Demon's Hunger (14 page)

Baunn sat in the smoky cantina in Chihuahua, Mexico, his back to the wall, a half-empty bottle of Dos Equis on the metal table in front of him. It wasn't a nice area of town, which suited him just fine. He wasn't in a nice mood.

The place was crowded, every seat taken. Dust hung in the air, visible in the halo of light that surrounded the naked bulb. The metal tables and rickety chairs boasted a patina of eternal filth.

A sullen-faced, pockmarked kid—Baunn pegged him at eighteen, maybe twenty—at the next table stared at him in challenge. His chin jutted forward, his lips twisting in a sneer as he met Baunn's gaze. He was lulled into a false sense of macho supremacy by Baunn's spun gold hair and denim-blue eyes.

Ah, the idiocy of youth.

Waving a hand near his beer, Baunn shooed away the flies, picked up the bottle, and took a slow swig. His eyes never left the kid's face.

With an expletive, the boy got up and went to piss in the barrel in the corner. Good choice. Better than getting in a pissing match with Baunn.

His beer gone, Baunn considered ordering another. But what was the point? Delaying the inevitable wouldn't change the outcome.

The bones were gone. He knew it. Putting off the chore wouldn't change the ending. He just needed to go see the empty hole with his own eyes.

Asher,
the Ancient
, must have thought he was being all cryptic and shit, but Baunn wasn't an idiot. Clearly, Asher and his demon allies planned on resurrecting the dead. In order to do that, they needed all the body parts, though how the hell they'd find them from all around the globe mystified him. Their goal was re-animation, kind of like Frankenstein, only with human victims' blood and demon dark magic as the catalysts instead of electricity.

A charming thought.

He rose and strode through the front door onto the street. The buildings were tight up against each other, faded and shabby, a couple so dilapidated he wondered if they'd last the week. Baunn walked down the street, rounded the corner, and made his way to the alley that ran behind the cantina.
Alley
was too generous a word. It was a guttered cesspool, stinking of old garbage and puke.

A cursory evaluation proved he was alone, so he grabbed hold of the dragon current, disappearing from the alley in Chihuahua and taking form once more a hundred fifty miles north at Paquime, Casas Grandes.

Before him stretched sun-bleached excavated ruins of mud and gravel, ancient living spaces that had been built around a common water source. In the moonlight, they were shadowed, eerie. Baunn paced off four hundred steps from the main group, passed the ruins of the market area and the I-shaped ball courts, and finally came to a square courtyard with the remnants of rooms fanning out on all sides.

Following human custom because Shay would have wanted that, Baunn had buried him at Paquime. His best friend, his brother in everything but blood, Baunn had put Shay deep in the ground here, in the place he had once been happy, raising scarlet macaws and human children.

And he'd buried the damned bones with him.

Closing his eyes, Baunn called his magic, let it swell in his veins. How long since he had allowed himself to summon it like this, since he had used magic for anything more than catching a ride on the dragon current?

How long since he'd believed he had the right to it?

He was the sorcerer's equivalent of a ne'er-do-well, and right at this moment, he wasn't particularly proud of that.

With a heavy heart, he unearthed the coffin far below the surface, below even the excavated ruins. He sloughed off rock and gravel and yellowish brown sandy loam. There were bones there, small, avian, remnants of the macaws that had once been part of this society, and there were bits of pottery, reminders of lives once lived.

And there were a sorcerer's bones. Shay's bones.

Baunn drew close and stood staring down at the skeleton. The right hand was disturbed, stretched out when it should have been crossed on the chest, the bones of the fingers spread and extended, as though something had been dragged from their grasp.

Because something had.

Shay had given his life to protect the mortal realm, and Baunn had done as he had sworn—put the charm bag with the bones of Bezal, the Solitary's keeper, in Shay's grave so he could guard the wall even after his death. Those bones were meant to stay buried, meant to stay lost.

Only, the bones were gone, and Baunn had an ugly suspicion he knew exactly who'd come to claim them.

Tipping his head back, he felt the breeze touch his skin, warm and soothing.

He wondered what the temperature was in Toronto. Probably twenty degrees below glacial.

Why the hell had the Compact chosen Toronto as home base? What was wrong with Acapulco or Mexico City?

He bloody well hated the cold.

Dain glanced to his left. There was a set of keys and a wallet on the entry hall table. He lifted the wallet, flipped it open. Rick Strasser. Age thirty-two.

The air was rank with the aura of dark magic.

No great riddle to figure out here. The serial killer the Compact was hunting had crept out from under its rock again. It had killed a group of
hybrids
outside and a human in here, and the question was,
why
?

Using the tail of his shirt, Dain wiped the leather clean and put the wallet back exactly where he'd found it. Not that his fingerprints would lead the police to him, but he didn't want to cause unnecessary frustration for the human forensic team.

From where he stood, he studied the room, taking his time. He could detect no evidence of forced entry. There were no bloody footprints. Just a dead guy with his gut ripped open and his intestines tumbling over the edge of the couch to puddle on the floor like the coils of a glistening garden hose that had been gnawed on by a rat.

Christ.

No needing his staff at the moment, he conjured it away, walked closer, and studied the corpse.

Where was the blood? With Rick's belly slit wide open, right up the middle, there should be a great pool of it congealing on the floor.

So why was there only a small puddle seeping into the white carpet?

The body looked dried out, desiccated, as though all life had been sucked out, the capillaries and veins collapsed, even the cells robbed of fluid. Dain squatted low, peered into the gaping wound. The internal organs were shredded… chewed…

What the hell had happened here?

