Heaven's Key (Demon Hunter Book 1) (13 page)

Cain

I watched him as he told her he’d be right back. He rushed back towards the house, his blond hair glinting in the sun. It made me sick. I wondered what lie he had told her. He could add it to the many he had spouted since he’d met her, hypocrite.

I had positioned one of the large chairs so I could watch him enter the room. The door opened and his feet pounded across the marble. He really shouldn’t have worn those combat boots across such a beautiful expensive floor. It brought me great pleasure that he looked even worse than he did the last time I’d seen him. When he whipped off his sunglasses, his eyes were still swollen and now they were a blue and sickly green color.

“What the fuck do you want and why are you in my home?”

“Calm down, Cole. Your partner might hear you.”

“I should call her in and show her what an asshole you are.”

“You could, but then I could also tell her what you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be coy, brother. We are the same, you and I.”

“Fuck you; we’re nothing alike.”

“I see. Is that how you trick her so easily? You lie to yourself, so when you lie to her, it’s more believable?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had his arms crossed and his cherub lips were pulled tight across his face. I was enjoying his anger and I tasted a little fear… delicious.

“I will get to the point, then, since we don’t have much time. You are a Nephilim. You were sent to make sure Jael never agrees to open the gates of Heaven.”

Cole was a good actor, but he couldn’t fool me. He was scared. “I’m here because I’m her partner. She doesn’t need anyone to help her make the right decision, Cain. Jael knows what she wants.”

“Really? I know it’s going to be a hard road, but with you in my corner, I have no doubt my hunter will come to see me as the man she needs and, once she is mine, of course she’ll grant me my greatest wish.”

“I’m not in your corner.”

“No? You’ve just made her trust you. She cares for you. You’ve opened her heart once more. She doesn’t do that easily and when she finds out you’ve been lying to her all this time and the only creature who has told her the truth all along is the one from Hell, then she’ll come to me willingly and I will comfort her. She’ll see that I’m the man for her and it ‘ll be you who does that for me.”

“She’ll forgive me. I lied to her because I had to. She’ll see that.”

“She’ll see yet another creature who has lied to her. A man she trusted, who she has grown to care about, has lied about who he is. Has known she was the key to Heaven’s Gate before she did. Will you tell her that you’re under orders to stop her at all costs?”

Cole’s nostrils flared and the muscles in his neck tensed. His fists clenched and unclenched. He wanted to attack me, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t risk Jael coming in and seeing us fight. “I would never hurt her. She’s been hurt enough. I just need to keep her from your clutches and that job doesn’t seem too hard.”

“Who made you? A cherub, maybe? Something very low level. I can barely feel your power. You don’t have the juice to stop me. You’ve seen how she looks at me and you know she doesn’t think of me as a demon.”

“She knows what you are.”

“Maybe if you tell her now. Tell her that you never wanted to hunt; you just needed to make sure she did the right thing. According to Heaven. Or are you working for Heaven? Are you sure it wasn’t a demon who came to visit you? They seem to be trying harder than you to stop her from opening the front door to Heaven.”

He just stood there glaring at me. He wanted to hurt me. I could feel the rage coursing through his body. I had hit a nerve.

“You better get going, Cole. You wouldn’t want to have to explain why we’ve been having this secret meeting.” “When I tell her, she’ll understand. She’ll know I lied about what I am, but not about how much I care about her. I don’t even want this divine assignment anymore. I could never harm her.”

“See that you don’t, my brother, because if you do, you’ll regret it. I’ve had millennia to hone my skills of torture.”

I smiled at him. He couldn’t do a thing about the situation he was in and his frustration made me giddy. He took a few steps towards me. I could see his mind calculating the risk of attacking me. I didn’t move a muscle.

Cole punched the wall beside him, then stormed off. I watched as they took off down the driveway. I felt bad keeping this secret from Jael, but I would reveal it when the time was right. When I knew she would come to me for comfort.

