A Wolf at the Door

by Stewart, K. A.

  “Lovely.” I dumped my backpack off for the time being and even tipped the bellhop. See, I can be civilized! “Let’s go meet her then.”

  As we stepped into the hallway, the double doors at the end flung open, and a harried-looking attendant pushed a cart out, the plates on it full of barely touched food.

  Tai shook his head a little. “Let me guess, her rare steak was too rare and her three-minute egg was in thirty seconds too long?”

  “And later, her porridge will be too cold and her bed will be too hard.” The waiter just rolled his eyes, and the two men exchanged fist bumps before he wheeled the rejected food back toward the elevators.

  The bodyguard caught the door when it would have closed, and gestured me inside. “Welcome to the penthouse, Jesse Dawson.”

  The penthouse was everything you would expect of a room tagged with that designation. Spacious, sumptuous, elegant, extravagant. It seemed to be a central sitting room, with several doors leading off. I mentally mapped them as the master bedroom, a second bedroom, a second bath, and off to the side there was a kitchenette and a full dining room with a twelve-seat table. The living room—which looked nothing like my living room, I might add—was crowned by a TV the size of my bed at home, and a couple of plush couches in dark brown leather.

  I might have noticed more, had there not been a topless woman standing in the middle of the room. Okay, she wasn’t totally topless, but she stood there in only her bra and panties with her hands on her hips like she owned the world. In the split second before I averted my eyes, I recognized her as Gretchen Keene, movie star extraordinaire. Hell, maybe she did own a good chunk of it.

  “Is it Take a Homeless Guy to Work day, Tai?” A small smattering of chuckles sounded from around the room. I mentally marked the positions of two other people, both male, but refused to look toward the crazy half-naked chick.

  “This is Jesse James Dawson. Reggie told you he was coming, remember?” If Tai was uncomfortable with her nudity, it wasn’t evident in his voice. Maybe this was normal? Naked Tuesdays or something? Geez.

  “Oh yeah. The demon slayer.” That made me look up in surprise. Very few people knew what I did. It wasn’t like demons ran PR campaigns or took out television ads. For her to speak so openly, in front of witnesses and everything…I wasn’t expecting that.

  Dear God, where was I supposed to put my eyes? I mean, the girl was smokin’ hot and the next best thing to buck naked. I think her legs went all the way up to her eyebrows, and even without makeup on, she was stunning. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, gold like only comes out of a bottle and all artfully messy-like, but it only made her even more gorgeous. Was this what demon magic could do? I could feel warmth in my face and fought the urge to look away again. Instead, I focused on her eyes. They were blue—darker than mine, I could tell from a distance—but there was that slight shadow behind them that I recognized instantly. She was soulless.

  That forced my eyes to her left forearm, looking for the telltale black tattoo. It was there. I could see one dark curlicue snaking toward her elbow, but it was mostly obscured by her stance. Still, if it stretched that far, it was a helluva tat. A helluva contract.

  Gretchen raised a brow when I finally raised my eyes to meet her gaze. “Well, are you any good?”

  “The ones who aren’t good don’t live to get better.” Every eye in the room was on me, which struck me as odd when they could have been staring at her. I could feel Tai standing behind me, and off to my right at the bar was another big man with a crew cut who had to be the other bodyguard. The third man was hanging over the back of the sofa, watching me, his short dreads dyed an unnatural shade of fire-engine red. I couldn’t see much of him except his head, but somehow I didn’t think he was a fighter.

  “Well, show me something.” Gretchen waved her hand and plopped onto the leather couch, curling her bare feet beneath her. “Do a spell or something.”

  This day was just getting weirder and weirder. “I don’t perform on command, Miss Keene.” Never mind that I couldn’t “do a spell” if my life depended on it. “I will, however, check the room over if you don’t mind.” What I couldn’t do, my friends could do for me.

  My mirror was still in the bundle of anti-demon stuff hanging off my belt loop. I picked it up and turned it toward Tai first. It was hard as hell, trying to get a look at the big man in such a tiny glass, but I managed it while walking a few slow circles around him. He was clean.