Demons killed their prey and ate it.
All
of it. Muscle. Bone. Organs. Same with
hybrids
. They didn't just rip their meal open, suck the blood and life away, and leave the rest.

They had a waste-not-want-not mentality.

So the group of
hybrids
that had been annihilated outside hadn't done this deed.

Dain rubbed his fingers along the side of his jaw. He was betting that whatever
had
done this wasn't demon. The signature was off beam, and though the aura that hung in the room was dark, he'd bet his Porsche and his Ferrari it wasn't demon.

So the Compact had been wrong.

They'd been looking for the wrong thing, coming at these murders with a full-blooded demon in mind. It wasn't. It was… something else.

The
hybrid had
said something—
S-s-s-succ
… Wariness trickled through him. He had no liking for the turn his thoughts were taking.

In all his time as a sorcerer, he'd never encountered the type of creature he suspected. But he knew someone who had.

So maybe it was time for Baunn to come home, time for the black sheep to revisit the fold. He'd look into that later. Right now, he had a corpse to deal with.

Snagging his cell phone from his back pocket, he flipped it open and dialed Ciarran.

"Something I need you to take a look at," he said.

"Aren't you enigmatic," Ciarran observed sardonically.

"So I've been told," Dain replied, careful with his words, not quite trusting technology. You never knew who might be listening in. He gave Ciarran the address. "Bring Clea. Her medical knowledge might be relevant. And, Ciarran, don't drive. Use the dragon current. Haste would be appreciated, and the less chance of outside observers at this point, the better."

He'd barely closed the phone and tucked it in his pocket than Ciarran and Clea arrived, a shimmer of air and a bulge in the
continuum
the only warning. Clea looked around, taking everything in with a cursory glance. She pressed her lips together as she stared at Rick, then took a deep breath and got down to business, conjuring a set of gloves and snapping them on.

For a girl who'd come into her sorcerer powers only a couple of months back, she was remarkably adept.

"Time to play
CSI"
Dain said.

"I'll do my best. It's not exactly my area of expertise." Clea reached out and lifted the wallet from the side table, mimicking Dain's earlier actions.

"We need to work quickly," Dain pointed out. She nodded in reply, her eyes haunted, her jaw set.

Ciarran stepped in front of her. "You don't need to do this, Clea mine. There are other ways we can seek answers. We can allow the mortals to do their job, then visit their records for the information we seek."

Leaning forward, she rested her cheek against Ciarran's chest for an instant, and Dain felt the crackle of energy, of magic between them, a shared loop of strength and power.

Something inside him twisted and shifted, an aching, a longing, and Vivien's face swam before him.

With a shake of her head, Clea straightened and stepped away. "I want to do this, Ciarran. The mortal lab will be too slow. We can do everything faster. This monster needs to be caught." Moving toward the corpse, she carefully skirted the small pool of blood.

"Did a demon do this?" she asked.

"No," Ciarran replied, his face impassive. "Not demon. Not
hybrid
. Something… other." He shot a glance at Dain.

"Now look who's talking in riddles," Dain said.

"He hasn't been dead very long. There's no rigor. I could check liver temperature to try and determine exactly how long, but I don't want to disrupt the body." Clea tipped her head to the side and frowned. "There are parts missing."

"Yeah, I saw that. Looked to me like his liver and half his stomach," Dain said.

"Then I guess there's no chance of checking liver temperature to determine how long ago he died." Clea peered into the gaping cavity. "The spleen's been ripped out. Splenic artery's cauterized. Looks like an animal gnawed on his guts. The duodenum's missing, and a good chunk of the ileum."

Ciarran cleared his throat.

"Oh, sorry." She glanced up. "Those are the first parts of his intestine. It looks like they've been ripped out and… eaten?" Her voice cracked, and she swallowed before going on. "But I wasn't talking about
that
when I said there were parts missing. His left baby finger is gone." She shook her head. "Actually, no, that's not accurate. See?"

She took the dead man's wrist carefully between her fingers and lifted his hand. "The skin is slit open and the flexor tendons cut, the extensor expansion severed. He's missing the
bones
of his left baby finger."

"The last body was missing its left kneecap," Ciarran muttered.

Bones.

A charred demon bone. Little red velvet bags of bones. And now, missing bones.

Fucking bones.

"The last guy. What was his name?" Dain asked, a gnawing unease tearing at him. He
knew
what this was about. Somewhere deep inside, he knew. He just needed to find it, find the piece that would solve the riddle.

"Gavin Johnston," Clea said, frowning down at the corpse's hand.

"No obvious connection there, but that doesn't mean anything." Dain flipped open his phone, dialed Javier.

"Jav? I've got two names for you. I want history, genealogy—trace these guys
way
back. To primordial sludge if you can. Gavin Johnston. Rick Strasser. And while you're at it, get the names of the other victims and check them out as well."

"No," Clea said, looking up. "The others weren't missing anything. Just these two. It looks like some are killed for food and the two most recent for food and parts."

"Check other cities," Ciarran said, his expression grim. "Have him check similar killings in other cities. Countries. I have a bad feeling about this."

Dain relayed the information and hung up, then dialed 911 to leave an anonymous tip about a noisy neighbor. He gave Rick Strasser's address.

"We're out of here in two minutes," he said as he hung up. "Let the mortals claim their own."

"There are epithelials—skin-under the nail of his index finger." Clea frowned as she conjured a sample kit. "I think he scratched his attacker."

"We can't leave that for the mortals to find," Dain said.

"I know. I'll scrape it, and we can take it for analysis."

Her words nagged at him. He froze, shot a sharp glance at the corpse.

Scratched his attacker.

Flashes came at him, of the open door of his penthouse when he'd returned to find Vivien on the phone with her mother.