The Immortals (16 page)

They were on their way back to her apartment when Colin’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number so he handed the phone to Anna. He knew who was on the other end before she had a chance to say anything. Luca had called him about his email.

Anna didn’t give him much chance to talk. As soon as she heard Luca’s voice, she sobbed out the entire encounter with Jeremy from that morning and what they needed to do now, and how she couldn’t stop thinking this was their fault. If that demon had just killed him in the field, it would have been a better fate than this hellish transformation.

Luca listened patiently as Anna cried in her sorrow and frustration, and Colin tried to wait just as patiently, but he desperately wanted to know why Luca had called. He was the most knowledgeable hunter they’d ever met, and far older than anyone else they knew. Maybe he’d only called to warn them about the inevitable outcome, and that’s why he didn’t bother interrupting Anna now.

Colin pulled into a parking spot at her apartment complex and Anna finally finished. Luca didn’t say anything right away and both Colin and Anna grew nervous.

“
He’s going to blame us. He’s going to tell us we never should have used that gift without knowing what it could do,
” Anna lowered the phone from her ear and put him on the speakerphone, even though Colin would have heard the conversation through Anna.

“
If he does, then he’s an asshole, and I’m never speaking to him again.
” Colin didn’t really mean it, but they had been in a difficult situation, and it had killed both of the demons. Sort of.

“You two have a tendency to find yourselves in unusual situations,” Luca finally said, the Italian accent of his own youth, over six centuries past, still lingering in his speech. Colin suspected he’d intentionally held onto his accent, though. Apparently, women found Italian sexy and Luca had always – or almost always – been single.

“Helpful, Luca,” Anna grumbled.

“What the hell are all these demons doing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, anyway?” Luca asked.

Colin sighed impatiently. “Luca, what makes you think we know? Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a beer and fill you in on the whole secrecy of this assignment to begin with. Right now, we’ve got three archdemons and a former human turned demon to deal with, so can you concentrate?”

“What do you mean secrecy?” he asked. Colin thought he was incapable of concentrating, apparently.

Colin quickly recapped The Angel’s instructions to come to Baton Rouge and to pretend not to know one another, her suspicions that he and Anna were on some sort of hit list, the way they interfered with their gifts and Anna’s abduction, and their own theory that maybe The Angel had sent them here because of this particular group of hunters, rather than the presence of so many high profile demons, who may have actually followed them here. Luca listened quietly again, and when Colin got to the end, he announced, “I need to finish up here in St. Paul, but when I’m done, I’m coming to meet you down there.”

Anna and Colin glanced at each other. Immortal hunters rarely worked together. Because they were married and it was part of their deal, Colin and Anna were the only two who did. There were too few of them and they were needed in too many places for them to congregate in one area, and
Luca
, the legendary badass-demon-hunter-extraordinaire, the hunter who had come to Colin and Anna and taught them everything they needed to know to begin their own lives as hunters, was coming to meet them in Baton Rouge.

“Luca,” Anna said uneasily, “what do you think is going on here?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this, honestly. Your theory makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t explain
how
they’re doing any of this. I’m kind of surprised my own angel hasn’t visited me to tell me what’s going on down there.”

Colin snickered. “Surely those guys talk to each other.”

“It’s the clouds. Probably interferes with their cell reception.”

Anna rolled her eyes. She still didn’t think joking about angels was funny.

“What about Jeremy?” Anna asked. “What can you tell us about him?”

“It,” Colin corrected.

Anna narrowed her eyes at him and Colin tried to look innocent about it.

“Well,” Luca answered, “
it’s
a demon now. It’s going to be out there doing all the things demons do unless you stop it.”

Anna thought it was a good thing he was in Minnesota, because she kind of wanted to kick him in the shin right now.

“I’ve only heard of this before, never actually seen it,” Luca continued, “but Hell broke the rules in transforming him, which means, theoretically, it should be reversible.”

“How?” Anna asked excitedly.

“Sorry, Anna,” Luca sighed, “I don’t know if it’s actually ever been done. I wouldn’t even know how to attempt it. Your friend is a demon now, and it’s a threat to humans. It will have to be hunted.”

Colin could feel Anna’s anger radiating from her. He didn’t need telepathy for that. “Then why even tell us it may be reversible? Why put the idea in our heads we may be able to save Jeremy if you’re just going to insist he’s hunted down anyway?”

“Because you asked me what I knew, and I don’t want to lie to the only friends I have that don’t grow old and die on me.”

“
Easy, Anna. He has a point. We have very few friends who will be with us until the end.
”

Anna crossed her arms defiantly, still seething, but didn’t reprimand Luca anymore.

“How long until you’re done in St. Paul?” Colin asked.

“Few weeks, I think,” Luca replied, sounding relieved Anna was no longer grilling him.

