Anger and frustration raced through him as he turned and stalked out of the control room. He didn’t care that Damon hadn’t said the meeting was over. He was leaving.
* * *
DR. SHANE GREY wasn’t sure which group of animals showed more overt aggression toward each other: hungry wolves fighting it out for food or his fellow division hunters. His gamble was on the hunters.
Shane watched David storm out of the control room in a fury. He couldn’t say he blamed him. He hated drama and conflict, and both of those figured in roughly eighty percent of the Rochester division meetings. He supposed it came with the territory. Damon had hired a group that was comprised of some of the most elite men in their fields, all of whom behaved like the alpha males they were. Just like in the animal world, they were bound to clash.
Shane really couldn’t say much on this one. As an occult specialist, witch hunter and the division’s unofficial tech-head, taking care of all the division’s electronic gadgetry, he didn’t see many dead bodies unless he was aiding in one of his fellow hunter’s cases.
Jace was the first to break the silence. “Well, if nobody else is going to go after him, I guess I will.” He stalked toward the door, then paused and turned around, shooting a pissed-off glance at Damon. “You know whose side I’m on for this one,” he said before leaving.
“Well, damn,” Ash said. “I guess the meeting’s over.” He eyed Damon cautiously.
Damon waved his hand in dismissal. “Yeah, whatever. Get the fuck out.”
Ash and Trent didn’t need any more of an invitation. They hightailed it out of there.
When Shane and Damon were left alone, silence fell over the control room. Shane pulled up the photos again, arranging them in rows on the screen. Once they were up, he stood resting his chin in his hand as he examined them. His eyes paused on the final photo of the innocent baby girl. His stomach churned. Such vile hate released on such a small innocent baby. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Damon watching him.
Shane’s gaze trailed over the blood smears on the wall next to the victim. “Do those look like anything to you?”
Damon stared at the screen. He remained silent for a moment, then finally answered, “Not at all.”
Shane crossed his arms. “Hmm. I can’t help but wonder if maybe they’re a symbol for a demonic ritual of some sort that we’re just not recognizing. That level of violence among humans usually indicates passionate hate, so I suppose it could be the same for demons. I’d have to dig further into the family’s background, though. I doubt they were involved in any sort of demonic activity. From the looks of them, they seemed pretty white bread. Your normal nuclear household.”
“Not to mention this was the second murder of an infant, which implies a less personal motive,” Damon pointed out.
“True. So if it wasn’t hate, why such violence?”
Damon didn’t respond. He eyed Shane as if he was assessing his abilities. Knowing Damon, Shane thought he probably was.
Shane turned back to the screen. “I’d like to make a copy of these to take with me, if that’s okay I want to look further into that symbol. It’s possible there’s a relation to a similar occult ritual. If I can find that relationship, I might be able to help David figure out the demon’s motivation.”
“If you want to aid in David’s investigation, you have my full support.”
“Thanks,” Shane said, pressing several buttons. He made quick work of copying the photos on to a USB drive, which he threw into his messenger bag. “I’ll keep you posted if I come up with anything.”
“Yeah, sure,” Damon replied.
Shane took the obvious hint that Damon needed to decompress after the meeting. He grabbed his messenger bag, left the room and retrieved his standard nine mm and his book from the weapons bin. He held the heavy book in his hands. Whenever he opened it, he could smell the old crinkled pages, slightly yellowed with age. He’d found it at a yard sale back home in Las Vegas when he was a teen. Not only did it contain loads of invaluable information about the occult, it also contained all his personal notes about the encounters he’d had with witches, warlocks and their spells throughout the years. Not that he’d had many years, considering he was the youngest member of the Rochester division, but he was a thorough note taker.
If there was any relation between the recent demonic activity and the occult, he would find it. He was certain of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A LOUD CREAK sounded from the warehouse, startling both Allsún and Frankie. David stepped outside, with Jace trailing close behind. Frankie quickly climbed out of the car and headed in his direction, and Allsún followed suit.
At the sight of Frankie, Jace’s mouth went from a tight stern line to a genuine smile. “Meeting’s finished,” he said. “Ready to go, princess?” He walked over and wrapped his arm around her shoulders before planting a quick kiss on the top of her head.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” With a small wave goodbye, the two turned back toward the H3.
“Frankie!” Allsún called after her.
Frankie glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Give me a call if you need anything.”
Frankie smiled. “Will do.”
A grin crossed Allsún’s face as she watched Frankie take hold of Jace’s hand. If her supernatural hearing served her right, she was sure she’d heard Frankie whisper to Jace, “Hey, can we talk?” as they slid into the car.
David mounted his motorcycle and buckled his helmet as Jace and Frankie drove away. He passed Allsún the spare helmet, and as she put it on she watched him release the kickstand. With a nod, he gestured for her to get on behind him. She understood him well enough to read his expression and know he was pissed.
“Meeting didn’t go well?” she asked as she swung her right leg over the bike.
