Demon Hunting In a Dive Bar (6 page)

“Well met, Ansgar.” Conall arched a brow at Beck. “You remember Rebekah Damian.”

Beck shot Conall an annoyed look. “The name’s Beck. Congratulations on your marriage, Ansgar. It’s nice to see you again.”

It wasn’t really, but Beck’s daddy had raised her to be polite. The last time she’d seen the blond demon hunter, he’d wrecked her bar. Granted, he’d had help from a passel of demons and a few others, including Conall, but the bar had been trashed all the same.

Ansgar put a possessive arm around Evie’s waist and gave his new bride a look so hot she should have been melted on the spot. He was one satisfied demon hunter. What would it be like to have someone love her like that? Beck wondered. She shrugged away the thought.

“Greetings, Rebekah,” Ansgar said. “Evangeline and I are overjoyed that you could be here today.”

He’d followed Conall’s lead on the name thing, Beck noticed with a twinge of irritation. Unlike Conall’s rough growl, Ansgar had a voice as cool and smooth as silk, seductive and mesmerizing. There was magic in that voice. Beck was beginning to understand what Conall had meant when he said the Dalvahni were powerful. These guys were the whole enchilada. Good looking, deadly efficient, and gifted with a bottomless bag of tricks. No wonder the demons were looking for a weapon to use against them.

If Ansgar’s gift was his mesmerizing voice, then Conall’s gift must be driving people bonkers, she reflected. Why, the citizenry of entire enemy cities had probably leaped to their deaths to escape the big Dalvahni pain in the ass.

Beck realized that Evie and Ansgar were waiting for a response, and babbled something appropriate. At least, she hoped it was appropriate.

“Sweetling,” Ansgar said to Evie in his sorcerer’s voice, “the fairies have grown impatient waiting for us to cut the cake and have gotten into the wine. They will be pixilated in a trice and cause no end of trouble.”

“Oh, my goodness. Yes, of course, you’re right.” Evie flashed Beck and Conall an apologetic smile. “Y’all be sure and stay. There’s a ton of food and plenty of champagne, and the cake is supposed to be delicious.” She wrinkled her nose. “It wouldn’t dare be anything less, not with Bitsy in charge.”

Taking Ansgar’s offered arm, Evie turned to leave, only to whirl back around. “Thank you so much for coming,” she whispered, giving Beck a tight hug. “Really.”

Dumbfounded, Beck watched Evie hurry off with her new husband. A warm, comfortable feeling bloomed in her chest. She rubbed the aching place in her sternum.

“Rebekah, are you well?” Conall asked.

“Heartburn,” Beck said, not meeting his gaze. “See you later. I’m out of here.”

She bolted for the door.

 

See you later? What kind of lame-ass thing was that to say? She’d see him later, all right. She’d hired the guy to work at the bar,
because she was an idiot
.

Good God almighty.

Beck paused at the top of the steps to take a deep breath. It was a beautiful night, star studded and clear, the air slightly chilly. She’d come out of a side door that led into a small enclosed garden with neat flowerbeds and a birdbath. Now, if she could only remember where she’d parked her truck. She’d been DUI on fairy crack when she’d driven here . . .

Ah, that’s right. The parking lot had been jammed with cars, so she’d parked down the street.

As she started across the garden, Conall caught up with her. “It is dark,” he said, wrapping a hand around her elbow. “I will accompany you.”

She jerked away from him. “I don’t need an escort. Go eat cake. Drink some champagne. Talk to a pretty woman. I’ve got to get back to the bar.”

Conall stood with his back to the church door, his face in shadow. “I have no interest in cake or champagne, and I am already talking to a remarkably pretty woman.”

“Why are you being nice? Aren’t you afraid you’ll break something?”

“A most suspicious woman,” he said, closing the space between them. “As I have already noted.”

“Female,” Beck said. Her breath caught in her throat. He was smiling; a real smile, not a mere curve of the lips. The effect was dazzling, like the sun coming from behind a thundercloud. “You said female, not woman. That covers a lot more territory. I’ve got my pride, you know.”

“So I have noticed,” Conall murmured.

He lowered his head. He smelled of mountain air, clean and crisp, a green scent laced with the tang of lemons and a hint of leather. Was he going to kiss her? More importantly, would she let him?

Maybe. It was the shoes, of course. She’d never let him kiss her if she wasn’t wearing the sparkly shoes. They made her feel special, like anything could happen. Like she was Cinder-freaking-ella.

Kiss him? Was she mental?

