by Holley Trent
“I got it. Get your wolf off it, Julia,” another man’s voice said.
Calvin couldn’t spare a look up. The creature was trying to stab his dagger-sharp claws into his underbelly, and he had to keep moving around.
“I don’t know how!” Julia said.
“Call him,” the man said.
“Uh…”
Leaves crumpled underfoot behind him, and Calvin stole a glance to the left to catch Julia in his periphery. “Cal- Calvin! You need to get away from it.”
Easier said than done.
He and the beast rolled, and Calvin used his powerful hind legs to push the creature back.
They separated, circling, snarling.
Something, no, someone, wrapped tentative arms around his belly and pulled him back.
“Calvin. It’s me,” Julia whispered. “Don’t bite me.”
The creature saw his chance, and dove, but before it could reach him, there was an explosion.
A gunshot echoed through the woods, and the bloodied creature fell onto the driveway, a meter from Calvin’s furry feet.
Now Calvin looked and saw a red-eyed man with his gun, and a second man with a sharp knife, leaning over the creature.
He snarled at both, and the husky voice behind him said, softly, “It’s okay. They’re my brothers.”
“You didn’t know he was a wolf?” the one with the shotgun asked the one with the knife.
“No, I can never tell,” the one with the knife said. “Not one of my powers.” He grabbed the creature by the feet and dragged it toward the road. “What I need to do to this thing, I shouldn’t do around the wolf,” he said.
The man with the gun knelt in front of Calvin and furrowed his forehead. “You understand me in that form?”
Calvin nodded. Of course he did. He was a werewolf, not an idiot.
“I should shoot you for making her run,” he said, “but I know you’ll heal it. Doubt you have silver in this thing.”
Calvin rolled his eyes, but according to his mother, that action was never particularly potent in his current form. Of course he’d heal it. He’d walked away from a fucking plane crash, and that was the moment in his life his wolf started demanding payback. He wanted his mate, and was going to make Calvin’s life miserable until the man heeled.
“Why’d you run, Julia?” the red-eyed man asked.
“I thought I might have been seeing things. He was over me, and I saw his face and a wolf head at the same time. I thought he was going to eat me.”
Calvin sighed and shifted back into his human shape.
Julia, still clinging to his waist, stood with him, and pressed against his backside.
Registering his nudity, she pulled her arms free of his waist and took a step back.
She blushed, but wore a little smile he didn’t need translation for.
All the same, he covered his junk with his hands. He could make her blush some more later and preferably not in front of the faux Winchester brothers. “I wasn’t going to eat you. I’m sorry. You scared me, and I guess my wolf wanted to help.”
“Is that why you hide out here? Because you’re a wolf?”
He shrugged. “I was born a wolf. I didn’t take a mate when I should have, so I got a little bit unpredictable for a while. I could accidentally shift if I get too agitated. Can’t have that happening in public, so I figured it was safest if I kept to myself. Look, I couldn’t hurt you, Julia. I promise. I’d just as soon gnaw my own leg off. My wolf wants you. I want you. I’m sorry for being distant, but…”
Well, he’d thought she was crazy.
He needed her to believe him. Every cell in his body screamed it out to him. He would never find another woman who’d be so good for him. Who could be his buffer to the world. She’d already imprinted on him, probably from that first look at his security footage.
“I’m a succubus,” she said, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
He wanted to pull her close, and hug her—kiss her face until the tears stopped, but he suspected the dude with his gun wouldn’t like being in the audience of that.
“Yeah, you told me that. Makes me wonder what else is out there in the world. Seems like we’re all keeping secrets instead of helping each other.”
“She can’t hurt you as long as she doesn’t get marked,” Gun-dude said.
“What does that mean? Marked?”
“The demon part of her is latent because she hasn’t been marked. She needs to stay away from our father. That’s why this place is important. We’ve got the property warded all the way around the woods now, so you shouldn’t have to worry about demon scouts flitting around anymore and drawing our father here. We’ve been working on this on and off for a month, but kept getting called away.”
Their father. So, this guy with the funny accent, curly hair and, a five o’clock shadow, and a Grateful dead t-shirt was demon spawn, too.
“Our father has a distinct aversion to werewolves, so as long as she’s near you, he won’t come close. You’ll actually be able to go out in the world with Monsieur Furry. Isn’t that great, Julia?” The other man had returned, wiping his bloody hands on what looked to be a very expensive pair of blue jeans. “He says werewolves smell like the seventh level of Dante’s Hell.”
Calvin huffed with indignation. “I smell amazing.”
Julia grunted her agreement.
“So, who the hell are you?” Calvin asked the newcomer.
