Abandoned him? Where had such a notion come from? A Dalvahni warrior was a rock, unworn by time, need or loneliness, an island fortress complete unto himself.
Shaking off his uncomfortable thoughts, he retreated into the shadows. A good hunter possessed patience. And, like all Dalvahni warriors, he was a very good hunter. The djegrali forgotten, he settled down to await his new prey. She would emerge from the safety of her den eventually and then he would . . . what?
Follow her home like a lovesick swain, an unseen escort protecting her from an evil she would neither accept nor comprehend? Step out of the night and introduce himself? But to what end? Congress between humans and the Dalvahni was impractical, to say the least. Humans were frail, insubstantial creatures, their lives but a brief flutter of candlelight in the dark reaches of eternity compared to the immortal Dalvahni.
The minutes stretched by and he grew uneasy. His instincts told him some mischief was afoot. He prowled the perimeter of the building, searching for signs of the djegrali, but found none. He could enter the building. Ascertain her well-being and slip out again undetected. No lock or key was proof against the Dalvahni.
He hesitated, reluctant to give in to this unaccustomed weakness. He was acting like an old woman, afraid of the dark and jumping at shadows. Annoyed with himself, he crossed the street and stood on the other side. He needed distance from the woman.
A man pulled up in one of the modern wheeled conveyances used by humans. Rafe could not remember the word for this particular contraption. The horse and carriage were still in use the last time he hunted the djegrali on Earth. He searched his word bank for the appropriate word. Ah, yes, the thing was called a “truck.” The vehicle had a sign on the side with some lettering. Rafe concentrated. The gift of languages was another Dalvahni talent, a necessity in their travels between worlds. After a moment, the strange squiggles rearranged themselves into something recognizable. Pringle Janitorial Services, the sign said.
The man pushed a wheeled cart up to the front door of the building and pressed the buzzer.
“Hey, Mr. Pringle, come on in,” the woman said, opening the door to the man with a smile. “I’m still putting up books, but I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.” She wrinkled her nose. “Good gracious, they must be burning tires out at the dump again. Something sure smells bad.”
The cart rattled as the man followed her inside and shut the door.
Rafe stood unmoving in the darkness. His blood pulsed hot in his head and in his groin. That voice, that throaty, slightly breathless voice, unexpected from a creature so sweet and demure in appearance. It conjured up images of heated bodies and sex-drenched sheets.
He wanted her. He needed her. Now.
Cursing his bewildering and unruly lust for the human female, he strode across the street. As he approached the entrance he detected the faint but unmistakable rank odor of the djegrali.
She had opened the door and let the demon in. She would be helpless against it.
A kind of madness seized him. With a roar of anguish, he flung his arms wide. The door tore off the hinges. Moving with the preternatural speed of a predator, he raced inside and found her, lying on the floor beneath the djegrali amid a jumble of books. There was blood on her blouse, on the books, and on the demon’s human shell. Rafe threw his axe. The demon snarled and leaped unharmed through a window, disappearing into the night.
There was no thought of pursuit. All of Rafe’s being was focused on the broken figure lying on the floor. Her arms and legs were bent at odd angles and her throat was torn and bloody. He fell to the floor beside her and pulled her into his lap. A weak pulse beat in her savaged neck but she was near unto death. The beast had torn her jugular and she had lost too much blood.
She was dying. He could feel her slipping away from him. “No, you will not leave me.” His voice sounded rough to his own ears. He shook her. “Do you hear me? You will not leave.”
Without thinking, he placed his hands on her and poured his essence into her body. The gaping wound at her neck closed and some of her color returned. Her eyelids fluttered and lifted.
Gray, he noted with bemusement. Her eyes were gray with turquoise rims. Beautiful, liquid, starred with flecks of silver. He fell into them.
“There you are.” She looked up at him in wonder. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.”
Her words startled him. She did not know what she was saying, of course. She could not. How could she be waiting for someone she had just met? It was irrational.
“Be at ease, you are safe,” he said gruffly, even though she did not appear to be alarmed. “I will protect you. You have my word.”
