The Unlikeable Demon Hunter_Crave

by Deborah Wilde

  His face lit up. “She likes football?”

  “European football, she’s nuts about. North American football, not so much.”

  “Who would be?” he said.

  “That’s cute. Your confusion does double duty as Italian condescension.”

  Rohan popped his head back in. “You two planning on coming?”

  “Grazie.” Drio gave me another chin chuck and bounded out of the room.

  From the road, the sugar refinery was confined to a series of connected, six-storey brick warehouses with arched windows that were over a hundred years old, but once we got through port security with our passes and identification very thoroughly checked and onto the site itself, we saw how large the property actually was.

  Fellow workers in white or beige overalls, all with hard hats and work boots milled about, going between the different buildings that facilitated the various aspects of the sugar refining process.

  After careful study of the map, we’d pinpointed the most probable area for Candyman to show himself. He wouldn’t be in any of the packaging centers, nor did the buildings for storing or melting sugar seem likely.

  “This way.” Drio led us to our destination along the waterfront like he’d been here a million times before. There were so many employees that no one glanced twice at us, plus if we’d cleared port security, we’d obviously been vetted. We kept our stride purposeful and not hurried, despite the fact the brilliant gleam of pink and gold sky was already shot through with inky purple, the sun starting its descent, and Candyman needing to feed for his next twenty-four hour cycle.

  The shed where they stored the raw sugar looked like it had been built for a giant. The huge bay doors were open, revealing massive piles of sugar the color of wet sand. I could easily picture some baby cyclops sitting in here building sandcastles, spinning turrets stretching up to the slanted ceiling.

  A group of workers were busy using the crane to transport the raw grains. We bypassed them and stepped inside the shed, only to be immediately hit with the smell of molasses that was so pungent, I tasted it at the back of my throat. The air was so thick with sugar that even this short exposure left my skin skim-coated in it.

  Steel beams ran the length of the ceiling, illuminated in pools of light. There were plenty of shadows for the hoc demon to portal in up there and never be seen.

  First rule of monster hunting? Always look up.

  We climbed the metal staircase to the catwalk, talking quietly, occasionally pointing at the sugar like we had some logistical problem to solve, scanning for any hint of movement.

  “There.” Rohan tilted his chin the tiniest bit to indicate the shadowy creature sitting at the juncture of two beams overhead.

  The hoc scrubbed at its mottled gray skin with its front paws, a long pink tongue lolling out between two very sharp fangs. Hairless cats were fugly. Demon hairless cats that were the size of a cougar with gremlin ears and wrinkles I could count like tree rings were profoundly disturbing.

  “Where’s the mate?” I asked. “Is this Candyman or the other one?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Drio said. “We tag this one, we follow it back to the other one. Va bene.”

  I leaned over the catwalk. “Clear.”

  Drio flash stepped the length of the catwalk. Our only sign that he’d jumped onto the railing and pulled himself up onto the beam with the hoc was when the demon swatted his ear with a heavy paw. Drio had tagged the hoc with a subdermal tracker.

  A sharp whistle sounded from down below. Drio stood at the bottom of the stairs, throwing a thumbs up.

  Ro and I kept our attention on the sugar, bodies relaxed as we clomped down the stairs, pretending we couldn’t feel the weight of the demon’s tawny-eyed stare on our backs.

  As soon as we hit the street, I pulled off my hard hat, scratching the top of my head in relief. According to the tracker, the hoc was still in the sugar shack, completing its sugar synthesis process, so we waited in my car.

  Drio sprawled in the back seat, fidgeting and tapping his feet. Every few seconds he let out an annoyed huff.

  “Quit it before I fry you,” I said.

  Another huff. “Your witch friend going to train you to fully use your magic?” he said.

  “I hope so, but I’m not sure when that’s going to happen.” I twisted around and ruffled his hair. “Worried about me?”

  He pushed my hand off his head and sank back against the seat. “Leonie is worried. Call her.”

  I hid my smile because that wasn’t actually a denial on his part.

  “You’re growing on him,” Ro said, his eyes trained on the tracking screen in his hand.

