Demon's Kiss (27 page)

With a strangled sound, he took a step forward. God, she loved the way he looked at her.

“How about you?” she asked, moving farther along the hallway. “Got any good ideas?”

For the longest moment, he just stared at her, and she thought he wouldn’t reply. Then he smiled, a slow, sexy shift of his lips that made primal heat stab fast and deep to the pit of her belly.

“I’ve got enough ideas to last forever,” he said in a low rasp.

Dain Hawkins raked his fingers back through the shaggy layers of his dark hair and gave a low, mordant laugh. Moon-spun purple shadows and pale gray light sliced across his denim-clad thigh, then fanned along the row of brick, stucco, and marble vaults of New Orleans’s oldest cemetery. St. Louis #1.

He crouched, waiting, hidden by the white Greek- revival tomb at his side—the voodoo queen’s tomb. It was covered in small
x
’s drawn there for luck and festooned with the offerings of the faithful: votives, flowers, hoodoo money—coins left to buy favors.

But Dain wasn’t here for voodoo magic tonight. As a sorcerer, he didn’t need that kind of help.

He was here for
hybrids
, brutish creatures that had been human once. Faced with death, they had chosen to allow demon will to overtake their souls, to become slavish minions of the Solitary, a malevolent demon of immeasurable power that wanted only to cross the wall between dimensions and turn the human realm into his own personal feeding farm.

Dain smiled mirthlessly. Not while he breathed.

The air was crisp with a hint of winter chill. He smelled the faintest trace of brimstone, sensed the ripple of evil that hung over the graveyard, a fetid mist.

Yeah, he’d come to the right place.

He rose, the material of his long, black coat flowing behind him, an undulating shadow. Walking to the end of the row, he turned and moved on through the city of the dead. Some rows were straight, some twisted, and still others led to blind ends in a tangled maze of family tombs: miniature houses for the dead, complete with low iron fences. Many tombs had been restored since the hurricane; others still bore their crumbled corners, decimated by time and storm, jutting out like barren bones.

Bones.
Dain’s lips twisted. He was here for more than the
hybrids.
He was here because of the blackened bone that sat heavy in the pocket of his long coat, burning through the layers of cloth into his skin like a brand. He hated the feel of it, the revolting aura that was so strong it sucked the breath from his lungs. Demon stink clung to it, and terrible demon power.

Weeks past, Dain’s contemporary, Ciarran D’Arbois, had slammed shut a portal between the demon realm and the dimension of man, and in so doing, he had maimed the Solitary. The demon’s foot had been severed when the doorway closed, leaving the powerful demon trapped in the pit that had spawned it. Dain had found all that remained in the human realm, a single burned and blackened bone that carried vestiges of horrific, dark magic.

Since that night, he’d kept the thing locked away in a vault in his home, but he’d dared not leave it unattended while he came to New Orleans. Still, he wondered if he was crazy to carry it about.

Choices, choices. No one to trust but himself. That lesson had been hard learned.

The outline of a cross reflected in the smooth surface of a puddle and the round bright shape of the moon. Dain looked up at the top of a nearby vault, at the cross there, and at the statue of the weeping woman on the tomb next to it. His booted feet scattered the reflections as he walked on.

He made no effort to hide his progress. Let them hear him. He was spoiling for a fight, had been for weeks, ever since the night the Solitary had almost crossed over. That night, Dain had learned that the Ancient, the oldest and most powerful of the Compact of Sorcerers, had betrayed them, choosing to ally with the demons. The Ancient had been his mentor, his friend.

Now, his enemy.

Following instinct, Dain navigated the maze of vaults and low iron fences. At length, he came upon a wider space with a lone, black tomb, brick and plaster torn open to reveal a musty, gaping hole. An old, rotting casket had been dragged out into the moonlight, the lid ripped off, and around it crowded a half dozen
hybrids,
casting long, menacing shadows.

Their clothing was stained, mottled, heavy with the metallic scent of fresh blood. Dain could tell they had fed recently. Not on the long-decomposed remains from the casket. No, they had hunted and killed before coming here to the cemetery.
Hybrids
liked their prey live. Their meat bloody.

And human.

It was the only thing that offered even a temporary relief from the endless physical pain of their existence—a small matter that the demons invariably failed to mention when they tempted the dying to become
hybrid.

