Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (89 page)

Wolves.

Gail ground her palms against her eyes and sighed. “Shaun, get your notary and give me the cash.”

“You used to be sweet back in the day.” He waved the notary over.

Grinding her teeth, Gail pushed both eyebrows up at him and let them fall quickly. “Mm-hmm.” Oh, he had no idea how sweet she used to be. Saint Laurette. Claude’s
sweet
Laurette.

Well, Gail wasn’t sweet anymore, and she was just fine with that. She’d turn in her Southern girl membership card if she had to, because she wasn’t even going to pretend unless she felt like it.

“I got you a cashier’s check. Is that okay?” Shaun patted his blazer pocket.

“As long as it’s drawn from a real bank.”

“Oh, come on. The judge agreed that was just a mistake last time. Bygones?”

Right, a
mistake
. She wondered now if the judge was in Shaun’s coven. There was no easy way of finding out unless she had a friend who knew a friend of someone in that particular gathering. She didn’t think she did. Her friends tended to be squeaky clean. Well, her
witch
friends.

As if on cue, Scott turned up his music, and it was some loud, discordant early seventies rock Claude might have enjoyed.

She barely squashed the compulsion to turn toward his Jeep. She didn’t want to give him away. By now, Shaun had to know they were acquaintances at the very least, maybe more depending on how much that mouthy wolf had told Ross. Shaun was going to pretend otherwise, though. He had to. His curiosity about the ring on her left hand was obvious, however. His gaze kept falling to it, and she had to admit it was a stunning piece of jewelry. Certainly not one she would have been able to purchase for herself.

Shaun handed over the envelope, and Gail checked to make sure there were enough zeroes in it before tossing it into her purse. She signed the title and handed it over along with the key.

“You’ll need to get gas,” she said, already walking toward the Datsun. “I ran it down to fumes for you.”

She nearly walked right into him because he’d skirted around her so quickly. That used-to-be-charming grin was back, and that wild magic flared up again, putting Gail on her guard and a bit of electricity within her reach.

“Give me a call, huh?” he said. “We can meet up for drinks or something. I don’t hear anything about you through the grapevine anymore.”

“I like it that way.” She ducked around him and had made it almost to the passenger-side door when Shaun grabbed her right wrist.

She nearly snapped it in two while snatching it back from him.

“What part of
don’t touch
do you not get? It’s a simple concept taught in most kindergartens. Put your hands on me again, and I will—”

“What, call the cops?” He chuckled.

Yeah, right. Fat lot of good that would do her. “Nope.” She shook her head hard, and channeled a bit of Ellery. With a wide grin, she said in a singsong voice, “I’ll kick your junk so far up your body that you’ll have to shave your pubes from your chin every morning.”

This time when his eyes widened, she could tell he wasn’t acting. Her words had genuinely startled him, and then judging by the way his eyes narrowed immediately after that, they’d also pissed him off.

Intentionally irritating him hadn’t been on her agenda. Before, she’d just hoped she could get through the meet-up without throwing up, but the second he’d hopped out of that truck, the indignation had simmered beneath her skin and waited for an opportunity to erupt. She was so fucking overdue for an eruption.

Scott stabbed his seatbelt release and pushed his door open. “Bud, the nice lady was real clear she don’t want to be touched. You need some help understanding?”

“Who are you, exactly?”

Scott scoffed. “None of ya business. Damn, you a smarmy little shit, ain’t ya? I do declare …” He slammed the door and turned the key in the ignition. “Gail, you coming or you walking? There’s a race coming on tonight I want to see.”

She got in the car and rolled the passenger-side window down just a hair to say to Shaun, “Lose my numbers and stay away from my family.”

Something not-so-innocent flitted in Shaun’s eyes, and Gail amended, “You know. Don’t call my friends. Don’t call my grandmother to see if I’m well, okay? There’s no need for you to worry about me. At all.”

She rolled the window up, and didn’t care that Shaun didn’t move as Scott pulled out of the spot. Maybe a little part of her would revel a bit in him having his loafers ran over.

