Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (38 page)

“I bet you’re the kind of woman who enjoys tossing rocks at wasp nests.”

“No, I’m an animal lover.”

This was just too damn entertaining. She’d never known she had it in her to be a tease. She’d never had the practice or the inclination before now. Flirting was fun! Maybe next she’d buy herself a tube of bubblegum pink lip gloss and a polka-dot peplum skirt.

“Well, you seem to have an obvious indifference for us beasts unfortunate enough to possess sentience.”

“What’s wrong, Chucky? Limited self-control?” She let her voice drop into a low rumble at the end, and when he turned his face away from the road, she winked.

His jaw ground side to side for several beats, then with a deft flick of his left hand, he activated the turn signal. When the SUV angled toward the exit ramp, she perked up. She’d read enough road signs in her day to know they were nowhere near their final destination.

“What are you doing?”

“Teaching you about cause and effect.”

“Huh?”

His eyes flitted down to the hand resting very near his crotch, then back to the road. “Cause and effect. You annoy the wasps long enough, pretty soon one is going to land right on your pretty ass and sting it. Perhaps you need a demonstration.”

He really
was
pulling off the highway.

She drew her hand away and straightened up. “Wait. Just what did you have in mind?”

He flicked a glance up to the rearview mirror. “What do you think?”

“I’m pretty sure what you have in mind doesn’t mesh with my preferred kinks.”

“Are you saying you’re going to behave?” His voice had taken on a lilting quality, but she could tell it wasn’t meant to put her at ease. It was a dare.

“I’m not into exhibitionism, jerk.”

They were almost near the point of no return in the exit lane. “Nor am I.”

“Umm …” Maybe this was the point in their
relationship
where she should really consider protective measures, but she didn’t really want to. She wanted to know what he had in mind for her, and whatever it was, she was about eighty percent sure she’d enjoy it. She didn’t get the vibe that he’d hurt her; at least, not in a way she didn’t like. Still, she’d known him a day. They should probably slow things down a bit. “Maybe you can just drop me off at a gas station and I’ll make my way back to the airport on my own.”

“Are you insane?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

He growled and wrenched the steering wheel left, putting them back into the flow of traffic. “Behave.”

She harrumphed.

“I’m trying to be a nice guy for you, which is quite contrary to my nature, Marion. I’m really trying, but you seem to enjoy being terrible.”

“Terrible? Me? You’re the guy who just admitted in pretty plain language that he’s a misanthrope.”

“More like a lone wolf,” he mumbled.

“What? What’s that about a wolf? Are you going to tell me your true nature is furry and growls a lot? That would explain some things, wild man.” She slapped her hands over her mouth to stifle the laugh that worked its way up her gullet. Laughing probably wouldn’t help the situation. Wait—maybe
she
was the one who was a little nuts.

She pondered that a moment while rubbing her chin. Was she?

Yeah, probably. That shouldn’t have been a revelation.

They rode in silence for a while, and the next time she looked at Charles, his jaw was tight, his brow furrowed.

She stared out her window, watching the countryside fly by. Seemed like a nice place, what she’d seen of it so far. It was a comfortable sort of place, imparting her with a feeling she couldn’t describe. Usually she visited places and felt a sense of ambivalence because she felt no attachment to them. This place, though, seemed different. The Southern charm had smacked her on the nose the moment she’d stepped off that tin can of a plane back at RDU. The lilting accents from even the smallest of the children had made her grin as they passed a coffee stand. And what had made her smile outright was seeing a young man, college age probably, waiting at his gate wearing a fine navy blue pea coat, madras plaid shorts, and leather flip-flops. At first, the seeming lack of coordination had made her cock her head and squint, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made.

He was dressed for where he was going, rather than where he was. Southerners were a sensible bunch.

The next time she glanced over at Charles, his expression had relaxed and his shoulders had fallen back into their former low position.

Good. He couldn’t have been too frustrated, then. She laid her head against the window and closed her eyes, thinking it’d be just for a moment. Just long enough that things didn’t look so fuzzy.

But when she opened them again, they were there.