With narrowed eyes, Dain studied the group. They had no idea he was here. Normally, they would have sensed the herald of his light magic long before this, but the malevolent power of the charred bone he carried was so great it obscured much. Hell, he was slathered so thick with the demon aura, they probably mistook his presence as just another of their own.

A valuable stealth tool.

Problem was, he was having trouble sensing them as well. The longer he carried the bone on his person, the more inured he became, less attuned to the current of demon magic. A danger, to be sure, but one that could not be avoided.
Hybrids
were robbing graves all over the world without subtlety or discretion, but with what Dain suspected was a definite plan. Until he figured out what the hell was going on, the scorched demon bone wasn’t going anywhere without him.

Yeah, him and his bone, inseparable.

Hanging in the shadows, Dain clenched his teeth, battling the urge to call his full power and step into the circle of
hybrids.
While a fight might relieve his tension, it wouldn’t get him answers. He’d wait and watch just a little longer. Whatever the
hybrids
were after, it had something to do with the Solitary and with rotted human corpses.

With a high, cackling laugh, one of the
hybrids
yanked something from the open casket before him: a bony forearm and hand, stripped of flesh by years and inevitable decay, held together by fragile remnants of desiccated tissue. Dangling from the moldered fingers was a tattered and rotting cloth pouch.

Frowning, Dain stepped closer. A voodoo gris-gris? A charm bag buried with the dead?

Whatever was in that pouch had demon stink all over it. The damned bone in his pocket heated, the sensation burning through coat and jeans into the skin and muscle of his thigh, bright, hot. Evil called to evil.

The
hybrids
were after that charm bag, which meant so was he.

Dain stepped forward into the moonlight. One of the
hybrids
jerked its head back and spun to face him.

So much for the covert approach.

The thing lunged with a feral cry. In a smooth execution of movement, Dain tucked, rolled, and rose, avoiding the creature that attacked, coming up next to the one that held the gris-gris
.
He plucked the cloth bag from the
hybrid’s
grasp. Red velvet it was, stitched with red thread.

Old. Very old. Bound by spells to protect the contents and stave off decay in the moist heat of New Orleans. Dain felt rank evil ooze from the small bag into the flesh and bone of his hand. The
continuum,
the dragon current—an endless river of energy that flowed between dimensions—shifted and writhed in protest of the unnatural shift in balance.

With a howl, the
hybrid
he’d robbed swiped at him, a rake of clawed fingers. Dain jerked aside, shoved the pouch into his pocket—the one that didn’t hold the demon bone—and leaped back so he was at the edge of the open space, a tomb at his back.

The
hybrids
advanced on him in a loose semicircle.

Dain called up a little more of his power, enough to let the
hybrids
sense his magic, let them know for certain that he was a light sorcerer. That was his warning to them, his single offer of reprieve. They could flee, and he would not chase them, or they could attack, and he would cut them down.

They hesitated, confused by the impossible mix of light magic and demon aura that clung to him, darkness oozing from the scorched bone that had become his constant companion.

He conjured a six-foot staff of acacia wood, ancient, deadly, and he waited.

Snarling, the closest
hybrid
fell on him like a rabid dog. Declining to summon more of his magic, Dain fought, preferring for the moment the physical release of punch and thrust and kick, even when they piled on him, six to one.

Claws sank into his chest, raking deep, and a fist to the jaw rocked his head back. He gave as he got, a jab with his staff, and then he tossed it high in the air, twisted a
hybrid’s
head from its neck, snapped out his hand to catch his staff on the descent, his fingers slick with black blood.

The
hybrid’s
remains bubbled and hissed and, finally, disintegrated in a stinking gray sludge.

Another
hybrid
moved into the place of the first. Dain let emotion take him, rage and pain at the Ancient’s betrayal, the memory of his mentor’s treachery still cutting sharp as a finely honed blade. Grief was there, too, and a centuries-old hatred of demons and their ilk, feeding his actions until there was a thick morass of bubbling ooze at his feet.

A single
hybrid
backed away, the only one left standing. It stood shivering, frozen in terror, then fell to its knees before him. Dain stared at it, chest heaving. The charred bone in his pocket heated with a gruesome energy, a forbidden magic, and the
continuum
writhed at the insult.

Temptation wheedled through him, and with it came a foreign and ugly craving for just one more kill.

Kill, kill, kill.