The man blinked. “I’m Cupid.”
Apparently, Cupid was six-and-a-half feet tall, wore a ponytail, and had a fondness for cashmere sweaters.
Julia started up the driveway. She wiped exploded creature bits from her cheeks and looked back at them all. “Calvin has coffee and frozen food,” she said to her brothers. “More importantly, running water. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get the lizard goop off.”
They followed.
Calvin watched them walk a few paces, and then threw up his hands and tracked after them.
“I told my mama I’d die before I mated a wolf bitch,” he mused to himself, “but I never said anything about a cult-reared succubus.”
• • •
Julia twirled the end of her long braid and waited while Calvin posed for yet another picture.
He rejoined her side and looped his arm around her waist.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know you hate it.”
“I think I’m becoming numb to it now. I’m still flummoxed, though, by how they all ignore you as if you weren’t standing there.”
She shrugged. “Claude said it was an angel thing. Goes hand-in-hand with the disappearing act. Takes some time to master, but so far so good.”
The last thing she needed was to have her picture printed in every major gossip rag in the country. Someone would probably try to abduct her within a week. Not that Calvin would let her go without a fight. Wolves were possessive that way, and Julia didn’t mind so much because his possession came with tickles and laughter and coffee, although his mother was a champion nag.
Julia and Calvin paused in front of a shop window, and she admired the mannequin’s plaid shirt.
“You like it?” he asked.
“I do. I still can’t tell what’s stylish and what’s not, and my brothers would have preferred me to keep the cult wear.”
“I would have, too.”
She elbowed him in the chest, and he wheezed as he exhaled.
He coughed and rubbed his sternum. “What’d you expect me to say?”
“No one even looks at me.”
“Everyone looks at you, apart from the ones shoving cameras in my face. You just don’t notice it because you’re not used to working crowds. For me, it’s like getting back on a bicycle after a lot of years. I’m okay at it, but it’s uncomfortable having been out of the spotlight for so long.
“Maybe. I love the crowds. Makes me feel like I’m out in the world. Involved.”
“I know. And I’ll tolerate them for you.” He checked his watch.
“Hey. We’ll come back for the shirt. You’re going to be late for your class.”
She looked down at her watch and cringed. Pulling him by the hand, she said, “Are you going to sit in the back and wait for me?”
“Nope. Told ya. Trying to get better about the creeper wolf thing. I’ll go hang out at the baseball diamond and heckle the kids. Gotta make some calls anyway. The team’s travel agent messed up my itinerary again.”
“I miss you when you travel.”
He winked. “Yeah, being away makes me a sad puppy, too. Wolves don’t like to stray so far from their mates. Being apart is distracting. Makes it hard to focus. It’s a wonder I’ve managed to manage to strike anyone out.”
“Of course you have and you’ll continue to do so. You’re Calvin F. Wolff.”
He chuckled. “You’re my number one fan. You know the F doesn’t stand for Frank, right?”
She stumbled, but he held her up and laughed again.
“That fact has recently come to my attention.” In fact, it had dawned on her while they engaged in some scandalizing acts behind closed doors. Apparently, Calvin had developed a long hair fetish in the past four months. She made his wolf wild with teases about cutting it.
“Your naïveté is so damned cute, but it makes me and the dingbat wolf worry about you, honey. I’m glad to be out guiding you through the world. I never thought I’d have a mate, and figured I’d just go feral.”
She nodded as they approached her class’s building. “We really are a pair, aren’t we? Dingbat wolf and ditzy succubus?”
He swatted her bottom as she started up the stairs. “I guess The Fates have a sense of humor.”
“I have it on good authority that Cupid would agree.”
About the Author
Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural, coastal North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range with her family. She writes sassy contemporary and quirky paranormal romances set in her home state.
She’s hard at work writing other stories set in the Sons of Gulielmus world, including one for Cupid himself—Charles. Read all about John’s clash with the demon daddy Gulielmus in A Demon in Waiting.
See Holley’s complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website, http://www.holleytrent.com. When she’s not on deadline, she boldly tweets under the handle @holleytrent.
A Demon in Love
Sons of Gulielmus, Book 2
Holley Trent
Avon, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2014 by Holley Trent.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.
www.crimsonromance.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-8150-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8150-2
eISBN 10: 1-4405-8151-7
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8151-9
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © iStockphoto.com/Nikada
I forgot to include a dedication in my last book, and I joked on Facebook that it was okay because I was going to dedicate it to myself anyway.
I’m actually not ballsy enough to do that, so I’ll dedicate it to my ever-supportive husband instead. Mwah!
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
With one more little grind of Charles Edison’s boot heel, the demon scout’s windpipe would be rendered as functional as a holey vacuum cleaner bag.
