Colin stepped aside, indicating he expected Eddie to leave now, and after hesitating a few moments, Eddie got up and left without another word. The rest of the group still in the break room remained silent until they heard the front door of the building close and Eddie’s tires squealing out of the parking lot.
“That was mature,” Dylan mumbled.
Max just shook his head. “We need to let Jeremy know about this. Maybe Eddie needs to go on leave or something. Not sure I’d want him out alone with me anywhere right now.”
Colin was pretending to listen to their conversation but he was really focusing on Anna. He wanted her to think of an excuse to leave soon and come meet him across town for lunch so they could talk about this email. As the other hunters gradually started talking again and things got back to normal, Colin slipped out quietly and made his way to the restaurant to wait for Anna.
She showed up about half an hour later and after spending a few minutes reading the menu, she finally let Colin speak to her. He had watched her the entire time, with a smile of adoration and complete devotion on his face.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Starving. So this is new. First email we’ve ever gotten from one of them.”
Colin took a sip of his water and nodded. He wasn’t quite ready to talk about the email yet though. “Anna, about last night…”
“Colin, forget it. Please. You had every right to be pissed. If that had been you… it doesn’t matter that I would have known how innocent it was. We can’t help feeling the way we do.”
Colin bit his lip. He couldn’t let her do this, let him off the hook for something that was killing him, that was hurting a hell of a lot worse than getting thrown by a demon halfway across a field in the English countryside had a while back.
“But I shouldn’t have talked to you that way,” he said quietly.
He couldn’t even meet her eyes when he said it. He was so ashamed of himself. And then he immediately felt guilty for that too because he knew how badly Anna felt over that and this whole conversation was turning out to be such a disaster. He really wished he had just bought the damn gift card.
Anna took a deep breath. He knew she was trying to resist reaching across the table to take his hand, to kiss his fingers and tell him how much she loved him, how she would always love him. Knowing those things and being able to do them were so different. So completely different.
“I’m sure I’ve said many, many things you didn’t deserve over the years, Colin,” and in that one sentence, Anna let herself speak the way she had when they were younger, the English accent of her youth so rich and lyrical. She had mastered an American accent in a way Colin had never been able to, which he thought wasn’t quite fair considering she’d never even minded hers. He was the one who had grown up despising his ancestry.
Colin tried to think back over the years to anything she had ever said that could have caused the kind of pain that he had inflicted last night, but he was pretty sure she had never treated him that way. Until this assignment in Baton Rouge, they so very rarely even disagreed about anything. But Anna wanted to believe she had; she didn’t want Colin to feel so guilty, so full of self-hatred and so he tried to bury it for her sake. It was hard. He knew he didn’t deserve her forgiveness.
“You do know that I trust you. I do. It’s just…”
“Oh, Colin, I know. And I told you, that was so unfair of me. I shouldn’t have even let him sit down even if it was just to have someone to talk to. If a pretty girl had sat down with you at a bar, God knows what sort of things would have come out of my mouth.”
Colin smiled at her. He had no intention of testing out this theory that her jealousy could get her to act just as badly as he had. But something else was troubling her. Colin watched her, waiting for her to tell him about this dream she couldn’t stop thinking about.
“It was so weird,” Anna said as she tore little strips off her paper napkin, “we were chasing a jade colored demon through Petrograd in 1920 and I followed you around a street corner, and there was Jas. But not like Jas would have looked in 1920 in Russia, but Jas as she looked one of the last times I saw her. And she knew she was dead, but was warning me to hurry up to help you, which doesn’t make sense either because the only reason I stopped is to see my dead friend standing in the street.”
Colin reached across the table to take the napkin away from her before their table was filled with paper strips. “Anna, dreams are always a bit like falling down the rabbit hole. They don’t mean anything, other than you’re grieving the loss of your friend.”
Anna nodded. She wanted to tell him how real it had felt, though, but the waitress arrived with their food, and as they started picking through it, Colin finally brought up the email. “They named us, but they don’t know who we are.”
Anna glanced up from her chicken shawarma salad. “I know. Something’s up.” She took a bite of lunch. “Not being able to sense the power of that demon the other night; our separation here; this email. They didn’t put two and two – or I guess, one and one – together. Colin, do you think we’re in hiding?”
Colin’s mind was racing. He’d had that thought, too. “I think it’s possible. But what’s scaring the shit out of me right now, if that’s true, is that apparently, no one has a clue what’s going on. How can that be possible?”
Anna was starting to lose her appetite and started picking at her salad. “Let’s assume it’s true then. We need to be more careful than ever. We can’t assume anything anymore.”
Colin agreed. “Does this mean you’ll stop objecting to me being so overprotective?”
He couldn’t help being overprotective. It was ingrained far too deeply within him and Anna knew that. She just smiled at him, but he suspected that she meant it as a yes.
He didn’t want their lunch to end, but they both knew they couldn’t let it last too long. There was always a danger of being recognized, or just spending too much time together and falling into temptation, so they went their separate ways after lunch, but Colin stood in the parking lot for a long time, watching Anna get in her car then drive away, wishing he could follow her home.
