Authors: Violet Walker
“
G
reat show, Lana!”
She turned and smiled at the bouncer at the exit. He was a big burly man whose large biceps and dark skin presented a terrifying image, but he was a sweet man at heart, and he got a little too stressed out when it looked like he was going to have to use his muscles. In fact, he’d told her that it ruined his whole day. But he never hesitated to protect the girls, and of all the bouncers, Carl was Lana’s favorite.
“Thanks, Carl.” She moved her bag from one shoulder to another. Carl was one of the few people who actually knew what she looked like. She slipped in and got ready when most of the girls were dressing, so only the manager and Carl could say for sure that she had long dark curly hair or that her skin was actually a shade lighter than her make-up portrayed. That was how she liked it.
“Want me to walk you to your car?”
Lana shook her head. Carl wasn’t allowed to leave his post, but he always offered, and she always declined. She didn’t want the man to get in trouble on her account. “Nope. I’ve got my mace. I’m good.”
“See you next week?”
“I’ll be here.” She smiled as he poked his head outside to check the surrounding area. When he gave her the go ahead, she gave him a quick hug and slipped out the door.
The full moon lit her path, and Lana made her way steadily out the alley. To the left was a dead end, and the alley stretched on for a quarter of a mile before she could reach the parking lot in the back. She hated having to walk that long with only one exit, but many of the surrounding businesses had panic buttons displayed at their back doors in case anything happened.
She was just about to reach the intersection when she heard it. It sounded like someone gnawing on a bone. She froze and gripped her mace and her keys tighter. It wasn’t unusual for a homeless person to make this alley their home, but whatever she was hearing sounded large.
Too large to be human.
She started forward again, careful to make her footsteps as light as possible. The dim yellow glow of the streetlamp at the intersection cast a wide birth, and she felt a little better when she stepped into the glow.
But this thing didn’t fear the light, and as soon as she stepped into it, the gnawing stopped.
She whirled around, her heart in her throat.
An immense black shadow raced towards her, and she heard the loud piercing of a scream. Was that her? When it knocked into her, she fell back against the wall. Long claws gripped into her shoulder, and when she focused her eyes, she realized she was looking into the jaws of hell.
Christ, it almost looked human, but its eyes were growing bright red, and no human could open its jaws that wide. No human had teeth and nails that sharp.
And no human was that big.
She sprayed her mace into its mouth and eyes. It screamed and eased up on its hold. Gasping, she whirled around and hit the panic button. When it came back to attack her again, the back door swung open, and a man charged out. The being whirled around to grab it, but Lana pushed him inside and slammed the door shut.
“What the hell was that?” the man shouted. “
With shaking hands, she pulled out her phone and dialed nine-one-one. “Hello? Please help me. I’ve just been attacked.”
“By another person? Are you wounded?”
Lana swallowed hard. “I’m wounded, but it was no human. I don’t know what the hell it was.”
Lana was pressing the towel to the wound on her shoulder when a detective entered the bar. She hissed. She needed a paramedic, not a detective.
“Lana Delgado?” he asked as he approached her.
Her mouth went dry when she got a good look at him. Golden skin, dark brown hair that had flecks of red in it, beautiful light green eyes, and a beard that was at least a couple of days old. The initial attraction hit her hard and then curled inside her belly, but the continuous sting from the claw marks on her shoulder and chest distracted her. She nodded. “I’m Lana.”
“I’m Detective Cole Shuster.” He nodded at her wound. “May I?”
His touch sent shivers down her body, and she jerked away. “I’ll wait for the paramedics,” she murmured.”
He hesitated before pulling away. “I’ve walked through the alley. Whatever was there is gone. Can you walk me through what happened?”
He must have seen the flicker of fear in her eyes because he pulled out his gun. “I’m armed. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
She nodded her head. “The door is this way. One of the workers at the club came out to help me, but he took off after we got inside. Whatever it was really freaked him out. I didn’t even get his name.” She frowned. “He probably saved my life.”
“I’ll get his information from the manager.” She watched with apprehension as he pulled the door open and searched the immediate area with his gun. Nothing attacked him, so she stepped bravely out.
