Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series

by Holley Trent

  Candy Corn’s eyelids went heavy with contented sleepiness.

  Fucking cat.

  What was she going to do now? She’d wanted to get this necromancer out of her apartment, but her familiar had rolled out the figurative fur-covered red carpet for him.

  Boo.

  “Is she just going to stay like this, or should I shoo her away?”

  Claude seemed genuinely distressed by the overweight feline on his lap. His nostrils flared, and breathing sped.

  “You’re not allergic, are you?”

  “No, but I prefer not to have a cat be the arbiter of whether or not I’m worthy to be in your presence.”

  “Hey, if it were up to me, I’d keep your gin and send you home. You mess with dead things, and I don’t like that.”

  That was wild magic: the shit she’d been taught to avoid because witches lost themselves to it. Once they gave into it just once, they couldn’t stop. Witches who used wild magic got shunned. Gail didn’t give a shit about being shunned because she already had been. That hadn’t changed her ingrained principles any, though.

  He ground out an exasperated groan and pounded the left armrest. “I said I do it as little as possible, and only in very controlled circumstances. I don’t exactly go into graveyards and raise revenants. Even if that weren’t beyond my capabilities, I wouldn’t do it. I think that most of the time, the dead should stay dead. I …” His brow furrowed upon uttering that profession, and his lips, parted as though he had more to say, formed no more words.

  Curiosity was probably going to be her final undoing one day, but right now, she had to know what the handsome, dangerous witch was thinking—what he was holding back.

  Carefully, she passed her hand in front of Candy Corn and gave Claude’s knee a little a little squeeze. “Tell me.”

  “I …” He forced out a long exhale and gently scooped the cat into his arms. He set her on the floor, and when she poised to jump right back up onto his lap, he stood. He paced in front of the coffee table with his hands clasped at his back. “I have so much to tell you, Gail.”

  “Tell me? Hey, you don’t have to use me for your come-to-Jesus confession. You raise a dead body here and there? Okay, that’s between you and whatever or whomever you worship.”

  He stopped pacing and scoffed. Dropping his chin to his chest, he looked down at her with impatience. “It’s not about that that. There are things you should know about the world you live in—the sorts of beings that reside in it.”

  “Beings like you?” Yeah, she was kind of starting to get that.

  “I’m the least of your problems, chéri, and I’m half-demon.”

  “That’s cute. You—wait. What did you say?”

  Did he just seriously toss that d-word out there like he was saying any other race? Maybe she heard him wrong. Yeah, that was it.

  “Half-Dominican? That’s cool. My sister went to the Dominican Republic one year for spring break. I hear it’s beautiful. I hope to make it down there one day when my checking account isn’t so anemic.”

  “Demon, chéri. Half-demon. My father is a demon, so that makes me a cambion. Half-breed. Mutt.”

  “Yeah, I know what mutts are.” She nodded, and didn’t stop nodding until Candy Corn head-butted her ankles.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  She nodded again, but stopped halfway through the movement, and shook her head instead.

  “No, no, I don’t. Demons aren’t corporeal, as far as I know.”

  “Another lie your parents told you, I suppose. I find it amusing that so many witches tend to be unapologetically straitlaced. You don’t want to sully the gene pool, I guess. Anyhow, most demons have a physical form, some of which are permanent, though there are some that are unbound for different reasons. Perhaps they lost their corporeal form as a form of punishment and have to earn them back. Some give them up freely because doing so changes the nature of their power. They move freely between this realm and the next and inhabit unaware mortals when they do need a pair of hands or a mouth to speak with.”

  “I don’t know if learning that makes me feel better or worse.”

  “Knowledge is power, but you should also be aware that not all demons are created equally. Just as there are different kinds of sprites and spirits, there are different sorts of demons. Some are simply playful, others are malevolent.”

  “And where do you fall on that spectrum?”

  He blew out a breath and resumed his pacing. “I’m capable of being quite malevolent, but that’s more a matter of me holding grudges longer than most people than me being what I am. I am dangerous, but you already think that.” He stopped, and fixed a red—a goddamned red—stare on her.

  There was some sort of disconnection between her brain and mouth. Her lips were moving, but no words came out, although in her head, she was thinking plenty of them, and none so nice.

  “Cat got your tongue, chéri?”

  On cue, Candy Corn rolled onto her back and lazily swatted the end of Claude’s shoestring.

  Saying she felt conflicted would have been a massive understatement. Candy Corn thought he was trustworthy, and the cat was incapable of being wrong—whether or not Gail chose to listen to her. But being trustworthy didn’t necessarily mean he was on high moral ground. He could have been a mass murderer, and probably was. But as long as he kept Gail reasonably safe, Candy Corn would give him the Familiar Seal of Approval. Was that good enough?

  “Look.” Claude squatted in front of her and rested his large hands atop her thighs. He swallowed, and when he turned his gaze up to her, his irises had gone blue again. “I’m telling you all this because I need you to believe in me. I might be saying a lot of crazy shit to you over the next few hours or days, and it may get progressively worse. I need you to be able to follow me without a single reservation, or this is all going to fall apart.”

