Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (95 page)

Claude blew out a ragged exhale and relaxed onto his pillows.

Ellery pushed the dividing curtain open to reveal the second bed in the room. Claude saw that his roommate’s feet dangled over the footboard, and his right arm flopped over the rail.

Claude couldn’t see who he was, though, because Ellery hadn’t pushed the curtain back enough.

“Hey, you’re awake.” Clarissa had poked her head into the room and looked from Claude to the medical associates flitting about. “Can I come in?”

“Please do.”

She stepped in and closed the door. The canvas tote she set onto the side chair was full to bursting, and although Claude was curious about what could be in it, she ignored it for the time being. “Gail tell you I carved out a little parcel of land for you?” Wringing her hands, she paced by the counter.

“He’s been awake for ten minutes,” Gail said. “All we’ve managed to clear up is that we like messes.”

“And thus each other,” Claude added.

“Good, good,” Clarissa said, still pacing.

Clarissa was a woman blessed with nerves of steel, so if she was pacing, something was seriously stuck in her craw.

“Well, it’s there if you’d like to build. I wish you would. Your brothers would like it. And we take care of our own.”

“I’m glad to belong.”

“And you’ll need people around to watch all those kids you’re going to have. Agatha’s already taking up knitting just in case.”

Kids? He cut his gaze down to Gail, but her expression was serene rather than appalled. He gave her a little squeeze, and she squeezed back an
okay
.

“Agatha’s a nutball,” Ellery muttered, scribbling on the stranger’s chart, but her smile indicated just how she felt about that ancestral oddity.

“I’ll call John and Charles and let them know you’re awake. Julia will probably want to pop over, too.” Clarissa moved back toward her tote bag as if she’d finally remembered she’d brought it.

“Thank you for that,” he said before she could flee the room. “But, tell me, what’s got you so nervous?”

She froze with one hand on the bag straps. “I’m not nervous.”

“You’re a ball of nerves. I’ve never seen you so agitated, and I know now that elves don’t get antsy unless things are bad. What’s up? Please don’t tell me that we didn’t really put Ross down and that he’s still out there being a devious little shit.”

“No, no. You got him. Mark made sure of it.” She sighed, and let the handle fall. Spinning on her heels, she looked to Ellery. “Pull that curtain back the rest of the way, will you?”

Ellery waited with one hand on the curtain edge. “He’s out cold, and we don’t know if he’ll ever wake up.”

The curtains whirred on the track, and it took a moment for Claude’s brain to make sense of what his eyes could see.

Yellow-blond hair obscured his eyes and a layer of scruff had grown on his usually smooth chin, but there was no doubting who that was.

Fallen angels didn’t sleep, so what the fuck was wrong with Papa? He wasn’t dead. His chest rose and fell with each breath, but his skin bore a sickly pallor, and even with his feet dangling over the end of the bed, he looked smaller than usual. Frail.

“I’m not convinced what’s wrong with him is medical,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “He’s got all the right organs and in the right places, but they don’t function quite like ours.”

“For people like him, they’re usually just decorations.”

“Well, he’s using them. I think. Look I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t wake up, but he just won’t.”

“What’s wrong with him isn’t medical. It’s supernatural.”

“Do you know how to wake him up?”

Claude pushed one shoulder up into his best approximation of a shrug. “When I’m on my feet again, I have some things I could try. With some help.” He chafed his right hand down Gail’s back, and she nodded.

“Happy to help.”

“But what’s got you so antsy, Clarissa?”

“You know, I’m on his paperwork as next of kin?” Her laugh was forced, bordering on crazed. “He changed all his insurance policies three years ago and added me as a person who could make decisions about him. He must have known there’d be no plug to pull if it came down to this. You can’t pull a plug on someone who can’t die unless he’s been smote.”

“I imagine he didn’t trust anyone else. He’s an enigmatic man.”

“Or maybe he just wants to drive me crazy, even from a coma. I can’t go anydamnwhere. I have to sit in this hospital and make sure anyone who comes in this room has already been exposed to our world.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“His personal effects. You know he wears a size seventeen shoe? Custom.”

Claude couldn’t help but to laugh. It hurt like a motherfucker, but he laughed.

Gail laughed, too.

“It’s not funny.” Clarissa pouted and fished her phone from the bag.

“Why don’t you go grab yourself a few hours of sleep? We’ll hold down the fort in here for a while.”

Clarissa’s thumb froze over the keypad, and her mouth opened as if she were going to argue, but then her right eye twitched.

“Go to my apartment and take a nap. My keys are the nurse’s station. Come on.” Ellery waved Clarissa toward the door.

After a few seconds, Clarissa sighed and joined her, leaving the bag. “Just a few hours.”

The doctor followed them out.

Claude waved the door shut, pulled the curtain closed between his bed and his father’s, and dimmed the lights.

Gail pressed the bed button to lower the head a bit, and maneuvered herself under the covers with him.

“You’re warm,” she said, snuggling closer.