The next day, he hunted down the man called Pringle with the intention of disposing of the djegrali once and for all. It was the only way to keep Bunny safe. But the demon had abandoned its human host and there was no trace of it. He could not predict where it might be or in what form.
The demon had marked her. It would come for her again. Rafe was certain of it.
And so he had married her. It had been an easy enough thing to accomplish. She was so in love with him. He’d planned the matter most carefully, laying siege to her with tender words and passionate caresses one night in her bedroom until she was panting and eager for him.
“Rafe, please,” she’d said, arching against him. “I love you.”
Meaningless words to a Dalvahni warrior and, yet, he hoarded them away like a beggar stores scraps of food for a cold, hard winter. He was sweating with the effort not to take her. It was always like this with her, a fever of desire he did not understand.
But he held back.
“I need you, too.” Lifting his hips, he rubbed the head of his shaft between her tender folds. Gods, she was damp and ready for him. He gritted his teeth to keep from sliding inside her.
“I want to make you mine,” he said, “to keep you safe and protect you. Say yes, Bunny.”
Her beautiful eyes widened. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
Marriage: a rite wherein one human is bound to another in a consensual, contractual relationship recognized by law.
Bunny would be his.
“Yes, I am asking you to marry me.”
It seemed the most expedient way to keep her safe, Rafe reflected as he followed his runaway bride down the path. He desired Bunny, this he freely admitted, but love had nothing to do with it. A Dalvahni warrior did not suffer the pangs of human emotion.
His steps flagged. A Dalvahni warrior also did not chase after a woman like a lovesick boy.
But how can you protect her if you are not with her? a traitorous voice whispered inside his head. The djegrali could return. The fiend could be at the river, disguised as one of the guests. She is not safe.
His gut clenched at the thought. He took a steadying breath and started after her again.
He said he would protect her and he would.
It was his duty, and a warrior always fulfilled his duty.
Chapter Three
Bunny ran, but she could not escape her whirling thoughts.
Demon . . . I am a demon slayer . . . a warrior who seeks the djegrali through space and time.
She had married a stranger. The man she’d fallen in love with did not exist. It was all a lie.
None of it made sense. This couldn’t be happening. Not here. Not in Hannah, a town so quiet you could hear an ant fart.
Heedless of her missing shoe, she raced down the treeshaded path that curved around the building to the front of the church.
She couldn’t face Rafe right now. She needed time to think.
Think? Think about what?
Think about dear, sweet Mr. Hardy turning into a denizen from hell? Or the fact that she’d married a superhuman escapee from another universe?
Think about the hundred-year-old rose garden Rafe the Newlywed Destroyer had turned into a scorched wasteland?
Or perhaps she should think about Rafe’s stunning pronouncement that she was no
longer human.
Which meant the precious, new life growing inside her might not be human either.
Her mind balked.
No. No. No.
Think about that and she’d go stark, staring mad.
She needed a drink.
Oh, hell, she couldn’t drink. She was pregnant.
Sugar. She needed sugar and lots of it.
She veered across the front lawn of the church. Grass, trees and the river went by in a blur and somehow she was at the reception, from point A to point B in a split second. It was like she acquired super powers, or something.
Weird, but she wouldn’t think about that either. She’d had more than enough weird for one day. Enough to last a lifetime.
She’d think about wedding cake instead. Mounds of it loaded with fluffy frosting. Five tiers of luscious lemon pound cake topped with buttercream icing and garnished with delicate white gum paste roses and calla lilies, sweet salvation calling her name from beneath the centermost tent.
Pushing her way through the crowd to the table, she grabbed the top layer of the cake and buried her face in it.
“Yum,” she moaned between bites, quivering with bliss. “Thish ish sum wumphful cake.”
Holding what was left of the slab of cake in one hand, she picked up a crystal bowl of butter mints and dumped them into her mouth. The mints were smooth and cool and creamy. They melted on her tongue and slid down her throat in a sugary cascade of deliciousness. She swallowed and jammed the rest of the wedding cake in her mouth.
