Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series

by Holley Trent

  “Yes. Let’s. Right now, unless doing it standing up is outside of your skill set.”

  “You talk a lot of shit, and one day I’m going to make you pay for it,” he growled as he thrust into her in one hard, fast stroke that made her gasp. Oh yes, she liked getting into this kind of trouble.

  “You should have known what you were getting when you came sniffing around.” She clamped down on him, making him curl his fingers into the meat of her ass.

  In return, he picked her up and wrapped strong as steel arms around her back, holding her up before forcing her down onto his cock again and again.

  “I could do this all day,” he said in a flat voice as she cried out and tightened her legs around his core.

  He nipped at her breasts through her T-shirt as he pistoned in and out of her. “To me …” Nip. “You weigh nothing.” Nip. “Strength is no issue.” Nip. “Your endurance is.”

  She had no retort. Her lips had begun quivering and where she should have been seeing white plaster on the bathroom ceiling, she was seeing stars and entire constellations.

  With every thrust, she whimpered and imagined she sounded like a marathon runner at the end of a long race.

  Already, fullness gathered between her legs and her body shook with the mounting orgasm, and she could do nothing to stave it off. There were no mental gymnastics she could do, except for one thing.

  She swept a shaking hand toward the door and managed the one spell that hadn’t failed her since learning it at sixteen. She erected an insulating bubble of air around them that stifled the shrieks of her orgasm and softened the ensuing bangs against the door when Claude pushed her back against it.

  He didn’t wait for her to come down from her orgasm, but kept thrusting, harder now, while whispering to her in that patois she couldn’t make sense of.

  If he were asking her to do something—to assist him in some way—he was shit out of luck. She was having a hard enough time feeling the limbs that were attached to her body. Her brain was in that delirious place between ecstasy and desperation where nothing she wanted of him was reasonable or sane.

  She wanted this to be their forever—this passionate coupling of two people so attracted to each other, but with enough differences to get angry on occasion. She knew they were going to fight, probably more than most other couples, but they’d do it because they cared not just about each other, but about their own sense of self. People couldn’t give everything away in a relationship. If they didn’t retain what made them so attractive to each other in the first place, the passion would flee, and the relationship would fall apart right after that.

  Was that what they had? A relationship?

  Gail wasn’t sure, but she knew one thing for certain. This wasn’t going to be like the marriage that had crumbled so quickly after burning hot and fast.

  Never again would she lose herself to a man who saw her as noting more than a trainable object allowed no opinions of her own.

  She may not have been very strong or have any useful social connections, but she was worth something. If not to Claude, then to herself.

  He shuddered against her, and slowly let her legs down. He held her until her body stopped shaking, and whispered more of that soft French to her.

  She didn’t realize she was crying until he dragged his thumbs beneath her eyes to wipe the wetness away.

  “What has made you so sad, ma reine?”

  She laced her fingers through his curls and pulled his head down so their foreheads met. She wouldn’t have him thinking it was something he’d done, when it was her own hang-ups rising to the surface the longer they engaged.

  “Me,” she whispered. “Just me.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Agatha and Mark teleported into Clarissa’s living room in a flash of white light that temporarily blinded Gail and scalded her insides.

  Damn.

  “Show-offs,” someone mumbled, and she couldn’t tell if was John or Claude. She rubbed her eyes until her vision cleared to find Mark adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses and Agatha standing in the corner near the front door, spine straight and nose held high.

  Clarissa waved them toward the sectional. “Sit. Y’all want something to eat?”

  Agatha shook her head.

  “As if I’d say no,” Mark said.

  Sweetie popped up, saying, “I’ll get it!” with far too much enthusiasm for a woman who hadn’t slept in a day. She bounded into the kitchen, and Gail caught Ellery pushing an eyebrow up.

  Gail put up a hand in a don’t-go-there fashion.

  Ellery still had crinkles on her cheek from her impromptu nap and she’d mashed her messy hair flat on one side. She probably knew and didn’t care. Gail didn’t blame her. It’d been a pretty fucked-up morning.

