Daughter on the Run (Sons of Gulielmus Book 2)

by Holley Trent

  THE SONS OF GULIELMUS SERIES

  A Demon in Waiting

  Daughter on the Run (novella)

  Cupid in Love

  A Demon Found (novella)

  A Witch Enraptured

  An Angel Fallen (novella)

  SUMMARY

  Julia Tate is straight out of a cult and into the fire. Her brothers rescued her to give her a chance at a normal life, but there’s really no such thing for the child of a powerful fallen angel.

  Not only is she likely to have lieutenants from her old compound seeking to put her back in her place, but her father’s enemies would like to put a target on her, too. The safest place for her to hide is on the property of a reclusive former baseball player who wants to be left alone and be forgotten.

  Calvin Wolff has his own reasons for retreating to the woods. The alpha werewolf is losing his grip on humanity because he refuses to take a mate.

  Unexpectedly, the beautiful, mysterious woman who appears on his doorstep seems to be a wish come true for his inner beast, but there’s something off about her and her story. But it doesn’t matter, anyway.

  Calvin refuses to subject anyone to the chaos that comes with being a wolf shifter’s mate, no matter how badly they seem to need his protection…or how badly he craves their companionship.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “What’s wrong? Don’t I look okay?”

  After glancing both ways down the quiet mountain road, Julia Tate met both of her half-brothers’ concerned gazes in turn and patted down her hair. With everything being upside-down in her world, she was trying to focus on things she actually had some control over.

  Her hair felt as it should have—one long plait forming a coronet around her head, and a second one knotted into a bun at her neck. She could probably do the style in her sleep. She’d been wearing the same look since she’d turned twelve. That was the day one of her stepfather’s many wives had taken her aside and whispered, “You’re a grown woman now, Julia. It’s time for you to act like it.”

  Acting like she was grown, in part, meant that waifish, baby-faced Julia was obligated to keep her hair off her neck or else she’d scandalize someone’s husband.

  Of course, it’d be all her fault if she did. There was a long-existing double standard that no one there dared to question. Women were always at fault if a man strayed.

  The expectation of purity that applied to the women of the Sweet Desert Rock cult had never made sense to her, but as a younger woman, she’d simply assumed she was deviant for expecting fairness.

  She didn’t think that anymore.

  Closing her eyes, she pulled in a deep breath, counted to three, and let the air out.

  Breathing was a coping mechanism for her that she’d developed at twelve years and a day. Back then, she did it so that she wouldn’t question the elders who supposedly knew better. She was supposed to be serene and obedient.

  Obedience was no longer her goal, thanks to her very recent surprise elopement from the cult. Serenity was what mattered. If she didn’t concentrate on that small thing, she’d fall apart. Assuming the SDR’s higher-ups had learned of her escape, they had most certainly dispatched their shepherds to track her down and return her to her stepfather’s household.

  She refused to go back there. She refused to sit around waiting to be bargained off to become the wife of whichever low-aptitude acolyte her stepfather most needed something from. Weeks prior, she’d been resigned to that fate, but then her mother had told her that Julia’s brother John had gotten out, and that there could be something else in store for her.

  Julia could follow in her older brother’s footsteps.

  Of course, there was just the small issue of how and why John had gotten away from the cult for good.

  It was because of what he was.

  …and apparently, what Julia was, too.

  The children of deviant fallen angels couldn’t seamlessly blend in out in the real world. Like escaped cult members, they were hunted, too—either by monster hunters or by the supernatural parent they wanted no association with.

  Or both.

  Opening her eyes, she took another breath and smoothed her hands over her simple white blouse, then down into the pockets of her ground-skimming prairie skirt.

  Her half-brothers’ stares followed the path of her assessment, and their scowls deepened.

  She hadn’t known Claude and Charles for very long and, given that they shared the same villain as a father, she shouldn’t have trusted them.

  But she did trust them because John did implicitly, and also…they didn’t feel like bad people to her.

  They’d rescued her, after all, and not even begrudgingly.

  She sighed. “What’s wrong with them? They’re good clothes. Clean.”

  “I don’t know how to explain this without offending you,” Claude said gently.

  She never would have expected gentleness of a cambion—half a demon, technically, though their father Gulielmus hadn’t started off on that side. He’d chosen to fall.

  “There was a similar skirt in one of those glossy catalogs you had stuffed into your Jeep’s door pocket.” And hers had only cost eight dollars to make. She’d studied that catalog thoroughly during the harried drive from the compound in Arizona to…wherever they were.

  She lost track somewhere about a day ago, and her homeschooling hadn’t been particularly strong in the area of U.S. geography. Afterlife geography, though? Plenty of that.

  All bogus, she suspected. The cult’s most precious textbook asserted that the place beyond life had nineteen continents.

  The catalog had been quite educational about the fashions of young women, and so she’d studied it like it were an arithmetic primer.

  She still didn’t understand why Claude had dog-eared those pages with the women’s underwear, though.