The scaly beast writhed under his press, growling and hissing through its short, stubby snout. It whipped its heavy, club-shaped tail toward Charles’s jean-clad legs, though the movement was ineffectual. Charles was too strong, and the beast was too tired. Charles had been running the big cat-lizard hybrid in circles all evening, foiling its mission. He didn’t think the scout was after him, but since it had encountered him, it would be sure to pass along a message to the next scout that it’d saw Charles.
Charles didn’t want that.
That scaly little fucker, which had the intelligence of a lesser reptile and the size of a large cat, was bred for one thing only: tracking people. Supernatural people like Charles, mostly. The scouts were single-minded and incapable of independent thought. They just patrolled their territories and passed on information to the next scout at the boundaries. Unmolested, they weren’t dangerous. Most humans weren’t even aware of them because the beasts existed halfway between worlds—man’s, and a realm where only the likes of angels and demons trod.
Left up to its devices, that beast would relay to the father Charles had been tediously ignoring for weeks that Charles was in Montana. He wasn’t supposed to be in Montana. He was supposed to be in his assigned zone down in Arizona and New Mexico, literally fucking the life out of women. He was an incubus—a sex demon. Well, sort of. Like Merlin the wizard had purportedly been, he was a cambion. Half demon. He didn’t have Merlin’s sort of magic, though. He couldn’t conjure spells, like his half-brother Claude, or vanish into thin air, like his half-brother John.
He could seduce women with little effort, drink their resolve as if it were fine wine, leaving them joyless, and tag their souls for Hell. They’d live what was left of their lives as shells of their former selves, and that was allowed because to the people in power, it was all a big game.
But Charles didn’t care anymore. They could play their game, and he refused to be a pawn in it anymore. After a century on the job, he’d quit.
Pop just refused to accept his resignation.
Charles clucked his tongue and freed his knife from the sheath nestled at the small of his back. “Such a fucking waste,” he said, studying the beast’s mottled, iridescent blue-and-dark-purple flesh. “Beautiful hide. You could have been made into a gorgeous pair of shoes.”
It kicked its rear legs up into the air, arching its spine off the asphalt and writhing ever more under Charles’s boot.
“Or maybe a pair of gloves and a belt.”
His phone vibrated in his back pocket as he mercifully dispatched the scout with a quick swipe of his knife. Though it was dead, it was still dangerous. When scouts died, others would go looking to find out why their psychic circuit had been broken. For a while, the information that scout carried would remain in a sort of stasis, ripe for the picking.
Charles would need to wipe the slate—leave no information there for the taking—so it’d be just like he’d never been spotted. Nor the pretty lady he’d been trailing for a month.
Squatting down, he looked across the truck stop’s dark parking lot and fixed his gaze on his woman. She may not have known she was his, but she was. That was why he was able to find her.
; He pulled the phone out of his back pocket and hit the Accept button with his thumb.
“Hey, Number One,” he greeted Claude. Half-brother, and half-demon, just like him. They shared a demonic sire named Gulielmus, whom Charles called “Pop,” though not out of any sense of affection whatsoever. It was just easier to say than “Supernatural Sperm Donor.” The Number One moniker was a holdover from the past, when paranoia had prevented them from using each other’s names on phone lines that could be tapped or in letters that could be intercepted. Claude was number one because he was older by a hundred years. Charles was, by default, Number Two. Last year, they’d added a Three: John. John was practically a baby, at only thirty.
“Careful out tonight, boy. Scouts are especially active,” Claude said in his usual relaxed lilt. He tried so hard to sanitize his Creole accent, but it was a part of him the same way his magic was. When he was comfortable with no one around to judge him for his eccentric speech patterns, he let it out.
Charles dragged the scout by the tail to the Dumpster he’d previously taken as a lookout point and grunted. “No shit? I just took one of the ugly things out of its misery.”
“Hope that weren’t no one’s pet.”
“No collar, no tag. Just a typical grid runner scout.” Charles clamped the phone between his right ear and shoulder, and kept one eye on the woman investigating her truck rig’s blown-out tire, and the other on the beast he was decapitating. After so many years, it was an easy job, but no less messy. He’d be bathing in a truck stop sink before the night was over.
“Who are they looking for?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew. He just hoped they weren’t so efficient to be on her trail already.
“From what I’ve been able to glean from the grapevine, some demon’s daughter hasn’t checked in in a month, and that’s unlike her.”
“Really?” Charles ceased sawing for a moment. Usually, he had no luck except for bad luck. Perhaps his fortunes were changing if he and the scout weren’t both on the trail of the same pretty lady.