  “Is it book club day and I somehow managed to miss the memo?” Agatha asked flatly.

  “Don’t be coy,” Claude said. “Are you really going to pretend that Gail and Ellery didn’t see you at the warehouse?”

  “Tact, Claude.” Clarissa sighed and sat on the ottoman near the door.

  “Someone needed to say it. Might as well have been me.”

  “He’s as powerful as me. I don’t scare him,” Agatha said. She crossed her arms over her chest and drummed her fingers against her bare arms. She’d lost her hooded coat and now wore a cream-colored sleeveless shell more befitting of the scorching summer temperatures.

  She was an interesting-looking woman. Her shoulder-length hair was a shiny silver hue that should have marked her as being at least fifty, had she been human, but her face gave few clues of her age. She could have been thirty. Forty. Fifty might have been pushing it. Like her clothes and hair, her brows were impeccably groomed, but she didn’t bother with makeup. She didn’t need it. Her skin was clear, lips full, and her charcoal gray eyes stole the show. Even when her face said so little, her eyes said so much.

  At the moment, they scanned the room as if she were taking an accounting of everyone present—as if she’d make them all pay for this indulgence later.

  Gail looked at Claude, wondering if he’d caught that little comment about his power, but he didn’t seem surprised by it. At least, if he was, he didn’t respond.

  Sweetie returned with a bowl of chili and a hunk of baguette stuck to the side. “Only nutballs like us eat chili in the middle of the summer.”

  Mark set the bowl on his lap and grinned up at Sweetie. “I bet providing protein for all you vicious carnivores is a full-time job.”

  Clarissa sighed. “No kidding. That reminds me. I’ve got chickens I need to roast, so if I have to excuse myself, don’t take it as rudeness.”

  “What exactly would you need to excuse yourself from?” Agatha asked.

  She really was going to play that stuck-on-stupid game, and maybe that was fine. Gail didn’t really want to confront her, and Ellery sure as shit didn’t seem to want to, either. Whose idea was this, anyway?

  “It’s just a little Q&A,” Clarissa said. “I think it’s up to you to tell these children—”

  Claude cleared his throat, and Gail could guess why. It was so easy to forget that Claude was more than a century older than Clarissa, especially when they looked about the same age. Gail wouldn’t mind having a sip of that immortality juice.

  Clarissa sighed. “Fine. My apologies to Mr. Fortier. Our merry band of miscreants would like to know certain things about you, and although I can speculate about why you behave the way you do, I was raised the old way. We didn’t stick our noses into other people’s secrets, because they’re secrets for a reason. I imagine your secrets exist for very similar reasons that the ones in my family do.”

  Agatha didn’t say anything for a long while, but then she shifted her weight from one Ferragamo pump to the other and eyed the empty sofa seat beside Ellery.

  Ellery waved her over. “Come on. Take a load off.”

  Agatha cleared her throat quietly and eased her tall form through the gap, around the coffee table, and settled onto
the cushion. She crossed one long leg over her knee and folded her hands atop her thigh. “My, this room’s crowded.”

  “I’m extraneous. I can go,” John said, standing.

  “Sit,” Agatha snapped, and John sat at if a rope at his waist yanked him down. “If I’m going to lay it all out, I’m only going to do it once. I’ve already broken the rules and relinquished my neutral status because of what I did earlier, so I suppose it’s best if I forego any further attempts at secrecy.”

  Neutral status? Gail must have looked confused, because Clarissa mouthed, “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Longer ago than I care to precisely recall, I broke the rules beings like me were bound to live by. I hate to sound clinical about it, but I conceived a child by a human man. At the time, I had two choices. Relinquish the child to his father after the birth and have no further contact with either, or raise the child myself and give up my status in the pantheon. My choice was the latter, however I didn’t know at the time the caveats that came with that. You see, back then, gods and goddesses quibbled over such small things. Having children was always a contentious thing for us, because we could never predict what sort of beings they’d turn out to be.”