That was new.

What the hell was wrong with him?

The bone, the goddamned demon bone.

Well, it would be disappointed if it thought to lure him to the dark side. Sorcerers were guardians, not indiscriminate murderers.

Pressing a hand to the deep gouges that scored his chest, Dain spat blood. He was breathing heavily, and his pulse pounded a hard beat in his ears.

“Go,” he snarled, and the
hybrid
didn’t wait for a second invitation. It scrabbled back like a crab, then rolled and stumbled to its feet, weaving as it ran through the graveyard, the sound of its footsteps echoing hollowly.

They never discussed it, but Vivien couldn’t imagine her mother surviving in a time before Botox. At least, she assumed it was Botox, because Araminta held on to her youth with amazing tenacity. She looked like Vivien’s contemporary rather than her mother.

Rubbing her knuckles lightly along her breastbone, Vivien sighed, half relief, half regret. This visit had ended with the exact sentiment that every such visit had ended with for the past fifteen years.

“Vivien,” her mother had said moments past, taking her daughter’s hands in a firm grip. Her eyes had been narrow and intent as she tipped her head back a little and studied Vivien under the overhead porch light, her voice ringing with the hollow echo of vast disappointment and despair. “You are your father’s daughter in every sense. There is nothing of me in you.
Nothing.
”

Vivien Cairn, BSc, MSc, PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UTM, University of Toronto at Mississauga, currently on sort-of sabbatical, was the bane of her mother’s existence.

“And
why
did you do this to your hair?” Araminta had reached up and flicked the edges of Vivien’s spiky new cut.

“I cut it. It’s easier this way.”

After a paralyzing moment where Vivien had considered moving her mother bodily into the car, Araminta had heaved a horrible sigh, the sort of sigh that meant that nuclear holocaust was about to fall upon unsuspecting humanity. Then, with a perfunctory kiss to Vivien’s cheek that Vivien had dutifully stooped to accept, Araminta had turned and left. Thank God.

There was something to be said for routine.

Now, the red taillights winked and disappeared completely as the road was swallowed by the night, and Vivien walked back toward the house.

At the bottom of the stairs, she slowed, glanced about, the winter air cutting through her sweater. Unease crawled through her like a centipede.

Continuing up the stairs, she paused on the porch, wrapped her arms about herself, rubbed her palms up and down. Turning slowly, she scanned the yard, her pulse speeding up just a little.

Something felt
wrong.
Not a particularly detailed reason for the chill that touched her and the uncomfortable wriggling low in her gut, but it was the best she could come up with. Instinct whispered that she was not alone.

For weeks, she’d been feeling off. As though unseen eyes watched her from the shadows. It was crazy. She knew that. There wasn’t actually anyone there. She’d even had a friend, Paul Martinez—an officer who’d worked with her on the ostrich farm case—stomp through the trees with her searching for signs of hidden watchers. They’d found nada
.
Zip. Zilch. But they’d done it in the daylight. Maybe that was the difference.

Not for the first time, Vivien wondered what had possessed her to buy this relic of a house on Sideroad Sixteen, where her nearest neighbor was a tree farmer five miles up the road, and the road itself was an unpaved stretch of dirt with row upon row of tree-farm trees on one side and an endless field of six-foot-high uncut grass on the other.

She’d wanted privacy, and she’d definitely gotten it.

Pulling the front door closed behind her, she turned the dead bolt, locking out the night. She took off her sweater, hung it on a peg, chose a red lollipop from the bowl on the entry-hall table. Popping it in her mouth, she savored the tangy sweetness and continued down to the basement. The overhead lights were bright; her worktable was clean and tidy, with six very old red velvet bags and their contents arranged in clear containers, lined neatly side by side.

Though she knew perfectly well the contents of each and every pouch, she washed her hands, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, ready to examine things she had looked at innumerable times before. It wasn’t a mere urge, it was a
compulsion.
Great. She wasn’t just imagining people watching her, she was starting to show signs of OCD. She sighed. What was next? Washing her hands fifty times a day? Checking the stove in triplicate before she believed she’d turned it off?

She reached for the first bag, the one from her father, one of the three things that she had to even remind her that she’d ever had a father. He had left her with a threadbare red-velvet bag; a single photo of a tall, handsome man with mahogany brown hair and hazel eyes just like hers; and a cold and bitter mother who had never gotten over the fact that he’d walked out on her and their two-year-old daughter, never to be seen or heard from again. At least, Vivien assumed that bitterness was the motivator for her mother’s behavior.