  Drio kicked the back of his seat.

  Ro shot him the finger, then held up the tracker. “Brace yourself, kids. It’s recalibrating.”

  The screen buffered for a second and redrew the map. We hightailed it to the next location. The hoc had set up shop in an empty storefront a few blocks away, its windows papered over, and a faded To Let sign on the outside wall.

  We parked in the alley around back, next to a stack of pallets, and exchanged our cloth employee overalls for brand new chemical protective suits and facemasks in case the oshk showed up, wriggling into them as best we could in the car.

  Ro picked the lock on the back door and I stepped through, magic on, ready to short-circuit any alarm panel. Good thing there wasn’t one, because in light of what I found in this back room, disarming any system went clear out of my head.

  One of the matryoshka, this one with a blood-encrusted female human torso, was bound to a metal folding chair with thick iron chains. The fat iron vise gripping her chest was overkill.

  Oozing sores dotted the raw red skin along the top of the chains and her tiny head was missing a chunk, like it had been bitten off. The demon had lost all blobbiness, her body more a teardrop than a water balloon. Ribs protruded from her human torso and she’d shrunk to about a third of her size, though slumped over unconscious as she was, her exact height was hard to determine.

  Clear plastic tubing was attached to her nipples with metal clamps. The other ends of the tube fastened on to a still, like the one we’d found at Candyman’s previous residence. That still was some kind of fucked-up mad science, with a humming box dispensing corn starch into the glass beaker collecting the oshk’s dripped secretions.

  The person-sized cartoon cake doughnut painted on the wall from the previous tenant, smiling merrily at us with the words “Add some YUM to your day!” floating in the clouds around it, really added that je ne sais quoi to the tableau.

  With a mechanical rumble, the vise clamped down, squeezing the oshk. Bloody liquid glugged out of her nipples and into the plastic tubing. The oshk was being milked, emitting a hot gush of cotton candy-scented stank with each spasm.

  I gagged, covering my own boobs in sympathy. Rohan put his hand on my shoulder to steady me.

  Wind whispered against my face. Drio was gone.

  Whistling in the front of the store cut off with a strangled shriek. Drio dragged Candyman through the doorway, into the back room. The hoc flickered between his human glamor of unremarkable brown-haired, white guy and his wrinkly hairless cat form. He fought hard, but Drio had skewered him through the shoulder on the end of a short iron spear. With the iron coursing through his system, the hoc was unable to portal.

  The hoc finally managed to lock into his demon form, sinking his fangs into Drio’s arm. Trying, anyway. His teeth snapped together with a sharp click, closing on thin air.

  I backed up against the wall, one eye on the back door and one on the exit to the front office. Chances were if the mate showed up, she’d portal in, but I didn’t want to be taken off guard because she used a door.

  “Here kitty, kitty.” Drio crooked a finger at him.

  The hoc leaped for Drio. Another miss. He bellowed a roar and pounced on me, knocking me to the ground with all four paws, but immediately bounced off with a yelp when he got the electric shock of his life.

>   Snarling, the cat swung his head at Snowflake.

  “Where’s your mate?” Rohan casually flicked out all his blades.

  The hoc growled and charged him, knocking Ro off his feet. My idiot boyfriend was grinning as he wrestled with the demon cat. The hoc snapped his fangs at him, barely missing Ro’s nose.

  Ro sliced the demon’s belly open. Liquid gooshed over his gloved hand and when Ro jerked away, it glistened, stretching like taffy.

  Candyman was coated in a fine sheen of sweat, his skin streaked with black from the iron now poisoning his system thanks to both Ro’s blades and the spear. Leaping away from Rohan, the demon changed back to his human form and tore the spear out with a wet plop. The iron tip splintered, leaving part of it embedded in him. It was designed to do that, but the demon didn’t know it.

  The sugar syrup that made up his blood streamed from both his shoulder and his gut. He was grayer as a human than his natural demon skin color.

  I grabbed the broken spear. One good tight grip and a little magic elbow grease and my current heated the broken tip until it glowed white hot. “Hold him, boys.”

