Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (27 page)

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.

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

“Or some
one
.” 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.