  “What do you mean?” John asked.

  “Well, my dear angel-mutt, most people aside of the angelic and demonic that are even a touch supernatural got their gifts from gods and goddesses like me. That’s why there’s no one skill set for a witch and why there are different types of shape-shifters. The witches of my line have an affinity to the air.” A lump traveled down her throat. “Weather. Wind. Electricity.”

  It took a moment for realization to settle into Gail, and obviously she was the last to get it. Everyone, save Ellery, was staring at Gail. Ellery was staring open-mouthed at Agatha.

  “I had the baby and ran,” Agatha continued, but they went back on their word when they saw what the baby was and that it had power.

  “They took your baby?” Claude asked.

  She shook her head. “No. I ended up giving him up anyway because a sympathetic sister warned me they’d be coming. She worked it so that the child would be hidden by magic as long as I didn’t try to seek him out. When my family, those bullies, caught up to me, I had to lie and tell them I killed the child. Because of that, they accepted me back into the pantheon, but only on the condition that I be celibate from there out.”

  If cringes had a sound, the noise in the room would have been deafening.

  “There aren’t very many of you,” Agatha said quietly, and it was clear whom she was referring to. “There never were. The line has never really rooted as it should, and nearly died out more times than my heart should have been able to take.”

  “If you couldn’t seek out the child, how would you know that?” Gail asked.

  “Because I know when he died,” Agatha said, and her usually emotionless voice had gone solemn. “Every cell in my body screamed out when his soul ripped free from him. It was when the spell was broken. He was gone, and with him, my secret. It took me a while to find his little family. This was in what’s now Belarus. I found them, and I was going to go to them, but I was followed and it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. I made a deal with my father to keep my distance, and I nearly broke my word many times over the centuries. I had to watch wars and disease nearly kill them off, and I imagined many of those blights were courtesy of my peers. I’d paid my penance, but there are always going to be some who think the punishment wasn’t strict enough. They try to make up the difference.”

  “So why now? You’ve been hands-off all this time, so why come out of the shadows now?” Gail asked.

  “Contrary to what you might believe, I’m not heartless. I play the same game Bill does.”

  “Bill?”

  “Gulielmus. The rules are the same for all of us. We do what we must to toe the line and stay out of public awareness. Sometimes, that means we have to distance ourselves from the things we’d care too much about. You think the only people the Fates are pulling strings for are people like you?” Agatha’s eyes went wide, and Gail could see fear in their depths. Why would the idea of Fate terrify a being as old as Agatha? “It’s no mere coincidence, daughter, that you’re Claude’s and that Claude belongs to this little group.” She waved a hand, indicating the people in the room and on the property beyond it.

  “And when you say daughter, you mean…”

  Agatha pressed her hands to Gail’s shoulders as if she feared the younger woman was going to float away. “You’re mine. Direct line.” She shuddered. “I generally pay people to do math for me, but I’d estimate there’s something like one hundred and twenty-five generations between us.”

  “A hundred and twenty-five generations and we’re it?” Gail shrieked. “You shouldn’t be able to count the number of descendants you have.”

  “The descendants of gods have very high early mortality rates. If you make it to thirty, you’re beating the odds.”

  Ellery made a whimpering sound. Gail nodded and didn’t stop until Claude grabbed her head.

  “Easy, chéri. You’re with me. You’ll be all right.”

  “Claude, honey, I suspect you’ll directly contribute to my mortality,” she whispered.

  He didn’t respond except to bury his face in his hands and mutter in French. She’d have to apologize later. She sometimes didn’t realize she was being mean until it was too late to stop the words. He didn’t deserve it.

  “It’s no coincidence that I headhunted Ariel years ago and have her on my staff,” Agatha said. “Those are all just puzzle pieces the Fates put together one at a time to force us into a group. Funny thing, because beings like me have been trying to fall out of collective memory. Now, it seems someone’s trying to rile us up and yank us back into it. Isn’t that right, Clarissa?”

