Midlife Demon Hunter: The Forty Proof Series, Book 3

by Mayer, Shannon

  “I was afraid there was. Tom said there was.” He frowned. “Damn it, he used helping you as a chance to tie you to the Hollows again.”

  I nodded and slumped back on the pillow, not taking my hand from him. I didn’t think he was lying. Not this time. I was too tired and feeling too alone to be smarter than that.

  “Stay with me,” I said.

  He didn’t hesitate, just crawled into bed, fully clothed, and carefully put his arms around me. The wash of his magic pushed the darkness back and my body relaxed, floating as if I were indeed in the water, the coolness soothing some of the hurt in both my body and my heart.

  No dreams haunted me after that, and when I woke in the morning, Corb was not there. Maybe he’d never been there and I’d only imagined it. I sat up slowly, my body aching but my ribs not nearly as bad as they’d felt the day before.

  “I can’t believe you slept with him,” Alan snapped from his corner of the room.

  I twisted around. “So he was here?”

  “He held you all damn night.” He shook his head, his nose wrinkled and lips pursed. As if it were disgusting that Corb had showed he was worried about me and had given me far more care than Alan would have done if the roles had been reversed.

  I rubbed my face and slowly pulled on my jeans, a clean bra and shirt, and my work boots. I put my knife sheaths over the jeans—I wasn’t going out without them anytime soon. Scooping up my bags, I took them out onto the second-floor landing.

  “Gran, I have bad news,” I said softly.

  She flickered to life in the doorway to her bedroom. “I also have bad news.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You sound weird, are you okay?”

  She spread her hands wide. “I am not your grandmother. My name is Matilda.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to react to that, so I just stared at her a moment before I could speak. “Shouldn’t you have been kept out by the spells and garden?”

  “The other witch removed the protections as she left, the one you call Missy,” she said. I noticed that her terrible wounds were healed. She touched her neck. “Yes, the energy here is healing for the undead. Which is what has finally allowed me to speak. The blood-born demon has your grandmother. She’s been trying to help me these last few days, but that was what he wanted all along. He wanted her. I was here, and she was busy hiding me from you. We didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. We didn’t realize he wanted her knowledge.”

  “Why would she help you?” I snapped, not sure I wanted to believe her words. “You were like two small dogs barking at each other across the fence.”

  She spread her hands in front of her. “Because the demon made a grab for you. We all saw that. She thought to weaken him by bringing me here.”

  And that made perfect sense to why Gran would do what she did. To protect me.

  I was up and running before she could say anything. I grabbed my hip bag and threw it over my shoulder.

  The blood-born demon had my gran.

  I was going to kick his balls so hard that they lodged in his throat if he so much as hurt a hair on her undead head.

  I yanked the front door open and was outside with a single jump. “Robert, he has Gran!”

  Robert was at my side in a flash, and I was sprinting across the lawn, hopping the fence and pounding up the front steps of the Sorrel-Weed house as if I didn’t have cracked ribs and a wounded heart. As if I’d never been remotely scared of it.

  The door swung open for me, but the eeriness of that didn’t bother me. I was burning with rage that he’d dared touch my gran. Never mind steal her away.

  In the main room I stood, breathing hard, Robert next to me. I reached out and touched him, my magic flaring as I brought him from skeleton to a fully formed man.

  “Bree,” he growled. “The magic here is darker now. Just in that short time since we were here last, it’s been growing.”

  “The basement,” I said, pulling my knives from their sheaths. “That’s where the tour guide said not to go, so that’s where we go.”

  Robert nodded and took the lead. He opened the door and reached for the light. Nothing.

  “In my bag,” I said. “There’s a flashlight.”

  He opened the bag, pulled it out and flicked it on. “This is going to be rough.”

  “I’ll probably pee my pants at some point,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  He grunted and took the first few steps down. “I’ll probably pee my pants too. Your secret is safe with me.”

