by Sara Snow
Demon Huntress
Book 3 of the Venandi Chronicles
Sara Snow
© Copyright 2021 - All rights reserved.
It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.
Contents
1. Georgia
2. Eli
3. Georgia
4. Jacob
5. Carter
6. Paimon
7. Georgia
8. Georgia
9. Jacob
10. Paimon
11. Olympia
12. Carter
13. Jacob
14. Jose
15. Georgia
16. Olympia
17. Georgia
18. Carter
19. Carter
20. Jacob
21. Jacob
22. Georgia
23. Jacob
24. Georgia
25. Georgia
The Venandi Chronicles Continue…
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1
Georgia
The air reeked of charred demon flesh. A cloud of smoke hovered over the cemetery where the battle took place. The street was empty, with no sign of the car that had sped off with Carter tied up in the back seat. Not even any skid marks on the asphalt.
Half an hour ago, Carter Black had told me he would always love me. Now he’d been abducted by my father, a king of demons.
Just when I thought life couldn’t get any worse.
“Where the fuck did you take him?” I shouted at the empty street.
“The car went that way,” Olympia said, pointing toward Alameda Avenue.
“That’s not much help,” I said bitterly.
I knew she didn’t have an answer, but she was the last to see Carter. I’d been sitting in the smoky remains of dead demons, all the minions who had died in our battle at the cemetery. I had been mourning the death of Kingston, the closest thing I had ever had to an actual father, when Olympia ran screaming through the tombstones to tell us that Carter had been abducted.
I took a deep breath, fighting off the panic that clawed at my heart. “I’m sorry, Olympia. That came out wrong. Are you sure the demons didn’t say anything about where they were going?”
Olympia shook her head vigorously, making her blond curls shake. “No. They tied Carter’s wrists, pulled some kind of bag over his head and shoved him in the back of the car. He tried to fight, but he had whacked his head on that tombstone when we were fighting in the graveyard. The asshole who was driving said that Paimon would contact us when he was ready. That’s all, Georgia, I swear.”
“What kind of car was it? Make, model, color?”
Olympia closed her eyes, trying to remember. “There wasn’t anything special about it. Four doors, black. I don’t remember anything else. Oh, the car had no plates.”
“Sounds like a car from hell, if there ever was one,” I muttered.
Everything was happening too fast. Kingston, the leader of the Venandi, was dead. Carter, the second in line, had been abducted.
“Where’s Jacob?” I asked, looking around for Kingston’s son. “If we lose him too, we’re really and truly fucked.”
As if on cue, the half-angel came staggering out of the gates of the cemetery. His clothes were smeared thick with blood—the blood that had poured from his father’s abdominal wound.
“Where’s Carter?” he shouted. “We’re not done with these fuckers! We need to get back there and fight.”
Jacob’s handsome face was streaked with smoke. None of us were in good shape right now, but Jacob’s heart had just been torn out. Kingston had been stabbed with a sword by Bebal, one of the three demon kings planning the end of the mortal realm. The leader of those three demons, Paimon, just happened to be my father.
“Carter was abducted. Paimon’s crew took him,” I explained. My heart was racing, but I forced myself to speak slowly. And calmly, if that were possible. “The battle is over—at least for now. What we need to do now is get Carter back.”
Jacob stared at me, panting. We faced off for a second, but I could tell he knew I was right. He wanted to keep fighting, but there was no one to fight. The major league players—Bebal and Abalam, the two demon kings—had finished their killing. I had torched Abalam with my pyrokinetic power—my mental flamethrower—and Bebal had disappeared. The rest of the minions had either fled the scene or were lying in among the tombstones, their remains evaporating into smoke.
“My father’s dead,” he said dully.
I nodded. I saw him through a film of tears.
After Kingston was mortally wounded, I sat with Jacob, and we let our sorrow rock us. I sat with Kingston’s body instead of making sure that Carter was okay. I had heard the crack of his skull on marble when he was fighting Abalam.
As Abalam had laid charred and writhing on the grass, Carter staggered around, swaying a little. I didn’t remember seeing any blood on his head. I went to be with Kingston, because I knew it would be the last time I’d be able to. Olympia went to check on Carter.
That was the last I saw of him. The next thing I knew, I heard Olympia screaming that Carter had been shoved in the back of a car and taken away by demons.
“What are we going to do now?” Olympia asked.
“We’re going to track down those demons and burn them into a pile of ashes. But first we’re going to rip them limb from limb and cause them so much pain that they wish they could go whimpering back to hell,” I promised.
This trip to El Paso had changed from being a reunion with my drug-addict mother to tragedy so quickly. Jacob and I had both lost a parent in the process, and now that we were without our leader, everything felt so hopeless. On top of it all, I was quickly hurtling toward the apex of my power, now without anyone to guide me there.