I wandered around his home for a little while. Trophies of his accomplishments cluttered the whole house. How could one man be so full of himself? His smiling mug stared back at me from numerous walls.

Whatever angel came down to Earth and put the bun in his mother’s oven, he must have been fuller of himself than his own father. It never hurt to know your enemy better. Nephilim were rare, but there must have been a better specimen for the job than Cole.

I’d have to look into who had given him the task of getting to know my hunter. It gave me hope that they were worried enough to try and stop me. After the third room-turned-shrine to Cole, I had enough.

I had better things to do. I had a date to plan. I was going to make sure she had the time of her life.

Blood and Loss

Cassandra Myles Witch Series Volume 1

Electa Graham

Chapter 1

“Do you have to go?”

I sighed. That was the tenth time she asked me the same question. My roommate was driving me around the bend.

Lena flitted around like a hummingbird, going from one part of our tiny dorm room to the next, getting in my way as I tried to pack. She was lucky she was so cute or I would have throttled her a long time ago. Her brown eyes peeked out from behind her Cookie Monster blue mohawk. She hadn’t bothered to put it up this morning, so it was hanging down across her face.

When she caught me watching her, she drew her tiny bow lips into a pout and batted her long black eyelashes. I wondered how she could fit that huge personality into that tiny body. If you included her heavily studded leather belt and soaked her to the bone, she might have weighed a hundred pounds, and she was using every cute ounce of it to change my mind.

“You know I do. Mom and Dad have been nagging me about Thanksgiving for weeks. Until I graduate, they control the money. If I have no money, then who will buy you your drinks?”

“I buy sometimes, plus I provide all of this.” She gestured to her body. “What more could you want?”

I had to laugh. I often had to pay, but she always brought the entertainment factor. “You would be the perfect catch if you had a penis.”

She stuck out her tongue. Lena enjoyed flirting with me. She didn’t like to be labeled, but she dated more women than men. Lena joked all the time about us getting together. I knew she wasn’t serious. I wasn’t a lesbian and, even if I was, what Lena and I had went beyond sex. We were BFFs. Since we were the two most powerful witches at the academy, most people left us alone, but if you went against one, you had to deal with two.

For two years, we had shared the same tiny dorm room at the Halifax Academy of Magical Arts. From day one, we had hit it off and, when it was clear we would both be at the top of the class, we found it was nice to have someone you could talk to that wasn’t either jealous or afraid of you.

“See how funny you are. Life is going to be so boring with you gone.”

“Come with me. We can get into Dad’s homemade wine and torture my mother by making her think we’re a couple.” I wiggled my eyebrows in a suggestive manner.

Her eyes lit up at the thought of tormenting my mother. “Well, now, that sounds interesting, but Tony and Bern already hate me; if they think I am snogging their virginal daughter, it might tip the scales to homicide.”

I shook my head at her use of the word “snogging.” She never liked to use the same name for sex two times in a row. “Suit yourself. I’ll be back as soon as I can on Monday. I am sure my parents will be more than happy to get rid of me by then.”

Lena gave me her whiniest voice. “Please?”

“Okay, now you are just being annoying. It is three days. Stop the drama.” I didn’t believe for a minute that Lena wanted me to stay that badly. Now she just wanted to get her own way.

Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “Okay, will you at least bring me back a piece of pumpkin pie? Bern does make a mean pumpkin pie.”

“Maybe my mom doesn’t like you because you call her ‘Bern.’”

She snickered and did her best Bern impersonation. “It makes her eyes go all squirrelly and her lips disappear into that thin line.”

“You are evil.”

“Moi?” My roommate batted her long eyelashes at me.

“I’ll bring you pie.”

Lena reached up to give me a hug. She was a hair over five feet and I was a little over five feet, eight inches. Mom said we looked like Mutt and Jeff. I had to Google it to find out what she was talking about, but she was right. I also had long, blond curly hair and no tattoos, making us look like the Odd Couple; that reference I knew. I wasn’t the huggy type either, but Lena had been working on me. Apparently, I went all stiff when someone put their arms around me. She called me “repressed.”