  They pinned the hoc to the floor and I jammed the tip in a fraction of an inch away from the kill spot in his stomach. His flesh seared like a good steak, though the smell was more fetid flesh than delicious BBQ. I kept up the heat and soon he was bubbling, charred human hair falling to the ground.

  The demon mewled.

  I crouched down so I was eye level with him. “This is a new trick for me, and I’m happy to spend the next three hours practicing increasing the heat on all the parts of your body. Or you can answer our questions and I’ll put you out of your misery. Where’s your mate and how did you capture the oshk?”

  The demon lasted another fifteen minutes before he cracked and admitted that he’d trapped this oshk after it had eaten his mate. There were no other Sweet Tooth production centers. It was kind of hard to understand him because half of his head was a ruined, blackened mess, but we got the gist.

  I drove my fist into his gut, firing my magic through my gloves into his kill spot. There may have been justice for Naomi and Jake and that poor couple, but there was no satisfaction. Soon as he’d disappeared, dead, I tore off my protective head gear and fired it at the wall, snarling at the single whisker left of the demon, beyond done with this entire mission.

  “You brutalized him.” Drio nodded approvingly, pouring the beaker of oshk secretions into a patch of weeds just outside the back door. He and Sienna would get along beautifully.

  Rohan unplugged the still and the humming quieted. He found a dented cardboard box and packed the still and tubing into it.

  I stood up and unscrewed the vise. The oshk flopped over in her chains, her smaller head blob jiggling. Her flesh overhung the side of the chair like a slime toy. “What do we do with her? The matryoshka doesn’t hurt humans. She eats other demons. Isn’t that something we want to leave alive?”

  Drio flicked something squishy off his suit and pushed up his face mask, cheeks ruddy. Being in these suits was like being roasted alive. “Kill her.”

  “She suffered.”

  “Demons are never victims.” Drio looked around the room for anything we’d missed. “We kill them. It’s what we stand for.”

  “The only good demon is a dead demon, I know.” But there were exceptions to every rule and he was currently sleeping with one of them.

  “Drio’s right.” Ro was remained fully outfitted from head-to-toe.

  Drio shook his head, as if that was obvious, picked up the box of drug-making paraphernalia, dumped his helmet on top, and carried it all out to my car.

  “How can you say that?” I demanded. “What about Leo?”

  Ro squatted down, working on the locks imprisoning the oshk. “I make an exception for her.”

  “How magnanimous.”

  “Yeah, it is.” The chains binding the oshk to the chair fell to the floor with a clang. “If I had my way, Malik wouldn’t be around anymore either. I appreciate he has his uses, for now. You’ve taught me the value of squeezing every drop of assistance out of demons I can before killing them.”

  “That’s not at all–Argh.” I threw up my hands.

  “Nava, things may not be black and white, but there’s still right and wrong.” Rohan kicked the chains aside, catching the oshk before she fell over.

  “Why is it still alive?” Drio was back.

  “We’re discussing what to do with her.” I picked up the chains.

  “What’s to discuss? It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t gun for humans, her secretions can harm us, and she has to die,” Drio said. “It’s not open to debate.”

  “The basic element of right?” Ro said. “Don’t fuck people over.”

  “This isn’t about the Brotherhood,” I said.

  “Demons, Brotherhood, it doesn’t matter,” Drio said. “Listen to your boyfriend.”

  “Bite me.”

  “It turns out we do have one more use for this one.” Ro threw the oshk over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He was fully protected by the chemical suit so I wasn’t worried about another episode. “She’s going to help us kill the rest of the matryoshka.”

  Drio nodded. “That works.”

  The oshk had some use as a demon-eater, but ultimately, it didn’t matter if she had to die. One day I’d kill Malik, too. No, I was incensed over Ro’s high-handed attitude about Leo. She wasn’t an exception. They’d become friends. Could he really flip on her that easily if push came to shove? Drio’s reaction didn’t surprise me, but I’d been counting on having Ro’s help in protecting Leo if things went sideways and Drio’s feelings got hurt. Now? Would Drio’s rights as a full human automatically trump hers as a half-demon? Would her human half even matter?

