Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (60 page)

He didn’t wait around for her to change her mind.

Letting a stranger follow her home probably wasn’t the safest thing Gail had done in her eleven years as a legal adult, but Claude had been right. She so rarely ever encountered natural-born witches outside of her small circle, and especially not male ones. He’d obviously had formal training of some sort for him to have been able to deflect her magic so easily. The last time she’d tried that little electric shock trick had been at a moment of true desperation. Her ex-husband had a temper when he drank, and he drank when he was frustrated. Toward the end, he’d seemed frustrated all the fucking time, and she’d gotten tired of cowering.

He’d advanced on her, barking about how nothing ever went right and how she needed to help him more. “That’s your job!” he kept screaming.

One day she’d snapped, and he hadn’t known what hit him. She’d drawn on all the “wild” magic she could grab and sent enough electricity at him that he’d wet his pants.

He’d passed out long enough for her to grab her vital records, pack a small bag, and flee their home.

She never told anyone except her sister, Ellery—who shared her witch predisposition as they’d inherited the trait from both sides of the family tree—what had happened. None of her friends would have believed it, anyway. She’d ended up telling them all a series of half-truths about the breakup—that she and Shaun were incompatible and she didn’t like the person she was around him. Hell. She couldn’t even remember much of the time they were together. It was all a fog with the occasional clearing of
why-did-I-marry-him?
confusion.

She cut her gaze to the rearview mirror and saw Claude following close to her bumper as she approached her apartment complex. She could still drive past, circle around, and stop at some well-lit gas station—tell him she’d changed her mind and that it’d be best if she went home alone.

“What to do?”

Sighing, she patted the center console blindly as she turned into the development and wrapped her fingers around her phone when she found it. “Call Ellery’s cell,” she told the phone, and slowed as she rounded the complex’s small pond.

She drummed her fingertips atop the steering wheel and drew her bottom lip between her teeth, watching him. He was looking down and to his right at something inside the Jeep, and she caught a glimpse of that perfect profile she’d been covertly eyeing for weeks. Yeah, she’d been looking, but that didn’t mean she’d been
interested
. She knew a hustler when she saw one, and saw men practice every night at the bar. Women fell hard for smooth-talking country boys. They always talked up how good they’d make a lady feel, how they’d take care of her and all that bullshit. And then after the wedding they showed their true colors. Little men got angry and took things out on their wives.

If she didn’t have such a strong yearning to talk about magic with someone who seemed to have a vastly different perception of it than she did, she’d ditch the bozo. The
beautiful
bozo with all that dark, curly hair and startling contrast: bright eyes, dark olive skin.

She bopped the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I bet he’s married.” She thought she’d been looking for a way out, but now she could blow steam from her ears. She could, too. It was one of her mostly useless witch tricks, and even that one she could only do a quarter of the times she tried.

Ellery answered. “Heifer, I just clocked in at the hospital and am shutting off my phone. What took you so long to check in?”

Gail blew a raspberry. “Heifer” and “Strumpet.” They’d learned those words from the Bible as children and somehow they’d become nicknames. They didn’t make a lick of sense, but neither did Gail or Ellery, usually.

Ellery, younger by not quite a year, had always been exceptionally paranoid, even for a witch. Apparently, she’d been that child who’d taken warnings about “stranger danger” to heart a bit too thoroughly. There was a long vetting process involved in gaining her confidence, and few people were up to the task. Checking in with her after work each night was more for Ellery’s peace of mind than Gail’s.

“Sorry. I got into a conversation with a guy in the parking lot at Rooster’s. He scared the shit out of me.” She turned right toward the newest building and scanned her mirror again. He was still there, following closely.

“Scared you how?”

“Well, he’d been eating there every night for the past few weeks. I didn’t notice at first because I don’t generally take orders out, but we got so backed up with one of the waitresses being out sick that I had to start clearing the counter. He came in every night when we opened and stayed until close. Never danced, never abandoned his table for more than a few minutes at a time. Spent a lot of time on his phone.”

“And he gave you the willies? Why? I thought you had a lot of repeat customers.”

