Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series

by Holley Trent

  “Yes. They figure something must have happened to her.”

  “Or someone.” Charles tossed the scout’s headless form into the Dumpster and buried it beneath a pile of full trash bags. If a human being were to see it, it’d appear to be the closest thing that made sense in their mind. An alligator in the middle of Montana?

  Sure.

  Maybe there’d be a stir in the local news for a while, but just like everything else, folks would move on to the next big scandal and forget all about the unusual discovery.

  “Also, I suspect they’ve been put on the alert for Marion. They know she’s gonna turn up soon, and the moment she hits the radar, she’s gonna have an entire legion of demons on her backside.”

  Charles plucked an empty grocery bag out of the Dumpster and dropped the scout’s head into it. He knotted the handles together and tucked the bag under his arm. Right now, she didn’t need to worry about a legion of demons; just one. Him.

  “Well, I assure you I’ll find her before they do,” Charles said.

  Unlike them, he didn’t want Marion as a prize. He wanted her as a wife, and he’d have her, too. She was his mate, after all, but he was the only one who knew beyond the Fates who’d pulled the strings. He wanted to keep it that way for the moment. This was a secret he wouldn’t even tell his trusted brother, because it all seemed too improbable. Who’d believe him?

  Last year, on John’s first day on the incubus job, he’d been hitchhiking and got picked up by the woman who was now his fiancée. Ariel was his first in more ways than one, and he’d gone rogue for her. He’d fight for her. She loved him in spite of what he’d been conceived to be, and he could never hurt her. He made sure of it, with Claude’s help. It was as if the demon part of him had never existed. He’d refused to let it take root.

  Ariel’s grandmother, Clarissa, took him in as if he were family. Somehow, Clarissa had known John was more than what he seemed and which side he was meant to be on. She’d lost her only sister to a wrathful incubus more than twenty-five years ago, and her daughter Lottie had taken up the fight. Lottie and her husband Sylvester killed that demon, and they were still on the run because of it. If located, they’d be killed to avenge the demon. Maybe that was fair, but for their children to have targets, too?

  Not so much.

  Ariel, who at age two had been left with Clarissa, had been assigned an angel who came to her aid at the time of Pop’s attack. She was more or less safe now under his guardianship, but Marion hadn’t even been born when the trouble started. She didn’t have an angel. The best the angels could do for her was make her disappear for a while, and even that was overstepping boundaries. The two sides had a tentative truce that said each wouldn’t interfere with the other when fair play was involved. Sometimes they ignored their own rules.

  For almost twenty-five years, Marion had disappeared into the foster care system, and no demon or angel could identify her because of that in utero blessing. Her own family couldn’t find her, and had sent John, Claude, and Charles out on a last-ditch effort to investigate her whereabouts. The moment she turned twenty-five, she’d pop up on the psychic radar like everyone else, and it wouldn’t take long for her to be captured. If the demons couldn’t have Lottie and Sylvester, Marion would do.

  But where John and Claude had failed, Charles hadn’t. There was his girl. He’d found her not because he was an incubus, but because of what he’d inherited from his mother, the demigoddess. Her domain was requited love. She made matches, just like Charles could, and part of his gift was being able to locate a person’s partner. He’d never thought he’d have one for himself, though. Not after all the sins he’d committed. But a month ago, Marion appeared in his mind, clear as day. He knew where she was, more or less, but the problem was that she didn’t stay there. She was a long-haul trucker.

  “I have to go bury this scout’s head,” Charles said, already scrambling over the fence that marked off the back of the truck stop’s boundary. He trudged through the snow, eyeing the snowy field for direction. Any place would do, but he didn’t want anyone stumbling across it in the two days it would take for all the psychic remnants to disperse. It’d be like a battery slowly losing its power.

  “Call if you hear anything about Marion,” Claude said.

  “Of course.” Charles ended the call and stuffed the phone back into his jeans.

  It wasn’t quite a lie. He’d have to call, eventually, but he’d do it on his own time.

