct odor of blood.

  Elise pulled the lever for the trunk. James waited until she was at his side, swords at the ready, before swinging the trunk open the rest of the way.

  The smell that had been faint in the passenger compartment slapped her in the face, so bad that she nearly gagged. Elise stepped back with a hand over her mouth.

  “He nested in his trunk,” James said, voice weak with disgust. “He nested. In his trunk.”

  There were seven eggs nestled among the blankets. They were each the size of Elise’s fists pressed together, and the first six of them were drenched in blood; the one on the far left was even beginning to crack, like it was trying to hatch. They shivered with internal motion.

  Elise was about as touched by the sight of the eggs as she was by the sight of human infants, which was to say, not at all. “Baby hellspawn,” she said. “How sweet.”

  “Good thing you killed him before he, er, fertilized that last one,” James said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I bet Rich Harris had fun shitting these out.”

  Elise smashed her sword into the first egg. Blood and ichor spilled over the trunk. James didn’t watch as she destroyed each of them in turn, hitting them again and again until they were thoroughly pulverized.

  So much for Courevore’s baby army.

  She slammed the trunk shut. “Have fun with that one, McIntyre,” she muttered, wiping her hands off on the butt of her skirt. She had been splashed with ichor, and it left behind tiny burn marks on her skin.

  “You know what today is?” James asked as Elise walked back to the McIntyre’s truck with him.

  “Saturday,” she said.

  “The fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Seems appropriate for a demon that feeds on broken hearts to make his last move today, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Elise said. “And demonic infanticide is an equally good way to spend a romantic holiday.”

  James laughed. “Do you want dinner? Let’s get dinner.”

  He opened the passenger door on McIntyre’s truck for her, and Elise gave him a rare smile before slipping inside.

  They drove into the sunset, leaving the bodies, eggs, and burned cookies behind them.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  I hope you had as much fun reading that as I did writing it! :) This is dedicated to all the readers crossing their fingers for James and Elise—the last couple books in the series will be very exciting, I promise. Paradise Damned will be out by June 2013.

  I write for a living, so I appreciate help spreading the word about my books! If you would like to get involved, go ahead and…

  Share it! All of my books are DRM-free, so feel free to share them with your friends!

  Review it! Help other readers find the good stuff. Leave your honest thoughts in a review!

  Sign up! Visit smarturl.it/armyofevil to get an email the instant I have new books out.

  Thanks for everything, and happy reading!

  Sara (SM Reine)

  facebook.com/authorsmreine

  twitter.com/smreine

  Check out Red Iris Books for the best dark fantasy available!

  facebook.com/redirisbooks