  I kept close to him and wasn’t surprised in the least that the door slammed behind us. Not surprised, but I did still jump and wobble on the stair edge.

  “This feels funny,” I said as we made our way down the steps. “Like the air is wrong.”

  “A demon’s home is never funny,” Robert said. “Smelly, horrid, but not funny.”

  At another time I would have laughed.

  Okay, I did smirk. Give it to Robert to pull even that much out of me. We reached the bottom of the steps, and he swept the flashlight over the room. Beside him was a light switch on the wall, and I reached over and flicked it on, figuring there’d be electricity due to the tourist visits.

  Robert didn’t flick off the flashlight. We crept forward. The basement had some ground-level windows, and there were pieces of furniture all over the place, scattered haphazardly.

  “Gran,” I whispered her name.

  I knew you’d come.

  The blood-born demon’s voice curled around my ear and I spun, slashing with one knife, cutting through absolutely nothing. Laughter rippled around us and the lights dimmed but didn’t go out.

  “Where is my gran?” I yelled.

  I’m going to enjoy killing you.

  A whoosh of air behind us, a sudden shriek, and I hit the ground, rolled onto my belly and found myself looking straight at Robert. He’d pulled the same move. “We have to kill it.”

  “I know,” he said. “But you ran in here without any thought about how you were going to do that.”

  “I killed the other demons.”

  “They were amateurs.” Robert grunted and pushed up to his feet, those icy blue eyes sweeping the room. He grabbed my hand and tugged me in close, his mouth against my ear. “You can’t hurt him until he takes solid form. Let him grab me. He can’t hurt me.”

  He let me go and took a few steps away from me. The air behind him moved, shimmering with a form I could almost see.

  “Robert, look out!”

  But I wasn’t fast enough, and neither was he. The blood-born demon wrapped itself around Robert, holding him tightly as the critter bit into his shoulder, tearing into him.

  The demon was solid, and that meant I could kill it.

  The creature swung Robert around to face me.

  You have to kill him to kill me.

  Which meant the life I’d given Robert had—temporarily, at least—confused the demon. It didn’t seem to get that he was already very much dead. It wouldn’t kill him to have the knife stuck through him. Again. The thing was, I didn’t want to hurt Robert. And the chance that my knife could indeed finish him off was there.

  I wouldn’t risk it.

  I lifted one of my knives then lowered it. “Take me instead.”

  Robert shook his head. “No, Bree, don’t!”

  The demon threw Robert behind him and rushed me. All the darkness in the world seemed to exist within him, within that critter that had been born evil.

  Once more, the thoughts that had harried me most of my life chewed through me.

  Not good enough.

  A joke.

  Embarrassing.

  No one wants you.

  Plain.

  Old.

  Slow.

  Useless.

  I made myself open my eyes and look into the darkness, and it surely looked back at me.

  It knew my faults, my worst fears. It blasted me with them.

  “You’re wrong,” I whispered those two
words.

  The demon wavered in front of me, even though it held me tightly. I stared hard into it, feeling every bit of the fear it had stirred in me. Hell, I was pretty sure I really had peed myself. My knives had dropped from my numb fingers, my body chilling as the demon drew my energy down.

  I was dying. I could feel it in my bones. I’d died just the week before and I could tell death was coming for me again.

  I forced my hand into the pocket that held the silver coin, barely managing to hang onto it as I pulled it out. The silver metal warmed in my hand and swiftly turned into the same two-foot tool that I’d used on Davin. A tool to use against evil.

  The Silver Lady had used it on a vampire all those years ago.

  Someone was screaming my name, someone who loved me for me, and it was all I needed to hang on long enough.

  “Where is my gran?”

  The demon cocked his head to the side and the spindles of darkness drove themselves deeper into me. You are dying, and you still want to know?

  “Yes.”

  She was taken by my master to his home in . . .

