Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (70 page)

She turned her left wrist over, stared at her watch face, and cringed. She needed to call her boss at Rooster’s. Yesterday, she’d managed a pretty convincing fake cough that had prompted the guy to tell her to just stay home, but she wasn’t sure he’d be so accommodating for two days in a row. God forbid Barrett would have to tuck that greasy hair of his under a hat and man the fryer himself for another night.

The more she thought about it, the less going back to work at all appealed to her. Her apartment had been broken into, and whoever it was probably knew where she worked, too. She couldn’t afford to quit, but Clarissa would certainly put her up until she found a job nearer the coast. She’d be closer to her family, too.

Claude made an exhale that sounded like a cross between a sigh and a hiss. His external injuries may have been healing, but who knew what he looked like on the inside?

“You yelled at me about a hundred and fifty years ago because I wouldn’t stand by and let your slave master beat you.”

Her back stiffened and she caught her own indignant lips jutting out at the bottom of her periphery. Bullshit. She wouldn’t—

Claude’s expression was pained, and not just because he was struggling to sit up.

“I don’t know what compelled me to intervene,” he said. Sweat beaded on his brow as he straightened up and put his back against the headboard. He tucked the striped pillow behind his head. “No, that’s not true. Then, as now, I didn’t pay much attention to the plight of the mundanes around me, you know? My magic acted as blinders of a sort, and I minded my own business as much as I could. The first time I saw him hit you when you were hauling water, I did nothing. You were his property, according to the law. I’m not always so keen on the law, but being what I am, I tried not to raise unnecessary attention to myself or my mother. She had enough suspicion on her because she wasn’t discreet in her practicing.”

Ever
, from what Charles had insinuated. Charles had never met her in the flesh, but he
had
met her. Even in death, Mathilde Fortier was a force to be reckoned with. Charles had hinted in his pseudo-delirium that one day Gail would have a meddlesome banshee for a mother-in-law and that she should resign herself to it now.

Marion had punched him in the arm hard for that, but he wasn’t the slightest bit contrite.

Gail fidgeted with the corner of the bed sheet and refused to meet Claude’s gaze. “What about the second time?”

“The second time, I … I told my mother.”

“And?”

“And she said if it bothered me so much, then I should take care of it. And if I didn’t, she would. As I said, she wasn’t a discreet woman, so I immediately regretted telling her. I had to fix it myself, and fast, before she got a fool idea in her head to start conjuring up dark shit. She wasn’t so concerned about her soul, you know, because she’d struck that deal with Papa.”

“What kind of deal?”

He scoffed. “Maybe
deal
was the wrong word. It wasn’t a deal so much as an edict. She had power of her own, but courted more of it. She farmed it, and then stored it up like bullets in an arsenal. By the time she lured him to her trap, no supernatural being in a three-state area would go near her. When she trapped him, it was a do-it-or-else type of scenario. She would have killed him if he didn’t give her what she wanted.”

“Which was?”

He rolled his eyes, and judging by the ensuing groan, it wasn’t an easy action for him. “His seed. He got a son he didn’t want, and in exchange, she got to steer her eternal soul. That’s the way it works. You give a demon a child, and your soul is free.”

“That’s why you hate each other—because of your mother.”

“That and other reasons. Where Papa is concerned, there’s no shortage of reasons to dislike him. He’s just …
odieux
. Odious.”

Clarissa had said Gail should get used to the peppering of French, because even after all these years, it was the language Claude thought in. His English, however, was impeccable. He had no accent at all unless he stressed. He was obviously stressed.

“Anyhow, I didn’t want to fight your master with magic or any overt force whatsoever. Instead, I tried to appeal to him on a business level.”

“Meaning?”

“I offered to buy you.”

“
Buy
me?” Her voice had careened into one of Ellery’s stratospheric pitches, but who the fuck could blame her? She set her foot on the floor, posturing to stand, but he grabbed her wrist.

“Please,
chéri
. I just want to clear the air.”

She settled back onto her bottom, but her foot bobbed angrily against the bedside. “Go on.”