  “Follow you how?” That probably wasn’t even the most important question she should have been asking at the moment, but there was so much he was throwing at her, that she felt like she was sawing blocks off an iceberg with a straight pin. She’d never get through.

  “Literally follow.” He slid his hands farther up her thighs and up her belly until his fingers skimmed the bottoms of hers. Her arms were still crossed over her chest. He gave her fingertips a gentle caress and there was so much longing in his tired eyes that she wanted to just let him hold her hands, if it’d make him feel better.

  Make him feel better? Wasn’t she the one who should be freaking out? He must have whammied her with that gentle magic of his without her noticing.

  Sighing, she unclenched her arms and let him take her hands.

  He held them atop her lap and studied them. His brow furrowed as he dragged his thumb pads back and forth across the backs of her hands.

  “My father,” he said, “is an incubus.”

  Incubus.

  She closed her eyes tight and let her mind organize all the bits and pieces of arcana and supernatural trivia she’d absorbed over the past twenty-nine years, and tried to remember what exactly that meant.

  Incubus.

  She didn’t know it, but that came as no shock to her because Claude was right—witches did tend to be rather conservative when it came to educating their children. They got by with the bare minimum of knowledge about other paranormal beings, and right about now, Gail was feeling in need of some intensive remedial education.

  Even more than working Saturday nights, she hated admitting she didn’t know something. What choice did she have, though?

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “What is an incubus?”

  “Incubi are masters of seduction. They can strip down a woman’s resistance with just a touch and siphon off her will—take everything that makes her unique and individual. They can render women into beings that are not much more than flesh and blood automatons, if they take too much. For them, the women’s wills are a kind of food, but that’s not to be confused with their so
uls. Their souls … well, that’s a separate transaction. When the incubi are done taking what they want, they mark those women’s souls as Hell-bound.”

  Gail tried to pull her hands back, but he tightened his grip on them. “No. Don’t pull away from me, chéri. I have no interest in sending you to that place, though it isn’t what you think. It’s probably worse than you think.”

  This dude was off-his-meds crazy. Wasn’t that always the case, though? The really good-looking ones always had insurmountable issues. Shaun had been maybe forty percent as handsome as Claude, but he’d managed to hide his instability for longer than a day.

  Now, where’d she leave her cell phone? Ellery should have been due to take her first break soon, and maybe if Gail texted her, Ellery could call the sheriff and have him drive over.

  Think, think. What to do? She tapped her right foot against the floor and pondered strategy. She couldn’t use magic against him, and force didn’t work. The cat wouldn’t fight him. Maybe she could try screaming.

  She sucked in a deep breath and readied her diaphragm, but before she could work up a proper bellow, he knelt up and covered her mouth with his.

  She sat there, stunned and frozen with her mouth and eyes wide open for a long moment, and then his hands were on her cheeks, tenderly caressing her.

  He pulled her bottom lip between his teeth and let it snap back, and as soon as the sting registered in her tender flesh, his tongue was there, soothing it, making it disappear.

  And that wasn’t magic.

  Looking at his blue—no, red—no, blue—eyes at that short distance made her dizzy, confusing her more than the conversation and his proximity already had—so she let her eyelids fall. Blocking off one sense should have made all the others compensate, and hopefully her common sense or sixth sense or something would kick in at any moment.

  He pulled his hands away, and she felt the sofa cushion beneath her sink down a bit farther when he pressed his hands onto it at either side of her thighs. A small moan vibrated in his chest, and then there were his lips again, skimming across hers.

  Soft, silken, seductive.

  Sinful.

  She leaned her torso back, but felt out of sorts with her body. Her mind was waging a war against her libido. Her body wanted him—wanted to wrap its legs around his thighs and pull him down atop her. Her body wanted to snake its fingers through his unkempt curls and make them obey. Her body wanted to see if he tasted as good as he smelled, wanted to dart her tongue at that bend in his neck just over his collar and sample his essence.

  Hell, her mind wasn’t fighting all that hard, either. It wasn’t the little voice at the back of her head warning her away from him—telling her that this was unsafe and that her immortal soul was in peril.

  No, what she feared most was that her grandmother would tell her she was stupid for falling for this, and what would Gail do? Blame the cat?

  “Oh, fuck it,” she said, and pulled her feet up to her left.

  She slipped her fingers into his thick hair and fisted large clumps, pulling his face closer to hers.

  She gave him a kiss that was meant to be punishing, pressing hard against his lips and aggressively fencing his tongue. It wasn’t dominating, but just damned desperate, and when she leaned back and tugged him down atop her, she learned just how desperate he was, too.

  His hard shaft bruised between her thighs as he ground against her. As he deepened their urgent kiss, all she could think of was that there were too many clothes between her and him and that the cat was watching.

  In the back of her mind, there was that knowledge that he was dangerous, that he could siphon her vitality and mark her soul.

  But the more he kissed her, touched her, she didn’t feel like she was some sort of incubus prize. Instead, he seemed to be begging her for an absolution of some sort, and he desperately needed and craved it.