“We do, but he was different.” She swung her car into its assigned space right beside the building’s path, motored down her window, and put her hand out to point to the visitor’s space on the other side of the lot. Claude nodded and backed his Jeep into it. Asshole. She hated people who could back into things. She couldn’t do that or parallel park, not even in her little convertible, and that thing was so low to the ground she felt a close, personal relationship with every rock she happened to drive over.

“Different how?” Ellery asked.

Gail put the window back up and killed the ignition. “For one thing, in a room filled with good ol’ boys, you’d notice the man who … well, isn’t one.”

“And?”

“Second, he seemed to have a purpose there. He wasn’t people-watching like some people come to do, and he never seemed like he was waiting for anyone. He was too comfortable. I started thinking maybe Shaun sent another one of those investigators out to watch me.”

“But that wouldn’t make any sense. The divorce is final now. It’s not like you have any new dirt on him, do you?”

“No, I don’t, and I’m legally gagged from speaking publicly about what I do know about that Ponzi scheme he tried before he took the city manager job, but that’s where my mind went. When it was time to close tonight and I’d walked out into the parking lot, the guy came out from the side of the building. I had my earbuds in as always, so I ignored him and walked faster, but I could hear his footsteps getting closer behind me.”

The knock on the window at Gail’s left made her startle and clutch her chest. She whipped her head around to see a grinning Claude holding up a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

She swallowed down her nerves and nodded at him. She mouthed, “It’s my sister. Give me a sec.”

He gave her a thumbs-up, walked to the building’s exterior stairway, and sat. He set the bottle between his sneaker-shod feet and wrested his own phone from his plaid shirt’s pocket. Looking at him now, she didn’t know how she could have thought he was dangerous. He seemed far too at ease with his circumstances, relaxed, as if he had nothing planned that would require his vigilance.

With the locked car door and a sidewalk between them, she could appreciate a bit more just how stupidly attractive he was. “Approachable handsomeness” would have been a good way to put it, even with his wrinkled clothes and untidy hair. It looked to have not seen a comb in a couple of days. The look suited him, though, as did the blue eyes. Genetics were such an odd thing. She wondered what else he had in the mix beyond Haitian.

“Gail, you there?” Ellery asked. She must have been near the nurse’s station now, because Gail could hear Ellery’s favorite coworker barking orders to some poor orderly in the background.

“I’m here. Look, I gotta go. He’s waiting on me.”

“Wait, wait, wait! Don’t you dare end this call and leave me on the lurch. You skipped from C all the way to Z, and I want you to go back and tell me all the letters in between.”

“You’re going to get in trouble. You should be working.”

“Manager’s not here yet, so spill it quick.”

“Okay, well, to make a long story short—” Ellery didn’t really need to know about that pitiful little scuffle in the parking lot. She’d make her big sister buy a Taser or something. Who was she kidding with that pepper spray? “He’s like us.”

“Meaning
what
? Lactose intolerant?”

“A witch, you strumpet.”

“Squash that noise. You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not. He’s waiting to get into my apartment now, and I’m going to go talk to him. I want to find out what he’s about.”

“No, no, no. Nope. We don’t do that. Send him away and tell him to come back another day when you have a chaperone.”

Gail laughed, and could imagine Ellery’s typically stoic face turning red with anger on the other end of the connection. The poor woman’s eyes must have been bulging. “Um, you know what? Not this time. You’re just going to have to trust me on this. I don’t think he’s going to hurt me, and I’m curious about him.”

“You don’t
think
he’s going to hurt you?” Ellery’s voice careened to a stratospheric pitch. If she kept that up, she’d pop a vocal cord.

“Hey, remember that I’m older than you by almost a year. I’m the trailblazer for doing stupid shit that you can learn from and not repeat. Or
do
repeat.”

“Don’t have sex with him.”

Gail laughed again, and stabbed her seatbelt release with her thumb. “Hey, if he’s single, which I doubt, I probably will. Wait. Let me take a picture of him.” She pressed her phone’s camera against the windshield, with Ellery yapping all the while, and sneaked a shot. She sent it to her sister and put the phone back to her ear.

