Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (66 page)

He slowed, sighing as he rolled up his window. They were close, anyway. Just a couple of sharp turns and a few more country blocks, and they’d arrive at the little village. Mortonville had become its unofficial name.

He chuckled, even thinking of it. Two years ago, Clarissa Morton’s property hadn’t had much more than an old two-bedroom sharecropper’s house, a chicken coop, and a rusting, abandoned trailer back in the trees. Now her little house had a second-floor addition, a gravel road had been constructed from ditch to trees, and numerous new homes had been erected.

One was John’s and Ariel’s, way in the back. A second, about halfway between Clarissa’s and Ariel’s, was Charles’s and Marion’s. A third house back near the woods belonged to Ariel’s and Marion’s parents. Beyond those structures were a few small but tasteful modular homes that belonged to tenants. John’s mother and his two youngest sisters were in one. They’d left a cult only to move into a commune of a different sort.

Tenants. That was what Clarissa called them because it sounded more genteel that what they really were: refugees. There were few places safe for people who offended the likes of Papa
.
Clarissa’s property was so heavily ensorcelled, thanks to Claude, that they could go there and hide. Leaving, however, was another matter. If they left, they might not make it back. That’s what Claude and his brothers were trying to fix. They were trying to put all the ridiculous politics and infighting on ice, at least as far as the cambions were concerned.

Cambions were stuck between here and there, demons but not demons. For too long, they’d been denied the ability to choose their affiliation. It was Hell or
else
. “Or else” was a death sentence, and an unfair one.

“Huh. That’s odd.” Approaching the property, Claude’s hackles rose upon spying the bright lights of the main house. It was three a.m. What the hell would Clarissa be doing up so early? Normally, she got up early to cook a good meal for all the bedraggled supernatural types in her charge, but that was generally closer to sunrise.

One or two lights wouldn’t have been so concerning, but the entire downstairs? It looked like Charles’s lights down the path were on, too, as well as John’s porch light.

Claude turned into the driveway and pulled right behind Clarissa’s pick-up truck. He killed his Jeep’s ignition and hopped down onto the dewy grass, pausing to filter out the sound of chirping crickets to hone in on the noise through the house’s open windows. The sound was muffled, through that side window, so they must have all been in the kitchen.

They were agitated, and
gathered
, so something had happened. Why hadn’t they called him?

He slammed the door shut and walked around front of the Jeep, pondering if he should go in first, or tend to Gail and her howling cat.

It was an unseasonably cool summer night. Though it was good and warm inside the vehicle, that temperature wouldn’t hold long. He pulled her door open and stabbed her seatbelt release with his thumb. As he worked her into his arms, he grinned. He’d done the best he could to dress her back at her apartment, though when she woke up, she probably wouldn’t approve of his choices. He knew little about women’s fashion beyond what he saw while perusing certain intimate wear catalogues every month. Those stretchy pants probably didn’t go with that nightshirt she’d pulled on, but between those and her jeans, they’d seemed like they’d be easier to get on.

He bumped the door closed with his hip and carried Gail carefully across the uneven pavers and up the porch steps. He pulled the storm door open only to find the inner door locked. He pressed the doorbell button once, waited a moment, and then remembered that Clarissa’s doorbell hadn’t worked since before John added on the second story.

“Let’s see …”

Closing his eyes, he let his mind travel through the doors and walls, and isolated the thoughts in abode. Two, five, six, eight—yes, eight people inside. It was about to get even more crowded, but that was par for the course at Clarissa’s. Her house was like the living room and snack pantry of the community. Fortunately, she thrived under those conditions. She loved taking care of people.

He didn’t bother knocking, and chose instead to give a mental nudge to one of the minds capable of telepathy in the kitchen.

Charles, open the front door.

He could sense Charles disengaging from the discussion and pulling away.

Footsteps sounded through the front room, and a moment later, Charles opened the door.

Charles—tall, broad, and probably built like one of King Arthur’s legendary knights if Arthur’s knights wore flannel pajama bottoms with thirty-eight-inch inseams—pushed his long hair out of his face and squinted at his older brother.

He hit the front porch light switch, and Claude closed his eyes and hissed at the sudden brightness.