  He doesn’t have a wife or a girlfriend, and—

  “Oh,” she murmured low as yet another Real-World Circumstance dawned on her.

  Whatever Claude was doing with that book, it wasn’t shopping.

  A twig or branch snapped in the woods Claude had parked in front of, and without thinking, Julia grabbed the bottom of her skirt and took off the opposite way, heart beating so hard she worried her ribs might crack.

  Oh no oh no oh no.

  If they caught her—

  “Shit, slow down!”

  On a delay, the voice booming behind her registered as Charles’.

  She slowed down just as he threw an arm around her, but not slow enough not to jam her torso against it. She let out a whimper at the dull ache across her chest and looked back worriedly towards the sound.

  Claude hadn’t moved.

  He was standing exactly where he had been near the Jeep and toward the entrance of a long private driveway.

  “It was just a bird of a squirrel. Something small and harmless,” Charles said.

  He was being logical, she supposed.

  She wrung her hands and forced the lump down her throat.

  “This place is safe, remember? That’s why we brought you here.”

  “Yes. Safe.” Grimacing, she started walking back towards Claude.

  Lacking her brothers’ instincts, she didn’t innately understand why they’d chosen that place. All she had to go on was what they’d told her, and she couldn’t make sense of it all.

  Claude, who was half witch in addition to whatever the thing was that Julia was, said her paranormal energy would be undetectable there. She’d be safe from the monster hunters, if not the shepherds. That sounded good enough.

  But then Charles had his own two bits to throw into the conversation.r />
  They’d been on the highway about an hour out, and suddenly, he’d turned to Claude with a stricken look on his face.

  Julia, in the backseat, had demanded to know what was wrong.

  She wished he hadn’t told her. And she wished she could have gone the rest of her life without knowing that Charles was a descendant of a Greek love god and could foresee fated matches.

  She’d left the cult to be free of unwanted attachments, and apparently, her brother had driven her straight to a new one.

  Unfortunately, or fortunately, for whoever lived at the end of that long driveway, she’d already chosen to opt out.

  Her layover there was out of desperation and temporary until her brothers found her another safe space. That was all.

  “Your clothes…” As she approached, Claude shifted his weight onto the handle of the spade he held and blew his breath out in a sputter. “Well—”

  “Doesn’t matter how you look.” Charles bumped his half-brother’s shoulder with his elbow and closed the back door of the Jeep. Slinging the strap of Julia’s bag over his shoulder, he jerked a thumb toward Claude. “Really doesn’t matter for what we’re doing right now, so ignore him.”

  “For what we’re doing right now,” he’d said. Pouting, Julia stared down at her skirt again. Maybe the flower pattern on the fabric was too dated or too faded. “Back home, all the women wore colors like these. Gentle colors are meant to keep us humble.”

  “And I imagine you’d be mortified for someone to think you were proud, hmm?” Claude asked.

  “At the compound, young women were taught that pride is not a becoming trait.”

  “Goes to show that sometimes nurturing wins out over nature,” Charles said, rolling his eyes, “because our father is the proudest creature on two legs.”

  “I guess I’m not one who should criticize about clothes,” Claude said.

  Another twig cracked in the woods, but Julia closed her eyes tight and forced herself to be still, even though her heart was threatening to run away again.

  “Most of what I wear, I gathered up from here or there,” Claude said. “These pants were Charles’ ten years ago.”

  Julia opened her eyes to look at them.

  “Those were mine?” Charles fixed his narrowed blue eyes on his sibling’s dark gray work pants. “How’d you do that?”

  “You were drunk. Easy to steal from when you’re in your cups.”

  Charles murmured an ear-scalding swear under his breath that made Julia glance to the heavens and then look about for the closest cover.

  No bolts of thunder seemed to be en route, but she took a big step away from both men, just in case.

  She didn’t really understand the natures of their abilities just yet or what all they could do.

  For that matter, she didn’t know what she could do, if anything.

  Probably nothing, or else she certainly would have known already.

  Laughing, Claude edged in and gave Julia’s nose a tweak. “Sweet thing. How did you get born into a mess like this?”

  “I should ask you the same thing. Have we not the same father?”

  Both men snorted.

  Then they turned toward the woods and assessed it for a while in silence, occasionally glancing at each other and nodding.

  She wished she could get into their heads, or at least understand them well enough to guess what they were thinking. They’d been in cahoots for decades longer than Julia had even been a twinkle in her mother’s eye.

  While she certainly didn’t think the cambions were “good people,” per se, they were her brothers, and they’d cared enough to get her out of the compound. They didn’t have to care, and she knew it. Their father had trained them not to care.

  Claude pushed his spade into the hard clay ground. “Let’s get this done, no?”

  “Indeed.” Charles handed his brother a bulging sack full of the sachets Claude had prepared earlier. In total, there were twelve mojo bags awaiting burial—just three for each side of the ten-acre parcel they were about to trespass on.