  I didn’t ask where again, maybe I should have, but I was out of time. Fully and completely out of time. With the last of my strength, I plunged the silver rod into the demon. For a split second, I thought it hadn’t worked. That the silver wouldn’t kill him. That I would be the one to kick the bucket instead.

  The tendrils digging into me loosened.

  No. NO!

  The demon fell away from me, his body fully solid as he slammed against a set of chairs, toppling them. Then he tumbled to the floor and shriveled where he lay until there was nothing left but a hunk of pale skin the same color as the “paper” Grimm’s family tree was written on.

  I went to my knees, the lights flickered on, and Robert stood across the room from me, still fully fleshed out for the moment. Still the man he’d been.

  “Well done, Bree.” He smiled and winked at me. “You are amazing.”

  And then in a blink, he stood there with raggedy long black hair, his bony body swaying side to side.

  “Thanks, Robert,” I said, scooping up my knives and the silver coin. I’d killed the demon. I’d killed him and I’d survived.

  But Gran wasn’t here. She’d been taken somewhere else.

  And Robert . . . Robert had been the one who’d called my name and kept me from succumbing to the darkness of the demon.

  I struggled to breathe a moment. The knowledge that, while I survived, I’d lost the person who meant the world to me.

  “Where the hell are you, Gran?” My words echoed and a chill worked down my spine as if my words were a portent of things to come. Something I didn’t like one ducking bit.

  27

  Alan’s apartment had three bedrooms and was as swanky as all get-out. Fully furnished and rented for the next two weeks, already paid. How did I know all of this?

  “I can’t believe you think you’re going to stay in my apartment,” Alan shouted. “And the ugly ones are coming too?”

  Corb had given us the keys and the address, and said he’d meet us at the apartment later. Thank all that was holy, Alan’s body was not in the apartment. Which begged the question, just where was his body?

  I twisted around to look at my three friends. Eric, Suzy, and Feish were behind me. I wasn’t exactly sure how it was going to work with Feish, seeing as she was technically Crash’s slave. But that she was striking out with us could not have made me happier. My smile faded.

  Gran had been taken by someone that a blood-born demon would call master. How the hell was I going to bring her home?

  “Alan, shut your trap.” I snapped my fingers at him. “We won’t be here long. Just enough to sort out a few things.”

  “That’s still too long. You know how I hate people in my space. Touching my things. Getting my floors dirty,” he grumbled, pacing the room.

  His apartment—well, really it was a flat—was the best option for all of us at the moment. Other than Corb, no one knew where we were staying. Not that I was worried about the goblins anymore—they all loved me for helping kill off their tyrannical king. No, I was more worried about whatever baddies had sat behind the wheel of this one—Davin’s and the demon’s bosses. Were they one and the same? Whoever we were truly dealing with, they weren’t done causing trouble.

  I knew it with every instinct I’d honed over my forty-one years.

  And I also knew this next bit was part of the larger whole. I sat at the kitchen table and pulled out the yellow and slightly battered envelope I’d retrieved from the Sorrel-Weed house, pulling the contents out one at a time, flipping the sheets over to face me.

  The reports were the easy part. They were full of a lot of jargon that I’d heard from all the cop shows Alan watched.

  DOA.

  No suspicion of foul play.

  Died of natural causes.

  That was about Gran. For my parents, it should have been just a traffic accident. It was not.

  There were only two pictures, no other paperwork. A note was stuck to them, pinning them together and also hiding part of the image.

  All the information was shredded. This goes deeper than any case I’ve ever seen. Be careful.

  Suzy was on one side of me, Feish on the other, as I pulled the note off the first picture.

  The image didn’t make sense at first, then I realized that it was two bodies. Not in a car or any other vehicle for that matter but on a lawn of grass. Maybe a meadow in the woods, that was harder to say. “These are my parents,” I said. I made myself pull the picture closer. The shot showed them curled around each other, spooning as if they were just sleeping.

  I swallowed hard.