“Promise me we’ll get super drunk next weekend. We will start two minutes after our last exam and we will not sober up until it’s time to receive our diplomas.”

“I promise. Morven has been riding my ass all semester. Once my practical is over, I never want to see that old bag again.”

“Amen. Hey, maybe the nun might actually pick up next weekend.”

“Don’t call me that.” She knew that nickname got under my skin.

“Cass, you have all these guys falling all over you and you have never shown any interest in any of them. I think maybe you are saving that sweet little cherry for yours truly.”

“Lena Celeste Lobenberg, that is over the line.” Lena liked to think she was shocking and told it like it was, but sometimes she went too far. “For one, I am not a virgin. Just because I don’t go home with everyone that wants me to doesn’t mean I am a nun.”

She looked sheepish. “I know, but we are only nineteen; we are supposed to be experimenting and sowing our wild oats.”

“Whom I sow my oats with is none of your business.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I think it’s a shame that I am the only one who gets to enjoy you running around in your tank top and sexy granny panties.”

“I think you’re the one who needs to get laid.”

I took my laundry bag and swung it over my shoulder. If I had to go home, the least my mother could do was wash my clothes. I took one last look around the room to find Lena had already moved on. She was bopping around our small room listening to her iPod like I had left already. I did wish she was coming with me. I really wanted a buffer between me and my parents. Lena might not be the best choice, though. Her favorite thing to do was tease my mother and when that got boring, she would start on my dad. Some things you had to face on your own. Looking back one last time, I shut the door and walked very slowly down to my ride.

Dad was waiting impatiently when I got downstairs. He glared at me as he stuffed my bags in the trunk. “Your mother is going to think something happened to us.” I rolled my eyes. Mom would think something happened to us no matter what time we arrived. She was a worrywart.

The ride home was an hour and we filled it mostly with awkward silence. My father and I had two genres of conversation: small talk and full-blown arguments. The small talk got us through the first set of lights after my dorm, so that left quiet or very loud. I watched the city give way to the suburbs and then to the country. My parents moved outside the city when I graduated high school. They wanted to start growing their own vegetables. They had become a cliché; college professors who were in the field of liberal arts and were all hippie dippy. I had never officially lived a day under the new roof. I visited when I had to, but being pent up with my parents in the middle of nowhere was my own personal hell.

Mom had never been too keen on me going to the Academy of Magical Arts. Her mother had been a very powerful psychic and it caused her no end of humiliation at school. She grew up in a small town where such things could still be considered the devil’s work. Teasing had been part of her daily life. She was a respected history professor. She didn’t believe I was evil, at least not for being a witch, but some things are too ingrained in our psyche to let go. So Mom gave in but didn’t give up. She just went underground. Her comments, like snipers, would pop out of nowhere every once in a while and score a direct hit.

I’d like to think that on some level, she was proud of me. I was graduating a year early. Lena was going to be valedictorian, but I was a close second. The ironic thing was I could sense my mother had potential to use magic too. In fact, whether she knew it or not, she used it when she cooked and gardened. Her intent guided the perfect pie or the juiciest tomato. I would never tell her that, or at least I would save it until I was really mad.

A witch who had the power to do more than make a few kitschy charms for tourists or make very vague statements about the future was rare. When it happened, the witch needed to have guidance and structure. When you could contact the dead, manipulate the elements, or had precognition, you needed to be told how to harness and control such talents. They could be dangerous to the witch and society.

The Academy and Witches Council filled that need. You couldn’t legally practice magic without a diploma from the academy and then you could only practice it within the guidelines set out by the council. The public felt better when those with power had rules they had to live by and the authority to enforce them. The vampires had a similar system. Anyone casting a bad light on their own would be dealt with. So the academy taught those with great power and those with little. Anyone with even the slightest gift could enter. Like most professions, there was room for a range of talent.

