A Demon Bound (Imp Book 1) (17 page)

“Is this not the first time you’ve had someone prowling around your house recently?”

The guy looked at me a moment. “Hold still.”

I held very still while he reached down, grabbed the hose nozzle and proceeded to spray me down. It was pretty humiliating to stand there with my hands in the air while some guy with a shotgun blasted me with water. It was uncomfortable too. The water was icy cold and it stung with the force of a fire hose.

“Turn around slowly,” he told me.

I complied and had the further humiliation of having my ass sprayed off.

I turned around to face him again while he looked. At least the blast of water had pushed my hair back out of my face. I did my best to look harmless. It was easier than usual since I was soaking wet.

“There were some murders up in York late yesterday night,” he said slowly. “They are part of a series of murders, so I’m a bit careful.”

There is no way he should have known about that couple. It wasn’t common knowledge, and there hadn’t even been enough time for the gossip mill to get going. I wondered if he’d been part of the local cleanup crew who discovered the bodies. The tape had been too grainy to easily recognize faces, and I still couldn’t see this guy clearly with the brim of his cap so low.

“Do you have reason to believe you may be a target?” I asked trying to give him a significant look. One of us was just going to have to come out and say it soon because all this dancing around was not good for my patience.

“Are you an angel?” There, shotgun guy did it for me. I liked him more and more.

There were all sorts of witty comebacks and innuendos I really wanted to make to a question like that, but I decided to keep with the straight talk program.

“No, I’m the one who’s going to kill the angel.”

He pushed the brim of the cap up and looked at me in astonishment. Okay, I didn’t exactly look impressive right at that moment, but his disbelief was a bit insulting.

“
You’re
the demon?”

So not only did this guy know about the murders, and the angel, but he knew I’d been contracted to save their asses. This was a guy I wanted to talk to.

“Have you had anyone nosing around your place but me? Any reason to suspect you might be a target? We think someone in the area might be, but if you could help us pin it down then we might be able to kill this thing.”

He looked undecided about whether to lower the shotgun or not. “How do I know you’re not an angel?”

Again, I had to bite my tongue. Oh, this was such an opportunity for smart comments. Instead I shrugged. “What do I need to do to prove it to you? I could find the cat that’s been peeing in your horseshoe pit and dismember it with my bare hands. Or we could have wild muddy sex here in your yard. I can’t see an angel doing that.”

Shotgun guy’s lips twitched. “You’re not of my species. That would be against the rules.”

I grinned. “I’m all about breaking the rules.”

He grinned back. “Me too actually, but I’ll decline your offer for now.” He lowered the shotgun and stuck out his hand. “I’m Craig Stottlemeyer.”

Craig was my new best friend. He invited me in, allowed me to drip mud and water all over his kitchen floor, wrapped me in a huge soft towel and gave me a hot mug of tea. I was happy to see his place wasn’t pristine. He had a stack of dirty dishes in the sink and piles of papers and old mail scattered around. My tea mug advertised some temporary labor agency and the handle had been crazy glued back on at some point. After meeting Candy and seeing that house in York, I was beginning to think all werewolves were OCD neat freaks. What a relief.

Craig was also easy to look at. And look I did as soon as he took the hat off. His neat brown beard matched his ultra–short clippered hair. He had high cheekbones in a thin face accented with an equally sharp nose. The severity of his features was softened by a generous splash of freckles. His eyes twinkled, too. I had no doubt he could dispatch anything that threatened his person or his home, but he looked like he’d do it with good humor and a sparkling smile. He was a cute guy to be a bachelor. I assumed that werewolves had difficulty finding suitable partners since they had to restrict themselves to their own species. In the cities it might be easier, but I could imagine it was slim pickings out here.

We sat at his kitchen table and talked. Craig was well informed of the danger he and other local werewolves were in. From what he’d gathered, the angel liked to strike in people’s dwellings when they were alone, which usually equated to night time. There had been a couple of instances when the werewolf target worked a night shift, or was home during the day and they had been killed at that time. Craig was usually at work during the day, but he’d taken off the next few days to prepare a defense. He had hid his cars down the road at a neighbor’s and snuck back quietly staying in a deer blind a good two acres away in the tree line at the edge of his property. There, he ate beef jerky and kept an eye on his house with binoculars. It must have really sucked with the heat and the rain we’d just had. That was really roughing it.

“I figured the freak would sneak around first and plan his attack. I’ve got a good nose, and I’m a good hunter so I can stay alert in a deer blind for two days with binoculars glued to my eyes. I haven’t seen anyone but you since I began at six this morning. I came straight here after we left the Randolph’s house in York. They wanted me to help with cleanup, but I used work as an excuse. I’ll be in a good bit of trouble with my pack leader when they find out, but protecting myself is more important than cleaning blood off a carpet.”

I agreed. “You got a map? There are some other places around here that are potential targets and I wondered if I pointed out their location and gave you their names you could tell me anything you knew about them and their properties. Anything. The more information the better.”

Craig got out an old fashioned map of Gettysburg and circled in red all the werewolf residences he knew. Having some local knowledge was priceless. I dotted the ones Wyatt had indicated were in his predictive line.

“These are the houses he may target, according to our analysis.”

Craig noted his place, then traced a finger over. “This is the Smythe place. They’re in Hawaii for two weeks. They just left Monday.”

Lucky them.

