by Cate Morgan
Dedication
For New Orleans—without your magic I might not have one of the best engagement stories ever. May you continue to survive all the gods throw at you, with all your joie de vive on magnificent display.
And for my husband, who asked me to marry him on Halloween night on Bourbon Street.
Chapter One
A dozen discs of light danced over the deteriorating steel boxes of the train yard, while too-loud voices called out in a grim game of Marco Polo. Fog blanketed the chill Midwestern air, while moonlight illuminated peeling paint here, the rusted metal gleam of track there. This is where trains came to die.
And one demon, if Chase Cole had anything to say about it.
A leviathan shriek echoed through the ghost town alleyways of abandoned machines from a long lost industrial age. The lights converged on a single boxcar, immediately blossomed out again as the car rocked and swayed on its remaining wheels. Shots rang out like firecrackers.
Chase hauled his Texan ass over the top of the bucking train car and fired directly into the dark pit of the open roof hatch. He nearly toppled off again as the demon lifted its makeshift sanctuary from the ground in distress.
A tentacle whipped out, mottled green and purple, covered in sucker talons seeping poison. Chase landed on his back as it caught him round the leg, dragging him forward.
He braced his free foot against the hatch. The tentacle pulsed in a boa constrictor grip as it pulled harder. Chase aimed his shotgun at the point where the demon’s limb curled down into the belly of the car, and blasted the appendage from its soon-to-be corpse. He rolled out of the way and into the waiting arms of his fellow hunters, while others climbed onto the roof and emptied their weapons into the shuddering car in a fit of righteous cowboy vengeance. Chase wouldn’t be surprised if the monster’s banshee shriek could be heard echoing all the way to Lake Michigan.
Callie Trevelyan finished wiping demon blood from her sword and unfolded her long limbs, stretching weary muscles. The death cry reached her as she sheathed her sword, and she debated whether she should investigate. Chase would not thank her for interfering in his fun. Still, she’d better check on the cowboy rabble, just to make sure the job was done properly.
This time they’d better remember the head. It was late, and she was tired, bruised, and not in the mood to chase half a dozen gleeful, chittering Kenyshin spawn through Chicago’s maze of sewer tunnels. Again.
She massaged the back of her neck and shoulders, willing the tension to drain as she looked over what she could see of the city’s skyline. Her city. She’d been born and raised here, more years ago than she cared to count. She’d lived and loved, lost and hurt—and even died once along the way. She’d fought her way through hordes of demons and a half dozen wars, and yet she always returned.
The Seven-Year War had been the worst. While the world shattered under the pressure of what no one was calling World War III, the Otherworld—angels and demons, creatures of myth and legend—had chosen sides and come out to play as only humanity’s greatest hopes and fears could. And so Callie and her sister Keepers of the Flame, champions of the mythic variety, had been called into active duty.
Another shrill scream tore midnight in two. There was enough triumph mixed with pain to drop Callie’s heart into her vitals.
She didn’t think. She ran.
The hunters parted to let her through. Chase lay sprawled on the ground, incoherent with the nightmare of pain and delusion tormenting body and mind. His eyes focused on her with visible effort. “Callie,” he rasped.
Callie swallowed. She slipped a military knife from her boot sheath and tore through his pant leg. A sucker talon protruded from the raging wound, the rent in Chase’s calf dripping thick rivulets of blood and poison.
She handed the knife to a nearby hunter, stifling a curse for Chase’s sake—it would do him no good to see her true concern. “You’ll have to cut it out. Preserve it if you can.”
“Bait?”
“Scrye. Kenyshin are hive demons—we’ll be able to find and trap them much easier than we did tonight.” Someone handed her water. She took a long draught and dumped the rest over Chase’s face to bring him around. “Look at me, Chase.” She swept moisture and damp hair from his death rictus expression.
Chase turned his head in the direction of her voice. “Don’t leave me.”
She forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But you know what comes next.” Behind her came the trickling of whiskey pouring over a blade, the flicker of a lighter igniting.
Warm light illuminated Chase’s long-lashed, bedroom-blue eyes. “Do it.”
Callie pressed her left hand over his galloping heart. After a long, tense moment, he stilled, gaze riveted to her as her steady breathing wove through his struggles for air.
They breathed as one, locked in an anticipatory tableau that stretched each of those moments to the breaking point. The atmosphere twanged and hummed around them like a tightened guitar string. She encountered his walls, secrets he kept even from her.
She exhaled. “Now.”
The hunter who wielded her knife sliced Chase’s leg open until the talon fell away in a spurt of hot blood and pus. Chase jerked once, as though waking from a falling dream, and stilled.
“Take a breath for me, deep as you can,” Callie urged, voice soothing despite her internal struggle with panic. “Exhale until you can feel it in your toes. That’s it.”
Green bile continued to leak from the open wound, followed by a sluggish flow of fresh blood. Finally it ran clean. Callie dumped the rest of the whiskey over the wound and bandaged him up from a first aid kit, at which point he passed out.
Callie sat back on her heels, head spinning. Healing always took a lot out of her, and she’d given it rather more than was strictly necessary this time.
She stood with a weary sigh and adjusted the set of the baldric over her shoulder. “Well, boys. What have we learned today?”
A general scuffling of feet ensued, followed by some casual stargazing. Out of character for seasoned hunters, but not unexpected, considering her reputation. “Remember the head,” someone mumbled.
“When do we get the head?” she prompted, schoolteacher before recalcitrant class.
Shuffle, kick, shuffle. Gaze. “Right away.”
“And we make certain it’s completely decapitated before congratulating ourselves on a job well done, don’t we?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Right, then. Get Chase into the van. We need to get him to the sanctuary.” She turned away. “And make sure you make a thorough job of the cleanup.”
After they dispersed to do her bidding, Callie pulled her phone from the pocket of her leather jacket and hit the redial button. Her call went right to voice mail, just as it had for over a week. Donal’s jovial Irish tones invited the caller to leave a message, unless, of course, he owed them money.
One friend on the seriously injured list. The other MIA—who knew where.
She turned to watch Chase’s prone form being lifted into the back of his beaten blue van. When he was settled beneath a scratchy Army blanket, she moved around to take the driver’s seat. As she passed the back bumper, she kicked a heavy object out of her path with her steel-toed boot. Upon examination, the object was a rock: oddly shaped, gray and porous.
She crouched to pick it up. Removing a leather glove with her teeth left a slight tang on her tongue. Despite the rock’s sponge-like appearance, it was weighty and tingled. As though it carried the burden of secrets.
Obsidian. Dead obsidian, all the color and texture of living stone drained.
In all her time hunting, she’d never heard of live obsidian being used to vanquish a demon, only in the summoning of one. And Keny
shin were hatched, not summoned.
Callie’s hand clenched around the dry, dead hunk in her palm. This was not a good sign.
Liam walked through a soundless landscape, grave dirt rough on his bare feet. The sky was just blue enough not to be black—to illuminate the buildings on either side, the triple spires of the cathedral ahead. He could make out the clock, marking time in reverse. The silhouette of a tree rustled in an unfelt breeze.
Suddenly fire ignited the landscape, tracing invisible lines in flames five feet high. The tree caught, transformed into a living torch. The half shadow of a woman gripped the silky shine of a moonlit sword. A raven flew overhead, shattering the silence. Liam tracked the bird’s progress to the tree, where it glared ancient malevolence at him.
Lines of fire met in the center of the dreamscape, where a fountain of flame grew five times in height. It took shape, churning and pulsating with life. The firestorm shrank to fine, twisting veins. Darkness coalesced, gained texture. Horns twisted against the indigo sky, and super nova eyes exploded with predatory triumph.