  “What are you looking for?” He watched me curiously when I headed next toward the man at the bar.

  “Fleas.” More precisely, I was looking for huge demonic fleas, things I called Scrap demons. As long as Gretchen had been demon-sworn, I’d be amazed if there weren’t at least a couple of the little beasties lurking around. They tended to latch on to the soulless, sucking their life force like greasy little parasites.

  “Seriously?” I ignored Tai’s incredulous question in favor of examining Bodyguard #2. Crew Cut eyed me with a raised brow, but held still as I passed the mirror over him. I mentally put him at a couple of years older than me, and though it was hard to say for sure with him seated, but I thought he was a bit taller than me, too. The requisite muscles filled out his plain white T-shirt, just like Tai’s, but he wasn’t some grotesquely built weight lifter. Those were usable muscles. Fighter’s muscles. Seriously, if these guys were already familiar with the concept of demons, what the hell was I doing out here? They looked like they could handle themselves.

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Bobby McGee.”

  That made me pause, and I looked up from checking out the guy’s boots to see if he was screwing with me. “Really?”

  He scowled, a scar at the corner of his mouth puckering the skin along his jaw. “Hey, your name is Jesse James.”

  “Good point.”

  Bobby McGee was likewise clean, and I went next to check out the guy on the couch. He raised a brow at me too, but where Bobby’s had been calculating—no doubt measuring me up as I had him—this one was decidedly lecherous. “Oh, I love your hair! Can I braid it?”

  “No.” No one braided my hair. Except my wife. And me. You know what I meant.

  “I’m Dante, by the way.” He offered his hand, but I left it hanging there until I’d looked him over thoroughly in my tiny little mirror. Mentally, I labeled him “groupie.” He didn’t seem to serve any purpose that I could see, yet. “You find what you were looking for?”

  “No.” Thankfully, we seemed to have a distinct lack of Scrap demons so far. When I was done checking the groupie over, I shook his hand (that he’d left hovering there in midair, waiting). His grip was firm, but his touch was cold. Scraps or no Scraps, I let go quickly.

  And that just left Miss Gretchen Keene. She stood up as I turned toward her, holding her arms out to the sides. “Take a good look. Most men would kill for this.”

  Already, her attitude was starting to grate on my nerves. I didn’t think we were destined to be friends.

  The first thing I examined was the black tattoo scrawled down the inside of her left arm. Some small part of me expected to recognize it, expected to hear the Yeti’s low chuckle from some dark corner of the room. But the Yeti was gone for now, dispatched by my own hand a few months ago, and her demon brand wasn’t from a demon I’d seen before. The black coils curled and writhed under my gaze and I forced myself to look at it longer than I should have, just to be sure. My head ached when I finally looked away.

  “Turn please.” She did. It was easier to examine her when I didn’t have her lovely…assets sticking in my face. Her back, though…I wasn’t expecting that either.

  At first, I thought my eyes were just protesting the hard work I’d had them doing, staring at Gretchen’s demon brand. But when I’d blinked them a few times, I realized that what I was seeing was real.

  Her skin was pale, as most true blondes will be, but just beneath the skin was something even lighter, shining faintly when the light hit in a
certain way. It reminded me of butterfly scales, a shimmer seen for only a split second when the sun shone just right.

  Her back was covered. The iridescently white tattoos spread from the tops of her shoulders to the small of her back, ending right where a married man should stop looking anyway. Once I really tried to see them, I could see the intricate loops and whorls, the whole complicated design almost swaying under my gaze. I caught myself swaying in time to it and looked away.

  So that’s what a trapped soul looked like. Many trapped souls, actually.

  It was fascinating and sickening all at once, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to reach out and touch those faintly seen shimmers or turn and walk right out the damn door.

  “Are you done?” Her tone of voice told me I was, whether I liked it or not. I stepped back, tucking my key chains and such away.