“I can’t believe you’d be flippant about such a thing. Wait, what’s that? Did you send me something? Hold on.”

She must have pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen, because a moment later, she said, “He’s a bum! And I can’t even see his face. And do you not watch the news? Women get abducted every day, and some are never again found. I’d really like for you to not be included in that statistic, especially if you’re just trying to squelch curiosity. Meet him at a library or something one day if you insist on knowing what he’s about.”

Gail rubbed her chin and gave Claude a little wave when he looked up. He returned a lopsided grin that could have set her poly-cotton-blend panties ablaze under the right climate conditions.

“Sweet Jesus.” Where’d he been all her life? All the male witches she knew personally, and there were only a few, were plain, mousy accountant types. Claude looked like he couldn’t balance his own checkbook, much less file taxes. “That’s okay, I’ll do it for you,” she whispered.

“Gail? You’re getting weird over there. Don’t do this to me. Oh, God.” Ellery wheezed, sputtered, and coughed. “Oh, God. Where’s my inhaler?”

Claude stood and wedged his phone into his shirt pocket. Nice and tall. Gave her more to climb.

Screwing her eyes shut, she shook her head. All of a sudden, she felt like her brain had been swapped out for potted meat or scrapple or something.

This was just a meeting about witch stuff. That was all. “I’ll be careful. I promise. Good night, Ellery.”

Her sister blew an exaggerated sigh. “Call me during my break.”

“I will. If I’m not busy.”

“Busy doing what? Nope, never mind. Oh my God, my stomach is churning now. I might not make it through this shift.”

“You’re in a hospital. I’m almost positive you can find an antacid nearby. Bye.” Gail ended the call, grabbed her keys, and unlocked the door.

“Looked like your sister amuses you almost as much as my brothers amuse me,” Claude said. He swatted the dirt off his rear and bent for the gin bottle.

“Understatement. It’s in her nature to drive me a little nuts, so I’m rarely surprised at anything she says.” Gail crooked her thumb toward the staircase. “Third floor, rear. After you.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Don’t like having …” Whatever he was going to say fell off, and he fixed his stare on something to the right in the lot, way back toward the pond.

She tried to follow his gaze, but saw nothing beyond a couple of nocturnal squirrels streaking across a power line. She was as suspicious of the vicious little nut-tossers as anyone else when walking beneath trees, but they didn’t exactly put her onto high alert.

“Don’t like having what?” She gave his free hand a nudge, and he wrapped his hand around hers, seemingly reflexively.

When he moved his body around hers, blocking her view of the lot, and scanned the area, some of Ellery’s panic washed over her.

“Claude, what’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer for a long while, and when he turned, still holding her hand, his smile was grim. He slowly raised her hand to his lips.

At the press of his lips, tiny prickles danced up her arm, raising the fine hair there, and spread upward to her heart, her cheeks. Soon, every inch of her skin tingled from his attention, and it wasn’t panic she felt now, but calm.

She drew in a breath and leaned into him, pressing her forehead against his shoulder, and letting him wrap his arms around her as she swayed.

“What’d you do to me?”

“It’s one of my gifts. I can turn panic into pleasure. Helps when I need to diffuse a situation.”

“I think that was overkill.”

“I didn’t want you to be scared.”

“So, you
did
see something.”

“Don’t mind me. I was in the military for a while and saw some pretty nasty combat situations. I’m overly sensitive to sudden noises, and I’m sure it was just an animal. We’re rural enough for deer out here. Shall we go upstairs?”

She wasn’t sure if she really believed him—that his fright had been sparked by an overactive imagination—but if there really was something out there, they’d be better off indoors than out.

“Okay. Sure.” She didn’t bother teasing him with an
after you
this time, and just bounded up the stairs, her keys at the ready.

Claude was still on ground level by the time she made it up to the landing, and he was looking toward that sound he may or may not have heard again.

“Claude?”

“I’m coming.” He joined her at the landing and walked the remaining three flights of stairs at her side with his hand pressed to the small of her back.