He hated to wake her, and it wasn’t just because she looked like an angel with her lips slightly parted, eyelids fluttering as if she were watching some movie play behind her eyelids. He needed a moment to not only prepare himself for what was about to be the end of a short, sweet affair he’d never known he wanted so much, but also to warn the people inside the house that little Marion was out of the loop. Did he have five more minutes? Time for more kisses, more gentle caresses?

He didn’t care that he’d lied. Now that they’d arrived, the only apprehension he felt was at the fact that in a matter of a day or two, he’d be cut off from any sort of intimacy with the woman who was born to be his. He’d committed far worse sins in the past than telling little white lies.

No, he didn’t have five minutes.

He sighed. The curtains in the small house’s living room shifted and a hand withdrew from the window. Someone was awake and had seen them. He’d create even more suspicion if he dallied. He was a lot of things, but tentative generally wasn’t one of them.

Managing not to jar her, he slipped from the driver’s seat onto the gravel driveway beside Ariel’s sedan, and pushed the door closed without slamming it. He climbed the porch stairs, turning back to look into the SUV, and found Marion’s head still propped against the window.

When he tried the door, it was unlocked. He stepped into the cozy living room of the tiny house to find a shirtless Claude sitting in the middle of the sofa, warming his fingers around a coffee mug. His dark, curly hair stood up at odd angles around his head, and his violet eyes were bleary. Perhaps violet wasn’t quite accurate. Sometimes his eyes were as blue as Pop’s, and other times they were cherry red. The red was a gift from his
maman
. Depending on what magic was closest to the surface, they took on the hue of one parent or the other—or the appearance of both at once.

Judging by the wadded-up covers around him, his low-slung pajama pants, and bare feet, he’d spent the night.

If Pop were to find out, he’d shit brimstone. John, Ariel, and Clarissa were supposed to be off-limits to them, but Claude and Charles had sort of a tacit understanding that this was the closest thing to family they had. Yes, being there was a risky thing for them and their hosts, but they tried to take precautions as much as they could.

“Where is everyone?” he asked his big brother, leaving the front door open and pulling the storm door.

Claude set down his coffee, stretched his arms high over his head, and grimaced at the click of his vertebrae. Cambions were practically indestructible, so if there was anything wrong with Claude’s back, it was a temporary discomfort likely caused by Clarissa’s geriatric sofa.

Charles squinted at the old floral-print thing and rubbed his chin.
I should buy her a new one.

“Ariel’s getting ready for work,” Claude said, crooking a thumb toward the former sharecropper house’s sole bathroom. “John is still asleep. Clarissa is—”

“Right here.”

Clarissa strode from the kitchen, wiping one hand on the bib of an apron that read,
Brunettes do it better!
and handed Charles a cup of coffee.

The apron had been funnier a year ago when her hair had been gray, but she’d gotten into that tussle with Pop last year. He’d meant to make Clarissa his whore and gave her some years back in preparation for taking her, but she’d had a trick up her sleeve.

Well, a borrowed athame—a ceremonial knife—actually. He’d let her off the hook after she’d freed him from his stony state, but she got to keep the youth.

Charles closed his eyes and inhaled the heady aroma of his java before taking one small but satisfying sip. The woman made a damn good cup of coffee.

“Any news?” she asked, wringing the bottom hem of the apron between her hands and shifting her weight from one house shoe to the other.

Charles chuckled. Clarissa was a creature of habit. Although on the outside, the pretty woman didn’t look much older than thirty, she’d still kept up most of her old habits from before Pop had given her back thirty-some years. When she did die, she’d probably be the patron saint of muumuus. They all thought it was hilarious, but the good news was Ariel had talked her grandmother into upgrading her hairstyle from the tight granny curls she’d gotten used to. She’d said the grandmother looked like a Monchichi, minus the freckles. Clarissa had grumbled a lot about it, but the next time she went to the salon, she’d come back with a simple, short bob.

Clarissa’s expression was so expectant—so anxious for a woman renowned for her calm as much as for her pies—that Charles hated to leave her on the hook. But he had to make her understand that—

The door creaked open and Marion, cringing, scanned the room. “Hello, hi, how are ya? Sorry, I should have gone at the airport, but I’ve really gotta go. Where’s your bathroom?” Her grin was so tenuous that under different circumstances, Charles would have laughed.