Vampires and witches might be powerful, but we were only a tiny part of the population. I didn’t want the rest of society to feel threatened. The Spanish Inquisition was not a part of history I wanted repeated. So we policed every infraction harshly, as did the vampires. A good PR person never hurt either. These were modern times and we used modern ways to keep our image polished to a perfect shine.

“Your mother is very excited about your visit, Cassie.” Oh! Goody. It was time for my don’t-hurt-your-mother’s-feelings lecture.

“Does that mean you’re not excited to see me?”

He winced. “Why must you always be a smart-ass?”

“I get it from my father.”

He grinned but kept looking at the road. That was what I liked about my dad; he could take a joke. He was turning fifty this year. It looked good on him. He was a health nut, so he stayed trim and his hair only had a fine spray of grey peppered through it. On the whole, he was a lot easier to take than Mom; she was just too emotional.

“I suppose you do get it from me. Just don’t tell your mother I admitted to it.” He turned to me to make sure I was paying attention. “My point is that you know how your mother is. She gets all these ideas in her head about how it is going to be when you come home, not taking into account reality, and then when things fall apart, so does she. I’m only asking for you to give me one night of peace with no fighting. You can break her heart tomorrow.”

“Yeah, ‘cause Mom never starts anything.”

The muscles in his jaw tightened. He was pissed already and we weren’t even home. “I never said your mother was a saint, Cassandra; I am just asking you to rise above and bite your tongue.”

“Can’t; my piercing is in the way.” I stuck my tongue out at him, displaying the shiny stud that pierced my tongue.

He didn’t say anything, just gripped the steering wheel a little harder. I actually hadn’t wanted the tongue piercing. Lena talked me into it. I had all these nightmares of infection and sepsis spreading to my brain. The look on my dad’s face was worth every minute. I thought about telling him about my other piercings, but I had to save something for Mom.

When we finally pulled into the driveway, Mom was outside, waving like a mad woman. Dad had not been exaggerating. In fact, I think he undersold her mood a little bit. I looked to my father for a little bit of help, but he was ignoring me. I couldn’t blame him. He probably had to put up with this mood for the past week.

Dad parked right in front of her, so I couldn’t avoid the hug. Her mouth was moving before I even opened my door. “You are an evil man.” He just smiled.

“Oh, I was worried. I thought you guys got lost or something.” She grappled on to me like I might float away.

Don’t use sarcasm as your first words. 1, 2, 3, ahhhhhh! “Hey, Mom. Long time, no see.”

“Oh, Cassie, we are going to have so much fun this weekend. I am so glad you decided to spend the holidays with us.”

Yeah, like I had a choice. “I wouldn’t miss Turkey Day with the family.” See, Dad, I can play nice.

“I wasn’t sure. You haven’t visited for so long.”

Come on; I am only human. “Well, you do come into the city every day, Mom. You can visit me, you know.”

This had to be a record; we hadn’t even left the driveway and we were already fighting. “Cassandra Elaine, you know how I feel about that school. You just don’t understand.” She looked hurt, but I knew better. A good defense was Mom’s motto and she was a champion at it.

“I understand that I am going to be a witch for the rest of my life, so you better get used to it.”

She started to tear up. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I caught my father glaring at me. “You can really be ugly sometimes, Cassandra.”

“Look, Mom, I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s just drop it.”

“I can’t. I know I should come see you, but those kinds of people always made me feel so uncomfortable.”

Count to ten. Go to my happy place. Did she not realize I was one of those people? “Mom, you have to get over that. Nanny Scott was a psychic, not some black magic practitioner. No one came to your house that would have harmed you.”

“Nanny Scott was a very powerful woman and like attracts like. There were some very frightening people that my mother associated with. I never wanted that life for you. I wanted you to have a nice quiet peaceful life.”

“I understand, but what you want isn’t what I want. I can’t get rid of what is inside me any more than she could. I don’t want to. I love being able to do the things I do. I just wish I could talk to you about them.”

She put her hand on my arm. She looked rueful. Was this progress, a breakthrough, right here on our driveway? I held my breath, waiting to see what she would say.