by Laken Cane
That was going to be fun.
Chapter Two
Freeing the trio would be simple, sort of. I needed my kit, which was back at my house. I kept it in my car, ordinarily, but I’d been in the process of cleaning, refilling, and sorting the items inside it, and I’d left it in my house. Not that I had my car with me, anyway.
I’d figured out what to do once I’d been able to quiet my mind and think about the situation. I used my blade—not the demon-blood one, that puppy stayed in its new home on my hip—to scrape the ash residue of his body into a little hill, which I’d then covered with dry leaves and sticks to keep it protected.
I would jog home, though because the human girl was with me I’d have to walk most of the way, to grab my kill kit.
The girl was a whole other problem.
She was also a talker. “You’re wondering how I ended up tied to an altar about to be given to a demon,” she told me as we hurried through the woods. She seemed awfully chipper for a woman who’d been abducted, nearly sacrificed, and exposed to the realities of a world she’d likely never knew existed. “Right, Kait?”
Like we were friends now. I strode through the woods with one hand on the hilt of the demon blade. I found the feel of it comforting—which was all sorts of fucked up.
“Could you slow down?” she asked, huffing. “My short little legs have trouble keeping up.” She laughed, but I heard the wobble in her voice.
I slowed down. “As soon as we get back to the city, I’ll drop you at the hospital. You’re going to need to be checked out.” I hesitated, my stare going to the blood matting her hair and gluing it to the side of her face. “And you’ll need a story.”
“I’m fine, it’s just a little cut. I’m not going to the hospital—therefore, no need to make up a story.”
She smiled brightly, but there was fear lurking behind her eyes. Understandable. I’d have been worried if she hadn’t been afraid. “I’ll drop you at your place, then. Where do you live?”
“Don’t you want to know why I was here in the woods? Or how to keep me from talking? Or—"
“If you talk,” I interrupted, “people will think you’re high, mentally ill, or a liar. And I don’t need to know your situation. It’s your business, not mine.”
“Fine,” she said, then tripped over something and nearly fell before I grabbed her arm. She immediately wrapped both her arms around mine and insisted on walking the rest of the way in that awkward position. “But I always talk when I’m nervous, so I’ll go ahead and tell you why I was in the woods with three silly young people and blood on my face.”
I sighed. She didn’t seem to realize that she was one of those “silly young people.”
“First of all,” she continued, taking my silence for consent, “they didn’t drag me there. I agreed to go.”
I gaped at her. “You agreed to be beaten and tied to a log while they summoned a fucking demon to come after your soul?”
“Well, now, Kaitlyn,” she said dryly, “I didn’t expect that they’d actually be able to get the demon to appear, but I felt so badly for them that I agreed to help them try.”
I could only shake my head, but I was interested now. Against my better judgment, I prompted her to continue. And I didn’t miss her quick grin before she did.
“I met them at a bar,” she told me. “I was looking for an appropriate hookup, because I like to have sex at least a couple of times a week and I’m not currently in a relationship and the two…friends I have who usually take care of my needs were not available.” She shrugged. “I’m not interested in a relationship—just some no strings attached sex. So that was why I was in the bar.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Jade’s, down on Seventh?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“It’s my favorite place to unwind,” she chattered on. “And that’s where I met the three kids.”
I snorted. “You keep saying ‘young people’ and ‘kids’ like you’re someone’s grandma. What are you, twenty?”
“Twenty-two. But I feel so much older than most people my age.” She cried out as she stepped into a hole and twisted her ankle, despite gripping my arm for all she was worth, and we had to stand still for a few minutes while she rested. She didn’t rest her mouth, though. “I found out that the girl—her name is Jessie—is dealing with an ex who is fighting her for custody of her baby. He’s an awful person, Kait. Just awful. He beat her, which is why she left in the first place, and she’s afraid he’ll hurt the child. But she’s afraid he has a good chance of getting shared custody, she has no proof of anything. She didn’t go to the police.”
“So you all thought…what? You’d summon a demon and he’d go after her ex and take him out of the picture?” My voice steadily rose so that by the end of the sentence, I was nearly shouting. “And you were willing to give up your soul for that?”
Ready or not, I began dragging her on, impatient and just a little pissed off. The amount of stupidity in some people was mind boggling.
“I didn’t know the ritual would mean giving up my soul,” she said, calmly. “And we hadn’t really been trying to summon a demon demon.”
I widened my eyes. “You were trying to summon a horse demon? A paper demon? A human demon?”
“A wish demon. For the gift of blood, a demon could appear and give us—Jessie, really—twenty-four hours of power over another. She was going to change her ex’s mind. Make him go far away and forget her and her child.” She picked her way over the ground and fell silent, thinking, maybe, or waiting for me to speak.
Honestly, I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I knew desperate people could do desperate things, and I was touched by the girl’s need to look for hope in something she felt was so hopeless.
We left the woods, finally, and began walking down the side of the highway. I kept well away from the road, because with the strange things that had been happening tonight, chances were good we’d get hit by a semi.
“We’ll be at my place in twenty minutes,” I said gruffly. “Can you make it, or do you want me to call for someone to come pick us up?”