“I’m an entertainer at Gaston’s Girls, and I was walking to my car. It’s parked in the employee parking lot on the other side.” She pointed into the darkness. “Several feet back, I could hear something like a dog chewing on a bone. Only it sounds much bigger. When I got here, it pushed me against the wall.”
She faltered when she saw her own blood painted across the brick. Her legs trembled, and he immediately grabbed her arms. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m usually more put together than this.”
“It’s the wound,” he murmured. “It’s sapping away your energy. You’ve got to let me look at it.”
She froze when he lifted away the towel. The entire wound had grown black, and she gasped. “How did it get infected so quickly?”
He studied her for a moment, and after a second, he sighed. When he reached down and pulled out a knife, she shrieked and backed up against the wall. He slashed the palm of his hand and pressed it against her wound.
“What the hell are you doing?” she screamed. “Do you have AIDs or something?”
“Shh,” he hissed. He reached up and covered her mouth. “Goddamn, woman. I’m trying to save your life.”
She opened her mouth to bite him when she realized the stinging was going away. When he took his hand away, she glanced down. The wound was changing colors, and soon it was just angry and red. “What the hell are you?” she whispered. She looked up, terrified.
“I need you to trust me, Lana. The paramedics aren’t coming. The rest of the police aren’t coming. It’s just me, and you need to trust me.”
“Trust you? I don’t know anything about you.” She tried to slide down the wall and get away from him, but his arms shot out, and he trapped her.
“It knows your scent. It’s not going to leave a witness behind. You know that it’s not human or animal. I can see it in your eyes. I can help you.”
“How can you help me?”
“Because it’s a demon. And I’m half demon.”
L
ana felt her world tilt under her. A demon attacked her. A half demon was trying to help her. These weren’t the things that happened to her. She was getting her Master’s degree. She was going to be an English teacher. This kind of crap happened in movies and books and television shows. It didn’t happen in real life.
But she’d seen her wound. She’d seen the black colored flesh heal itself with the touch of blood. His blood.
He opened his tempting mouth to speak, but she put her hand up. She was processing. “There is a demon after me. And it’s going to keep coming after me. It looked demonic enough, so I’m okay with that. I mean, I’m not okay with that, but I can believe that. I guess. You are going to keep me safe. You’re half demon. I watched your blood heal my wound, so I guess I can buy that as well. I can’t really wrap my head around it, but if there are demons then I suppose there could also be half demons.”
“You’re doing okay so far,” he said encouragingly.
“What I can’t do right now is trust you. I don’t know you, Detective Shuster. How are you going to protect me night and day?”
“I’m moving in.”
“Moving in?” she squeaked. “I have work and school. Oh my God.” Her eyes widened. She immediately pulled her phone out. “I’ve got class in like four hours. I don’t have time for this.”
He blinked, and she could almost see what he was thinking. She was obsessed about school right after a demon attack? But she couldn’t miss the lecture. She looked wildly around. He wasn’t going to go away just because she told him to. “Okay, I have to get to class tomorrow, so you do whatever it is that you need to do so I can make it on time.”
“Stripper and student,” he murmured with a cocked head.
“Entertainer and student,” she snapped.
He put up his hands. “Sorry. You can leave your car here. I’ll take you home.”
She stopped for a moment and stared at him suspiciously. “How do I know you’re really a police officer?”
He flipped open his badge. “You can confirm it with a simple phone call, but I’d like you to leave out the part where you were attacked by a demon. It’s going to take a little bit of magic on my end to make the police forget about that.”
“Magic?” she said with wide eyes. Did he have demonic powers?
“Finagling the truth,” he said with a small smile. “That’s all.”
“I believe you,” she said as she handed his badge back. And she did. The truth was that she believed him from the very beginning. She just didn’t want to admit it.
Lana let him into her small one bedroom apartment with some apprehension. She’d never had a man sleep over, and certainly never a half-demon. Detective Cole Shuster may have only been half a man, but he was enough to make her nerves sing. She worked in a sexually charged environment, but she’d never been so turned on as she was right now.
“The couch is a pull out,” she murmured awkwardly as she picked up a few odds and ends that were littered around her room.
“There’s no need to pull it out,” he said as he kept his eye on her. “The cushions will be just fine.”