He and Colin talked for a few minutes about sports and Anna got bored. She got out of the car and walked back to her apartment. It didn’t take long for Colin to catch up to her. “Don’t be mad at him,” he reminded her.

“I’m not,” but Anna wasn’t really sure about that. Hunting the beast that was now Jeremy would have been a hell of a lot easier if he’d never told her it may be possible to save him somehow.

“Anna, if you’d found out the truth years later, imagine how angry and betrayed you would have felt if he hadn’t told you. You’re putting Luca in an impossible situation.”

Anna paused by the foot of the stairs leading up to her apartment because she knew Colin was right, but it pissed her off anyway. Or maybe the whole situation just pissed her off and no matter what happened, she was going to be irritable and sullen about it, because even though Jeremy’s flirting had annoyed her, there were plenty of moments she had genuinely liked him. And the attractive young man with auburn hair and persistent five o’clock shadow had been murdered, morphed into a hideous creature that would terrorize the same city he’d once worked to protect. Yes, Anna was definitely pissed off.

“He wasn’t
that
attractive,” Colin grumbled.

Anna shot him a don’t-be-an-asshole look and clomped up the stairs. “
Bradley Cooper is a sex symbol, you know
,” Anna retorted, not because she was sexually attracted to Bradley Cooper or Jeremy, but just because she wanted to mess with Colin.

“
Now how would I know something like that?
”

Anna could hear the sigh in his voice even though he wasn’t speaking aloud. “
I hardly think Jeremy was wasting his days celibate while he was pining for me. He had as much trouble getting laid as Luca.
”

“
God, Luca’s going to want to talk to me about it, too, when he gets to town. Why does he think I want to hear about his sexual exploits?”

“Because he has no one else to talk to about them.”

Anna unlocked her door and Colin begrudgingly acknowledged she was right, even though it still made him uncomfortable to listen to him talking about his sex life. As Anna stepped inside her apartment, she was thrown across the living room by a force she couldn’t see, by something she couldn’t
sense
. Whatever had blocked them before was doing it again, only this time, it had found them. It was in her apartment.

Colin hurried to Anna’s side as she struggled to get back on her feet. The tingling electric feeling of this new gift from The Angel was charging within them again, but they didn’t know where the damn thing was. Movement from the kitchen made them both draw their daggers, and a gray beast with bony growths protruding from its face lunged at them. The invisible force hadn’t come alone. It had found Colin and Anna by bringing Jeremy with it.

The gray demon knocked Colin to the ground and Anna cut one of its forelimbs to push it off of him. The creature screamed and rolled its goldenrod eyes toward her, but Colin was on his feet again, ready to stab it, when the invisible demon knocked them both against the wall. Colin’s dagger fell from his hand and Anna’s heart leaped into her throat.

“
Blow the goddamn apartment down!
” she yelled, and that power surged from them, exploding windows and light fixtures, overturning furniture and throwing debris in the air as if silent bombs had been detonated inside the apartment.

As fluttering papers and stuffing from the furniture settled to the floor, Colin and Anna moved away from the wall. He bent down and picked up his dagger, keeping it in his hand just in case. The walkway was filling with nervous tenants who had left their own apartments to check on the cause of the explosion, the second one at an apartment complex in the city that day. The door had been blown off its hinges and the glass had been shattered in all of the windows. There was no point in trying to get any privacy from the curious onlookers now.

They picked up a few items they didn’t want to leave behind as they walked through the living room, making their way to Anna’s bedroom. She wanted to grab a small case she kept a few relics of their past in that had personal significance to her, then they were getting the hell out of here before the cops showed up. Anna stepped over a pile of clothes that had been knocked from a drawer in the dresser and froze. Lying by the door to the bathroom was a large gray form, and it was still alive.

It turned its head and glared at Anna and Colin with those
almost
human yellow eyes. The demon was badly injured or it would have attacked them already. Colin’s grip tightened on his dagger.

“
Wait,
” Anna begged, “
don’t kill it.”

“
What? Anna, it’s a demon.”

“It’s Jeremy.”

“Not anymore. Look at it.”

“I am.”
Anna started slowly backing out of the room. “
Come on, Colin. Please.”

Colin stared at the hulking gray beast whose features betrayed how willing it would be to murder them if it could. “
Anna, it’s hurt, it’ll be easy to kill now. Jeremy would want us to end this.
”

Anna just shook her head. “
What if we can save him? What if Luca can help us figure out how? And if not, we’ll find him again. It’s what we do.”

The monster made an odd moaning sound and Colin breathed slowly, relaxing his grip on his dagger, then backed out of the room with Anna. In the distance, they could hear the sirens of the approaching police cars. A large crowd had gathered at her doorway now, but The Immortals stepped around them and vanished.

Devil’s Thumb
, Book 2 of
The Immortals
series

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