She had icing and lemony bits of cake on her hands and under her newly manicured fingernails. Her nose was coated in icing and buttercream frosting ringed her mouth and dripped from her chin. A blob of cake dropped off her hand and landed between her boobs.
No problem. More cake for later.
The sugar entered her bloodstream and shot straight to her brain. The fog cleared. Oh, good God, what was she doing? People would think she was off her nut. Her family would have her committed.
And rightfully so. How many brides took a swan dive into their wedding cake?
Cringing in mortification, she glanced around, expecting to be the center of horrified attention.
To her surprise, no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Guests wandered the manicured grounds that gently sloped down to the river’s edge, and swarmed around the refreshment tables and the low stage and dance floor that had been set up for the band.
Her sense of relief was short lived. A man’s raised voice drew her attention to a nearby card table stacked with presents.
“—and the reason those pants make your ass look big, Doreen, is ’cause you got yo’self a big old ass,” George Nesbitt, the henpecked pharmacist from Hannah Drugs, said to his wife.
“I got your fat ass right here.” Doreen whopped George upside the head with her oversized purse. “I’m glad Junior looks like the air conditioner repair man, ’stead of you, praise Jesus. I may be fat but I can lose weight. But you ain’t never gon’ be nothing but ugly. You got a puss on you that would sour milk.”
She hit him again with her purse for good measure. Goodness, whatever possessed Mr. Nesbitt to talk to his wife like that? He ought to know she was mean as a snake in heat and would squash him like a bug.
Bunny started as another loud voice assailed her ears.
“—been cheating on my taxes since ’02,” Eugene Huggins said in a booming voice from the next tent. He balanced a loaded plate of food in one hand as he addressed Carl E. Davis, the Chief of Police. “And socking away a little moolah so me and the girlfriend can take us a vacation while the wife’s away at that family reunion of hers. Nothing like a little strange to keep the lead in the old pencil, if you know what I mean. That and Viagra. I’m telling you Carl, that little blue pill is a pecker picker upper.”
Bunny flushed. Mr. Huggins was a regular at the library. He enjoyed nonfiction books on history, the occasional mystery . . . and, apparently, a little nookie on the side. Good Lord. How was she supposed to look him in the face the next time he came in to check out a book?
The steady wump wump wump of a big engine made her forget about Mr. Huggins.
“Oh, no,” Bunny gasped, looking up the grassy slope toward the church.
Darryl Wilson was doing doughnuts on the lawn in his old Chevy. Chunks of grass flew from his spinning tires. His girlfriend, Raeleene, was hanging out of the passenger side window, her dress hiked up around her tanned thighs. She had one fist in the air and she was whooping at the top of her lungs.
Holy cow, what was happening? Had somebody slipped something in the punch? People were acting crazy.
Then Bunny heard someone sobbing. She followed the sound to where her daddy was sitting in a folding chair under a tree. He held his head in his hands as he cried. Her mother hovered over him, offering him support. Mama looked shell-shocked too. Bunny knew exactly how Mama felt.
She hurried toward her parents only to stop short at the sound of a familiar male voice.
“Whoo hoo, this water’s colder ’n a well digger’s butt,” the voice said.
“You can say that again,” someone else said. Someone she knew.
“Whoo hoo, this water’s colder ’n a well digger’s butt. There, you happy?”
“You are such a smart ass, Cam.”
“Kiss my ass, Coop, and get smarter ’cause you’re dumb as a bag of hammers.”
Oh, no, they wouldn’t.
Bunny whirled around. Oh, yes, they would.
Her big brothers, Cam and Coop, were swimming in the river.
Naked.
Bunny loved her brothers. She really did. But she could go the rest of her life without seeing either one of them without their clothes on, especially at her wedding.
And that sentiment was doubly true for Herbert Duffey and Jefferson Davis Willis. They were friends of her grandparents, eighty years old, if they were a day, and skinny-dipping at her wedding, for Pete’s sake! The old guys’ pouches were saggy and the ‘boys’ were hitting the water. So were Mamie Hall’s tube sock boobies. Miss Mamie was older than dirt, too.