The veritatem. That’s what Kingston had called it. The moment when I would reach the peak of my abilities. Before I could figure out how to get there, Kingston had been killed by one of the demon kings who served my father, King Paimon.
“Paimon’s not going to sit around on his ass waiting for us to find Carter,” I said. “He’s going to let us know what he wants and how to deliver it to him.”
“He wants you, Georgia. He wants his daughter in return for Carter, and we can’t lose you.”
Jacob looked at me intently. He was still shell-shocked, but I could tell he understood how bad our situation was. Kingston and Carter had been the original founders of the Venandi, a team of demon hunters who all had some form of supernatural cred. Kingston was a fallen angel, Carter a half-vampire with a human father. Without those two, we were hanging by a thread.
I faced Jacob and Olympia, my two ragged compadres. “Listen, if you two think that you’re going to get rid of me, you’re out of luck. I have no intention of turning myself in as ransom, but we need to play along until we can find out where they’re taking Carter.”
The wail of police sirens filled the air, and a whirling mass of red and blue lights suddenly
approached us.
“Hey! Get back! This is the last thing we need right now.” I dragged Olympia behind a delivery truck, and Jacob followed us.
“Are they looking for us?” Olympia asked.
“They’re looking for whoever started a bonfire in the cemetery and left a bunch of demon splats lying all over the grass,” I said.
The cops seemed to be everywhere now. We had to get past them to get to the church where Carter had parked the car, but it was going to be tricky. Streaked with blood and ashes and still armed with our weapons, we weren’t exactly low-profile.
“If we duck behind the cop cars, we can cross the street and make a run for it,” I said. “They’re all heading into the cemetery. Someone in the neighborhood probably complained about the stench of sulfur. Come on. Let’s go.”
“I’ll go first,” Jacob said. “You two run beside me, but stay low.”
I squeezed Olympia’s hand, and we darted into the street. We were about halfway across when an officer shouted at us to freeze.
Shit. Now on top of everything else, we were going to be thrown in jail for vandalizing one of the city’s largest cemeteries.
Two cops, a man and a woman, aimed their guns at us. They had seen Jacob’s crossbow and my blades, and they weren’t messing around. Frozen with our hands up in the air, we were holding up the morning traffic, which had thickened now that it was rush hour.
“Drop your weapons!” the woman yelled. Her voice was high with excitement—obviously she thought they’d hit the jackpot this morning by apprehending the three of us, and it wasn’t even time for coffee yet.
Before I could move a muscle, Jacob stepped forward. He still held his palms up, and he hadn’t touched his crossbow.
“Jacob!” I hissed. “What the hell are you doing? They’re going to shoot us full of holes!”
“Please, officers, you have to trust us. We’re on an incredibly important mission we need to get out of here. Everyone’s lives depend on this,” he pleaded. “This is bigger than all of us.”
I waited to be taken down in a storm of bullets. Instead, the female officer’s face softened. I might have thought she was responding to Jacob’s good looks, but her partner was suddenly all smiles, too. Like they just couldn’t believe how silly they had been to assume we were a bunch of crazy misfits.
“Seriously?” the male officer called.
His partner beamed. “That sounds intense.”
Meanwhile, my heart was pounding in my chest and my throat felt like it was packed with cotton. The three squad cars parked on the street beside the entrance to the cemetery were starting to shake. It was only a matter of seconds until my brain started to move them. Typically I could control my telekinetic power, but we didn’t have time to get stopped by the police, much less have a meet-and-greet with the cops in the middle of a busy El Paso street.
“If you don’t mind, Officers, we need to go and find our car,” Jacob continued. “So we can chase those demons.”
“Absolutely. Go ahead,” the female officer said, practically bowing to Jacob. She moved slowly, as if she’d been hypnotized. I’d never seen Jacob do anything like that…except at the Catholic church when he’d convinced a skeptical priest to let us stay there.
The two of them lowered their weapons and stepped out to halt traffic so we could cross the street. As soon as we hit the sidewalk, Jacob, Olympia and I took off running. We made a mad dash toward the church where we’d parked the car, pausing briefly in the shelter of some trees further off the road to regroup. It seemed safe enough, the thick shadows obscuring us from the view of the street. For the moment, it was a relief to be hidden. To the human eye we were probably invisible.
Hopefully the same went for demon eyes…But I didn’t want to think about that.
“So, are we going to talk about that?” Olympia asked. “That was amazing, right? Like, too amazing?”
I looked to Jacob, but he didn’t seem to have an answer, his mouth open like he wanted to say something, yet no words came.
“Maybe later,” I said. “I have no idea what the hell just happened.”
I turned to study Jacob’s reaction. He seemed far away, deep in thought. It was hard to tell if he even heard what I’d just said. I decided to change the subject back to the more pressing matter at hand.