The shadowed figure was in front of him now, smiling at him over her shoulder. Her features changed color and shape so rapidly Liam found it impossible to track. She was all women, all at once. And then she became a medium-sized woman, blonde with very blue eyes, and familiar.
“Eva?” Liam reached for her.
And then she was gone.
Liam bolted awake, the Marks crawling over his left arm and across his chest screaming with pain of such intensity his head swam. His bare feet hit the floor as he hunched over, growling between clenched teeth. He forced himself to keep breathing.
Finally, the pain receded to an insidious dull throb—stage by reluctant stage, moment by grudging moment. When a full minute passed without much more than an understated ache, Liam uncurled his spine and exhaled.
Just when his heart resumed normal operations, a raucous shriek from outside stopped it again. He lurched to the window and yanked the white sheer curtains aside. From his third story live-in suite, he had a clear view of the courtyard below.
The fountain had stopped sometime before the Seven-Year War, its stone cracked and pitted and draped in moss, still water a murky black-green. The occasional sluggish burble provided the only sign of life within its depths. The courtyard garden hadn’t been tended in about as much time. He kept meaning to get to it.
The shadow of an overlarge bird darted across his vision and landed on the top tier of the fountain in a violent flutter of wings. A raven the size of a small hawk and with approximately the same amount of predatory intent glared at him. Liam got the impression he was being accused of something, though he wasn’t certain what. But he did recognize a summons when he saw one.
He muttered a curse. Two centuries in this city, and the so-called Big Easy only seemed to get more complicated as the decades passed. Despite popular belief, the vast pantheon of New Orleans’s guardian spirits weren’t deities themselves, but intermediaries between humanity and a distant Creator god who must be served.
The Loa were also a bickering, rambunctious, often drunken rabble who amused themselves with intricate Otherworld intrigues they dragged their followers into like unsuspecting guests to a family reunion. A reunion that wasn’t considered a party until half the goers had fallen unconscious and the cops were called to collect the walking wounded. When the Creator god was away, the Loa will play.
Liam wasn’t a follower. He’d been press-ganged via a Crossroads bargain wrought of desperation and illegal Irish whiskey half the world and an aeon away. And for some inexplicable reason no one saw fit to give him a straight answer to, the spirits had brought him to New Orleans, soon after which the prophetic dreams had started.
Such dreams weren’t so much unfamiliar for Liam as they were infrequent. When they did come, however, they always meant one unassailable fact: trouble, in a big, not-so-easy way.
He let the curtain fall back into place. There was only one course of action when the dreams came, and the Loa called.
Get cleaned up. Get dressed. Find the Baron.
Saturday’s was like no other jazz club in the city, and that was saying something. Built smack on top of a gate between worlds, New Orleans and the realm of the Loa lay on one side—on the other, nothing quite so pleasant.
What had begun in the early nineteenth century as the finest house on Royal Street had been through fires, floods, demons, hurricanes, and tourists—occasionally all at once. Now it was a nightclub dedicated to jazz, restless spirits, and the council of a certain Baron. But it was tourists that fed the city with their energy, their hunger for excitement, their dreams and desires, which had grown only more desperate since the war.
Because of tourists, the city lived. Thrived.
Pungent smoke drifted from the open door to mingle with the fog flooding the night streets, the pavement glistening with residual rain. Inside, the joint was packed tight in a blue and purple haze. Jazz slunk between the crammed bodies like a pickpocket on payday. Liam slipped past a party awash with candlelight and alcohol. The huddle of women erupted excitedly the moment he disappeared into the smoke.
A stage jutted out onto the floor like a small, moonlit island in a world of mist, pulsing with electric blue and purple light. Close observation might reveal the members of the jazz quartet bore a striking resemblance to one another, but such examination wasn’t advisable. The trumpet player featured prominently in a black suit with blue shirt and purple fedora. When the light crossed his face, the bones and hollows stood out like a skull.