He was a demon hunter and she was part demon, for crying in the beer. Sure, they’d called a truce. Sort of. At best, that made them frenemies.

With a reluctance that surprised her, she stepped back.

“Rebekah,” he said, reaching for her.

“I don’t have time for this,” she said. “I gotta go.”

Ignoring the flash of disappointment in his eyes, she spun around and headed for the wrought-iron garden gate. She needed to get back to the bar. She was way out of her comfort zone here, in more ways than one.

“Rebekah Damian?” a man called out of the darkness.

Beck screeched to a halt. Something about that smooth, sly voice sent a chill down her spine. The night seemed to still and her senses tightened in warning.

Conall stepped in front of her, sword in hand. “Who are you? Show yourself at once.”

A man slid out of the shadows and through the gate. Tall, dark haired and handsome in a lean, elegant way, he was a young, skinny Elvis with torn jeans and an attitude, and too many piercings to count. In spite of the chill in the air, he wore a sleeveless T-shirt and carried a black leather jacket slung over one shoulder. Tattoos snaked up his forearms and curled around his toned biceps. The dark ink stood out in startling contrast to his pale skin. Jeez, had the guy never been out in the sun?

His sooty hair was artfully tousled and kohl ringed his glowing purple eyes. Kith, definitely, though not from around here. They didn’t get many goth types in Hannah. This guy stuck out like a dead cockroach on top of granny’s Sunday buttermilk pie.

Who was he and what did he want? Beck wondered, taking in his sneering, sullen expression.

“I’m Beck Damian,” she said, stepping around Conall. “What do you want?”

“A welcome home hug, for starters.” The stranger threw her a crooked grin. “I’m Evan, your brother.”

D
imly, Beck realized that Conall was speaking to her. His deep voice was rough with concern, and he had his hand on her arm, supporting her.

“Answer me, Rebekah,” he said. “Do you know this man?”

“No.” She shook her head to clear her spinning thoughts. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Evan’s grin faded. “Guess a hug is out of the question. And here I was looking forward to a tender reunion.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, not an easy thing to do when they fit like a second skin. “I’m disappointed in you, Cookie. Twins don’t forget one another. All that time together in the womb, I guess.”

Beck felt the blood drain from her face. “W-what did you call me?”

“Cookie, like when we were kids, ’cause you were so sweet. Remember?”

Oh, yeah, she remembered. It had been their little joke, because she’d
never
been sweet. Her childhood had been one long time-out. Like the time she’d put sand in her daddy’s gas tank—that one had earned her a trip to the whup shack. Or her certainty that the ants in the ant farm she and Toby had built as a science project were suffocating, so she’d freed them, trailing syrup through the bar so they could find their way out.

Her heart thundered in her ears and her knees had the wobbles. “But, you weren’t real. I imagined you.”

“It was real to me.” Evan’s mouth thinned. “And then you left me.”

“I didn’t leave you. I grew up.”

“You got your period on our ninth birthday,” Evan said. “You had the cramps and you were scared. You didn’t have anybody to talk to. You were in pain and confused, and then you went away.” He shrugged. “Puberty’s a bitch, ain’t it? Hits halfsies like us early and hard.” He turned his cynical gaze on Conall. “Who are you?”

“I am Conall.”

“You wanna put that pig sticker away? You’re making me nervous.”

There was an undercurrent of sly laughter in Evan’s voice that Beck didn’t like.

“Good,” Conall said, making no move to sheath his weapon. “You should be nervous.”

Evan chuckled. “You got yourself a real character there, sis. Is he always this jolly?”

“I am never jolly,” Conall said. “I work for Rebekah.”

“I’ll just bet you do. What are you, her boy toy?” The corners of Evan’s mouth lifted in a smirk. “You like ’em big and rough, sis? This one looks like he can deliver.”

“Never you mind what I like,” Beck snapped. “And stop calling me ‘sis.’ ”

“Touchy. I can see I’ve outstayed my welcome.” Evan turned away. “I wanted to introduce myself, but it’s late. I got business to attend to.”

“Wait.” Beck wasn’t done with him, not by a long shot. She had too many questions.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “Yeah?”

Beck struggled for the words. “This is crazy. How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You know,” Evan said softly, and then he was gone.

 

Beck shivered and clasped her hands together in her lap. She had a brother named Evan.

No. Everything in her rebelled at the notion. She would have known. She would have felt it.

Wouldn’t she?

Unbidden, the memories rushed in. Memories she’d long since relegated to a mental file marked “childhood imaginings.”