“I’m fine walking with you,” she said immediately. “I’m happy this finally happened.”
I frowned. “What?”
Now it was her turn to sigh. “You won’t want to hear this, but I’ve dreamed about you for weeks now. It’s no coincidence that you found me in the woods tonight. I was there for you. I was waiting for you.” Her eyes, when she peered up at me, seemed about a thousand years old. “I dreamed this night.”
I looked heavenward. “So you’re telling me you’re a pie-baking psychic?”
She shrugged, something she did often. It was a funny little mannerism where she lifted one shoulder practically to her ear and held it there for a few seconds before letting it fall. “I have dreams. My dreams show me things.”
“And why would your dreams show you me?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a reason.” There was utter belief in her eyes.
I didn’t want to believe her, but I couldn’t deny I was just a little spooked. It had been one insane night. I rolled my shoulders, trying to loosen the tension my constant pain caused. I led her through the same dark field I ran across every time I left the city for the woods. The cluster of huge, hulking warehouses stood silent and dark, waiting for the workers to arrive in the morning and make them a little less sinister.
The sounds of the city, dim at first, exploded suddenly as I stepped past a certain point. It was always that way.
“Welcome back,” I said to myself, as I always did.
Lucille didn’t say another word until after we’d walked three blocks to my little row home and were climbing the steps to the front door.
“In my dreams,” she said abruptly, “you were screaming. You were…not the same, and you were screaming. You were in unbearable pain, and I could not help you.” She rubbed her eyes, almost angrily. “I could feel your agony, but I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t do anything. I neve
r can.”
I looked at her. “It was just a dream,” I said quietly.
“Was it?” she asked, just as quietly. “I felt it, Kaitlyn.”
I shoved my key into the lock and then pushed open the door. “Come in. I’ll get you something to drink before I drive you home.”
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” She reached out to squeeze my arm. “Kait.”
Again, she shortened my name like she was an old friend instead of someone I bought baked goods from, and it bugged me a little. I pulled away from her. “Bathroom is down the hall. You want coffee, diet soda, or water?”
“Water, thanks,” she said. “I’ll just go clean off some of this blood.” She hesitated. “Kait…I saw the demon cut you. I saw the blood. How come you’re not hurt?”
For a second I stood frozen, my mouth open. I’d forgotten he’d sliced me with the blade I now claimed. My shirt was neatly cut, but when I pulled the fabric away from what should have been an excruciating wound, all I found was a long scratch amidst all the blood.
“You’re not human, are you?” she asked, then gave that already familiar shrug. “Of course you’re not human. I have psychic dreams—at least sometimes. I watched a sad little group of kids call a demon, and then I saw a girl burst from the darkness to fight it and save my life.” She laughed, then began to cry. “What is happening?”
I felt a spark of pity. For someone who probably hadn’t even known demons and nonhumans existed yesterday, tonight would be a definite shock to her system. “Go get cleaned up,” I said, but gently. “I’ll get your water, then I need to drop you off so I can take care of those demon-summoning sons of bitches.”
“Can I stay the rest of the night here?” She stared at the floor as she asked the question. “You don’t know me that well, and for all you know I’ll steal your stuff and burn your house down, but…I really don’t want to go home. I can’t go home. Not right now.”
“Lucille, I—”
“It’s okay, I understand,” she interrupted. “I’ll just clean up and go back to the woods with you to get the demon-summoning sons of bitches.” She grinned, but her pale face was paper white, and her eyes were too wide.
“You can stay here,” I said, maybe surprising myself more than her. It wasn’t like I trusted people. But for some reason, I trusted Lucille the psychic. I was a good judge of character, and besides, she wasn’t a total stranger. Or a man.
I left her standing there staring after me as I went to fetch a bottle of water from the kitchen and my kit from my bedroom closet.
Five minutes later I tapped on the bathroom door, then went in when she invited me to do so. She stood at the sink, staring into the mirror, but hadn’t attempted to so much as turn on the water faucet.
I set the bottle down. “The guest room is across the hall. You’re welcome to it.” I handed her one of my t-shirts, a robe, and a thick pair of socks. “Make yourself at home—but stay out of my bedroom.” I grinned. “I’ll be back.”
She met my stare in the mirror. “It’s like déjà vu, you know. Having dreamed about this night for so long, and now I’m actually standing here in your bathroom, and I know—” She abruptly cut off whatever it was she’d been about to say and gave me a wan smile. “I’ll be here when you get back. Be careful. And,” she called, when I was nearly out the door, “thank you, Kait. Thank you for everything.”
I climbed into my car, glad I’d gotten the crossover SUV when I thought about the three people I was going to put into the backseat. I didn’t want any of them sitting next to me, though behind me wasn’t much better. I put my leather-wrapped kit into the passenger seat and gave it a pat, then started the car and went to free the trio.
Chapter Three
My “kill kit” contained the tools of my trade. It was a demon-killing, vampire-staking, supernatural-hunting satchel that I loved more than anything else I owned. For years I’d added pieces to it until it was nearly bursting with the necessary—and perfect—items I needed to not only make a good living, but to satisfy the craving in my soul to…well, to hunt. To catch. To investigate.
