A small smile crossed Frankie’s lips. “Yeah, I do think he’s going to be an amazing dad.”
Allsún smiled. Deep down, she wished she could be in Frankie’s position. She’d wanted children when she and David had been together. That had been five years ago. Now, that ache to have a child of her own had grown and become so intense, she couldn’t see any pregnant woman or newborn baby without filling up with envy. Despite her happiness for Frankie, she was filled with a jealous longing. Man, she was an awful person.
She grabbed hold of Frankie’s hands, gripped tight and met her friend’s eyes. “I’m really happy for you, Frankie. Don’t be afraid. Jace will take it much better than you think he will.” She gave Frankie another squeeze.
She wasn’t lying. She was happy for her, but a sick twisted side of her couldn’t help but feel sorry for herself.
Such cruel irony. If only Frankie knew the real reason she’d left David, aside from him joining the Execution Underground.
“Are you going to tell Jace soon?”
Frankie nodded. “I can’t avoid it much longer. I’m tired all the time, eating everything in sight, and since I’m having twins, I’m certain my stomach is going to pop at twelve weeks and there will be no more hiding it.” Frankie let go of Allsún’s hands. She stared out the window at one of the glowing streetlights, wrapping her arms around herself as if to stop herself from falling apart. “I’ll tell him, but what if he leaves? It’s not like we’ve been together that long. He may love me, but I doubt anyone would be ready for the commitment of having children this soon in a relationship. Hell, I don’t know that I’m prepared, but I don’t want to give these little ones up. Still, what if this scares him away? What will I do then?”
“You really think he’ll leave? Jace isn’t that type of man—I know that much just from David. From my understanding, he had a pretty shady childhood. An abusive, then absent, father. Jace would never do that to his own kids, and he’d never leave you like that. I can tell how much he cares for you.”
A small smile crossed Frankie’s face. “I never thought I’d be able to love someone so quickly and so deep. It seems unreal at times how fast things have happened.”
Allsún placed a hand on Frankie’s arm. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
* * *
FOR THE FIRST time in all his years of hunting, David was late to a division meeting, and Damon was not going to be happy. Normally David was the first one there, ready to follow orders. He was also unofficially responsible for getting Jace to show up no more than twenty minutes late, something that generally took a long series of nagging phone calls and texts. This time was different.
He pushed open the door to the warehouse.
“You’re late. Better be for good reason,” Damon said.
David walked around to the far side of the table. He sat down, leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table, then rested his head in his hands.
His fellow hunter Trent Garrison, who specialized in hunting non-werewolf shapeshifters, placed a hand on David’s shoulder. “David, you all right?”
Without answering, David unholstered the Beretta, placed it on the table, then quickly removed his other weapons. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t push the images of the victims from his mind. All the spilled blood and the way the demons had mutilated that poor baby girl. His stomach churned. The thought of it made him sick.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Ash—short for Ashley—Devereaux, the division’s resident ghost/poltergeist hunter and medium, leaned back in his seat and eyed David. “If you’re actually carrying a gun, I’m a bit concerned,” he said, his thick Louisiana drawl drawing out the words.
“Enough,” Damon said. “Now that David and Jace are here, we need to get started.” He grabbed David’s weapons off the table and placed them in the large plastic container they used to check their weapons before entering the control room, a small hidden space that held all their supercomputers and the technology that connected them to their division’s underground ops center.
A chorus of screeching sounded as the men pushed back their chairs across the concrete floor. As they stood, Damon met David’s gaze. His eyes narrowed. David wasn’t certain whether it meant Damon was pissed off or concerned.
“You all right?” their boss mouthed silently.
David gave a single nod. Everything that had happened in the past hour weighed heavily on his shoulders. He was glad when Damon took the hint and didn’t ask any more questions.
David followed his fellow hunters through the warehouse. He helped Ash move seven crates aside until they cleared a path to the key panel hidden in the wall. Damon typed in the code, placed the weapons in the containment drawer and entered first, passing through the scanner. They followed one by one until they were all crammed inside the small control room. Everyone took their usual seats. When all six men were settled, Damon cleared his throat and turned to David.
“You want to go first, since clearly you have something important to share?”
David shook his head. “Save the shitty news for last.”
Surprisingly, Damon obliged and didn’t push further. He turned his attention toward Jace. “You have anything for us?”
Jace shook his head. “Nada, mi capitán. Nothing to report. The wolves are behaving under my watch, with Frankie’s help. No rogues have come into the area, since the rumors of Robert are still pretty rampant. After hearing what happened to him, they don’t want to be met by the badass that is Jace McCannon.” He flashed a smug grin.
Damon didn’t look one bit amused. “You’re certain you have them under control?”
Jace crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, you doubt me?”
Damon ignored his question. “How would things be in your absence?”
Jace uncrossed his arms and sat forward aggressively.