Evan, the make-believe friend of her youth, her constant companion and confidant, had seemed more real to her than the adults in the bar. He’d been the product of her isolation from other children, her fright and confusion at the things she could do, her anger and resentment at being different.

At being a freak.

And then one day he was gone. Lots of kids had imaginary playmates and outgrew them. Evan had been a childish fancy she’d set aside.

Hadn’t he? He couldn’t be
real
. . . could he? This had to be some kind of trick.

The rumble of the wheels over the river bridge pulled Beck from her thoughts. Conall was driving her truck, a deep red, four-wheel-drive Toyota Double Cab Tundra. She had a vague memory of him walking her across the dark lot and helping her into the passenger side of the cab.

She glanced over at him. Big Red was her baby. She never let anyone else drive her truck, not even Toby. Of course, “driving” could only be used in the loosest sense of the word to describe what Conall was doing. He sat in the driver’s seat, his hands resting on his powerful thighs instead of on the wheel, while the truck glided through the night like it was on rails. Except that it wasn’t on rails and nobody was driving the damn thing, which made it freakazoid and downright unnerving.

Conall’s chiseled features were stern in the dim glow of the dashboard. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. In the scheme of things, it probably didn’t matter much. Conall had said demon hunters were hard to kill.

“You aren’t wearing your seatbelt,” she said anyway. “You could get a ticket.”

He didn’t say anything.

“That’s a bad thing.” Still no response, so she tried again. “Maybe you should pull over and let me drive.”

“No. You are in shock.” The muscles in his back and shoulders bunched beneath his jacket as he crossed his arms, making the whole no-one-at-the-wheel experience that much harder to ignore. He reminded her of a big, muscular, well-dressed genie. She half expected him to bob his head and blink. “Would you like to talk about it?” he asked. “I know that conversing with another sometimes eases human troubles.”

“I’m not human.”

“You are part human. Perhaps your human part would like to talk about it.”

“Very funny,” she said. “I thought demon hunters didn’t have a sense of humor.”

“And I expected you to stink of demon. It would seem we were both mistaken.”

She smoothed the front of her dress, mostly to have something to do. She’d cleaned her truck a few days earlier, and the slightly citrus scent of the vinyl cleaner still lingered, but mostly she smelled
him
. He might be annoying, but he sure smelled good.

“You’re being nice to me again,” she said. “Why?”

“I am trying to lure you into complacence with my charm so I can do something nefarious to you.” He lowered his arms and turned his head to look at her. “Is it working?”

“Yeah, I’m eat up with complacency. Everybody says so.”

He made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort. “This I have not noticed.”

His gaze moved to her legs and locked. Beck’s skin tingled and grew warm, and it was all she could do not to squirm in her seat.

“Have I told you how much I like your shirt?” he asked, lifting his gaze to her face at last.

“What?” Why was it so dang hot in the truck? Beck took a quick peek at the thermostat. Nope, set at sixty-eight degrees, like always. “It’s not a shirt, it’s a dress.”

“There is scarcely an ell’s length of cloth in the whole garment,” he said. “ ’Twould pass as a chemise in most realms.”

He didn’t like her dress. Well, hell. So much for feeling girly and pretty.

“Take it up with the fairies if you don’t like it,” she said. “They made it.”

“I did not say I do not like it. I like it very much, as did the other males at the wedding. They were looking at you.”

The only male at the wedding she’d been aware of was him. Not that she’d let him know it.

“I didn’t notice.”

“I did.” There was a note of barely suppressed violence in Conall’s harsh voice. “You have beautiful legs, long and sleek and firmly muscled.” Beck blinked at him in confusion. Had she really compared his eyes to the black emptiness between the stars? Space was cold and his eyes were hot. “They were all looking at your legs,” he said. “They were looking at the rest of you, too.”

He liked her legs, and she
liked
that he liked her legs. This would not do. This would not do at all.

“You sound almost jealous,” she said with a nervous laugh. “And we both know that’s not possible.”

“Of course not.”

He turned his head and stared back out the windshield into the inky pool of blackness beyond the headlights like nothing had happened.

Beck drew a ragged breath. But something had happened. Something had changed between them, although she couldn’t say what.

“That thing you did this afternoon . . . when you turned into water,” he said after a while. “ ’Twas quite an impressive trick. Are you a naiad?”

“You mean one of those chicks from Greek mythology?” There’d been a time when she’d lost herself in the old tales, searching for some clue as to what she was. “No, at least, I don’t think so. My powers are stronger near water, though.”

