Summoner of Storms

(SPECTR #6)

Jordan L. Hawk

Summoner of Storms (SPECTR #6)
© 2014
Jordan L. Hawk

ISBN: 978-1-941230-05-3

All rights reserved.

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover art © 2014 Jordan L. Hawk

Image credits: © iStockphoto.com /
NicolasMcComber

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Edited by Annetta Ribken

Caleb opened his eyes and found himself alone
in bed.

Well, not alone. Not really.
Alone
wasn’t something he’d ever be again. He’d passed up the last chance
to be rid of Gray, the entity who’d accidentally possessed him
exactly forty-one days ago.

The temporary roommate in his head had become
permanent. Sharing the duplex. Co-signed on the home loan.

“
You are sometimes very strange,”
Gray
observed.

Oh sure,
you’re
the 5,000 year old
demon-eating vampire, but
I’m
the one who’s strange.

So not alone, but also without the other body
he’d expected to find. The rather fine body belonging to Special
Agent John Starkweather, Strategic Paranormal Entity Control, aka
SPECTR. Or maybe former special agent, given the events of the last
twenty-four hours. The white sheets still held the musk of sweat
and sex, mingled with the fading trace of John’s aftershave.

“
John left without us.”
Disappointment, mingled with memories from the night before. John
stretched out on the bed beneath them, his eyes an uncannily
brilliant blue in Gray’s amped-up sight. His mouth on their cock.
The way he’d tilted his head to one side in invitation when Gray
asked to taste John’s blood...

Caleb’s morning wood took on a new urgency.
Would you stop? We’ve got other things to worry about right now
besides sex.

“
Will we hunt demons?”

It’s all about food or fucking with you,
isn’t it?
Caleb shook his head, but his lips curved in a smile.
Damned drakul might have a two-track mind, but unlike a human,
Caleb always knew exactly where he stood with Gray.

“
Mortals make things needlessly
complicated.”

Well, Gray had a point there.

Caleb stretched and sat up. The room looked
like a bed and breakfast, but was actually part of a mansion
converted to a safe house by the Vigilant. Who the Vigilant were,
he still didn’t know for certain, other than they opposed the
government’s “all Non-Human Entities must die” policy. Not to
mention SPECTR’s “let’s load demons into soldiers and try to
control them, because what could possibly go wrong?”
initiative.

The sound of voices carried from somewhere
below, the words indistinguishable even with his enhanced hearing.
Caleb rolled out of bed and picked up his discarded sweatpants from
last night. They were one-size-fits-all, which meant short enough
to expose his ankles and baggy enough to ride dangerously low on
his hips even with the drawstring pulled tight. One of the Vigilant
who’d hosed him down the night before—after the battle, demon blood
had covered him from head to toe—said his clothes would be cleaned
and returned. Hoping to track them down, Caleb went to the bedroom
door and opened it.

A spirit ward lay just outside the door.

Caleb stared at it, a sick twist in his
stomach. What the hell?

“
It cannot hold us,”
Gray pointed
out.

Yeah, I know.
As did the Vigilant.
They must have put it here as a sort of alarm, because they wanted
to know the moment he started wandering the halls. Which, in turn,
meant despite all their high-sounding words, they didn’t fully
trust Caleb.

No. They didn’t fully trust Gray.

“
Foolish.”

Yeah.
Except in ordinary
circumstances, once the forty-day limit ended, NHEs generally took
over their hosts and set about sowing major havoc and death.
Tiffany had taken a huge risk, at least from her perspective, by
allowing Gray’s possession to become permanent. Maybe not everyone
in the Vigilant was entirely happy with her decision.

Hell, could he really blame them? Sure, it
sucked, but even he couldn’t really explain why Gray was
different.

“
Because I am not a demon.”

Whatever that even meant. “Demon” wasn’t even
a real category, just a word left over from the days before anyone
understood NHEs. Not to say anyone really understood them now. That
had been one of the more disillusioning things about the last forty
days, discovering even the experts didn’t have any real idea what
they dealt with.

Well, maybe the Vigilant would have more
answers. At least they’d left his clothes, neatly folded and
stacked on the floor, beside the spirit ward. With a sigh, he
stepped across the ward; it tingled across his skin. Caleb's ears
popped, as if the pressure had changed around him. Whatever
exorcist laid the ward knew he was up and around now.

He dressed quickly in black jeans, dark gray
tee, and black leather boots adorned with buckles and straps. And
his long coat, elk leather dyed black, underlain with kevlar.
Someone had done a quick repair job on the holes and rents left
behind from his demon brawl the night before. Although it had been
as much feast as fight.

His teeth burned and his fingertips itched at
the memory.
You can’t be hungry after snacking on all those
demons last night.

“
No. But if we came across one...”
A
predator’s logic; no telling if famine would follow feast. Better
to eat while the eating was good.

Fortunately, they weren’t likely to find any
demons nearby, not with several exorcists under one roof. The
thought didn’t cheer Gray, but Caleb didn’t care. He’d endured
enough violence in the last couple of days, thank you very
much.