“Ok, so we have a pretty good guess at what they’re planning, but what the hell do we do about it? We have no clue where they’re taking him,” I pointed out.
“I think I might be able to help with that,” Olympia said with a tinge of her usual brand of lofty self-assurance. She dug in her pockets, pulling out her mirror, which she waved in front of her face with a smirk, almost as if to say “Duh!”
The “duh” felt well-deserved, and I couldn’t help but smile. As a Trikoni witch, Olympia had scrying powers that rivaled most GPS systems. Even if the demons were moving too fast for her to scry their exact location, it would give her something to do to take her mind off the abduction she’d just witnessed.
“How long will it take you to find him?” Jacob asked.
“Honestly, I’m not sure. Not too long? It’s usually easier if I have something that belonged to him, something with a connection to him to help me track him. I don’t usually do this without something to guide my senses.”
I wondered if we had the time to wait and try. It wouldn’t be long before more demons came along to find us, and with Carter on the move, the faster we found him, the better. If he got too far, I was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to catch up in time. I shuddered to think what would happen. A sudden realization hit me.
Something with a connection to Carter.
“What about me?” I asked.
“What about you?” Jacob mirrored.
“I mean…” God, this was going to sound so stupid. “I have a connection to Carter. Right? I know neither of you are particularly close with him, but he and I…” I glanced at Jacob, whose mouth was drawn into a tight line. He knew where I was going with this. “I mean, we get along well.”
I could feel Jacob’s eyes on me like a magnifying glass under the sun.
I cleared my throat. “We made a commitment to each other. Does that count?”
The group was quiet as I internally died in shame, realizing how dumb I just made myself look before Olympia gasped and clasped my hand so tightly I thought it might break.
“Georgia!” she squealed. “That’s a great idea!”
A weight lifted off my shoulders. “Do you think it’ll work?”
“I have no idea, but it won’t hurt to try! It’s not like we have many other options.”
Jacob was tersely silent, kicking at the dirt at his feet. It was obvious that he wasn’t a huge fan of my connection to Carter, but we were quickly running out of options. I didn’t have time to cater to his feelings.
“You two should be safe here for the moment, why don’t you two do your…your whatever and I’ll circle the block and check things out. If anything weird happens, I’ll be back in a flash.”
I fought back a sarcastic retort about jealousy that was brewing in my brain when I had to remind myself of Kingston and the hell that Jacob had just been through. My mind eased back into concern instead as a pang of guilt stressed how little space he had to process such a personal tragedy at the moment.
“Are you sure you should go alone? This place is going to be crawling with demons soon,” I said, sounding maybe too concerned for his male pride to handle. “Maybe we should all stay together.”
Olympia waved me off. “He’s a big boy, he can take care of himself. Besides, the sooner we can find Carter the better. Just let him go.”
Jacob seemed to agree as he was already heading wordlessly off in the direction of the church where the car was waiting for them. He didn’t seem too concerned, and while I stood by my opinion that we should stick together, I was obviously outnumbered and outmatched. I couldn’t help but worry. I knew how macho men worked—all broody and quiet, always wa
nting to channel their feelings into some type of tough guy exterior. Even within myself, though, I felt a deep, longing sadness in knowing that when we returned to the warehouse, we wouldn’t be greeted by Kingston’s warm smile and some nice home-cooking. I’d never really had a family to lose until I met the Venandi, and it was already taking its toll on me, but imagining what Jacob was feeling made my stomach churn.
Olympia seemed to sense my worry, squeezing my hand again. She was gentler this time, rubbing her thumb lightly over it. The comfort was nice.
“He’ll be fine,” she reassured me.
And she was right. I knew that, because I was determined to get him back. But was I fine? My mind continuously raced with worry, between seeing Kingston in his final moments to the thought of Jacob’s mourning to the image of Carter being taken away from me by demons. It was all so much, and I couldn’t focus on one thought. There wasn’t any time for me to answer my self-imposed question as Olympia sat herself on the grass, tugging me down with her. She held my hand in hers and held up her mirror, focusing on it.
“Well, here goes nothing,” she said, her confidence wavering for a moment. “Alright, now just sit tight and try not to move. I saw the car, so I can fixate on that, but you should try to focus on Carter. Try to feel…I don’t know, whatever gross feelings you feel for him,” she teased, trying futilely to lighten the mood.. “The stronger, the better. Maybe imagine him naked or—”
“I think I get the picture,” I said.
I did as she said, focusing hard on Carter, my hands trembling, imagining what sort of pain they’d be inflicting on Carter right now. I took a deep breath, trying to imagine something nicer, pulling up old memories that would hopefully quash my anxieties for just a few minutes. I struggled to avoid images of him all alone in that car with those demons, suffering whatever damage had been done to his head and whatever other damage the demons would inflict on him for fun.