Why was she telling him this? She never talked about this stuff with anybody, not even Toby. Silence stretched between them again as the driverless truck purred down the highway and bumped onto the narrow dirt road that ran beside the river. There were no mercury lights this far outside of town. Trees hunched overhead, branches entwined, exchanging whispered secrets on the wind. Outside the truck, it was cow-belly dark.

“I was a Happy Kids dropout,” she blurted. “Actually, I was expelled.”

“I do not understand.”

“It was a daycare, a place where people leave their children while they’re at work.”

“Ah,” he said. “For a moment, I feared we were speaking of goats.”

“No goats—just human kids, preschool, mostly. And me.”

“There were no other kith at this place?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “Course, I wasn’t there very long . . . maybe a week at most before they kicked me out. I was three years old. Knew nothing about demons or the kith. Didn’t have a clue what I was and neither did Daddy.” She looked out the window. The river was just beyond that fringe of trees. She smelled its musky sweet scent and felt the pull of water. “There was this baby in the nursery, a little girl named Jewel. Sweet little thing with big brown eyes and a head full of curly black hair. A year old, at most. She had a growth inside her. I could see it.”

“Like you can see demons inside of people?” Conall asked.

“Yeah, exactly like that. I had my hand inside her chest when the teacher came in and caught me. It freaked her out pretty bad. The teacher, I mean. They had to sedate her. Mae Givens was her name. They called Daddy to come get me. I was home-schooled after that.”

“Home-schooled?”

“I wasn’t allowed around norm kids again. Daddy decided it was best to keep me away from humans and under the radar, so I stayed at the bar. We lived in an efficiency apartment in the back. It’s gone now. Made it part of the kitchen when I remodeled the place a few years back. He and Toby taught me—Toby, mostly. I freaked Daddy out too much.”

“Your sire bears no paternal feelings for you?”

Beck made an impatient gesture with her hand. “He loves me, but I make him nervous. He knew Toby was like me and so he turned me over to him. Like to like, I guess he figured.”

“I am beginning to think I was mistaken in my initial impression of your father. I do not think I like him very much, after all.”

“Oh, he wasn’t ever mean to me or anything like that,” Beck said quickly. “It’s just that he didn’t know what to do with me, so he mostly ignored me. He’s such a norm, you see, and I’m . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Well, I’m not.”

“No, you are something quite out of the ordinary.”

Was that a compliment? Beck wasn’t sure, so she plunged on. “When I got older and we got a computer, I took classes on-line. Passed the GED when I was fifteen.”

“What is this GED?”

“It’s a battery of tests,” she said. Conall knew less about the so-called real world than she did. Beck cast about for a way to explain the GED to a demon hunter. “If you pass, you get a piece of paper that says you graduated from high school. It’s like a rite of passage.”

“High school: a secondary school that usually encompasses grades nine through twelve,” Conall intoned, as though reading from a book. “It is part of the human educational system?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you ever go to school?”

“No. The Dalvahni train for combat, but we do not go to school in the manner of humans. It is unnecessary. We have other ways.”

“You mean you learn things by magic?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Our powers enable us to adapt quickly to any culture and clime, else we would be disadvantaged in hunting the djegrali.”

“Sweet.”

“Sweet is not a word I would use to describe the Dal—”

“You can say that again,” Beck muttered.

“—but being Dalvahni has its compensations, if that is what you mean.”

He fell silent again, but Beck could feel the current of his thoughts the same way she sensed the flow of the nearby river.

“You are largely self-taught and you grew up among adults in a tavern,” he said at last. “Not the most wholesome environ in which to raise a child. You were lonely and isolated from others of your kind, but for the shifter Tobias.”

He said it in a matter-of-fact tone that was without pity, and that made it bearable.

“That about sums it up,” she said. “Except I had Evan, too. He was my imaginary friend.”

“He is not imaginary, and he is not your friend. I would advise you to proceed with caution where that one is concerned. I do not trust him.”

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“Neither do you.”

“I don’t know doodly squat about you, either, except you’re a demon hunter,” she pointed out. “That ought to send me screaming in the other direction. Instead, you’re working at my bar.”

He turned his head to look at her again, his eyes shining like a wild animal’s. In spite of his calm exterior, there was something deeply wild and savage in him that unsettled and excited her.

“I have been honest with you,” he said in a low voice. “You have my sword arm and my pledge of loyalty. Can you say the same of your brother?”