“Move,
pute
.”

“What the fuck?”

“This is Gail.”

“No shit, it’s Gail. Of all people, I would know. I’ve got an excellent memory, so I remember quite clearly the conversation we had yesterday morning. You said you hadn’t spoken to her yet. Call me suspicious, but I don’t think she came here on her own volition.”

Claude edged past his brother, being careful not to brush her body against Charles’s on the way through the door.

Charles was a bit like a live wire. Most paranormal types were unaffected by his incubus touch, but witches sort of walked the thin line between human and supernatural classification. Supposedly, the first witches were born of minor gods and their human consorts, and millennia of propagation and intermarriage had made the gene pool somewhat unpredictable.

Some witches, like Claude’s
maman
and her mother had been, were closer to those godly ancestors. Even after uncountable generations, their power never dimmed. Others, like Gail, were more human than not.

He didn’t want to risk her safety for the sake of feelings when he knew Charles wouldn’t take offense with Claude’s cautiousness, anyway. Charles was nearly a hundred and twenty-five years old. He’d accepted his lot in life, and that meant knowing there were few people he could touch.

“Yes, I did say that.” Claude shifted Gail in his arms and freed one hand to reorder the pillows on the living room couch. He laid her down reverently and pulled Clarissa’s old afghan over her. “But something clicked, and couldn’t wait. You know how it is.”

Charles sighed. “Yeah, I know. It’s like you see a pretty thing in a museum’s glass display, and you know it belongs to you. They won’t give it back for some bullshit reason, and you can’t rest until it’s returned to your possession.”

“I suppose that sums it up.”

Charles put up his hands. “I was there eighteen months ago, remember? That’s why I know you’re supposed to jump through the hoops, cross all the Ts and dot the Is before you get that thing back. If you don’t, people will think you stole it, even though it was yours.”

Claude rolled his eyes and padded back to the door. “If you had ripped that Band-Aid off sooner with Marion, you two wouldn’t have gone almost a year with few civil things to say to each other.”

He pushed the storm door open, and Charles followed at his heels.

“How much did you tell her?” Charles asked.

“Everything.” Claude pulled the Jeep’s cargo bay door open and unhooked the bungee cord holding the pet carrier in place.

Candy Corn’s yellow eyes shone like mirrors in the near dark.

“And she believed it?”

Belief had been a huge problem for Marion when Charles had gone looking for her eighteen months ago. She hadn’t grown up in their world and had no knowledge of things like incubi, demigods, and werewolves. Saying she was skeptical would have been putting things mildly. In all those years on her own, hidden in the Ohio foster care system, she’d had no clue that she was a touch supernatural herself. That, she was still trying to come to grips with, because although her parents and grandmother did try to hide what they were, sometimes the magic made its own way out. At twenty-six, Marion had only just begun figuring out her gifts. Oddly enough, her older sister Ariel had
no
supernatural gifts at all. John liked it that way.

“Yes, she believed it, thanks to this thing.” He pointed down at the cat carrier. “It would be just my luck she’d have a familiar.”

“What do you have against familiars?”

“Nothing. Just the fact that after Laurette was killed, her cat kept finding me and following me around whenever I was back in New Orleans. You think people are good at doing guilt?” He slammed the Jeep door shut and picked across the lawn toward the house. “Cats are even better at it.”

“You do realize that just because she believes it doesn’t mean she’ll be happy about being here, right?”

“I doubt she’ll be happy about it. In fact, I fully expect her to throw every insult and barb she has in her at me before we come back around to something resembling civility. She’ll learn to tolerate me.”

“More than that.” They climbed back up onto the porch and into the house. “But whether or not she’s going to help you is another question altogether. She may not want to get involved in this shit, and who could blame her?”

They paused near the door, and Claude watched Gail’s chest as it slowly rose and fell with her deep breaths. Her lips moved as if to form words and he wondered what she was seeing in her dreams and whether he was in them. Likely, if he was, he was enduring unspeakable torture at her hands. He probably deserved it in real life.

“She’ll help,” he said. “If I can’t talk her into it, the girls will.”