Chapter 5
Anna’s ringing phone woke her from another bizarre, terrifying dream. This time, she had been dreaming about Paris, but not Paris today. This was an old Paris. A dirty, smelly, crowded Paris and she was standing in the middle of the street watching mobs of men and women pass her by.
She was trying to follow the conversations as they buzzed past her, but she was still learning French and so much of it didn’t make sense to her. Who were the Jacobins? What had they taken over? This seemed to worry some people, though, so it made her worry, too. She had already seen enough violence.
The crowd swept her along down the street and she picked out words, phrases, just enough meaning to know this revolution had taken a deadly turn. Accusations were being made, summary trials held throughout the country, sentences handed down with no recourse. There was no time for second chances or appeals anyway. Somebody bumped into her and she tripped into the rough texture of the street. Nobody stopped to help her.
And then, as dreams so often do, it got even weirder because she was suddenly standing in a different part of the city, in front of a large platform, and the crowd around her was even larger, louder, more sinister. Anna had only a moment to realize what the stage in front of her was used for as the swooshing metallic blade reflected the sunlight into her eyes.
Anna flinched and wanted to turn away as the man on the stage lifted the bloody head to the roar of the crowd, but the people pressing against her trying to get a better view wouldn’t let her walk away from this grisly scene. They were already bringing another man on stage, his arms tied behind his back. The blade lifted into place again as they shoved the condemned man onto the block, and Anna squeezed her eyes shut.
As she did, she heard a musical ringing. A strange, anachronistic sound, yet another thing out of place in her odd time-traveling dreams
, and she looked around her, trying to place the pleasant noise among the throng pushing toward the guillotine, wanting to get a better view of the newly decapitated head but that sound… Anna couldn’t place it, but she knew that sound. She looked around the fevered crowd for it, but couldn’t find anything that would make such a lovely bell noise amidst the chaos in this square.
Anna’s eyes slowly opened in her bedroom in Baton Rouge. The cries of the French crowd were quickly dissipating as she oriented herself, realizing she had been dreaming, she wasn’t in Paris, and her phone was ringing.
She groggily picked it up and glanced at the screen. Jeremy. Why the hell was he calling her at 6:14 in the morning? No one should call at 6:14 in the morning. Or before a person has had the chance to consume at least two cups of coffee. That’s just common sense. She answered it anyway.
“Anna, turn on the news,” Jeremy told her.
The remnants of her sleepy haze vanished. No more French dream, no more fantasies of coffee. She grabbed the remote and turned on the television, flipping channels until she found the local news station.
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
The reporter was outside one of the plants in Addis where a huge explosion over night had caused a cascade of fires. They suspected at least twelve employees were killed, over twenty had been taken to nearby hospitals and three were still unaccounted for.
She knew it wasn’t true as soon as the words escaped her lips but it was like listening to someone else speak, not herself. “It could have been a coincidence.”
Jeremy didn’t answer her right away. She wasn’t the first person he’d had to talk to about this and he was probably exhausted. “Colin’s the one who called me. About an hour ago. He didn’t think it was a coincidence. The explosion happened exactly one hour after we missed our deadline.” Jeremy exhaled slowly, a tired, weary, stressful breath. “And I got a call last night from Father David. Said a woman came in to see him claiming she was being harassed by a demon. So we need to go check this out.”
Of course. Because when Hell has you on its Hit List, following around crazy people was exactly the kind of thing Anna wanted to do. She made plans to meet him later that day so they could see if any of this woman’s story might be true – but more often than not, people were either genuinely crazy or just blamed demons or Hell or something like that for doing stuff they knew they shouldn’t be doing.
By that afternoon, Anna was standing outside a small strip mall where the woman worked in a nail salon, with Jeremy and Colin looking decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of having to go in there, and Dylan looking decidedly bored with the whole thing. Anna thought it was completely ridiculous that Jeremy had brought three other hunters along with him to investigate one far-fetched claim of demon-stalking but the email and last night’s tragedy at the plant in Addis had everyone on edge.
“Fine,” Anna sighed. “I’ll go in by myself. If one of those old ladies getting her nails done turns out to be an archdemon in disguise though, then I’m coming back to haunt you all for letting me get killed by a demon with better nails than me.”
That part actually would kind of suck.
Inside the salon, Anna spotted the dark haired, small-framed manicurist at the back of the room and even though she already had a client at her table, she sat down. Linh looked up at her, shaking her head, and started to tell her she couldn’t help her. But Anna had already gotten what she needed to know. She sensed the residue of a demonic presence on her. Linh had been telling the truth.
Anna apologized and left the salon, telling the others they should check out her apartment complex. A part of her was actually glad Linh’s story had turned up something; it was distracting them from Jas’s death, the horrors of last night and whatever else these pissed off archdemons might do in retaliation for the hunters not showing up like sacrificial lambs.
