In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance (10 page)

11

Another Demon Heard From

“
See
, you bastard
puta!
See
! You are supposed to see and show me
everything
. You stinking fica! You …” Enzo Donatore stood above his magical see-stone, screaming in frustration. When he was very upset, he cursed in Italian, his family’s native tongue. He slammed his massive fists and forearms on the granite slab supporting the crystal. The table broke on each side of the triangular mass.

“Pezzo di merda! Piece of shit!” He tore the cracked end of the slab off and spun, slamming it against one of the stone pillars of his lair. The underground warren shuddered, and the hunk of granite broke into shards.

“Diego! Get in here!” Enzo screamed into the microphone. He continued to swear until his brother arrived. “Took you long enough.” Diego arrived wild-eyed.

“It wasn’t my fault …”

“Look!” He indicated the fragmented desk. “The stinking piece of crap you got me two days ago broke, just like the last piece. Get me some
real
granite! Something strong.” His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about this, Diego?”

“About what, Enzo?”

“The Duane bitch. She escaped from one of my business ventures in New York City. Except she was so weak, she couldn’t escape. Have you seen these,” he turned to the see-stone and commanded it. “Show him.” He pulled back, trying not to threaten the stone. If it was afraid, the crystal didn’t work. It was working: they watched Hannah Herhman, Doug, and some others break into the bordello and waft Cass away. He couldn’t see who was carrying her, just a blur. And then she became a blur.

“Look! A sorcerer has taken her. He has disguised himself and the bitch so that the stone can’t see them.” Enzo threw his head back and howled; a screech of agony and frustration.

The next images thrown up by the all-seeing crystal were more disturbing: Hannah Hehrman taking apart the whorehouse and everyone in it. Enzo watched in disgust and admiration.

“She is so good, this Hehrman woman. Look at her work with a knife. And so neat. And listen to them, talk, stinking cowards, spilling my secrets. Cowards! Putas!” The crystal showed the empty apartment after Hannah’s team left. No blood, no gore. Not a single living soul. “She is so good. Not even fingerprints. She will be charged with nothing. That woman should work for me!”

Enzo contemplated the image of the empty condo, and then abruptly recalled the problem “The Duane bitch has escaped me. You let him do it!”

Diego backed up, holding his hands out to his brother, trying to keep him away. “I didn’t know anything about it, Enzo. I was assigned to …”

“I don’t care what I told you to do. Cass Duane and her sow of a mother are my
top
priority. You should always be watching. You failed me, Diego, when I was injured and sick.”

The Indian’s “spiritual” retreat had left him not just chastened, but beaten to a shadow of himself. All those false deities the old man had called flapping around. That gigantic supernova that the old Indian called “the Great One” illuminating everything, eliminating darkness. It was nothing but an astronomic phenomenon, but a powerful one.

Being near it had almost killed him, though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone in the castle. “I was wounded, and what do you do, quit on me. Lazy lay-about …”

“Enzo, I was in North Korea, taking care of our interests there. You told me to go there. I don’t have a see-stone. I don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the world. And you didn’t call me.”

“Shut up! Look what you did!” Enzo turned his attention to the stone. The lovely crystal pyramid spun lights toward the cave’s ceiling. They saw Cass’s rescue again. This time, they couldn’t see anything of her at all: a blur. Then the shadow of a blur, then a memory.

“Where did she go?” The man, he assumed it would have to be a man to carry her, didn’t show up at all. “Play it again.” Nothing. The event was gone from the stone’s memory.

“Look at this. Play the following hours,” he ordered the stone. Fuzzy images of a dark van traveling through the Manhattan streets. Turning in somewhere. All street signs were blank. None of the businesses had signage. The images became fuzzier. Finally, all the stone broadcast was shadow.

Enzo pulled himself up, holding his mouth shut. He couldn’t rage at the stone. It wouldn’t work. “Show me more. Show me everything. Where is she now?”

A map of Manhattan appeared, and then the state of New York, and finally surrounding states materialized as a hologram above the stone. The vision hovered, and dissolved, becoming a film with indistinguishable hallmarks and boundaries.

“Where is
she?”
Enzo bounced from foot to foot in front the fractured table that held the stone. “I don’t want to see the fucking eastern seaboard. I want to see
her
.” He grasped the edges of the slab with his fingers. It crumbled.

The vision disintegrated. He couldn’t see the quarter of the
country
where she was. Nothing. Sure as the fact that he was the most powerful thing that existed, he couldn’t search every stinking clinic and hospital in that area to find her.

“Something’s blocking her,” Diego said, peering at the mist above the stone. “Only something very powerful could do that. More powerful than …”

“Nothing is more powerful than
me! Nothing! That stupid old man, that shaman and his hocus-pocus is
not
more powerful than I.
This is
your
fault, Diego. You were asleep at the wheel.”

He covered the step or two between him and his brother, his claws coming out unbidden. His human flesh, so fine and blond, lightly tanned with silver/gold hair dusting it, withdrew, revealing his shining black scales.

His teeth ripped through the flesh of Diego’s throat before his brother’s reptilian armor could protect him. Blood vessels ruptured and spurting, trachea standing out rigid-white, flesh torn open: Diego had no defense. Even if his demon form had emerged, he would have had no defense: Enzo was the king of demons, the essence of demonic nature personified. None of his kind could beat him.

“Clean up this place, you stinking stronzas,” He roared as a knock on the door announced the housekeepers. “Turds like you don’t deserve easy work like cleaning my office. You should be scrubbing the torture chambers.”

The maids came in, long aprons over their shining snake-like skins. They carried buckets and mops and kept their heads averted.