“Okay.” She spread out her hands. “There’s not much to it. Kitchen. Cups are in the cabinet if you need some water. There’s bourbon above the fridge if you need something stronger. If I didn’t have class tomorrow, I’d definitely be drinking something stronger.” She smiled weakly. “Bathroom is in there, and my room is at the end of the hall.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Curious and terrified,” she said as she met his intense gaze. “Part of me thinks that the less I know, the safer that I’ll be. But if you’re under my roof, maybe I need to know as much as possible to protect myself.”
“But you have class tomorrow,” he said with a wry smile.
She laughed hoarsely. “Yes. I have class tomorrow. And I at least need to get a few hours of sleep.” She frowned at her wound. “I should probably get stitches, but I don’t have time.”
“Do you have some bandages?”
“In the bathroom.”
“I can wrap it for you if you like.”
She didn’t want him to get that close. It made her nervous to think of him touching her. “I can do it. I was a cocktail waitress at a fairly rowdy bar for a while. Open wounds was an occupational hazard.”
“Good thing you got out of that job.”
She heard the sarcasm in his voice. “Let’s just stop right there. I dance at the club. I take off a few clothes, but I’m still in a bikini at the end of my show. The men are not allowed to touch me, I don’t honor any lap dance requests, and I wear a disguise on stage. A few nights a week pays my bills and covers quite a bit of my tuition, so quit judging me,” she hissed.
He spread his arms open. “I’m not judging. Trust me. I’d never judge in my line of work.”
She nodded her head. “Okay. Well. I’m going to bed. Do you need anything?”
He shook his head and lifted his duffel. “Over night bag.”
She raised his eyebrows. “Do you do this kind of thing often? Save a damsel in distress?”
“You may be a damsel, but I wouldn’t go as far as say that you’re in distress,” he muttered.
She nodded her head. That’s right. She may need protection, but she wasn’t going to let this odd development change things in her life.
She might be terrified, but she had more important things to focus on.
Cole shadowed her every move. They swapped out his cop car for her Ford because she didn’t want anyone at school to look suspiciously at her. When classmates asked about the new man walking around campus with her, she told him he was her out of town boyfriend.
He’d smirked at that one. And he took advantage.
In the lunch line on campus, he kept one hand draped low over her waist. Her heart skipped a beat, but she didn’t immediately run away. She had a role to play.
At least, that’s what she told herself. What she really wanted to do was move that hand a little bit lower.
He followed her to the library and watched her study. Occasionally, he called someone on his phone, but his voice was always too low for her to hear. She tried to focus on Spencer’s epic poem, but her eyes kept watching him. He was gorgeous beyond words.
Finally, he drove her home. He stayed close behind her when she locked the door, and the sexual tension between them thickened. “That lock won’t keep a demon out.”
“What about a half demon,” she said in a thick voice. God, he was so close. If she turned around right now, she could kiss him.
“No,” he said. His voice wrapped around her, and she nearly moaned. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “Why did you tell your friends that I was your boyfriend?”
“I couldn’t think of anything else to say,” she said as she swallowed hard. What was wrong with her? Her stomach was fluttering, and she was already getting wet.
“Did you have some fantasy in mind when you said it?”
Fantasies? Yes. She had plenty of fantasies. She’d thought about straddling him in the middle of class. She’d thought about taking her in his mouth under the café table. She wanted him to lick her nipples in the middle of the library. It was insane how many fantasies she’d had about him in such a short period of time. “No,” she managed to lie.
He wrapped a hand around her waist. “I could make some of those fantasies come true,” he whispered in her ear. “I could make all of those fantasies come true.”
She took a deep breath. “The only fantasy I have, Detective Shuster, is for this to be over soon so that I can go back to my normal life, and you can go back to chasing demons. Does that sound okay?”
Immediately, the hands disappeared, and she felt cold air move into the space behind her.
When she turned around, he was closing the bathroom door. Soon after, the shower started.
She leaned weakly against the wall. He hadn’t even been under her roof for twenty-four hours. How was she going to survive the rest of his time here?
Cole Shuster was not having a great time. He was babysitting the sexiest female he had ever laid eyes on, and although she denied the attraction, he could see her pupils dilate whenever she laid eyes on him.
