by Holley Trent
She pinched herself. Nope. That hurt like a bitch.
“So, see you at work tomorrow?”
“Are you kidding me? Tell me you’re frickin’ kidding me.”
Mark cringed. “No. Guy’s gotta earn a living, and I really am a copywriter most of the time. Following you around isn’t exactly profitable.”
“Apparently being me isn’t particularly profitable, either.”
“Hey, things’ll shake out. I’m sorry you had to find out about your parents this way, but I was a concession of that deal. Me and a few other angels. You were just a toddler at the time, and they assigned you a team that would get deployed at certain points of your life. Betty, your L.A. angel, worries about you, by the way.”
“Betty.” Her old landlord. She grinned. How many times had she told Betty she was an angel for looking in on her?
“Anyway, I didn’t get deployed until you were in actual harm. I think I got buzzed sometime after you met John. That’s when I felt like your soul was in peril.”
Ariel’s cheeks burned. She was pretty sure she knew what they were doing when her soul was crying out for salvation. And she was pretty sure Mark knew what that was, too.
“Anyhow, your parents’ lot in life is that if they slow down, something might catch up to them. And I’m sorry your grandmother never found what foster home they put your little sister in after she was born. Maybe it’s best that way.”
“Maybe so.”
“Hey, good news is she should be pretty much invisible to demon sorts until her next birthday. Hope you can find her by then, because that’s when her shield wears off. She doesn’t have a team. We hoped by now she wouldn’t need one.” He waved, and was gone.
John stepped outside at that moment bearing two ceramic coffee mugs and wearing a wary smile — this one quite different from the one Gulielmus had been wearing earlier. Gulielmus didn’t have an apologetic bone in his body.
She slumped onto the porch swing, sighing as she accepted one of the cups.
John sat beside her, but put a careful gap between them on the bench. They let the swing sway a while without saying anything, both looking down into their coffee cups.
Then, they spoke over each other. He said, “Ariel, I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
She said, “So, you were only after my soul all this time?”
They went quiet again. She wanted an answer to that question, though. So she looked at him, hoping the intensity of her glare burned holes right through that blond head of his.
“I’ve never been a good liar, sweetpea, so I’ll be honest. I lured you at that gas station back in the desert, and when I got in your car I thought it’d just be a quick thing. I thought it’d be easy, you know? But, then you turned out to be interesting.”
She scoffed. “Yeah, that’s exactly what every girl wants to hear. That she’s interesting. A girl will fall in love with you over words like that.”
“No need to be sarcastic, Ariel. Look at it from my perspective. I had a sheltered upbringing. I was a throwaway. I never met a woman like you before. Naturally, I was intrigued. But then it seemed like you were doing more magic on me than I was on you.”
Now he looked at her and his expression really was contrite.
Damn him.
“So how much of it was your cambion appeal and how much was just John?”
“I swear to you, Ariel. The only time I enthralled you was at that gas station in Arizona, and I can’t say I regret it now. We wouldn’t be here, otherwise.”
“And where exactly is here?” she whispered. “This isn’t how normal people come together. Sane, normal women don’t pick up hitchhikers who later turn out to be demon spawn. Normal women don’t have angel protectors. Normal twenty-six-year-old women don’t have grandmothers who look thirty.”
He lifted his shoulders just slightly and rubbed his eyes, which had been white earlier, but now had a pop of color. A pale outline, really, but more than what was there before. “I’m new at this, too. I have no idea what I am. Not human. Not angel. Not demon. I don’t know what unusual things will happen to me or what I’m capable of.”
“You mean whether or not you’ll die if I hit you with my car.”
He smiled, but it was a small one. “You wouldn’t do that.”
He was right. She wouldn’t. Because regardless of everything, she loved the jerk, and she realized none of this mess was his fault. He was riding the rapids without a paddle to steer, too.
She sighed and leaned over to set her coffee cup on the porch floor, then laid her head on John’s lap.
“This is crazy.”
His fingers tickled her scalp as he smoothed her hair. “Yeah. I wonder what our kids’ll be like.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“I’m broke. Can’t buy you a ring.”
“I haven’t even found an apartment yet.”
Pop!
Agatha appeared on the porch, smoothing her slacks and looking around. “No wonder it took Mark so long to track you. This place is warded like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s like trying to get to a place that doesn’t exist on a map.”
Ariel raised a brow at her.
She sighed. “Sorry, honey. Look, I’m here to talk to John.”
John’s forehead furrowed. “Why me?”
“’Cause you’re a rogue now. Like me. There’s lots of us. We don’t get involved. We just … ” She made a waffling gesture with her hand. “ … exist.”
“I can’t not get involved if people I care about are in trouble.”
“And no one’s expecting you to sit idle if that’s the case. Just be careful. Supernatural types hold grudges. They have long memories.”
Momma appeared at the door. “That’s for damn sure.”
Agatha stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket and chewed her lip a moment. “I guess what I mean to say, John, is if you need someone to answer questions for you, I’ll be around. I can do that much.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But, what are you, exactly?”