A space cleared nearby to reveal a table backed by blood red curtains, its lone occupant enjoying an expensive cigar. His suit was crisp white, paired with a purple shirt. A midnight blue fedora hunkered on the table. He acknowledged Liam with shimmering black eyes and enigmatic smile as he wafted a smoky invitation to sit.
Liam grasped the only unoccupied chair. It felt remarkably real in his hand. It encompassed the very definition of a chair, weighty and solemn. He sat, crossed one leg over the other and waited.
A waiter appeared at his side, materializing from shadow and cigar smoke. He set a rum bottle and two cut crystal glasses on the table and dematerialized once more. Liam opened the bottle and splashed amber liquid into both glasses. On second thought, he made it a double.
Shimmering eyes missed nothing. The Baron shifted back into the shadows afforded by the plush curtains and nearby candelabra. “Dreaming again?”
“You would know.”
“As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t.” He unleashed a switchblade smile as the cigar described a vague pattern in the air, adding to the haze. “I hear things.”
Liam cleared his throat. “Anything about a great bloody demon setting fire to my city?” He froze in the abrupt focus of his host. “Our city,” he amended wisely.
“Could be one of the ladies getting involved.” The Baron tapped ash from his cigar. “They do that.”
“Which lady would that be?”
A languid shrug. “Hard to tell, time like this. If it were me looking for answers, I’d find myself a hoodoo.”
Liam poured another round. He didn’t care for rum, but it was a favorite of the Loa and consultations required gifts in return. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
“Not me. Him.”
Liam turned in time to see someone fighting his way through the smoke. He stumbled into their midst, twisting from the hazy thick folds as one would escape a maiden aunt’s determined pinch.
“Really, ladies.” He straightened the lapels of his brown leather blazer, out of date by at least fifty years. “That sort of behavior is completely uncalled for.”
Liam swallowed a groan. “You’re joking.”
“Ah. Right on schedule.” The Baron drained his glass and took a final long pull on his cigar. When he exhaled, the smoke formed extravagant curlicues in the already heavy air. It spread in a perfect circle around their little cove of comfortable dark and music. He snapped the fingers
of his free hand. The smoke stopped drifting, while ambient noise and activity came to a halt. Only the music continued unabated.
The lapel tugger approached, wary. “Baron Saturday?” His gaze swiveled from the Baron to the jazz quartet and back again.
“Best not to dwell,” Liam advised, not unkindly.
The Baron puffed heavily on his cigar, working up a good head of steam. He exhaled, smoke churning until it formed another, whispy chair that turned as solid and real as Liam’s.
The newcomer pulled it out, sitting as though it might erupt beneath him. “I’ve seen some strange things. This”—he nodded at the smoke swirling about them like a cat at the prospect of cream—“takes the gumbo.” He placed a gray pouch on the table between them, and waited.
The Baron claimed the pouch with a long fingered hand, brought it to his prominent nose and inhaled with deep satisfaction. “Irish tobacco. Haven’t had the pleasure in some time.” He secreted the gift inside his jacket, stubbing out his cigar. “Suppose you tell the old Baron what brings you to his fair city.”
“A woman.” Their unlikely visitor shot a furtive expression about, swallowing. “A dead woman, to be precise. And it’s going to piss the almighty hell out of a friend of mine when she finds out.”
“And you are?” Liam wanted to know, eyebrow raised.
“Donal. Demon hunter.”
Liam tried not to look skeptical. “You’re a demon hunter.”
Donal cocked his head, rocking his hand to and fro. “Not as such. But my friend’s gotta knack for it, and I help her with the reconnaissance. When she finds this particular demon, she’s going to rip it limb from limb.”
“It’s a big demon.”
“Yes, and it’s killed a member of her family.” Donal turned to the Baron. “She’ll need your permission to enter the city. She’ll be arriving by… Call it ‘unusual transport’.”
The Baron took the request as his due. “Your friend serves a different Loa.”