Finally, she allowed herself a deep breath, but it didn’t seem like enough. Her chest was tight, and now that all the adrenaline was wearing off from the encounter, she wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. Maybe she’d made things worse for all of them. She hadn’t been able to help herself.

She pulled up her text message screen, and it took her three tries to get one simple little word out.

Done
.

Claude responded in under ten seconds.
You okay, chéri?

Scott turned onto the main road and put his own phone to his ear.

Gail checked the rearview mirror on her side. Shaun was leaning into the trunk of the convertible. Did he think she’d planted a bomb in it or something?

I was okay, but I’m not now.

They didn’t get five miles before Claude called Scott and demanded he pass Gail off to him. The plan had been to get farther outside the city limits—off Shaun’s turf—before she switched vehicles, but he could sense her stress and wanted to do what he could to relieve it.

Even if it was just a hug. There was no magic required for that.

Gail climbed up into the Jeep, trembling, and Claude pulled her across the bench as close to him as he could and put his arm around her shoulders.

They didn’t speak, because he suspected she wouldn’t want to. She’d likely dusted up some unresolved feelings during the meeting and didn’t know how to process them.

He couldn’t help with that, though if he could take all that regret away from her, he would.

His phone rang. He slid his thumb across the screen and put Scott on speaker. “Yes?”

“Hey. Ben’s got a good tail on Shaun. The lady he was with parted ways and headed downtown. Looks like Shaun’s heading toward I-85. We’ll check in when we find anything out. Don’t wait up. Might be a while. Once we sniff out a lead, we keep following it until there ain’t nothing left to uncover.”

“Do what you must.”

Claude ended the call and stuffed his phone into his shirt pocket. Once he was out of the congested Triangle, he settled in at a comfortable speed heading toward the coast and stole a glance at Gail.

She was already asleep, or at least pretending to be. She either needed the sleep or needed for her thoughts to be her own for the moment, so he let just drove and kept his words to himself.

• • •

Claude pulled Gail through the front door of Clarissa’s house, and gave Ellery a nod in greeting.

She opened her mouth to say something, but then took one look at Gail, and clamped her lips.

“Who all is here?” he asked.

“Clarissa’s here. Last time I saw her, she and your father were going at it about Kelly, and each of them were trying to have the last word. They’re probably still out back arguing. Mark’s in the kitchen. Agatha’s still at work. Everyone else is at home, waiting on information from you.”

“Well, they’ll be waiting for a while. Scott and Ben will let us know when they hear anything.”

She nodded and fiddled with the remote control in her hands. “Gail, I locked Candy Corn inside Claude’s room. She and Pumpkin Pie got their fur twisted over a mouse. They needed a time-out.”

Gail sighed. “That cat is mental.”

Claude pulled her on, and had gotten her as far as the stairwell when Mark poked his head through the kitchen door.

“Hey,” he said. He nudged his horn-rimmed glasses up her nose and wrung the bottom of his plaid shirt. “You saw Scott and Ben, huh? Did they tell you how Sweetie was?”

“I—”

He shook his head. “Gail cringed. I saw her, so just tell me whatever it is.”

“It’s … not great.”

Mark gently thumped the door molding with his fist, and uttered, “Damn. I told her not to wait so long. She’s so picky.”

“No pickier than her brother,” Gail said, sounding slightly chagrined. “Why was it okay for him to go practically feral, but not her? It’s her choice not to take a wolf mate.”

“Yes, it’s her choice.” Mark seemed completely unbothered by the edge in Gail’s voice, but then again, he’d been working with Agatha for ages. A bit of feminine snark was probably par for the course for him. “But she knows what she is, and she’s known since she was a child that this day would come. They’re trained to start looking early. You can’t buck biology.”

“Says the angel who can shape-shift at will.”

“That’s different. Besides, I’m not bound by laws of science. My issues are …” He pushed off the door frame he’d been holding up and walked toward the kitchen.

“Your issues are
what
?” Gail called after him.

Claude didn’t think he was going to answer. Plates clattered in the cabinet as Mark pulled down a dish. He slammed the cabinet door. “Different,” he answered. “Just different.”