  As long as Marion’s shield was up, he’d be just like any other man to her. He couldn’t stun her with incubus seduction, and more importantly, his touch couldn’t hurt her.

  For a couple of days, he could actually court her and make her fall for him and not his magic. For him, knowing that the Fates had made them a match wasn’t enough. He wanted to know she’d want him even without it, because if he was going to love her, he wanted to know that her reciprocity was because she knew and understood him, and not because the cosmos said so.

  He’d waited a long time for her, and he was going to do this right. They both deserved it.

  • • •

  Charles rubbed his hands dry on a rough paper towel and tossed the trash into the bin. He made his way through the tired restaurant and put his shoulder to the door, glad to see Marion remained near her rig.

  He’d wanted tonight to be it—no more chasing her, and waiting until she was in just the right place to approach her. He’d want her to feel safe, unthreatened, and that was the only reason he hadn’t engaged her before now.

  Okay, that, and maybe he was a little afraid she’d reject him. He was out of practice with the art of simple flirtation. In his trade, he hadn’t needed it.

  She had an identical bearing to and the same sensual, though self-conscious, walk as her older sister. He wondered if that was where their similarities stopped. Ariel was so kind and accommodating, and although they got along well and she was perfectly suited to John, a woman like that would get sick of Charles in short order. He was too broody, too cynical.

  He eased back into the shadows at the side of the restaurant and watched her kicking the gravel near yet another deflated tire, fists clenched at her sides in rage.

  He couldn’t blame her. She’d been going through tires at quite a clip in the past month. They were probably all due to be changed, given the aggressive driving schedule she kept.

  When she’d arrived at the station, she hadn’t seemed to have noticed the first flat. She’d parked, nimbly hopped from her rig like some sort of long-haul trucking sprite, and hiked across the icy lot into the restaurant. She’d picked a table next to the window, much to Charles’s viewing pleasure, and shrugged off her puffy coat to reveal a delicate frame and a plaid flannel shirt buttoned all the way up to her clavicle.

  She’d sat there for an hour, nursing the only hot meal she’d had all day: a chili cheeseburger and fries drizzled with mayo, not ketchup.

  He’d watched her with a quiet curiosity from his shadowy station. How odd his fated match was.

  For most of his many years, he’d successfully suppressed the part of him that impelled him to play matchmaker. He knew instantly upon meeting a person if they had a love match, and knew precisely where to direct that person to find him or her. It was a gift he couldn’t turn off, but he could quiet it. He’d done that with alcohol for much of the last century, but recently he’d had to sober up.

  Pop had made him dry out. He wanted to groom Charles to become one of Hell’s lieutenants, but the funny thing about sobriety was that it made real life pop in painful clarity. Human beings weren’t playthings. Hadn’t God made them in his own image, just like the angels? Charles wanted to live in the world with them again, like he had as a boy, not lord over them.

  Marion lifted her mesh trucker hat, rousing him from his reverie, and raked her short brown hair back from her eyes.

  He shifted for a better view. He’d yet to see her head-on in the light. She’d always had her head down or he’d been in a
bad position. In his vision, he’d seen her time and time again, but visions weren’t real. He wanted confirmation that she really was that beautiful.

  He exhaled as she turned her face toward the shadow where he waited.

  Even with the boyish crop and no makeup, she was stunningly pretty. She had the same brown eyes as her sister, though slightly upturned in comparison, and the same pixie nose. There was no mistaking their relation.

  “Fuck,” came her surprisingly husky voice. She propped her fists onto her hips and paced. “Flat tire in the goddamned frozen hinterlands. Just my luck.”

  He clamped his teeth to suppress the chuckle bubbling up from his gut. Oh, yes. She was descended from Clarissa, all right. With a mouth like that, Marion would fit right in with the Morton bunch.

  She stopped pacing and looked at the big tire again.