There they went again, David thought. Another pissing contest. He let out a long sigh. He had more important things to think about than this. Like the fact that some sort of demonic shit-storm was about to go down, and his ex-fiancée was the last Fae outside some weird otherworldly faerie dimension, so all the demons were going to be coming after her.
“What the fuck are you saying?” Jace asked.
Damon growled. “Just answer the damn question.”
Jace scowled. “They’d be a bit more unsteady without me, but nothing Frankie couldn’t handle. Why?”
Damon met Jace’s gaze head-on, and if David hadn’t known better, he would have thought he was going to fire Jace right then and there.
Despite the cold fire in his eyes, Damon kept his tone calm and even as he spoke. “Headquarters requested you make a trip down to New York City to assist in a hunt there. They need someone with your experience to lead. Can I count on you to do that without fucking up?”
Jace’s frown deepened, but he nodded. “Yeah, I’ll get the job done.”
Damon twisted in his office chair and looked toward Shane, clearly happy to done with Jace. “Anything?”
Shane straightened his glasses. “Well, actually something’s brewing—no pun intended—with the witch covens. There’s been some activity, but nothing I can really pinpoint. I don’t know the definite significance yet.”
Damon tapped his pen against the stack of reports in front of him. “Anything you need?”
“Not at the moment. No. I’ll keep you posted,” Shane said.
Damon scribbled notes on a blank sheet of paper. “What about you, Ash? How is everything going at the asylum?”
“Slowly,” Ash replied. “There are enough souls that need to be put to rest to keep a hunter busy for years.”
Damon raised a brow. “Mostly benign spirits?”
Ash gave a low chuckle. “Hell no. The mentally ill are tortured souls, treated badly enough in life as it is.
Their problems only get worse when they become spirits. I’ve got poltergeists coming out my ears.”
Damon shook his head as he continued taking notes. “Not what I wanted to hear, but keep working at it. Just make sure no teenage assholes decide to show off and take their girlfriends in there again.”
Ash gave an ironic salute. “You got it. That place ain’t safe for anyone.”
Damon’s gaze flicked toward Trent. “You?”
Trent grinned like he was the cat who’d just swallowed Tweety Bird. Whatever he had to share, he wanted to tell it. “You’re not gonna believe this, with all the normal nasty monsters I have to deal with, but yesterday I found a pig shifter.”
A moment of silence passed before Jace, Shane and Ash all burst out laughing. Even Damon cracked the smallest of smiles.
Trent chuckled, his own grin stretching from ear to ear. “No joke, and I’ll be damned if that guy didn’t have the most pig-like nose I’ve ever seen when he was back in human form.”
In between laughs, Ash managed to choke out, “You didn’t kill the poor motherfucker, did you? Sounds like he’s got it bad enough as it is, bein’ a hog and all.”
Trent waved his hand in dismissal. “Nah, I didn’t kill him. There was no point. He wasn’t hurting anybody. Poor guy didn’t even have those badass tusks like some wild pigs do.” Trent faced Damon again. “Jimmy from the police department called me in on that one. Apparently they raided some pig slaughterhouse just outside the city and found the guy covered from head to toe in mud inside one of the pens. Jimmy figured it qualified as strange enough to call me. I got everything sorted out, though.” He shrugged. “Aside from that, I’m getting some of the aftershock of Jace killing Robert, too. Non-werewolf shifters seem to be steering clear of Rochester right now.”
A smug grin spread across Jace’s face.
Once the snickering over Trent’s pig-shifter encounter settled, all eyes turned toward David. No one spoke, not even Damon. A wordless understanding hung in the air. It didn’t take David saying so for his fellow hunters, the only men he called his friends, to know that what he was about to show them was tragic.
He reached inside a pocket and removed his cell phone, then handed it over to Shane. “The crime scene photos are on there. Can you bring them up on the big screen so everybody can see what we’re dealing with here?”
With a nod, Shane took the phone from David’s hand and pulled a cable from his messenger bag. He quickly hooked the phone to the main system, then started pulling up the photos. David immediately knew when Shane had seen them, because his fellow hunter’s eyes widened and the blood drained from his face. Shane passed the phone back to David once he’d uploaded the photos.
Shane shook his head as he spoke, as if he didn’t like what he was about to say. “Uh...guys, brace yourselves.” He hit a button, and the first of the crime scene photos appeared on the screen.
“Oh, shit,” Ash mumbled.
Trent swore under his breath.
Jace slammed his fist on the table. “Demon motherfuckers.”
Damon stared intently at the screen. His eyes iced over into a stare that was purely professional. David could always tell that Damon distanced himself from the reality they dealt with as much as he could. He tried to see things objectively. But David couldn’t be objective when it came to gruesome acts like this. No matter how hard he tried.
The rest of the photos flashed across the screen in succession, one every few seconds.
David massaged the edges of his temples. “The worst is the last one.”
Another round of cursing and disgust raced through the small control room as the final photo, a close-up of the baby girl, filled the screen.