Clarissa, seemingly stupefied, stared at the younger woman agog, as still as the statue she’d once turned Pop into.

“Clarissa?” Claude said from the couch.

She looked toward him, apparently unseeing for a moment, and then her head swiveled back to her granddaughter.

She knew. There was no way she couldn’t have known.

Charles whispered, “May our guest use the restroom?”

Clarissa’s mouth opened, closed, and she shook herself like a dog ridding itself of water before spinning on the heel of her slipper and moving around the coffee table toward the hallway.

She banged on the door. “Ariel! Ariel, come out, girl. You gotta come out.”

“If you’ve gotta pee, go ahead,” Ariel called out from the shower.

A door in the hallway creaked, and from John’s deep voice came, “What’s wrong?”

Charles heard her whispered response. “It’s her. Marion.”

Marion quirked up an eyebrow. Clarissa’s behavior would have certainly seemed odd to her.

John didn’t respond, as anything he would have said could have given his complicity away, but the next thing Charles saw was his blond-haired brother at the end of the hallway, letting himself into the bathroom. “Sweet pea?” he queried inside before he closed the door.

“Sorry,” Claude said. He stood and extended a hand to Marion. “I’m Claude.”

Her gaze flitted down his naked chest, all the way to his waist, before she accepted his hand.

The growl that escaped Charles’s throat didn’t register to his ears until after his big brother cast him a red stare.

“Marion Wilder,” she said, bouncing a bit.

The shower water turned off, Clarissa returned to the living room, wrenching her apron hem again, and a moment later John hustled a towel-clad Ariel out of the bathroom. Ariel tried to crane her neck to see, but John kept her moving.

“Go for it,” Charles said, bobbing his head toward the open door. “Try not to slip on the wet floor I’m sure Ariel has—”

She shut the door and locked it before he could get the word “left” out.

John joined the trio in the living room, trying for nonchalance on his face and failing.

“Hey, you want to put on a shirt?” Charles asked Claude, but it came out sounding more like an order than a suggestion.

Claude looked down at his naked chest and rolled his eyes when he looked up again. “Mind your tone.” He clamped his lips, but he wasn’t done yet.
John and I have held our tongues, but I suspect you’ve got about ten minutes before the Mortons go apeshit on you. Do you really want to be on my bad side?

Hell no, he didn’t. He might need Claude to act as a human shield. Or half-human. Or, well,
whatever
he was. They weren’t certain whether Claude’s mother Mathilde qualified as human when she was alive.
Homo sapiens
, yes, but beyond that they couldn’t speculate.

Charles had suggested that one day, just for shits and giggles, they all do one of those ancestry DNA tests just to see what the lab spit out, and the mere suggestion had made Clarissa launch into a stream of expletives Charles hadn’t heard the likes of since 1973.

“Well, come on, aren’t you curious what they’d find? Don’t you want to know how similar angels and demons are to humans?” he’d asked.

She’d narrowed her eyes at him and responded, “Do you value your life at all? Sometimes I doubt it, Charles.”

He’d shrugged. At the moment, he actually hadn’t cared so much about his livelihood. He’d been entrenched in a fit of “woe is me” due to having recently coming off the sauce.

Now Clarissa sidled up close, her eyes wide and excitement glowing on her face. “Where’d you find her?”

“Tracked her through Montana into Idaho. She’s a trucker.”

She clapped and howled. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Trucker was, after all, the nickname Pop called Charles when he couldn’t remember his real name. Charles suspected he remembered perfectly goddamned fine, being the supernatural know-it-all he was created to be, but calling his children by their cambion designations seemed to give him a special sort of thrill, a sense of power. To Pop, names held power, so it made sense he regularly sought to strip them away. Scout. Trucker. Hitch. The girls didn’t get off much better, what few Charles knew personally.

“Wow, I can hardly believe it. Little thing like her,” Clarissa said.

Oh, she could believe it just fine. That was evident from the twinkle in her eye and the proud grin she wore. Any girl of Clarissa Morton’s was going to be chock full of surprises. Charles knew that already—that he hadn’t even begun to peel back Marion’s layers.