  Did she need help? He straightened his spine and poised to go to her, but she shrugged, patted her puffy coat’s many pockets until she found her what she was looking for. She pulled something from an inside pocket, and used her teeth to free her right hand of its glove.

  “Ah. Her phone.” He eased into the shadows again. She’d been taking care of herself a long time and could certainly cope just fine without him. At least for the moment.

  While she spoke quietly into her cell, he patted his pocket for his own phone. He felt a surge of relief that he’d had the foresight to put the thing on vibrate. It wouldn’t do for Frank Sinatra’s dulcet voice in Charles’s ringtone to blow his cover.

  “Who this time?” he muttered.

  Pop flashed on the screen along with the older demon’s smiling countenance.

  “Resorting to human means of communication,” Charles said with a chuckle. “I should have expected it.” Normally, Pop communicated with his children telepathically, but unlike some of his half-siblings, Charles was a strong enough psychic to block him out. He didn’t used to bother. When Pop said, “Jump,” Charles would do it on one foot with one hand raised in salute.

  “Bet he regrets sobering me up.” He tapped Send to Voice Mail and nudged the phone into his pocket once more.

  There was no way Pop could have predicted some of his children would turn on him. They usually succumbed to the power, got lost in it.

  John had been lucky. His incubus powers hadn’t been online long enough for the dark seed to take root and he’d been successfully exorcized of them, thanks to Claude. John got all the immortal perks without the heavy conscience. Neither Claude nor Charles could hope for such a thing, not at their ages. The demon halves of them had settled in comfortably, and were something they’d have to live with until they died—whenever that was.

  “It’s the same wheel I keep putting fresh tires on. What the hell is wrong with it?” Marion shouted into her phone. She shouldn’t have been so damned cute kicking that big tire, but she was. “Do they ever blow out during the daytime? Fuck, no. Always in the goddamned dark in the motherfucking snow and ice. When is your guy going to be here to fix it? Do me a favor and tell him in advance not to feel obligated to make small talk. Can you believe that people find little old me unpleasant?”

  He clasped his hand over his mouth and nose and stifled the laugh. God, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her. She’d have some spirit. She wouldn’t just lie there, waiting to be taken. No, she’d give back as good as she got.

  Right now, with her shielded the way she was, he could touch her. Kiss her, as he’d done to no human woman in so long that he couldn’t even remember. He could hold her. Make love to her while without doing her any lasting harm—at least, not more than a couple of days. Then she’d be like all the rest. Weak. Vulnerable. Powerless against him. She’d go glassy-eyed and incoherent in his presence. Whatever common sense she’d had would suddenly evaporate. The little voice in her head that usually warned her away from dangerous things would go quiet, because he overpowered instinct.

  He wanted her before she didn’t have a say in the matter. He wanted to give her the chance to say no, though he hoped she wouldn’t.

  One last interruption to endure, courtesy of Marion’s tire, and she was as good as his. Even if he could only touch her for a day or two, she’d be worth his long wait.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marion had no idea why she’d picked up that extra load. She’d had the opportunity to take a couple of extra days off, but the trucking company asked her if she’d wanted the money, and she’d said yes without even thinking.

  Dumb. What was she going to do with the money? Yeah, she could dump it into the fund she’d started four years ago when she’d first starting driving trucks—the one she’d meant to put down on her first home. She’d been feeding the fund bi-weekly for nearly six years, and it was fat as a tick. She had no expenses, really, beyond food and toiletries. For chrissakes, she lived in her truck cab. That meant no rent, and no utilities beyond her cell phone, and she paid that bill a few months in advance. The only cash she kept on hand were the quarters she used to wash her small wardrobe, and she showered in those dank truck stop facilities. She carried shower gel, a bath pouf, shampoo, shaving cream, a sparkly pink razor, and a Smith & Wesson knife in her shower caddy, and pretended that was a normal thing.