“The price he quoted for you was obscene. Not that you weren’t worth every penny and trillions more, but he knew the price he was quoting was one I couldn’t pay … at least, not yet. I don’t know what was going on in that house, whether he wanted you for—”

“Don’t say anything else.”

He raised one shaking hand and nodded. “After that, I truly considered handling the man the way my mother might have. Perhaps poisoning him, but then his bitch of a wife would have decided what happened to you. I didn’t want that. I had to wait, and get the money.”

“So you did buy me.”

“Took me about a year, and by then, he needed the money badly.” Claude chuckled briefly, then gasped from the probable pain of it.

“What did you do to him?”

“Wasn’t me, I swear. Karma. Sometimes it even works in the favor of sad sacks like me. I got you for half what he originally demanded, and used the savings to set you up in a little house near my mother. She kept an eye on you, best she could.”

“But … that wasn’t enough?”

Claude closed his eyes and gave his head a small shake. “You want to hear this now?”

No. She absolutely didn’t, because what if the story was worse than what her runaway imagination had been feeding her? Anxiety gnawed at her gut, and her foot tapped ever harder.

“Yes. Tell me the story.” She’d keep pretending to be brave around him, though she didn’t know how much longer she could keep it up.

Claude opened his eyes. “My mother often went into trances to communicate with spirits, and sometimes she couldn’t be pulled out until she was done conducting her business. I suspect my father had been counting on that and waiting for it. Had she been conscious at the time, he wouldn’t have gone near you.” He cringed and balled his hands into fists. “Laurette, I mean. He wouldn’t have gone near Laurette.”

She waved him on, but couldn’t help feeling slighted. Did he see them as the same person?

“She’d been recently ill and had been in bed sleeping it off. He skewered her with his sword. I walked in just after, and he was still there cleaning his blade. She didn’t feel a thing, but that didn’t make it any better, of course.”

Actually, knowing she hadn’t suffered relieved some of the weight on Gail’s chest. Laurette hadn’t been tortured, at least, though judging by the look on Claude’s face, he had been by the ordeal.

She took his hand and he relaxed it from the fist.

His whole body seemed to relax from that small touch, and hers along with it. The anxiety in the room was palpable, and likely because it was coming from both of them.

“Why did he do it?”

“By killing Laurette, he’d not only put me in check, but thumbed his nose at my mother.”

“How long were we—
you
—together before …” She swallowed and shifted her gaze from his hand in hers to his heavy-lidded eyes.

Bright blue. Not the red they’d been earlier when he’d been forcing his witch magic—his mother’s magic—to the surface to jumpstart his healing.

“Not nearly long enough,” he whispered. “Maybe six months before Papa got annoyed that I wasn’t working, wasn’t tainting souls for him. He was embarrassed enough as it was for me even having been born, but for me to turn my back on him?”

“Don’t you dare blame yourself for that.”

“I was born bad,
chéri
. I was
made
to be a vessel of magic, and with my parents being who they were, how could I have been anything but bad?”

Without thinking, she grabbed the flesh of his nearby forearm and gave it a hard pinch.

“Fuck!”

“Stop it,” she said, standing. “You’re looking for something to blame, and that’s fine. But don’t say you’re bad because you were born that way. We all have the ability to make choices. We have free will, every one of us. Your father chose to fall from grace. Your mother chose to court power. They could have both been good, but didn’t want to be. You’re not born inherently bad because your parents made choices not to be good. If you were bad, you wouldn’t have wanted to buy me.”

“How do you know I didn’t want a pretty slave?”

She wanted to punch him right in the forehead with her ring hand for playing devil’s advocate at time like this, but she lifted her thighs and sat on her hands to stifle the compulsion. “Because, like people around here keep saying, we’re stuck together in this stinking, tragic cycle of reincarnation because we can’t get our shit together. I want to know what it is we keep fucking up on, because five lives in a row of
are-you-fucking-kidding-me
is way too many. I was a good student. I learned my lessons in school the first time around, so I don’t like this idea of remedial education.”