Bunny shuddered and turned her back to the river, but everywhere she looked she saw more craziness. Over to her right, Billy James Overton, a tetotaling Southern Baptist, had his head under the champagne fountain guzzling bubbly like a frat boy at a keg party. To her left, Mr. Overton’s wife, Lou Lee, was doing a burlesque bump and grind in the middle of the stage. She was dancing to an imaginary tune, because the band had broken out in a fistfight.
Directly in front of Bunny, Mayor Tunstall, a career Republican, was committing political suicide by telling anyone and everyone who’d listen that his daddy was a Yellow Dog Democrat. Less than ten feet away from him, the Judson twins, prim, retired schoolteachers and soloists in the Methodist church choir, were speed cussing.
“—hasn’t touched me in over a year,” someone said.
Oh, Lord, she knew that whiny, unpleasant voice. It belonged to Meredith Starr Peterson, bitch extraordinaire and wife of Trey Peterson, scion of one of the richest and most socially prominent families in town.
Meredith had made Bunny’s life miserable in high school. Made fun of her because she was a straight A student and called her the Princess of Poop because her daddy ran a successful plumbing business.
Bunny hated Meredith.
But then pretty much everybody hated Meredith. She was an equal opportunity pisser-offer. Bunny invited her to the wedding for her family’s sake. You couldn’t operate any kind of business in Hannah and alienate the Petersons.
Meredith stood by the punch bowl. She was wearing an ice blue silk designer suit and matching heels, and holding court with a group of her sycophants.
“Twenty-eight years old and limp as an overcooked noodle.” Meredith fluffed her perfect blond bob with a manicured hand. The big diamond on her ring finger sparkled in the sunlight. “He was Mr. Big Stuff when I married him, but he couldn’t get it up now with a cable and winch. If it wasn’t
for that vibrating radish I got at my cousin Debra’s sex toy party, I’d be dry humping a fire hydrant by now.”
“Shut up, Meredith,” her husband Trey said, just before he dumped the bowl of lime sherbet punch over her head.
Green foam dripped from her hair and down her face. Meredith screeched and launched herself at Trey like a spider monkey. He grunted in surprise at the impact and stumbled back. Wrapping her legs around Trey’s waist, Meredith grabbed a double handful of his hair and yanked. He bellowed and tried to pull her off.
Trey was wasting his time, Bunny thought in dazed amusement, as she watched the couple stagger around the lawn. Meredith had a leg lock on him a can of WD-40 and a crow bar couldn’t pry loose.
They lurched past Bunny, got their feet tangled together and crashed into the wedding cake. The table collapsed and the cake exploded in a fountain of yellow and white goo. Snapping and snarling, the Petersons rolled around in the remains of Bunny’s once beautiful wedding confection.
“My cake!” Bunny shrieked in anguish.
“Ooh, cake rassling.” Looking gorgeous in a sleek, deep red dress that hugged her curvaceous body and showed off her killer legs, Bunny’s friend Addy Corwin strolled up to watch. Addy’s white-blond hair hung in soft curls around her toned shoulders. The platinum do was a new look for Addy, and Bunny thought she looked stunning. “You sure throw a fun wedding, Bunny.”
“Fun? It’s a freaking disaster.”
Addy’s mocking expression softened. She put her arms around Bunny and gave her a swift hug. “Don’t look so woebegone, Bun Bun. It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t. My parents paid a wad of money for this train wreck. Have you seen my poor daddy? He’s crying. And Mama looks like she wants to throw up. I feel like hurling myself.”
“Ah, it’s not so bad.” Addy picked up a monogrammed napkin and dabbed at the icing on Bunny’s face. “Looks like you got caught in the fallout. That cake went up like Krakatoa.”
Bunny jerked away. “Not so bad? It’s mass insanity. Half the town’s acting certifiable.”
So I Married A Demon Slayer Page 18