  “Yeah. You’re all clean.” When I really thought about it, I guess it wasn’t surprising. I mean, Gretchen was some demon’s pride and joy. They wouldn’t want some skuzzy little parasite sucking on all those glorious souls she was carting around.

  “Good. Now let me make a few things perfectly clear to you.” Again, the hands on the hips. “I don’t like you. I don’t want you here. The only reason I’m allowing this is because Reggie thinks it’s a good idea. So you will sit down, you will shut up, and you will stay out of my way, are we perfectly clear?”

  Oh, that was it. “Then let me make myself perfectly clear. I don’t like you either. I think what you’ve done to other people puts you one rung below slime on the evolutionary ladder. I am here because I owed someone else a huge favor. At no time did I say I’d take orders from a spoiled little rich bitch, so what you do or do not allow really means diddly-squat to me.”

  I don’t know what I expected from her, but it wasn’t a very satisfied smirk. She nodded once. “So long as we know where we stand.” Turning on her heel, she snatched a satin robe up off the couch—proving she could have dressed any time she wanted, she’d just chosen not to—and marched back into her bedroom.

  I don’t know what I expected from the other men in the room either, but when Tai and Dante laughed, I felt some tension ease across my shoulders.

  Even taciturn Bobby nodded his approval. “You’ll do just fine here.”

  I had my doubts.

  7

  I escaped to the safety of my own room after that. “Freakin’ California.” I’d just tossed my suitcase on the bed earlier, so I made some vague motions toward unpacking it. “The problem with California is that it’s full of Californians,” I told the empty room.

  It was a nice room. Not the sprawling paradise down the hall, but nice. I’d never had a king-sized bed, and most definitely hadn’t had one all to myself. The comforter was black satin, and looked like you could sink into it forever, and the bed was piled high with eleventy-billion pillows. I had a small bar to one side, and a fully stocked office area to the other. The closet was bigger than my den at home. Cripes.

  I threw the curtains on the windows open wide, staring out at L.A. for a few long moments. Buildings stretched as far as the eye could see, all different and yet oddly the same as what I’d see in Kansas City. Somewhere out there was the ocean, and I wondered briefly if I’d be subjected to it during my stay. Sunlight and me, we don’t exactly get along. I’d wind up looking like a samurai lobster if I was out there for more than an hour or so. Still, a city was a city apparently, especially from this height. Stone and concrete, brick and asphalt. I had to wonder if all the seductive tinsel and bright lights only glimmered at night.

  But enough of that foolishness. Top priority was getting Cam’s portable wards put down. When I opened up my suitcase, the first thing to catch my eye was a tiny piece of quartz, resting on top of my neatly folded Tshirts. I picked it up, rolling it between my fingers.

  Ivan had given the crystal to me, years and years ago. I was supposed to do some meditation exercises with it or something, try to awaken the magic Ivan was just sure I had buried deep inside me. I think the crystal was supposed to react in some way if I ever got it right. Needless to say, it had always remained still and quiet, perfectly clear except for the one milky white flaw deep inside it.

  Mira must have packed it for me, but I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why. I tucked it into the pocket of my suitcase, and kept digging through my clothes. I found the Ziploc bag containing my magical goodies stuffed under my socks. The canister of demon repellent had survived intact, and I hooked it on to my belt loop with the rest of my doohickeys. I uncoiled the lengths of blessed string from the bag, examining the tiny tingles that spread across my skin like a band of ice-skating fleas. The trip had no ill effect on Cam’s spells, then.

  I eyed the expansive windows first. That was a lot of glass, a lot of entry point. With the coin on my key chain, I could make some holy water, paint protections on the windows. I finally opted not to. This high up, I didn’t think a window entry was likely, and I hated to waste spells when I didn’t have an easy way to replenish them.

  So that just meant warding the doors. I briefly thought of doing the elevator too, but I wasn’t sure how the constant motion would affect the spell, and I wasn’t sure I had enough string, either. Only the occupied rooms would get the warding treatment.