  Having a house to make her landing pad was a damned appealing idea for a girl like her. She was an orphan who’d come up through the foster care system. Moving from one family to the next every six months or so, she’d acquired no real grasp on stability, but still she yearned for it. Not just the house, but all the trappings of it—including the family to go with it.

  She figured if only she could find her landing pad, everything else would fall beautifully into place. House, first. Then she’d dip a toe into the dating pool and try to rustle up a man who wouldn’t try so hard to tamp down her spirit of exploration. Later, if all went well, she’d have a kid or two.

  As she burned up the roads, traveling long stretches of desolate highway, she stoked that excitement to fervor levels—but once she’d delivered her loads and settled in for a night, she froze up. All that enthusiasm waned away as if being siphoned off by some unseen force. It was like there was some magic wall that pushed up out of the earth and barred her access every time she wanted to get serious about the idea.

  Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Maybe she was meant to wander.

  She sighed and watched the tire repairman’s taillights disappear as he hauled ass to his next call.

  Goddamned tire. Third flat in three days.

  She bent to pick up the receipt she’d dropped, and then yelped at the sight of the stranger six feet from her. She blew her fright away on an exhale and put her hand to her heart.

  Why did they always frighten her? By now, she should have been used to strange men approaching her. Sometimes they heckled her—the “little girl” truck driver. Occasionally, they tried to sell her things. Dick and weed, mostly. One she didn’t partake in. The other she sure as shit wasn’t going to pay for, even if she were that kind of desperate.

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head, hoping he’d catch the drift. Not that they ever did. Bozos.

  “Cold night, isn’t it?” he asked. His voice was deep and cultured in the way Shakespearean actors’ voices were. Trained. Odd, seeing as how the only culture this guy had likely rubbed off from the newspapers he slept on. She cocked her head to the side and really studied him. Maybe he was experiencing some sort of delusion and believed he was on the set of a BBC miniseries or something. Maybe a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. She knew which character she’d be cast as, and was already gearing up to play the role if he said something sufficiently stupid. And he would. There was always something wrong with these truck stop guys. Pity, because this one was hot. He had to be around six and a half feet tall, and a nicely proportionate breadth to go with that height. Not bulky, but there were definitely some muscles beneath that jacket. He had to outweigh her by a good hundred pounds.

  He fixed a stare on her she couldn’t tell was from bl
ue or gray eyes beneath the pole light, but either way, it was oddly mesmerizing. She couldn’t bring herself to break free of it, although it somehow made her feel exposed.

  Naked.

  Why was he looking at her like that—like he knew her? She’d never seen the man before. She certainly would have remembered those startling eyes and all that dark hair. Jesus, she liked a bit of mane on her men. Someone could slap him on the cover of a romance novel. Just wrap him in tartan, hand him a sword, and set up an unobtainable fantasy for a few thousand women.

  She pursed her lips, considering him. Nah, she’d read probably a hundred thrift store romance novels in the past year, and this guy was too tan to be a Scotsman and not dark enough to be a sheikh. Greek tycoon, maybe? Oh yeah. Put him on the deck of a yacht wearing some of those little European swim trunks and—

  “Isn’t it?” he repeated, and raised one dark eyebrow.

  “Huh?” She blinked. Did he want something?

  He shifted his weight and shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, grinning at her. Shit, he could have lit up the entire parking lot with that smile. He was so pretty—now, what did he want with her? Whatever it was, she wasn’t paying for it.

  She closed her eyes and drew in a bolstering breath. “It’s cold,” she said blandly and tossed the wadded up receipt into her truck cab.

  “Montana’s a pretty inhospitable place, huh? There’s still a month until winter, but I don’t think the snow cares about timeliness.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She patted her pockets in search of her keys. The next thing he’d probably say was that he could make it a lot more hospitable for her, if she had enough cash.

  Prostitutes were pretty predictable, and she certainly got propositioned enough, though usually the truck stop hos were a little less—upright.

  But, shit, did she really look like the kind of woman who’d pay a man for sex? She wrapped her fingers around the handle, prepared to slam the door.