He could smell her sex when she was wet.
By the time he’d made it to the Slavante Brotherhood meeting, he was beyond frustrated. No amount of cold showers was easing the deep ache within him.
It was ridiculous of course. He’d seen beautiful women. And as old as he was, he’d sampled more than just a few of them. But the feeling deep within his gut was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. Lana Delgado was exotic, sexy, smart, witty, and cool under pressure. And whenever he looked at her, his entire body paid attention. Even after running on just a few hours of sleep, he was ready to bend her over the nearest piece of furniture and plow her until she screamed.
And he wanted to hear her come. God, that shook him more than anything else. He wanted to pleasure her like no one else ever had.
“Cole? Are you paying attention?”
Cole shook his head and met Damien’s icy glare. “I’m listening,” he muttered.
“We need to trap this demon and send him back to hell. Any ideas?”
Cole frowned. “Don’t we need to trap it long enough to perform a ritual?”
“Nobody has performed the ritual in over a hundred years. I’m not even sure we know how to do it anymore.”
Damien looked as though he’d seen better days. Cole had no doubt that he was stressing about Cresher. His older brother had wreaked havoc on the city, and Damien could have ended him decades ago. Cole couldn’t judge. He didn’t know if he could kill his own brother if push came to shove. But Damien was going to have to do just that.
“We will have to find the rituals book. Where is it?” Cole asked.
Damien sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll have to look through the archives. Everything is digital these days. How is the girl?”
“Lana? She’s doing far better than I expected. She’s going on with her normal life. I have police outside her apartment, but it will do little good if the demon attacks tonight,” Cole said tightly. He was worried about her. His scent marked her apartment, and he hoped that was enough.
“Is she going to the tabloids?” one of the members asked.
Cole shook his head. “She would rather just have this whole mess be done. She has too much on her plate.”
“How is her wound?”
“Healing.” Cole swallowed hard. “I helped heal her. The poison was fairly fast acting. I feared she wouldn’t make it through the night if I didn’t act.”
The brothers started murmuring. It was a big deal for a hybrid to show the effects of his blood, and many of the brothers would let a stranger die before they saved them with their blood.
Damien nodded. “You did what you thought was right. We need to trap the demon first and then deal with Cresher second.”
“Why don’t we deal with Cresher first,” one brother said accusingly. Cole tensed. Damien was touchy about the subject.
“We won’t be able to touch Cresher if the demon is still attached to him. And if we kill Cresher before we deal with the demon, we’ll have an unattached demon roaming the world,” Damien hissed. The table fell silent. “Does anybody else have a problem with how I’m handling this?”
No one said anything. “Dismissed. Cole. Will you meet me in the archives please?”
The other men bowed their head and exited the room respectfully. Damien raised his red eyes at Cole and stared. “What am I doing, Cole?”
“Your job. Keep holding it together, Damien. This is just a setback.”
“A set back? People are dying because I couldn’t kill my brother. Preston should replace me as soon as he returns.”
Cole shook his head. “No one can fault you for wanting your kin to live. You’re still half human, Damien. None of us can judge you because none of us have been in your shoes. You’re not unfit for this post. You are doing better than we could do. It’s in your blood, Cole.”
He pushed his chair back. “I haven’t been in the archives for awhile. Let’s see what we can find.”
They entered the room together, and Cole immediately sneezed. There hadn’t been a reason for them to use any of these books in awhile. The dust had gathered on the ancient leather bound books, but the glow of technology lit their way. Cole widened his eyes as he saw several computers on and ready to go. “You weren’t kidding about going digital,” he murmured.
“I’ve kept the most important books in the back and out of the hands of the help,” Damien muttered as he led them through the back.
The room grew darkened as they moved further down the stacks, and Damien reached up and turned on the single light bulb in the ceiling.
Cole whistled. He glanced over the titles he’d only heard about in legends. “You have these?” he said in a low voice.
“They were originally in Italy, but when the hybrids descended a few decades ago, they sent these our way. They were supposed to take it back and send it to Germany, but no one has been by to collect them. To be honest, it makes me nervous to have these, so I try not to broadcast it.”