Man, was she thankful David’s jacket was so long on her. Otherwise her ass would be hanging in the wind for everyone to see, courtesy of the hospital gown.
“Downright shitty,” he replied. “But the main point is the samples were sent off to HQ, so we’ll have an analysis on them by tomorrow evening.”
“And until then?” She clung tight to him as he started the engine.
“We don’t really have any leads, so until then we wait at my apartment.”
A lump crawled into her throat. David rolled the bike forward and eased it on to the street. Seconds later they were speeding downtown toward his apartment. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t shake the nervous feeling in her gut. Her? Inside David’s apartment again? The night just kept getting better and better.
Completely stunned didn’t begin to explain how she felt when she walked into David’s apartment a little while later. She took in the clean countertops, uncluttered by empty beer bottles. The floors had recently been vacuumed, and she was pretty sure there wasn’t a single speck of dust anywhere. She wasn’t quite sure she believed her eyes. She lingered in the doorway for a moment. This apartment held so many memories for her, memories she didn’t care to think about. She wasn’t sure which was worse: to recollect the happy memories—the ones that made her miss what she had before—or the bad ones, which were a painful reminder of how wrong everything had gone.
“Apparently you learned to use basic household cleaning tools,” she said. She pulled the door closed behind her and walked farther into the living room. Why couldn’t he have been this clean when she was dating him? Men.
“I always knew how to use them. I just preferred to watch your cute little butt as you danced around the apartment flittering away with your duster cleaning everything. That’s why I never cleaned on my own.”
She blushed, and even though he wasn’t looking at her, she tried to hide her face. She didn’t want him to know that hearing him say that, thinking about him wanting her, sparked a
fire in her that hadn’t been lit in years. She scolded herself. They were just friends now, and she had ended a different relationship with a different boyfriend not long before she’d been kidnapped. She wasn’t ready for another commitment. Not yet.
“I never knew you were a chauvinist,” she teased.
“You always did like using big words to try and confuse me, at least when we were kids.”
She laughed. “Like you haven’t heard me use that word hundreds of times before in other contexts.”
He grinned, before gesturing to the couch.
She crossed the room and sat down.
“You want something to drink?” He walked into the kitchen, fully visible thanks to the open floor plan, and wrenched open the door of the stainless steel refrigerator.
“Water would be fine.”
He pulled a pitcher of water from the fridge, then removed a glass from the closest cabinet, filled it with ice, then poured in the water. He grabbed a beer for himself, then headed back to her. Dogfish 90-Minute I.P.A. Dogfish had always been his favorite brewery since he’d developed an interest in craft beers back in college. He uncapped the bottle with a fish-shaped bottle opener on his key ring, took a sip, then sat on the coffee table across from her. She drank her water.
Man, this was awkward already.
He cleared his throat. “So...we need to discuss what we’re going to do about this demon situation.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know that there’s much to discuss. It was interested in me because I’m the last Fae outside the Isle of Apples, right?”
He nodded and took another sip of his beer. “As far as I could tell, anyway. I had to kill the little fucker before I could find out more. Didn’t want him getting back to hell to pass on any more information to his sulfur-sucking buddies. Turns out I was too late, though the only reason I found out he’d already told others is because the doc told me before he died.”
Allsún shook her head and fought back a curse. She felt awful for the poor doctor, but she couldn’t shake the fear gripping her, knowing she was going to be followed by demons everywhere she went. That was certainly going to screw with her life. She wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without being on guard. She tried to tamp down her growing sense of panic and maintain a level head the way she’d always been able to do back when she hunted demons. “Is there really anything we can do? You know how demons are when it comes to the Fae. They’re so intent on seeing our demise, they’ll drive themselves into the ground in order to destroy us. They won’t stop until they have me or I’m dead. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to avoid them. It’s not like you can protect me every minute of every day—not that I even want you to. There’s no place to...” Her sentence trailed off as the idea hit her.
She’d been about to say there was no place to hide, but she was wrong. There was a place to hide, the same place all the other Fae were hiding: the Isle of Apples.
“Allsún, are you okay? Allie?” David waved a hand in the front of her face.
She snapped back to attention. “Sorry. The weight of the situation just finally hit me.”
And, boy, had it ever. The only place she would truly be safe was the Isle of Apples. The only problem was that getting to the Isle required magic she didn’t have. She needed her full magic, her “light,” in order to get to the Isle, and she had unknowingly gifted part of hers to David nearly seven years ago. A faerie’s light was their essence, their source of power that they drew from to create their magic. After she and David had separated, she’d briefly considered relocating to the Isle permanently, to get away from Rochester and all the memories it held, and to be with creatures of her own kind. She’d discovered the hard way that she wasn’t able to enter the Isle anymore. When she’d tried, she hadn’t been able to conjure up the magic she needed to open the portal. Apparently one aspect of being Fae, an aspect her mother had neglected to tell her about before her death, was that half of a Fae’s “light” passed to their “life mate”—their life mate being the first person they ever slept with. It worked out great for Fae who mated with other Fae, a pairing that was always for life. They expanded their powers by swapping half their magic with one another. But for a half-blooded Fae like herself, who mated with a human man, it didn’t work out so well. Getting her light back would be easy—if she wanted to sleep with him again. Which she definitely did not.