Her cheek twitched.
Normally, Ariel wouldn’t have pressed, but she felt like if there were any time she needed information, that was one of them. “Please, Agatha.”
Agatha stared up at the porch ceiling and sighed. “There are a lot of things that exist that fall outside the definitions of Western religion. I’m one of them. Maybe one day I’ll explain. Over drinks or something.”
“I’d like that,” John said.
Ariel pinched his thigh.
“Sorry. We’d like that.”
Agatha nodded, then vanished.
Pop! She was back again.
“Oh, forgot to tell you, Ariel. If you want to work at home for the next couple of weeks, I won’t judge you for it. You’ve probably guessed by now some of our clients aren’t human. News of this kerfuffle will probably get out fast and I don’t want people thinking I’ve got trouble on my payroll. I’d like to keep the drama down to a minimum so our board of directors doesn’t chew me out. They’re not in the loop.”
“Gotcha.”
And she was gone.
They waited for her to pop back in with “One more thing” but when that didn’t happen, Momma said, “Well, now that you know it all, Ariel, we can put our heads together and find your sister. I want both my babies.”
John gave Ariel a pat, urging her to sit up. He stood and loped to the door. “I’ll call Claude. See what he can shake out of his network. Maybe he has a crystal ball or something.”
Ariel followed. Momma looped her arm around her waist as they approached the threshold.
“I like him,” Ariel mused. “I think I’ll keep him.”
“Good. I think you should, too. I need someone to fix my water hea
ter.”
Ariel groaned.
“I hope Social Security doesn’t catch wind of this. They might want me to go back to work.”
Chapter Nineteen
Gulielmus’s nostrils flared as he approached the dark, dank alleyway. Of all the places a cambion would tread, why that one? He could have at least rented a room for the night. But maybe he couldn’t make it that far.
Gulielmus sighed and knelt down beside the slumping form next to the dumpster. He nudged his shoulder, and when the drunk didn’t budge, he grabbed hold of his son’s hair and pulled him to standing.
Now his eyes opened. “Wha da fug?” Charles mumbled, his eyes barely focusing on Gulielmus.
Gulielmus let go of him and turned his face away. The man’s breath could probably peel wallpaper. It was a wonder he was as productive he was.
No, there’s no wonder. He’s powerful. What a fucking waste.
Taking a step back, Gulielmus wiped his hands on his pants. “Let’s find you a room. Get you cleaned up.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got work to do. Got to pick up John’s slack.”
That seemed to sober him up real good. Charles’s blue eyes went wide and his jaw drooped.
“What do you mean, pick up his slack? He’d barely started. There is no slack.”
“Don’t you understand? He made a fool of me. What do you think my boss feels about that, huh? Like I can’t get my own kids in line?”
Charles’s expression was quite telling, so Gulielmus stabbed a finger at his chest to stave off whatever it was he was going to say. “Don’t even.”
Charles took a deep breath then let it out slowly. “You have other kids. Some you haven’t even brought online yet.”
“But they’re not like you and Claude. They don’t have juice of their own — only what they got from me. You’ve got to have something special to shine as an incubus.”
Charles looked doubtful. Gulielmus wrapped an arm around his shoulders and guided him toward the street.
“What sets you apart from John is that you’re ruthless. You’re not sentimental. You get the job done.”
Charles didn’t respond. He just walked, eyes trained straight ahead.
“Maybe it’s time you started building up a little workforce of your own. Pick a few women. Breeding stock, you know? Make sure they’re not too bright. That’ll bite you in the ass.”
Charles grunted as they crossed the street to the pay-by-hour motel.
“Let’s get you cleaned up. I’ve got three hours carved out just for you. We’ll talk about it.”
About the Author
Holley Trent grew up in rural eastern North Carolina. She now lives in the not-so-wild West on the Colorado Front Range, but still sounds like a Southerner.
When she’s not writing or reading romance novels, she’s chasing kids, yelling at incontinent cats, or trying to match mated pairs of her husband’s multitude of gray socks. She’s never given a ride to a hitchhiker, but when she was young and adventurous, she did pick up a flirty guy in a parking lot. (He was harmless.)
Holley’s an active member of RWA’s Colorado Romance Writers and the CIM special interest chapter. She’s hard at work on stories for Charles and Claude.
See her complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website, http://www.holleytrent.com/blog. Catch her tweeting random bon mots under the handle @holleytrent.
Contents
A Demoness Matched
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
About the Author
A Demoness Matched
Holley Trent
Chapter One
“What’s wrong? Don’t I look okay?”
Julia Tate met both of her half-brothers’ concerned gazes in turn, and patted down her hair. It felt as it should have—one long plait forming a coronet around her head, and a second one knotted into a bun at her neck. The same style she’d had since she was twelve and was told by one of her stepfather’s many wives that Julia was now a grown woman. Grown women kept their hair off their necks lest they scandalize someone’s husband.