“Better than the alternative.”

“Loads better. I don’t know if I ever said it before, but, thank you for holding out for me—waiting for me.”

“I’d do it again and again. I do wish you knew your own worth,
ma reine
.”

“I’m learning. With help.”

She pressed the ring into his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Fix it so it never comes off again.”

“I’ll try. My mother did it the first time.” He kissed the top of her head, and skimmed his lips over her messy hair. He loved every lump, gnarl, and tangle. He loved that she didn’t try to hide them from him. Like he’d said before, they were messy.

And perfectly matched.

Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural coastal North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range with her family. She writes sassy contemporary and quirky paranormal romances set in her home state.

She’s hard at work writing other stories set in the same world as the Sons of Gulielmus series. Catch up on other stories in the collection in the following order:
A Demon in Waiting
,
A Demoness Matched
(
Melt My Heart
anthology), and
A Demon in Love
.

See Holley’s complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website,
http://www.holleytrent.com
. When she’s not on deadline, she boldly tweets under the handle @holleytrent.

Avon, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2014 by Holley Trent.
All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Crimson Romance

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

www.crimsonromance.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-8790-6

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8790-0

eISBN: 1-4405-8791-4

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8791-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Cover art © 123RF/Vioral Sima; iStockphoto.com/jiexaa; iStockphoto.com/Pampalini; iStockphoto.com/Gilmanshin

1. Title Page
   
2. Copyright Page
   
3. CHAPTER ONE
   
4. CHAPTER TWO
   
5. CHAPTER THREE
   
6. CHAPTER FOUR
   
7. CHAPTER FIVE
   
8. CHAPTER SIX
   
9. CHAPTER SEVEN
   
10. About the Author
    

The weatherman had wished for a white Christmas, and the asshole had gotten it, all right.

“Hope his junk falls off.” Mark Mayer pulled his cap down over his eyes and burrowed his hands in his pockets as a freezing wind from the Appalachian blizzard passed through him. He groaned. Angels didn’t feel pain, and now that he technically wasn’t one, Mark was being introduced to it in new and exciting ways every day. The damnable snow had to be part of his punishment for choosing to fall. He’d always thought snow was pretty before, but that was when he was still sipping the angelic Kool-Aid. And before he had functioning boy-parts that shrank painfully with each frigid gust through his jeans.

Freezing balls or not, he wouldn’t change a thing … except maybe falling sooner. He wouldn’t be trying to coax the woman whom he hoped was the love of his life out of the mountain woods if he’d manned up six months ago.

“Ah. There she is.” At the sight of a swishing, matted tail, he climbed up onto a short rock ledge and peered into the small cave atop it.

The wolf, with fangs bared and an unholy growl, poked its head out of the small cave it’d taken for cover. Mark put his hands up in the universal gesture of
I come in peace
and made soothing shushing noises at the animal. Pathetic beast. Her fur was matted and ribs visible beneath her fatless skin. She’d once been a beauty, both on four legs and two.

“Come on, Sweetie,” he said and hoped she recognized her own name, for that’s what it was. It wasn’t a term of endearment, though she was dear to him indeed. Her birth certificate read “Sweetie Evelyn Wolff,” and he knew this because in his months of transition after his fall, he’d had plenty of time to learn all about his werewolf.

Or at least, he hoped she’d be his. “No” seemed to be her favorite word when it came to mates, and she’d likely reject him just like all the rest.

She canted her head to the side and panted breathlessly. Her confusion and fear played across her canine face, but she knew him. Somewhere in that cluttered brain, there had to be a memory of him. As her friend, he’d held her and soothed her for so many hours before she’d walked down this feral path. His empty arms ached at the memory.

“That’s right, Sweetie.” He took a cautious step closer, never taking his eyes from her. “It’s me. Mark. You like me, don’t you? The lady inside you recognizes me. Tell my friend I’d like to say
hello
.”

All he needed was to get near the frightened wolf, and his touch would do the rest. Their energy had always been compatible, and though his power was greatly diminished now, he hoped he could still be her balm. His healing angel energy had kept her beast at bay in the months leading up to her wolf mania, but those were only quick fixes. Treatment, not a cure. The cure was taking a mate, but she wouldn’t.

She’d always been stubborn.

For more than a year before she’d been overcome by her wolf, he’d been her friend as well as her sometime-partner-in-crime. They’d shared a motley crew of friends and acquaintances comprised of part-demons, demigods, witches, and other sorts of supernatural delinquents. He’d been assigned to protect one of them—Ariel Tate—and Sweetie had been taken in by them, in a way.

Most folks probably didn’t expect to find an entire community of supernaturals living in the Eastern North Carolina boondocks, but Clarissa Morton fostered one there on her land. Not only was she Ariel’s grandmother, but a sort of collector of the paranormal huddled masses. When Sweetie had run from her pack to escape their increasing pressure to take a mate, Clarissa had put her up and Mortonville had gained a ferocious defender in this ray of sunshine that sometimes went furry.