She was caught between a rock and a hard place.
Renew a past romance that had placed her life in potential danger at its end or be chased by demons for the rest of her life.
Either one would eventually be the end of her. It wasn’t as if she could tell David about the situation. Not after the threat she’d received so long ago. A shiver ran over her skin.
David cleared his throat again. “I think the best course of action would be to gather as much information as we can before we make any rash decisions.”
“How do you suggest we go about doing that?”
“Well, I think all of this has to be connected somehow. I said this earlier, and I’ll say it again, you waking up on the same night a demon tells me he’s after you and then showing up at the crime scene where I’m working can’t be a coincidence. This all has to be connected. I think the more we learn about what happened to that poor family, the more we’ll learn about the situation with you and the demons.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with you on that.”
David held up his beer in a toast. “Here’s to agreeing on a strategy.”
Allsún raised her glass to meet his bottle. “Well, we did used to hunt together all the time. It doesn’t surprise me that our minds are still in sync.”
He took a swig of his beer, then set the bottle down on the coffee table next to him.
Her eyes followed the movement, and she noticed a novel sitting not far away. “You’re still reading?” she asked.
“Of course. You taught me to love it.”
She laughed. “I always kind of wondered if maybe you were just doing it to impress me or get my attention.”
David grinned. “That was it at first, but I did eventually grow to enjoy it.”
“So, what have you been reading?”
“Romances.”
She laughed again. “No. Really...what are you reading?”
“I’m serious. I’ve been reading romances.” He pointed to the book on the coffee table. She looked closer and smiled. A Nora Roberts novel. Good choice. When they’d been together, he’d always seemed to like suspense novels and adventure, sometimes even literary fiction, and an eclectic selection of nonfiction. Romance, though one of her personal favorite genres, just didn’t seem like his thing.
“Huh. Why romance?”
He shrugged and glanced down at his feet. “Because it’s so different from real life. It’s like an escape. In romance, there’s always a happy ending. The guy always manages to get the girl, sometimes not in the way he expected, but he still always gets her.” He met her gaze.
An electric pulse jolted through her as their eyes met, and she quickly looked away. She picked up the book and examined it more thoroughly, anything so she didn’t have to stare into those dark brown eyes of his. “I bet Jace gives you a lot of hassle for that.”
“I don’t tell him about it. I only read here at home. I can’t focus if it’s not silent. If he asks what I’ve been reading, I make up some shit about a crime novel or some sort of literary fiction that bores him out of his mind, so then he won’t ask anymore.”
She grinned. “I bet it’s a real hit with the ladies, a guy who’s sensitive enough to read romance novels.”
He looked at her head-on, almost as if he wanted to be certain she heard him. “There aren’t any women in my life.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure what to make of that. “So you’re not seeing any
one?” She knew she was prying, but she didn’t care.
“No. No one since you.”
Her eyes widened. “No one?” The words came out a little more flabbergasted than she intended.
A slight frown tightened his lips.
She quickly tried to cover her tracks. “Sorry. That came out wrong. I mean, I’m just surprised. It’s not like you’re not a major catch. I know that firsthand.”
His frown faded, and he took another sip of his beer. “I’m not with anyone by choice, not because there haven’t been offers.” He chuckled. “There’ve been plenty of those. More than I can keep track of.”
“Way to be humble,” she mocked, trying to be lighthearted. She bit her lower lip. Lighthearted, her ass. Deep inside she was really thinking about how she wanted to beat down any woman who even looked at him twice.
“What about you? Have you been seeing anyone?” he asked.
Briefly, she considered telling him she’d been single since they separated, but that seemed like a truly shite-filled idea. What was the point in lying? “Yeah, actually I have, but we broke it off just before Robert abducted me.”
“Oh.” A deep sadness swept into his eyes, and the look on his face nearly killed her.
“It was nothing serious,” she added. That was a lie, but she would say anything to wipe that pained expression from his face, and, well, despite Tom’s proposal, it wasn’t very serious. At least not on her end, anyway. That was why it had ended when he’d asked her to marry him. She and Tom couldn’t be serious.
How could they be, when she was still in love with David?
She shook her head. No, she didn’t love him. She couldn’t. She’d loved him—emphasis on the “ed.” But she hadn’t been in love with Tom. She had been trying to convince herself she was in love with him for the past year, but his proposal had blown her charade to smithereens. The head vet at Rochester’s main animal shelter, where she worked as a veterinary technician, Tom Dodd was good man, average and unobjectionable in every way.
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