  It took me a few minutes to figure out just how to go about applying said string, but it finally came down to a liberal application of tape and staples, which I just happened to have on the nicely equipped desk. The string was long enough to make the entire loop around the inside of the doorjamb, and once in place, I verified that I could feel the boundary as I passed in and out of my door. It glided over me like a soap bubble, making the short hairs on my arms stand on end.

  I had to wonder just how powerful it would be, though. Cam’s wards had failed us in the past. Granted, he’d also been close to “spelling” himself to death at that point, so I wasn’t sure I could hold that against him. I just…wasn’t sure I could trust him, yet. If it had been Mira’s work, I wouldn’t have questioned it at all. I had more faith in her than I did in myself, most days.

  Speaking of…

  With my room at least nominally secure, I flopped on the monstrous bed, listening to the phone chirp in my ear, and smiled when she answered on the third ring. “Hey, baby.”

  “Jess! You made it there okay?”

  “Yup, just got to my room. You should see this place, Mir, it’s a freakin’ palace. We totally have to come here on vacation sometime.”

  She chuckled a little. “Because your last vacation went so well.”

  “Point.” I sighed, putting one arm behind my head to get comfy for a bit. “So how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.” She answered too quickly, which meant she knew it was a loaded question. “Did you tell Estéban that I’m pregnant?”

  “Um…no?” Technically, I hadn’t. I told him she might be pregnant. “Why, what’s he said?”

  “He hasn’t said anything, but I’m apparently not allowed to reach for things on high shelves or pick up anything that weighs more than five ounces without him right there, doing it for me.” I could hear the annoyance in her voice. Nothing pisses my wife off faster than being told she can’t do something.

  “He means well, hon. Cut the kid some slack.”

  “So you did tell him.”

  Oops. “Was it supposed to be a secret?”

  She sighed, and I could picture her raking her fingers through her long curly hair. Her green eyes would be dark, a small crease between her brows. “I just don’t want a lot of people to know, if it’s a false alarm. Or if…if it doesn’t last.”

  Yeah. Three miscarriages in, we knew very well that sometimes things just didn’t last. “Just…take it easy, okay? Let the Boy Wonder do some of the heavy lifting around the house for a change. It’s good for him, builds character. And do not cast any spells. Not even little ones. You need something done, let Estéban do it. Or Cam.” That last part was bitter to say. I wasn’t sold on Came
ron, not yet, but if it was a choice between using his skills or losing a baby…well, I knew which I’d pick.

  “I know.” She fell silent, then. Sometimes, those silences say more than the words. I could hear the uncertainty in it, the desire to be hopeful, and yet dread at the same time. The fear of the what-ifs and the joy of the maybe-coulds. Everything I was feeling, too.

  “Whatever happens, baby, I love you. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, I know that.” There was a small smile in her voice. “I love you too.”

  “Listen, I gotta go put some wards up around the diva’s door. You call me as soon as you know something, ’kay? No matter what time it is.”

  “I will, Jess. And I’m sure if I don’t, Estéban will send up smoke signals or something.”

  I lay there for a few minutes more after we hung up, just rolling things over in my head. Another baby…Christ, I didn’t even know which outcome to hope for. I wondered if that made me a bad person.

  Tape and stapler in hand, I went to go ward Miss Gretchen Keene’s door next. I was almost done, crawling on my hands and knees across the carpet, when the door opened and Tai looked down at me with a raised brow. “Do I want to know what you’re doing?”

  “I’m willing to say no.” One last staple held the blessed thread in place, and I nudged Tai back so I could pass through the door several times. As expected, a subtle shock passed over my skin, marking the location of the protective barrier. “What do you feel, Tai? When you wave your hand through here?” I admit, the entire concept of Maori magic made me curious.

  Eyeing me like I was bonkers, Tai waved his hand through the door negligently, then hesitated and did it again, slower. “It’s some kind of…electrostatic barrier? What’s it for, jamming listening devices?”

  “Not quite.” He could feel it! First, this meant it was really working. Second, it meant that he could pass through it without harm. That worked in his favor.