  The trespassing part of the hastily thought-out plan made Julia nervous, and she’d already wrung an entire layer of skin off her hands from worrying. Where she came from, trespassers were usually met with armed posses and situations escalated far too quickly. She didn’t want to see her brothers get hurt at her expense, but they’d promised that the plan was a solid one.

  She was a child of a notorious monster and that made her a target for rogue demons and creature hunters. While she knew she was perfectly harmless, outside of the cult, she was no longer safe. She found it ironic that the place she’d come to think of as a prison had been the safest possible location for her to be because of the traits that made it so hostile in the first place.

  “I wish we could have found you someplace else and some other situation, but when we figured this out, it seemed too good to be true,” Claude said. “It’s off the demonic grid, in a manner of speaking, and psychics and other sorts of sensitives avoid it because the energy around the place would seem unwelcoming to them.”

  Fidgeting the cuff of her sleeve, she gave Charles a wary look. “Do you…think he knows that?”

  “Who?”

  She tilted her head toward the driveway and, ostensibly, the man who lived at the very end of it and on the other side of those woods.

  “Ah.” Charles dragged a hand down the stubble on his chin. “No way of knowing. Most humans wouldn’t have any unusual sensitivity to energy vacuums like this.”

  “So, he’s human, then?”

  Charles’ brow creased. “I…assume so?”

  Dejected, Julia let her shoulders fall. She didn’t see the point of standing up so straight and tall when the world was crumbling around her. “I thought you could see him. In your head, I mean.”

  “It doesn’t exactly work that way for me. When I discover a match, there may not be faces attached to any of the parties involved. I may only be working with the idea of a person.” Charles cupped her chin and turned her face so her gaze met his. It was strange looking at him from so close up—the stranger who’d come to her rescue. He was a dark-haired version of John. Their chins were different, and their forehead shapes were a bit dissimilar, but the resemblance was stunning.

  So she knew exactly who they must have looked like, and because she loved her brothers, she couldn’t be repulsed.

  “Everything’s moving so quickly. We understand. This kind of intrigue is normal for us, but we know the scenario is unbelievably stressful for you.”

  Nodding, she gave his wrist a gentle squeeze and turned away.

  “You’ll be fine.” The corner of his mouth quirked up the tiniest bit at the corner, the same way Claude’s always did. And John’s.

  John had been sent to solitary meditation more than a few times back at the compound for that smirk. He never could manage to give it up.

  “I’m not going to love him,” Julia said with sureness in her voice and in her spirit. “No matter what you think he is to me, this is temporary. I’m going to somehow get him to let me into the house and I’m going to hide until you tell me it’s safe to come out.”

  Julia pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it.

  God, what if he doesn’t let me in?

  Charles must have noticed her renewed apprehension because he pressed a hand onto her shaking shoulder and squeezed. “It’s all right, Julia. Listen, this isn’t just a coincidence. What’s happening now is because The Fates are scrambling to fix things for you, if you’ll let them.” He turned her around and pointed toward the driveway entrance. “But all that aside, just remember, this place is so far off the beaten path, your cult shepherds will never think to look for you here. And because of the supernatural properties of this place, it’ll be damn near impossible for Pop to find you if you’re near the cabin.”

  “The mojo bags are part of the spell that’ll extend the protective barrier.” Claude tossed one into the air and caught it. “Do
n’t make the guy run you off before I get all the components in place. I don’t care if this guy’s the love of your life the way the Ivy League Incubus here claims. If you leave his house before I finish doing my job, you’re going to get snatched. Papa is going to send his scouts out to hunt you the same way he does us when we fall off his telepathic grid. He’s got to know by now that you’ve left the compound. He’ll want to collect you and put you to work.”

  “All right, enough of that,” Charles snapped. “What’s the point of scaring her more, hmm? Or do you just get off on being an asshole?”

  Shooting daggers at his brother with his gaze, Claude mumbled something in the French patois Julia had already become so familiar with after only a few days of knowing him. She had no idea what he was saying, but she didn’t think the sentiment was meant to be a flattering one for Charles.

  Claude walked toward the pink flag on a pine tree that marked the property line.

  Charles put his hand against her back and gave her a little nudge to start her walking. “The fact this guy is supposed to be yours makes this easier, okay? There aren’t so many people who’d take in one of Pop’s kids, even unmarked ones like you. Trouble tends to follow us. We looked. There’s nowhere else this perfect right now.”

  Well, then.

  She swallowed and straightened her spine once more.

  The world may have been crumbling around her, but she was going to walk to meet her fate with her head held high. She was going to breathe and not let herself believe that breaking twigs were the shepherds coming to snatch her back.

  Or some hunter who thought she deserved killing simply for having been born.

  “The least I can do is be brave, right?” she said in a voice that sounded more certain than she really felt. “I…don’t have it as bad as you two, right? You’re marked.”

  Charles nodded sharply and studied the palm of his left hand.

  Julia couldn’t see the mark their father had placed on it, but she’d learned it was in the same place on every child of his he claimed. When they came of age, he burned a sigil into their flesh and activated their innate magic. Once marked, Gulielmus could summon them or transport himself right to them.