But first, I’d had to go through some shit. To become an adult and move away from my mother.
After we’d been kicked out of the pack, life had been good, really. With the money my mother had and the payment the wolves had given her to help us start over in a human world, she’d put us up in a hotel.
Two months later I’d come home from school and found her busily packing, smiling for the first time since my dad had died. “I found home,” she told me.
Home was a big, crumbling old house on a five-acre property outside the city, part of a little town called Huntersburg. Making the place livable and working her gardens were what got my mother through those first extremely difficult years.
“Hard work is the best medicine, Kaity.”
“I thought laughter was.”
“Well, we don’t have a lot of that right now, but we have an abundance of hard work ahead of us.”
And did we ever. So much work. We fell into bed at night exhausted. Even wolves got tired. She didn’t let me rest except long enough to do my homework, and one morning I woke up and realized the months had flown by and I was feeling better. At least mentally.
When the full moon came, she did what she could to help me, but our alpha had not hobbled her, and she was forced to leave me so her wolf could run. Only extremely powerful wolves or hobbled wolves could resist the pull of a full moon, and she was neither.
She never apologized for my childhood. It wouldn’t have occurred to her. Wolves did not have soft lives. Strong wolves helped strengthen the community, and there was no place for weaklings—at least not in the Stone Moon Pack. We were often challenged by rivals attempting to kill our alpha and absorb our wolves. We were attacked by our natural enemy, the vampire, at least a couple of times a year. We had to fight other shifters to defend our territory. Not just the wolves, but bears, coyotes, and foxes, to name a few.
It was a constant fight to defend ones territory against invaders and to keep safe a pack that other alphas wanted to rule. Wolves needed numbers, and one way to get them was to kill an alpha and take them.
It was a hard world.
But nothing was as hard as being cast out of your pack and tossed into an unfriendly world where you had to not only defend against humans, but other nonhumans—while keeping the fact that you were a wolf secret from the human world. Actually, that part wasn’t as hard as one might think.
I’d left my mother’s house when I was twenty-two. It wasn’t like I was leaving her alone. Her neighbors all looked out for one another, and she’d met two women—both of them just a little on the eccentric side, like her—and they’d moved in with her before I left. They’d needed her, but she’d needed them as well. Maybe she’d known I wanted to leave for the city. By the time I was ready to go, she was well ensconced in her country life with her part time job at the local diner, her housemates, and her social activity, and I was free to strike out on my own. I visited her every week.
She wouldn’t admit it, but I knew the constant pressure of my pain wore on her. There was nothing she could do about it, and that fact was hard on her. No mother wanted to see her child in agony.
It didn’t help that she thought my hobbled wolf had driven me mad. When I was a very small kid, I’d begun seeing the spirits of people who’d passed. Died. Yeah. I was one of those “I see dead people” people. Only my mother hadn’t known that. Not long after we moved to Huntersburg, she’d caught me pointing my finger at someone she couldn’t see and yelling at them to leave me alone.
I was a kid then. A kid full of anger and pain. The only dead person I wanted to see was my father, only he never showed up.
I could see them, but I could rarely hear them. Half the time, they didn’t even know I could see them, and I’d learned early on to pretend like I couldn’t. People didn’t like it when they found out I could see dead people. My former alpha, for instance.
Fuck him.
I drove as far into the woods as I could get, which wasn’t all that far. I grabbed my kill kit and then jogged back to where I’d left the humans and the demon pile, hoping a cop wouldn’t drive by, see my car, and decide to investigate. Not that I didn’t have my connections in the JPD, but only one of them actually believed I had supernatural abilities.
The three humans were standing exactly as I’d left them, frozen and silent, their eyes wide and empty in the bright moonlight. I crouched beside the demon pile and opened my case.
Everything inside the beautiful wooden box was blessed or touched with power. Some of the items were hundreds of years old, and all of them would hurt a nonhuman. Including me, if I wasn’t careful. Usually, I would have opened the case in the car, selected a few items, then left the kit in the car where it’d be safe. But I didn’t think I’d be facing any vampires or fighting any other demons tonight, so I took the entire kit.
I selected a tiny vial of holy water, removed the stopper, and sprinkled it over the pile of demon ash, sticks, and dry leaves.
“Shit,” I yelled, scrambling away when the entire pile forcefully ignited. My face felt scorched, and I lifted my fingers to my eyebrows to make sure they hadn’t been burned off in the explosion. Thankfully, they were still intact. The scent of sulfur lingered in the air.
I stood and faced the trio, watching as they broke from their invisible chains. One of the men gave me and the still burning fire an almost blank look, then began running in the opposite direction. His gait was odd and lopsided as his mind attempted to catch up with his body.
“I’ll give you a ride,” I called, but he ran on. I didn’t think he even heard me.
The remaining two clutched at each other, shock in their eyes. Neither said a word, but they shrank away from me after I collected my hunting kit and approached them. I held up my free hand, palm toward them, like I’d just cornered a frightened dog.