He followed the sound of voices downstairs.
The air smelled of bacon, hash browns, toast, and coffee. The safe
house had once been an old plantation-style home, complete with a
huge dining room, an enormous table, big chandelier, and a
sideboard laden with a wide variety of breakfast foods.

All murmur of conversation stopped when Caleb
stepped through the doorway. He halted, uncomfortable at having
every single eye in the room turned his way. Most of the roughly
dozen people there he recognized as Vigilant operatives from the
night before.

At the head of the table sat Tiffany Ward,
SPECTR agent and Vigilant mole. He didn’t know what her status was
in the Vigilant, precisely, except she’d commanded the assault on
SPECTR’s Non-Human Entity Research Division last night. Supposedly,
RD investigated the different types of NHEs, or worked on
developing ways to exorcise them more easily. In reality, Assistant
Director Graham Forsyth was using RD to stuff demons in soldiers
and run experiments on how to control them.

Which didn’t go down well with Indira
Kaniyar, SPECTR District Chief and John’s boss, who now sat to
Tiffany’s right. Kaniyar was a hard ass who frankly scared the shit
out of Caleb, but she would never go along with the horrors Forsyth
was cooking up. She, along with her pet empath Pittman, were now on
the run from SPECTR along with the rest of them.

John sat halfway down the table, a half-eaten
bagel in front of him. Bags showed under his bloodshot eyes, and
his dark hair had started to grow out of its normal clipped
perfection. But at the sight of Caleb, a bright grin lit up his
face. “Hey, babe. I saved you guys a chair.”

Gray preened at the inclusion, like a
satisfied cat. And yeah, it was thoughtful of John, but given the
present company, Caleb would just as soon he’d skipped it. No need
to remind everyone just what they had in their midst, after
all.

“Um, thanks,” he said, gesturing vaguely at
the sideboard. “Just let me grab some breakfast.”

“Well, hurry it up,” Tiffany snapped. As
usual, she dressed in a tailored Italian suit and skirt. Although
her flawless makeup concealed most of the damage from lack of
sleep, the way she slumped slightly in her chair, hands wrapped
around her coffee cup, gave away her exhaustion. Had she rested at
all last night? “We’ve been waiting on you to drag your ass out of
bed. Thanks for keeping half the house awake with your kinky
sexcapades, by the way.”

“Speaking of which,” Kaniyar said, “you owe
me twenty dollars.”

John took a sip of his coffee. “I can’t
believe you actually bet on whether I’d survive the night.”

The heat building in Caleb’s cheeks drained
away, and he scowled. “The hell, Tiffany? The spirit ward was bad
enough, but this? If you think Gray is so damned dangerous, why did
you let him stay with me?”

Tiffany dug a twenty out of her wallet and
passed it to Kaniyar. “Gray
is
dangerous,” she said. “That’s
the point. I took a chance on you. The spirit ward was just a bit
of reassurance for all concerned.”

In other words, maybe some of the other
Vigilant didn’t think she made the right choice. “And the bet?”

“Because only Starkweather would be crazy—or
dumb—enough to fuck something that can rip through a solid iron
door.” She made a face. “There’s just too many ways it could go
wrong.”

“Ew. And thanks for the fucking vote of
confidence.”

“Any time. Now would you please get some damn
breakfast so we can start here?”

He loaded up a plate with bagels and toast.
Being vegetarian, he would have avoided the bacon even before Gray,
but the drakul had a poor opinion of what he called carrion and
cold blood.

This from a creature who drank the blood of
ghouls, which reeked like fucking corpses.

“
But they are alive,”
Gray countered
with what he obviously considered unassailable logic.
“Whereas
this has been dead for some time.”

Can we just have breakfast without a
discussion of what’s on other people’s plates? Christ.

He took the chair beside John. Before tucking
in to his breakfast, though, he leaned over and kissed the other
man, a bit defiantly.
Screw you, Tiffany.

“I can’t sense him,” Pittman said.

Caleb was no empath, but even he felt the
mood of the room change. If it had been wary before, now it was on
edge. Startled, he pulled away from John to find everyone staring
at him in varying degrees of alarm.

“Clarify,” Kaniyar ordered. Her sharp tone
was no different than usual, but he thought her expression hardened
slightly.

Pittman looked the stereotype of an
all-American football player: blond, big, and burly. But the bright
green band around his upper arm marked him as an empath, able to
sense emotions and know if someone lied. And right now, he didn’t
seem happy at all.

“It isn’t something a lower-level empath
would necessarily twig to,” he said. “At least, not if there were
other people around. I’ve never had a problem reading Mr. Jansen
before. Now...he’s just not there.”

“Well I am, asshole. Quit talking about me
like I’m not,” Caleb snapped. Damn mind-fuckers.

Kaniyar ignored Caleb’s protest. “What about
last night? After the possession became permanent?”

Pittman’s blue eyes fixed on Caleb, as if
doing his damnedest to sense something. “I don’t know. With so many
people and emotions so high, I couldn’t sort things out. But right
now, it’s no different from any full-blown possession. I can’t
sense Mr. Jansen’s emotions at all. As if he’s no longer
human.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Caleb shoved his chair back.
After everything else, damned if he would sit here and let some
toady of Kaniyar’s insult him. “I’m still human.”