Julia smoothed her hands over her simple white blouse and down into the pockets of her ground-skimming prairie skirt. They were good clothes. Clean. What was so wrong with them that made them deserving of her brothers’ derision? Why, she’d seen a similar skirt in one of those glossy catalogues Claude had stuffed into his Jeep’s door pocket, and hers had only cost eight dollars to make.
She didn’t understand why Claude had dog-eared those pages with the women’s underwear, though. It wasn’t like he had a girlfriend to shop for, or…
Ugh. She narrowed her eyes at her two-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old half-demon brother.
Claude shifted his weight onto the handle of his spade and blew out a breath. “Well…”
“Doesn’t matter how you look,” Charles said. He bumped his half-brother’s shoulder with his elbow before closing the back door of the Jeep. Slinging the strap of Julia’s bag over his shoulder, he jerked a thumb toward Claude. “Really doesn’t matter, so ignore him.”
Claude shrugged, and then pushed his spade into the hard clay ground. He and Charles had twelve mojo bags to bury—just three for each side of the ten-acre parcel they’d parked just down the road from. Technically, they’d have to trespass to install them, but they were incubi. Compared to some of their past transgressions, the sin would be a minor one. And being incubi, they knew exactly what sorts of monsters roamed the Earth … some of which were on the hunt for Julia.
“Look, he’s going to love you because he can’t help it, and you him,” Charles said.
Julia pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it. Coming from anyone else, those words weight have been condescending and placating. Charles, however, was speaking the truth, as he knew it. Right after he’d snuck her out of the compound, he’d frozen up and was quiet for a long while as he stared out at nothing. When Claude had nudged him, Charles said, “She’s got a match, and he’s on some prime real estate. The Fates must like you, Julia. I’m never wrong.” Charles had told her he couldn’t even remember where he’d encountered the man, but for him, making matches was like playing a mental game of the card game Concentration. And he knew this stranger tucked back in a woods-shrouded Appalachian cabin would love Julia, because Charles was the closest thing to Cupid that a modern man could be. He descended from the erotes on his mother's side: Greek love gods.
On his father’s side … well, he shared the same dark smudge in his family tree as Julia and Claude. Their father Gulielmus had once been an angel, but he’d joined The Fall because he would have preferred to worship women—at least certain parts of them—rather than the big guy upstairs. That hadn’t changed in tens of thousands of years. Now a powerful incubus and a high-ranking general in Team Hell’s army, Gulielmus outsourced all of his dirty work to his legion of children: cambions—half demon, half … well, whatever the heck they were. Gulielmus liked his ladies fancy: witches, like Claude’s maman; demigoddesses like Charles’s mother; and fae, if he could catch them. Julia’s simple mother was nothing compared to all that. Darla Tate was approximately one-drop angel, which made her just supernatural enough to set off Gulielmus’s radar. She’d already been “married” to a polygamist cult follower for several years when Gulielmus found her and made her his supernatural broodmare. Julia was child number two of their ongoing couplings, not that her human stepfather knew. He assumed all of Darla’s blond-haired, blue-eyed kids were his.
Well. They weren’t.
Darla abided by it because as long as she didn’t refuse Gulielmus, he wouldn’t drain her and taint her soul.
Julia moved her hands from her pockets and pressed them over her unsettled stomach. “Explain to me what’s supposed to happen and what t
his man has to do with it.”
They’d already explained it three times since they spirited her away from the cult compound. She just didn’t feel any better for it. Julia was in a damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn’t type of situation. She’d been terrified to run, because she hadn’t known where to go. Who to ask for help.
But if she’d stayed, she’d have to marry that geriatric windbag who’d earned her by doing some good deed or probably making a large donation to the “foundation.” And Gulielmus would have come to fetch her soon. Her full brother John had had been the last sex demon trainee, but he’d thumbed his nose at Gulielmus. With Claude’s help, he’d purged himself of everything that made him demonic. He couldn’t risk returning to the compound Gulielmus so often visited, but John had gotten a message to Julia. He’d said that she was next. It was her turn. Gulielmus would have marked her and brought her succubus powers online so she could do what she was conceived to do.
Serve Hell.
She’d wanted to escape the compound, but not to do that. So, she’d written to John asking him to find her help, and he’d sent the big brothers who were in the midst of a demonic defection of their own. They were already in hot water with Gulielmus, and if the demon found out they were helping yet another one of his children slip away, there would be Hell to pay—literally. Apparently, Gulielmus got performance reviews, and if his spawn embarrassed him, he’d get reamed out by his boss.
Charles must have noticed her apprehension, because he pressed a hand onto her shaking shoulder and squeezed. “It’s all right, Julia. This isn’t just a coincidence. What’s happening now is because The Fates are scrambling to fix things for you, if you’ll let them.” He turned her around and pointed toward the driveway entrance. “This property is in a weird void, okay?”
“It’s the elevation and latitude,” Claude said.
“What he said. It’ll be damn near impossible for Pop to find you if you’re near the cabin.”