“Clean it! All of it! And no licksies of the scraps or blood! He’s mine. Not a bite for you. If you find something to eat, bring it to me.” Enzo stalked from the main part of his quarters, a stone lair set under the castle. Its rock was warm buff color and should have given off a cheery feeling, but nothing in the castle or his chambers gave off anything but cold and dread.

Carrying one of Diego’s legs and his torso, Enzo retreated to an upper level of the dungeon. What he had done to Diego was really too messy for his workspace. The see-stone had been very upset by it. He’d had to calm the stone down before covering it. He’d finish his snack here, and think about what was going on.

Sitting in a massive wooden chair upholstered with interwoven strips of leather, he daintily polished off Diego’s thigh. Little prick had it coming. Always thought
he
was next-in-line. The Donatore dynasty had no next-in-line; Enzo would live forever, unless he met with terrible misfortune of the kind that only he could mete out. Usually.

He’d been at the receiving end because of that dreadful old man, that Indian charlatan. But the old man was right, even as he was driving away Enzo and his hordes; he had said that Enzo existed at the pleasure of the Great One. His superstition, known as
God
by idiots and sycophants far and wide,
did
keep Enzo alive because
it pleased him
.

Pleasure! Pleased! Nothing was pleased for very long in Enzo’s world. But it was true; the old man had shown him. He was allowed to exist by a power larger than he because that power wanted it that way.

He ripped into the upper part of Diego’s torso, lower jaw stuffed in the cavity of his ribs and upper jaw crunching down on his chest. Ripping and tearing his brother’s flesh gave him some peace.

He’d been haunted by the defeat at the Indian’s retreat. It could have been a great victory, but it wasn’t. Only a few hundred of the thousands there had died, and none of those had joined his followers after death. Killed by a demon, they were supposed to become demons, his immortal servants. The shaman had stopped that.

What was going on with the see-stone? Delicately spreading Diego’s ribs and stripping the meat from them, Enzo contemplated. Something—someone—had blocked the stone. Only a creature as strong as that shaman could do that. Was it the old shaman? It could have been. Enzo didn’t know where he’d gone.

He tossed a stripped rib to the rats hiding in the shadows. Could the shaman have died and left someone as powerful in his place? The thought took Enzo’s breath away. What if that person, atrocious though he or she might be, had picked the Duane bitch out of her filthy closet and taken her somewhere? What if that was what the fogginess of the stone meant? That person could block out the entire quarter of a country?

Enzo froze. What if that person had done something to the bitch that rendered her invisible to him? Changed her brain waves or identity to his sensors? How could he find something that couldn’t be seen?

Easy! He ran his bloody hands through his hair. He’d turned back to his human form. He had to get to work. How to find what couldn’t be seen? Look for what wasn’t there. Look for people acting like they were doing/helping/healing someone–
her,
the bitch—that he couldn’t see. How was he to find the new shaman, this very dangerous survivor/usurper? Follow the blur. Use his assets to cover the globe. The bitch would be in a hospital. No one could heal her. He hadn’t left the life force of a slug in her. Which hospital?

“Dr. Lanzing, I need to ask that favor that you promised so long ago. Yes, it has been a long time, but a promise is forever.” He spoke into the telephone in his lair. In his human form, Enzo was as handsome a man as ever lived. Close to a giant, but beautifully formed in face and figure. Blond, blue eyed. Every inch a businessman. His voice was melodious and irresistible. “I need you to make some staff changes. I’ll take care of all the details.”

He smiled. Finding out what happened was too simple, really. That fake, Grandfather could evade the see-stone, as could the man he’d left in his place. But Will Duane couldn’t, nor could his people. Enzo found out what had happened, directly from her father’s mind. Cass Duane had been rescued by Grandfather’s grandson, Leroy something. He had taken her to a hospital to gain weight and recover. After that, her loving father would transfer her to a very reputable mental hospital for treatment of her multitude of mental ills. Enzo thought that was smart. The bitch was a fruitcake, a very dangerous one.

As a reward, Will Duane was treating Leroy to a lavish vacation/makeover, to render him suitable as a spouse for the fair Cass. Talk about a match made in hell! Enzo belched, hitting himself in the chest with his fist. Diego didn’t agree with him.

Leroy would be hobnobbing with royalty all over Europe. Riding to the hounds, making quite a splash. How to deflect that splash and destroy Will Duane’s plan? And Leroy? And Cass?

He picked up the phone, “Ferguson, my man. I need you to deliver some horses. To your friends, the Ballentynes. Yes,
those
horses. I want them there.”

He made another call, adopting a slight upper-class British accent. “Dash, my friend, how good it is to hear your voice!” He could feel the man on the other end of the line cringe.

Donatore’s bonhomie was irresistible and unnecessary. Dashiell Pondichury, the ninth Duke of Lancature, had been in Enzo’s pocket since that bacchanal four years ago. Not only was he Donatore’s spiritual slave, he was terrified that his master would reveal the truth about what had happened to his three wives.

Dash had brought his first wife to a party at the castle four years ago. Enzo’s parties were notorious; once they really got going, people lost control. They also lost other things: feet, hands. Heads. Dashiell had had a wonderful time; his first wife had not, alas. She lost her head and that was that. Didn’t stop her husband from bringing his second and third wives to Enzo’s galas in subsequent years.

Now Dashiell was worried sick that Enzo would reveal what he thought was buried out in his vineyard to the authorities. Dashiell needn’t have been so concerned; his wives were fully resuscitated, “alive”, and back in service at the castle. They made great whores. Indestructible. Dash should have worried about running into the three of them getting sued for bigamy! But he didn’t know they were up and passing for alive.

“I need to you check on someone for me. His name is,” the words burned Enzo’s tongue. No, his whole mouth and throat, “Leroy Watches Jr. He’s attempting to crash noble society in London. A pretender of the worst sort. I need you to destroy him …