“Claude, I think the girls would tell her to run far and fast, and not to come back until the coast is clear.”

Claude sighed. Charles was probably right. He knew he shouldn’t hold out hope of an easy transition for Gail, but he wished it for her—and him. “Wait …” He closed the front door and set down the cat carrier. “Why is everyone awake? What happened?”

Charles tipped his head toward the kitchen and walked toward it. “Come on. You might as well save your
I-told-you-so
for all to hear.”

Well, shit. Did he even want to know?

They strode into the bright, roomy kitchen where the head of household, Clarissa, sat with her daughter Lottie, Lottie’s husband Sylvester, and their two daughters, Ariel and Marion. Marion stood as Claude and Charles walked in and handed Claude the fidgety infant, his niece and goddaughter Ruby.

“Hello, tiny. Why are you awake?”

Ruby was nine months old. She had no answer for him beyond grabbing a chunk of his hair and pulling it.

“Missed you, too.”

“It’s that nephew of yours,” Clarissa said. She rubbed tired red eyes and yawned brazenly. Claude didn’t know her exact age, but she was old enough have retired from her job as a school janitress years before John hooked up with Ariel. She didn’t look it, though. Thanks to Papa, she had the same countenance she’d had as a thirty-year-old. She looked younger than Lottie and could pass for Ariel’s and Marion’s sister. When Papa couldn’t take who he had set out for—Ariel—he’d settled on Clarissa as a consolation prize. He’d given her back a few decades of life in preparation of taking her, but she’d grabbed him by the demonic balls, figuratively, and he’d had no choice but to let her go. Since then, he’d avoided coming near her home, though he hadn’t given up on seeking revenge. Instead of taking it out on the Mortons, he sought to make the sons who’d sided with them suffer.

“What about my nephew?”

He didn’t have to ask which nephew she meant, because there was only one he knew by name.

Charles settled into a chair next to John and sighed. “He escaped.”

Claude sat, too. Ross had escaped? That wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do. He’d been under guard by werewolves for more than nine months out in the mountains. Charles hadn’t known his quarter-demon son existed until Papa had threatened to sic the groveling upstart on him as an overseer. Ross had gotten too close to Marion and had made insinuations that he’d harm his unborn sister if he could. Because Charles wasn’t wired to be a killer, instead of dispatching Ross at that time, he agreed to let their brother-in-law Calvin and his wolf pack keep him under guard. Ross had been holed up in the mountains for longer than Ruby had been alive. Perhaps they’d become complacent with the arrangement.

“Well, that’s not quite accurate,” Marion said. She dumped two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee mug and rolled her eyes. “It’d be more precise to say that my stepson was
sprung
.”

“By whom?”

“A wolf, surprisingly,” John said. “I teleported out to there a couple of hours ago after Julia called. She went out to the little bunker they kept him in to take him his dinner and found the door was wide open and the shackles that kept him from leaving the structure had been cut off.”

“So, someone who didn’t have access to the keys.”

“Yes, which is a fuck-load of people, but we don’t need to worry about it. Calvin and a couple of the other wolves he trusts sniffed around. She wasn’t hard for them to find. When they caught up to her, she started crying and mumbling something about how the devil made her do it. Best they could figure out, she got too close to the room they kept Ross locked up in and he used what little incubus pull he had to lure her in. Shouldn’t have worked, but some folks are more susceptible than others.”

“The
devil
made her do it? Are we certain Papa’s not involved?” Papa had a well-known aversion to werewolves. He couldn’t stand the smell of them. It must have drove him apeshit that Julia married one, and that revulsion must have made Julia very happy because it kept her dangerous daddy far, far away.

“Nope. At least, not directly. He can’t teleport onto that property nor walk onto it, so he would have had to have someone else do it for him … if he even cared that much about Ross.” John turned his gaze to Charles. “No offense, bro.”

Charles shrugged.

It was probably hard for him to take offense. Charles had spent most of his first century in a drunken stupor, so whichever woman he’d seduced who had borne his psychotic son, he couldn’t identify. He’d tried to feel something for his son, and the best he could do was revulsion. Ross had been born bad, and didn’t try to be otherwise.