  Driving home, ignoring the guys chatting about some Rasha that Drio had run into on his jaunt to Palm Springs, I got my anger under control. I’d promised to have Leo’s back. I glanced at my two passengers and their combined deadly force and my heart sunk. In another world where Drio didn’t hate demons and Leo didn’t have that unfortunate parentage, they would have been great together. With all that baggage? There was only one way to keep her safe: convince Leo to stop seeing Drio before she went from an exception to a statistic.

  Ro and I carried the oshk from the car to the iron chair in the torture room. She remained limp and unconscious, as far as we could tell without her having eyes. I leaned into the oshk with the side of my body, keeping her upright so Ro could tape her in place with the special duct tape threaded through with iron and salt. Under my gloved hands, the demon had the blubbery consistency of Silly Putty.

  Ro ran the duct tape over her raw sores to pin her torso to the chair and the oshk jerked violently against me.

  Startled, magic snapped out of me like a whip. “Jeez!” I laughed, placing my hand to my chest. It had only been a spasm. The oshk was still limp, out cold.

  Ro tore off his glove, reached for my ribcage, and abruptly dropped his hand before he touched me. “Does your skin feel wet?”

  “Shit.” I flung off my gloves, grabbed the chemical suit and twisted the material to examine it. My magic, born of surprise and therefore, uncontrolled, had torn a hole in the suit.

  There was a single glistening drop on my skin that I wiped away with the fabric.

  I bit my lip. “One tiny drop. It didn’t even sink in. How much damage could it do?”

  “Right.” He slung an arm over me. “Besides, I’m here to keep an eye on you. Go all crazypants and I’ll take you out.”

  I bumped his hip with mine. “And to think some women only get jewelry. I get my own personal assassin.”

  “Anyone can buy jewelry.” Rohan slapped his hand against the scanner to open the door and let us out into the Vault. “I’m full-service.”

  “Oh yeah?” I ghosted my lips over his. “Prove it.”

  He did. Three times.

  It was yet another night of very little sleep, but I wasn’t compla
ining. In fact, when Ro woke me the next day, I bounded out of bed. Meaning, I opened my eyes on the first try and didn’t brain my boyfriend with sleeping implements.

  “How you feeling this morning?” he asked.

  I stretched. “Sore, but good.”

  Ro crossed his arms, wearing another pair of board shorts–these a dark plaid–that rode low on his hips. “Demon-wise, Sparky. I figured when you woke me up that last time begging for it, that you were probably good.”

  I was momentarily struck dumb by the dip between his hips and his abs in the strip of skin visible between his shirt and waistband. One bite of that beautiful brown skin, please and thank you. Maybe a couple of licks.

  He snapped his fingers. “My eyes are up here.”

  “Yeah. Not really interested in that feature right now.”

  Rohan tackled me and I squealed. “Just because I’m the hottest lay you’ve ever had,” he said, “doesn’t mean you can objectify me.”

  I beat him with the pillow until he rolled off me. “One of these days,” I said, “your arrogance will outweigh your use in providing orgasms.”

  “With you? Not if you had three lifetimes.”

  I reached for him, fisting my hands in his shirt. Pulling him close, I kissed him. “Let’s test that theory.”

  He groaned. “Drio’s waiting for me. Rabbi Abrams got us a meeting with Mischa.”

  Sighing, I let him go, smoothing out the wrinkles I’d put in his shirt. “All right. Go confirm his twin is still alive.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “I gotta talk to Leo. Then I’ll check in with Gelman, see if she got hold of Tessa.”

  I lay in bed a bit longer after hearing the front door close and the Shelby drive off. I texted Leo asking if I could come over and got a thumbs up emoji. Got my word of the day as well: indomitable. Why yes, I was, thanks.

  As I hopped out of bed and grabbed my headboard, the room swung sideways, my vision blurring at the edges. I’d stood up too fast. Coffee would fix that. Hmm. Since I was going downtown to Leo’s anyways… I sent her another text and grabbed a clean towel for the shower.