As they walked around her apartment building, hoping to sense any of that lingering effect that would give them some clue as to what to do next, Anna found herself walking alone with Colin. They hadn’t intentionally walked away from Dylan and Jeremy but their thoughts were connected, they were so used to working together and being together that they ended up taking opposite sides of the complex then coming back toward the center at the same time. Jeremy and Dylan were still near the front of the complex, near Linh’s apartment itself where the strongest residue was. Where was that bastard hiding?
“Let’s go check the pool,” Anna suggested.
It seemed strange to think a demon would spend any of its time hanging around a pool but many of them were capable of taking a human form; Linh had told the priest this one did, a man who looked about thirty with striking features, tall, thick dark hair and a muscular build. To Anna, it sounded like this demon had ripped the image straight off the cover of a cheap romance novel. The pool area was empty but they finally picked up a scent again, a hint of a decaying, rotten, unearthly stench that definitely was not coming from the nearby dumpsters.
Anna and Colin glanced at each other. “Let’s follow it,” he said.
Anna was wondering if they should get the others, but if it was here, they didn’t want to risk losing it. They followed the trail, that putrid odor growing stronger as it led them to a ground floor apartment. It was absolutely reeking. That goddamn demon was living here.
Anna and Colin reached into their sheaths and pulled out their knives, hoping this was a demon that could be killed with a somewhat ordinary knife, and tucked them in the waistband of their pants where they could reach them easily. They sensed that it was, but then again, they hadn’t been able to tell an archdemon from a lesser demon the other night.
“What do you think? Should we knock?” Anna asked. She was only half-joking. It was broad daylight and she didn’t know how to kick down a door anyway. Colin shrugged then knocked. What else were they going to do? They were hunters, not Hollywood gangsters.
They listened to the movement inside, footsteps, a pause by the door. The odor was so strong Anna instinctively took a step back. They could hear the chain sliding out of place, then the door opened to reveal a tanned, handsome man with a charming smile, perfectly straight white teeth, his features impossibly sculpted and shaped like an airbrushed Adonis. Most people wouldn’t have noticed he reeked. Colin and Anna felt like they were suffocating.
And he couldn’t tell who they were. They were masked as they should have been the night the archdemon attacked them, but the way it had looked at Colin and Anna, it seemed to know they were different: not just hunters, but special, blessed.
This one was just looking between them, grinning, that smile never faltering, asking them now if they were here to convert him or to sell him something. The way he asked was so friendly, so outgoing and affable, that it would be easy for others to be completely won over by this gorgeous man with the too-charming smile and the sociable personality. This demon was probably good at his job of convincing people to give up their souls.
Anna was trying to decide which was less annoying – someone trying to sell timeshares or religion. She decided on timeshares. Then she wondered if people still went around selling timeshares. Colin had apparently decided she was doing too much wondering.
“We’re hoping we could talk to you for a few minutes. You look like a man who enjoys the beach,” Colin said.
The demon kept that smile in place. “Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“This would be a lot more believable if we had a brochure, Colin. We should have gone with religion.”
“Screw it.”
Colin pushed the demon farther inside the apartment, and it was clearly surprised by his strength. Anna quickly followed and closed the door, locking it behind her. She already had her knife in her hand.
The demon-man had recovered from his initial shock and ran at Colin with that inhuman speed, even in this human form, expecting to throw him against the wall, but Colin evaded him and got his knife blade across its arm. The demon let out a low moaning growl,
a beastly wounded animal sound and dropped its disguise. It would need to conserve its energy now.
It dissolved into a gaseous gray cloud then reformed, an ugly mixture of boar and goat, except it was really freaking huge. Colin and Anna didn’t wait. It was already backed against a wall; they took sides and it snapped at them, reaching out with long thick talons that Anna could swear looked like they were stained with blood. Colin swiped at its neck and cut a gash into its throat, and that fetid odor spilled out around them. Anna cut into its side, more of that noxious smell surrounding her. She willed herself not to pass out.
But demons really don’t like to die. It lunged at her, swiping one of those thick, decaying claws at her and it caught her leg, dragging her to the ground, pulling her underneath its hideous body. She heard Colin… was he screaming? But she was in so much pain. It had its long nails in her leg still and this time, she was sure they had blood all over them. She was trying to focus on his mind. He was talking to her. It was so hard to focus.
“… Anna! Take your knife, thrust upward now!…”
She tried, but her arm felt so heavy. Or was it her knife? Was her knife really this heavy? It had seemed so light before.
Anna was still trying to force her arm to move the knife when she realized Colin was on top of her, with both knives now, one jammed into the paw that was clutching Anna’s leg, the other thrust upward into the demon’s throat, opening another long incision for that putrid rotten fog to escape.
Anna didn’t want to breathe it anymore, she didn’t want to see this creature anymore, or feel the pain of the deep lacerations along her leg or the sticky warm blood that was oozing from them. The room was spinning. So much motion.
“Stay with me, Anna!”
“I love you, Colin.”
And then Anna passed out.
Chapter 6
“Anna, open your eyes,” Colin said softly. He had been trying to get her to wake up for fifteen minutes now. She was stirring at least. He could sense more coherent thoughts. She was finally starting to come around.
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