  “They have the same wounds as Alan,” Eric said from right behind me. “You see there, around the neck and shoulders? They look like they were attacked by a shifter, ragged wounds claws and teeth would make.”

  I put that picture down and picked up the other. Gran was in a chair, her head lolled forward as if she were simply sleeping.

  Eric took the picture from my shaking hands. “Let me see. Yes, these are the same kind of wounds. Though on Celia, they are harder to see because of the way she is bent forward. Your gran, parents, and Alan were all killed by the same creature. The cops who wrote these reports must have been spelled. Or scared enough to lie. But two of the real pictures got preserved.”

  Alan paced in front of me. “Before you ask, I don’t remember anything. I just remember waking up and then walking to your gran’s house.”

  “Ghosts rarely remember their actual death,” I said. “They get frightened, they get angry, but they don’t remember details,” I said, the words from Gran’s book echoing through me.

  I picked up the case information and read it over, looking for something . . . and when I found it, I couldn’t believe I’d not seen it before.

  “Place of death . . .” I rubbed my finger over the city on all three death certificates. Not Savannah like I would have thought. “They were all killed in New Orleans. No one told me that’s where they died. Why would the paperwork be here?”

  Of course, there were a lot of unanswered whys.

  A knock on the door turned us all around as Corb let himself in. I didn’t know what to say to him. I was angry. I was hurt, and he’d held me all night so I wouldn’t be alone. The bags under his eyes said it all.

  It had not been a restful night for him either.

  “Grimm sent me with something for you,” he said, holding up a bag that looked like a watermelon was in it, and it clinked. It freaking clinked. “And he asked me to remind you to hold on to his family tree until you can destroy it.” He cleared his throat. “For safekeeping.”

  I touched the bag on my hip and nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best given what’s written on it.”

  All eyes turned to me and I sighed. “A spell to bring about a plague of vampires. You know, nothing major.”

  What could only be described as shocked silence
descended on the room. “Why?” Suzy was the first to splutter the question I was sure we all wanted answered.

  I shrugged. “Who knows? But it’s on that paper, and Davin wanted it. Derek wanted it. Maybe Derek thought the vampires would help him? Or that they’d be forced to help if he brought them back to life? I don’t know.”

  I gathered up the papers from Eric and stuffed them into the manila envelope. “Everyone pick a room. We’ve got this place until the end of the month when his rental is up.”

  Alan stomped around the table toward me. “I will not let you live here!”

  Corb cleared his throat. “I’ve been doing some digging, Bree. I do have some good news for you.”

  I slumped into a chair and he pulled up one beside me. “Fire away.”

  He grinned and glanced at Alan. “It really is good news.”

  I didn’t trust it, but his smile was contagious. “You know, you have the slightest dimple on that side.” I poked at his cheek, and he caught my hand.

  “You know that Alan moved all his debt onto you, and really seemed to cross all of his T’s and dot his I’s,” Corb said. I nodded, wondering how this could lead to good news.

  “Yes, I do seem to recall that he did that,” I said.

  “Did you know that he forgot to cross one very important T?” Corb was full-on grinning as he pulled a single piece of paper from his back pocket and smoothed it on the table. “Alan, you recognize this?”

  Alan pushed between us, making my skin crawl with a cold breeze. “No, oh shit, no!”

  Anything that would make Alan curse had to be good. I leaned forward and stared at the paper.

  “It’s a life insurance policy?” I scanned the page quickly, shock settling in, and then scanned it again. “Alan’s life insurance policy. Is it really correct? Is that what I think it is?” I jabbed my finger at the beneficiary named on the policy. Which happened to be me.

  Alan all but threw himself around the room, cursing and yelling that it wasn’t fair. That his secretary was supposed to have made those changes. That he hadn’t meant to forget.

  “He probably thought he had years, that it would be the last thing he needed to change,” Corb said. “The policy is enough to cover all the debt and leave you with a good nest egg.”