  Clarissa’s nod was slow, but clear. “I put my ear to the ground after seeing Gulielmus at Rooster’s. Nothing about his situation seemed right to me. Say what you want about him, he did his job the way he was supposed to. There’s no good reason for him to be on the outs right now. From what I could piece together from the people in my network willing to talk, the balance is tipping. There are some who want to be out in the open the way gods and creatures were thousands of years ago.”

  “Demons? They thrive on that sort of attention.”

  Clarissa shrugged. “I don’t know, but I don’t like these covert agendas. There’s no way to stay on top of them or to figure out how deep the roots go.”

  “Maybe it’s good you’re all being pulled back out now, though,” Gail whispered, and she brushed her frayed shirt hem with the pad of her thumb. “We’ve forgotten what we are. We don’t even know what we’re capable of anymore.”

  “And you’re capable of so much.” Agatha had moved quietly and stealthily around the coffee table. She mussed silent John’s hair, and paused in front of Gail. She nudged up Gail’s chin, forcing her to meet her many-times great-grandmother’s gaze. “Someone used you and Ellery to draw me out into the open, and now I’m out. I don’t care. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch another generation get yanked around. I’ve nearly lost you all so many times because of petty god squabbles, but now you’re going to destroy yourselves by not acknowledging what you are and what you can do. I don’t know about my brethren, but I’m not going to let that happen to the handful of descendants I have left.”

  “Wait till our grandmother hears about this,” Ellery said.

  “I don’t care about your prim and proper grandmother and her spell books and rituals. She’s not the real deal. She married into magic.”

  Gail startled. Her grandmother wasn’t even a proper witch? What the fuck? “So, Granddad?” The man who always walked two paces behind his wife and didn’t speak until after she was done talking?

  Agatha nodded. “He’s another one who doesn’t know his value. But it’s too late for him. You girls, though …” Agatha pulled Ellery closer and held both sisters in her embrace. “You’ve st
ill got the future, and I’ll make sure it’s a fruitful one.”

  Fruitful?

  Gail edged out from Agatha’s embrace. “Wait. Hold the motherfucking bus with that one. I’m not having kids. I can’t be anyone’s mother, especially not in a political climate like this. I’d be insane.”

  “You’ll change your mind. You’ll want to.” Agatha squeezed her hands, and her voice went quiet. “You have to.”

  Gail felt Claude’s departure from the room before her eyes registered it. When he left the room, it was as he’d yanked the tethers on her heart, and it was then that she’d recognized her gaffe.

  He’d been following her for five of her lifetimes, and she’d thrown the gate closed on their legacy.

  Agatha gave her another little squeeze. “You’d make a wonderful mother. Better than I was.” She stood and headed toward the kitchen with Ellery on her heels.

  A wonderful mother, she’d said.

  Gail could barely take care of herself and a cat.

  If that would be a deal breaker for being with Claude, so be it. It likely wouldn’t be the last thing they came to an impasse on. She didn’t know if it was poetic or pathetic, but this was shaping up to be another lifetime where they just couldn’t get it together.

  Maybe there was a reason for that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Claude rubbed his eyes and pushed back the cup of coffee Gail had slipped onto the kitchen table near him.

  He really didn’t need her so close for this. In fact, her presence was distracting.

  He’d driven home to the mountains to pick up a couple of crates of research materials and was working diligently to hone in on the sort of magic used to ward that warehouse door and to lay him out on his ass a week ago. It was dark magic, that much he knew. Sometimes, certain spells originated in families who’d recorded them for posterity, and other witches cited them as source material. He’d made it as far back to 1912 with the spell he thought was cast on the door, but hadn’t yet made headway with the other. The problem was, he didn’t know enough about what had been done to him to research it. The spell had been quite complicated, and he’d need to question his brothers, Calvin and Sylvester, about what they saw and heard before they got blasted.