“Turn it the fuck off, Shane. Turn it off.” When Shane hesitated, Jace stood and stalked across the room. He hit the power button, and the screen faded to black. He let out a long string of profanities before he turned to face the rest of the group again. “Well, David may be too much of a good guy to say it, so I’ll say it for him.” He pointed at Damon accusingly. “That’s the second dead baby we’ve had to deal with. And David told all of us—” Jace pointed to each of them in turn “—after the first one that he thought it was going to happen again. He fucking told us so, and we didn’t listen.”
“Damn straight,” Trent said. He glanced over at David. “Sorry we didn’t listen to you, man.”
David nodded. “Aside from finding that shit storm earlier this evening, I’ve got other news, too.” He let out a long sigh. “Allsún’s awake again.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Shane asked.
David debated whether or not to lay all his cards on the table. So far, Jace and Frankie were the only ones who knew Allsún was part Fae. It wasn’t that he thought his fellow hunters would go after her—the Fae weren’t an enemy of the Execution Underground; they protected humans from demons the same way the EU did—but did he really want Headquarters to get wind of her situation? All the possible scenarios flashed through his mind, and finally he decided that yes, he did want Headquarters to get involved, because maybe, just maybe, they could help him find a way to better protect her.
“Yeah, but before I found that mess, I was tracking a demon who’d possessed the psychiatrist who’d been taking care of her. She woke up on the very night that little piece of shit told me it knew...it knew she was half Fae.”
Damon stared at David as if he’d grown five heads. “She’s a Faerie? And you neglected to tell me this?”
David decided to try brazening it out. “What does it matter? We don’t hunt faeries.”
“What did you do with the demon who told you that? Did you exorcise him?” Jace uncapped his flask and chugged a swig of the Bushmills Irish Whiskey he always drank.
Damn, this was the part David had really been dreading. “No, I didn’t exorcise him. I had to kill him. There was nothing else I could do. It was either exorcise the demon and risk him telling all his buddies about Allsún or kill the thing and take out the doctor in the process. The doc told me to just kill him and the demon, because if I didn’t kill him, the demon was going to, so I did what I had to do. Turns out I was too late anyway. The last thing the doc said was that the demon had already told all the other hellspawn.”
“Kill an innocent man? And not just any man, but a well-known and respected psychiatrist?” Damon swore. “What the fuck were you thinking? The family being murdered is going to cause enough media trouble as it is, but another dead innocent? I thought you were more professional than this, David.”
David rested his face in his hands and sighed. He was so not up for listening to Damon’s anger. “There was nothing I could do. The demon was killing him anyway, and you think I should have just let that thing get away with it? Better to kill it than let it get away with murder, then waft off to take over another body.”
He could feel his anger rising. Damon had no right to rip him to shreds in front of his fellow hunters.
Damon let out a low growl. “That’s not the point, David. What about his family—or the police, for that matter? To them, you’re the one who killed him, not the demon. If the police manage to crack this and point the finger at you...”
“The doctor was able to push through the possession momentarily. He told me to kill him.” David clenched his fists.
Damon shook his head. “I expect this kind of behavior from Jace, but from you?”
“Hey. What the fuck did I do to get drawn into this?” Jace spun in his desk chair to face Damon. “In case you forgot, I just bagged a fucking serial killer last month. Why are you on my case?”
“Shut up,” Damon barked. “If Headquarters finds out about you and your Berserker shit, all of us are fucked. You’re still on my shit list.” Damon pointed a finger at David. “And now, thanks to you, HQ is going to be all over my ass.”
Damn
it. Frustration rose up in David’s chest. He’d put up with a lot of Damon’s crap, but this was pushing it. He fought to hold his tongue as Damon went on.
“If anything goes wrong because of what you did, I’ll—”
Enough.
David stood and stepped toward Damon. “Look, I don’t care if HQ is so far up your ass their heads are poking out your mouth. I won’t let a demon walk away free. It was gonna murder that poor man, so I killed it. The doctor would’ve died either way, and if you and HQ can’t understand that, you can bend over and kiss my hairy ass.”
The two men stared at each other in silence, as if daring each other to speak.
Trent cleared his throat in an attempt to lighten the mood. “For the record, I’ve seen his ass, and it is just the slightest bit hairy.”
Jace busted out laughing.
Damon shot Jace a death glare. “You think this is funny?”
Ash raised his hand, moving as slow as his Louisiana drawl. “Actually, it is pretty damn funny.”
David ignored them all and started in on Damon again. “I’ve got so much shit to deal with right now that I don’t need you getting on my back to top it all off. You’re the one who wanted to be a division leader. That means you have to deal with Headquarters and their shit regardless of whether the team members that you picked are fuck-ups, which we’re not. I’m not going to deal with your bullshit right now.” He pulled the samples from the crime scene from his coat and dropped them in front of Damon. “Send HQ the photos and the samples, and if they’re pissed off about how I do my job, then either fire me or tell them to get the fuck over it.”
Immortal Hunter Page 7