Claude pulled Gail onward up the stairs. He knew that Mark was like Papa in many ways. Many of their abilities on Earth were possible because of choices they’d made. Papa had chosen to fall, and perverted his heavenly gift of providing love and comfort into baser things: lust and self-preservation. Mark hadn’t fallen. He’d had no
desire
to fall, but he enjoyed being amongst mankind perhaps a bit more than he should.

And anyone with eyes would know that one particular member of mankind aroused his attention more than others. He loved Sweetie, and not in the way angels are supposed to love the people they’re charged to protect. He’d never lead her on, though. He wouldn’t flirt back because he knew he couldn’t have her.

Just once, Claude wanted someone he knew to experience a simple love. Love that didn’t start with upheaval or tragedy. Love that wasn’t forbidden. Who’d decided that love was only for certain people, anyway?

Candy Corn darted out of his room when he pushed the door open, and he immediately closed and locked it behind her. She could go terrorize Pumpkin Pie for a while. He was long overdue to utilize his own bed for a while without a furry plus-one.

He made Gail sit on the bed, and knelt next to the nightstand to dig through his bag. He knew just the thing to pick up her mood. He’d wanted to share this with her for a while, in fact, but simply hadn’t had the opportunity. There was also the slight fear she wouldn’t be interested in what he had to show her.

He pulled out his laptop and pushed the power button before taking the seat beside her.

“I always keep my promises,” he said when her brows knit at him. He clicked through the menu hierarchy, entered his password, and opened the encrypted documents folder.

“What’s that?” she asked quietly.

“This is where I keep all the information I don’t want anyone accidentally stumbling into. It’s private, so no one’s ever seen it all but me. There are photos, legal documents, client information, and all kinds of stuff. I even have some scans of my mother’s old books and her handwritten notes. My journal is in one of those folders, too.”

“You keep a journal?”

He’d had to. He’d needed a way to confess, and as he’d trusted no one in his early years as an incubus, he’d turned to his little leather book. Through the years, he’d filled enough little leather books to fill Clarissa’s linen closet.

“I don’t get to update it much nowadays, but yes. I have entries going back to my twenty-third birthday. I jotted down things that stood out to me, new people I encountered, spells that went badly. Things that … weighed heavy on me.”

The souls he’d marred.

He wished he could take it all back and give those women a second chance. Maybe they weren’t all good women, but if there were a few that would have been heaven-bound otherwise, he’d want them to go.

He’d spent years trying to figure out how to undo what he’d done. That was mentioned in some of those journal entries, too.

“It’s nice to have it all electronic now because I can just search the entire document for keywords if I need to refer back to something,” he said.

“You have everything in here? All those years?”

“No,
chéri
. It’s patchy—a work in progress. Whenever I get back to my cabin, I spend a few hours here and there scanning loose papers and organizing information. I’ll be happy when it’s all done.”

He set the computer onto her lap and tilted the screen to suit her height. “There you go.”

“W-what do you want me to do with it?” She tried to hand the computer back to him.

He nudged it to her and eased back farther onto the bed. He lay on his left side and heeled off his shoes. “Everything about me that matters is in that computer. If you idle too long and get logged out, the password is my mother’s name backward and your six-digit birthdate. I change it every three months or so, but I’ll let you know what it is whenever I do.” He closed his eyes. “The wedding pictures should be clearly marked. There’s a folder for Charles’s wedding, one for John’s, and one for Julia’s. Feel free to click around.”

“I…” Whatever she was going to say, she let fall off. She sighed.

He opened his eyes, and watched her shoulders relax and her head lower over the computer.

Good.

They both needed this now. She needed to know that his knowledge and experience—his control of his craft—had come at a cost. She needed to read about his missteps and his uncertainty as a young witch. He hadn’t always channeled his gifts with such masterful restraint.

There’d been days he’d failed and couldn’t fix the messes he’d made.

There were days he’d thought no one would ever want to love him again.

The best person for her to learn about him was him, and if he detached himself from the storytelling, she could process it all at her own speed. She could learn what she wanted and leave all the rest. It was up to her if she wanted to know it, whether it be now or in the future. She had to know he hadn’t been an angel in the past couple of centuries, but what she didn’t know was how much inner turmoil that had caused him.