  She was going to give it to him, because somehow she understood he couldn’t get it anywhere else. Maybe that’s why he’d come to her.

  She wasn’t strong or powerful. Hell, the truth was, in her circle of witch friends, she was the liability—the one who had to try twice as hard as everyone else to complete tasks that should have been natural.

  But she could do something no one else could. She could make Claude happy, at least for the night.

  Her.

  Why her?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  No, no!

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, not before he’d had a chance to say his piece. He’d wanted to lay it all out. Well, almost all of it. His plan was to tell her that he was an incubus—check.

  That he wouldn’t hurt her—check.

  That his father probably wanted to kill her—again. Nope.

  That someone had been in her apartment and that if Claude wasn’t there, she’d be a sitting duck. Nope.

  That she’d been around before, and he’d loved Laurette more than anyone sense. No, no, no.

  But how could he tell her all that when she was beneath him and so willing to be touched, in spite of what he was?

  Gail flicked her tongue along the seam of his lips.

  He opened his mouth to receive her sweet tongue, and moaned as her fingers threaded through his hair.

  It was a tentative touch, as if she were seeking permission to muss what was already messy—as if she feared he’d tell her to stop.

  He’d never tell her that. Her touch was as relaxing to him as his had obviously been to that odd cat of hers. That was no surprise, because it had been the same way the last time, too. He’d relied on her gentle caresses to bring him down from his guilt-fueled rages, his mania.

  Laurette never knew what had incited his agitation, or what he did when he was away from New Orleans, but the moment he’d walked through her door, she drew her into her arms. She comforted him, though she didn’t know what ailed him. She just held him.

  He’d never told Laurette what he was—what his father was. She’d only known the witch part of him because she’d known his mother. She didn’t know that when he was traveling, he was out marking souls, and using seduction as a snare. Maybe he didn’t go all the way with those women, but it felt close enough to cheating to him. The tenderness he’d wasted on all those women he didn’t care one iota about should have all belonged to Laurette.

  Gail wrapped her legs around his thighs and tipped her head back, exposing her neck to him.

  He kissed her from chin to collar, his arousal swelling at her feminine scent, and she ground her crotch against him, enticing him.

  “What happened to your fear, chéri?”

  She worked the back of his T-shirt up until it could go no farther and pressed her hot palms against his naked back. “Common sense is losing. I want you. Tell me I won’t regret it.”

  “You won’t.” At least not for the reasons she was probably thinking.

  He sat up and peeled off his shirt, and immediately she put her hands against his chest and trailed her fingers down his pecs and belly. She wavered at his waistband for only a moment before deftly unfastening the button and letting down the fly.

  With shaking hands, he freed each of her six shirt buttons and spread the plackets apart to reveal a lacy black bra that barely covered her breasts, and a tattoo beneath the band he traced the outlines of with his thumb. “What’s this?”

  “It’s silly.” Suddenly shy, she nudged his hand away and tried to sit up, but he kept her pinned down.

  He lifted her breasts for a better view of the flesh-and-ink storm on her torso. “It’s not silly. This had to have taken more than one sitting, so obviously it means something to you.”

  He leaned his head to the side to see the dark storm clouds wrapped around her sides to her back, and when he pushed her sleeves off her shoulders, he saw they curled down one arm, too. It could have looked like a mistake, just a dark gray blob of ink, but the image had been rendered by a master. Within the clouds were streaks of lightning, which illuminated an intricate beach and coun
tryside scene down below.

  She sighed as he pulled her arms free of her shirt, and took in the entirety of the tattoo. Rolling her onto her side, he briefly studied the full back piece. She was covered in ink from collar to waist, and no one could tell as long as she wore a modest shirt.

  “This is a place you know?” he asked, rolling her onto her back and standing. He heeled off his shoes while she rubbed her eyes.

  It had to be a real place. It was too detailed to be imaginary, and he knew it wasn’t New Orleans.

  “It’s the beach near Manteo. That’s where I grew up.”

  Manteo. He’d been there a couple of times trying to shake his father off his trail. It was a few hours north of where John and Charles lived on the coast.

  “Why’d you pick clouds instead of sun?” He stepped out of his jeans, and she sat up, and sucked in some air when her gaze fell to his shorts. He nudged his Y-front shut and put his hands over his junk. “Don’t get distracted.”

  “How could I not?”

  It was the same size it’d always been, and he didn’t remember Laurette being so astounded by it.

  “Try, chéri.”

  She closed her eyes and for added measure, covered them with her hands. “It’s a thing that all the kids in my generation do in my family. My sister has one and all my cousins on one side. The tats are all different, because all of our gifts are a little different. We all have an affinity to air, but my quirk is electricity. That’s what I tried to throw at you back at the bar.”

  “I guessed that. There’s a lot of static in your aura.” It made the hair on his arms stand up when he touched her, and it wasn’t a bad feeling in the slightest bit.

  “Oh.” She chafed her arms as if cold. “I can pull static from the air and direct it. That’s what my grandmother would call wild magic. She wouldn’t approve.”

  “Ah.” He padded to the end of the sofa and pulled the first of her jeans legs over her heel.