“Here I was, thinking you actually liked me a little.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Shut up. You just
think
you know me based on who I was in my last life. I’m certain I’m not like her, your Laurette.”

He cringed again.

“See. I knew it. You don’t even have to tell me, and really, I don’t want to hear anything else about her.”

From what little bit she’d learned, Laurette had been sweet as sugar. Well, she must have lost that personality trait before her return. It obviously hadn’t served her so well the last time.

“But you’re going to have to give me some time to reconcile all this,” she said. “Charles says we’re eternally stuck with each other, but I don’t know you. I don’t know what having a soul mate is supposed to feel like.”

Well, she knew he could rock her world in fifteen minutes or less, but Earth-shattering orgasms did
not
equal a love match.

Could they take long road trips without ripping each other’s throats out? Could he eat all her experimental dishes and be tactful when he didn’t like them?

Would he defend her in front of her grandmother, or would he be like Shaun—failing at things and blaming Gail for them when she hadn’t even been involved?

Those were the things that mattered, not Fate. Fate was just a catalyst. It didn’t automatically grant them respect for each other.

“That’s fair.” He swallowed, and closed his eyes. “Hear this, though. I want this to be the last time, too. I’m not giving up because I’m tired of the chase, but because I believe you’re ready to help me set things right. Maybe we weren’t ready before, but we are now. You’ve got the power now.”

“Bullshit.”

“You don’t have to believe it,
ma reine
. I believe it. I
know
it. It’s my job to show you. It’s time you stopped hiding from yourself.”

“
Merde
.”

Claude had a throbbing head, burning skin, and a gnawing stomach, so the very last thing he wanted to endure at the moment was his mother’s heckling. Coming through the veil between the realms of the living and the dead wasn’t difficult for her, but it wasn’t something she could do frequently. The fact she was wasting a trip now didn’t bode well.

He turned his body ninety degrees to the right and hung his legs over the side of the bed. “What do you want?”

The apparition in the corner straightened her
tignon
and cleared her phosphorescent throat.

Great. She was making him wait, and that meant whatever came out of her mouth wouldn’t be especially flattering.

“You should be more gracious,” she said in that exquisite French she’d always clung to, and smoothed her hands over her skirts. Somewhere beneath those voluminous things, her legs moved. She must have crossed them. “I told you she was back so that Charles could seek her out, did I not?”

“Yes, you did. I—” He clamped his teeth and drew a deep breath through his nose. He couldn’t raise his voice. The last thing he needed was for all the upright members of the household at the moment to come running in with weapons at the ready. This was his business, between him and Maman.

He blew out the spent air and focused his stare on her red-brown eyes.

She blinked and drummed impatiently on the chair arms. He wasn’t going to let her amp him up. She probably wanted that—for him to show some fervor and passion when he had none to spare.

“I suspect you’ve been holding onto that information for, let’s count—oh, twenty-nine years. You knew she was here and nearby, even when Charles didn’t.”

She shrugged. “Maybe she’s not yours. Not your true love. Why
would
he have heard?”

“Bullshit. He
has
heard now. She’s been mine all along, but apparently someone, and I wonder whom, saw fit to pull some strings and keep the messengers of such information silent about it.”

She blinked again. “I wonder who would do such a thing.”

“Again, bullshit. It’s a scheme that has your taint all over it. You probably did it when you set her house on fire with her body in it. But what I don’t understand is why you’d do it. It’s like you get off on having me be miserable. Why did you go into a trance knowing—”

“
Stop
.” She slashed her hand through the air and suddenly, Claude had no words. She’d taken them—or had frozen his voice box, at least. Old trick, and one he was never prepared for.

She stood, and passed in front of him, swishing her long skirts against his legs as she walked. “I’m not at fault for what your father did. In fact, it had already been foretold, and I knew it.”

What?

Claude pounded the nightstand to get her attention and pointed to his throat. The fuck!

She gave her head a small shake and moved to the dresser. She skimmed her small fingers along the edge and stared into the mirror at her shimmering reflection. “Damn, I was a fine woman.”