The sins of the fathers . . . Araminta had never forgiven the daughter.

Not that her mother didn’t love her. She did. In her own really special, controlling, eternally disappointed kind of way. And it wasn’t that Vivien didn’t love her mother. She did, in a thank-heaven-she-only-visits-three-times-a-year kind of way.

They got along fine over the phone. E-mail was even better.

Vivien ran her index finger along the worn velvet. With its contents of salt, red pepper, colored stones, and bones, the bag resembled a voodoo gris-gris
.
But the bones themselves were far older than the cloth. A puzzle. There were other things she’d found in the bag: hair, desiccated skin fragments. Definitely a charm bag of some sort. And her father had left it for her. The
why
of that nagged at her more and more of late.

Leaning forward, she studied the bones, let herself slide into the cool familiarity of anthropologist mode. Phalanges: finger bones. Very old. Human. Three of them, all from the same finger. There was a deep slash across the middle phalanx, as though a blade had hacked at it.

Each of the bags she had acquired through the years had similar contents. Different-colored stones. Different bones: fragments of a twelfth rib; a second cervical vertebra broken into three pieces; a fragmented fifth lumbar vertebra; three cuneiforms from the right foot, two of which bore slashes from what appeared to be the same instrument that had marked the finger bone. All the bits and parts had come from the same person. A male.

Who? Why? How had his skeletal remains ended up scattered over the globe in little red-velvet sacks?

And why did she keep stumbling across them?

She’d found one in a head shop on Queen Street years ago when she’d first moved to Toronto. It had been in the display window, a small red-velvet bag sewn with red thread. She recalled how she’d stopped dead in her tracks, amazed, determined to buy the thing because it was an exact match for the one she had from her dad. Then she’d unearthed one in a shop in New Orleans—she’d been in town for a four-day conference. One in Paris—again, a conference. The shop owner had insisted that the bag came from an aristocrat, a confidante of Marie Antoinette, a woman who’d clutched the bag as she was guillotined. The story was gruesome. Maybe the shopkeeper had thought it would up the price.

Another from London from a tiny little store that had smelled like old books and rot. That bag had carried the dubious distinction of having been owned by a victim of Jack the Ripper. Supposedly.

The most recent bag had come to her just last week, in the mail, delivered in a plain brown paper package with no distinctive labels and no return address. Its arrival had creeped her out. She couldn’t think of anyone who knew she collected these bags, certainly no one who would send one to her anonymously.

Icy fingers skittered over her skin, and she shuddered, set down the bones, rose to turn a slow circle.
Not alone. Not alone.
The certainty was so strong, but there was no one there. The room spun, and Vivien steadied herself against the side of the table. Her eyes stung and she felt an overwhelming fatigue, soul-deep, a frozen ache.

Pressing her fist against her forehead, she took a slow breath. Maybe she needed food. Her mother’s visits always decimated her appetite, and she’d barely eaten the past couple of days. She tidied her work area and turned toward the stairs. The small hairs on the back of her neck prickled and rose.

Someone
was
watching her.

She spun. Her gaze shot to the small basement window high on the wall.

Nothing. Just a thin glimpse of star-dusted sky.

She blew out a hard breath as she stalked up the stairs, wanting to wish it all away, wanting to crawl into her bed and pull the quilt up until it made a warm little cave, wanting to sleep until she could wake up and feel like she was herself again without premonitions and suspicions and paranoia that she was being watched.

Pausing in the kitchen doorway, she pondered her meal choices, finally opting for microwaved soup. She took her steaming mug with her to the back door, where she stood leaning her shoulder against the cold glass, blowing on the hot soup and looking out at the back deck.

Winter sunlight streamed over the wood, kissing it with warm highlights.
Sunlight.

No moon or stars in sight.

Oh, God.

The mug slipped from her nerveless fingers, falling, falling, until it hit the wood floor with a sharp crack, spraying soup in an arc, droplets speckling her jeans and slippers.

Vivien slapped both palms against the glass and stood, shivering, staring at the cloudless blue sky.
Sunlight. Sunlight.

She looked at her watch—8:30.
In the morning.
She’d lost twelve hours.

Again.