“This one is Robinson. He’s a long distance trucker. He’s expected back tomorrow night or the day after tomorrow. Took a truckload of appliances out to a regional warehouse in Iowa.”

Could be Robinson then. That would buy us some time. Or it could be Craig.

“That leaves you,” I told him. I felt like I was on one of those dramas where the surgeon tells a man he has an inoperable brain tumor. You have a malignant angel. It will kill you in three days or less.

Craig raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips as if considering his funeral options. “Or, it could be Mrs. Staley.” He dotted the map in a spot between his place and Robinson’s.

I looked at the dot. “According to the master database there isn’t a werewolf living there.”

Craig gave me a significant look. Ah. Ms. Staley was off the grid. “If she’s been able to avoid registration and/or death, then how do you know about her? How does anyone know about her?” I asked.

I watched him take a sip of his tea and look worriedly out the kitchen window. “Sometimes you fake a death, or don’t record a birth. It’s easy to get human identities and the angel that is in charge of the werewolves doesn’t pay much attention to the humans. They are really stupid about most technology, too. It’s very difficult though. You can’t live as a werewolf. You can’t socialize with them, hunt with them, you can’t even think of letting your wolf out during the moon. It’s a life cut off from your culture, your people, even a part of yourself. You live as a human. You can’t mate with a human because it goes against millennia of teaching and culture, but you can’t mate with a registered wolf and not blow your cover. There are no records of you as a werewolf. Even the local wolves don’t know who you are in case one is tortured or there is a snitch. There are only a few hundred in the world who live like this, but it’s important to the freedom and future of our species to have a handful off the radar, just in case.

“Ms. Staley does my taxes. She lives alone. Never mated, never had kids. She’s in her mid–sixties. She hasn’t changed form in almost twenty years. If she hadn’t told me in a fit of loneliness one day I would have never known. She doesn’t even smell like a wolf anymore.”

Craig looked at me, his eyes no longer twinkling. “That’s a horrible way to live your life. Of course, I don’t know if ours is much better tiptoeing around, minding our P’s and Q’s and hoping our friends don’t find our body in the kitchen one day with angel wings on our forehead.”

I agreed, but I didn’t see how my killing one angel was going to help their case in the long run. I didn’t get how the humans got to run amok, breeding like rabbits, taxing the natural resources and driving themselves closer and closer to extinction with their folly, but others like the werewolves were hammered with impossible rules and unnatural restrictions. Maybe just to strike out once would be enough. They’d have the satisfaction of knowing they didn’t go gently into that good night.

I shouldn’t have cared. If the angels wanted to make life miserable for this species, drive them into extinction, why should I care? It wouldn’t make any difference to me. The whole thing bothered me, though. Angels were such controlling assholes. What gave them the right to target a species like this? The werewolves were so outclassed, too. If all of them united they’d never stand a chance against even a couple of angels. Bullies. And the thing with the baby. Hypocrites. Even if Althean accidently killed the woman and the baby, to mark them as guilty, to cover it up was deplorable. Fuck, I hated angels.

I asked Craig if he’d mind driving me back to the motel. I was still damp and muddy in spite of the hosing off, and my jeans were beginning to dry into the stiffness of plywood. Even though the rain had stopped, I didn’t relish a jog or even a walk back. My legs would have been chewed through to blood and bones by the time I reached the vacancy sign. Craig looked a little surprised as if he expected me to sprout leathery wings and fly back. I could do that, but I was pretty sure I’d be chopped out of the sky by an angel with a sword before I reached my destination. We walked over to the neighbor’s house and he motioned for me to get into a little Toyota pick–up. I’d pegged him for a Chevy or Ford man myself. The Toyota was trashed inside with dirt on the seats, balled up fast food bags on the floor, and a box of shotgun shells spilling out of the cup holder. At least I didn’t worry about my muddy ass staining his upholstery. I was more worried about week old barbeque sauce staining my muddy ass.

Craig turned to me even before we pulled out of the driveway.

“So, what do you do? Do you throw lightning, or shoot laser beams out your eyes or something?”

I didn’t blame him one bit. I hardly looked like a bringer of death, and the most impressive thing I’d done so far was get my foot stuck in the mud outside his window. Heck, I even had to ask him for a lift. Badass me.

I shrugged. “I can do a lot of things.”

It was a good question, though. What could I do? I didn’t know what it was going to take to kill this angel. I didn’t know what he was going to throw at me, or what he was susceptible to. What if nothing I had worked? What if he ended up being vulnerable to something stupid like aluminum beer cans? Deep down inside, I had a secret fantasy of Owning him. It would be epic to go home and parade around Owning an angel. That was a total fantasy though, and I knew better. Just concentrate on killing him before he killed me. I was thinking that, when I confronted this angel, I should probably start with the basics in terms of my skills and work from there.

Electricity and fire in varying intensities were pretty much gifts at birth. Caretakers had to be fast and proactive around the infants they guarded since babies let loose bursts of energy without warning or provocation. There was just no control at that age, and many would cook themselves, seriously injure their caregivers or accidently kill a foster sibling. Even the Low managed to master electricity and fire to some degree, although they often couldn’t do anything complicated. I’d always been skilled at electricity in all its strengths and forms. I was good at persuading elementals to service too, not that I was aware of any elementals on this realm. My greatest skill, though, was that I could shuffle the periodic table around like a dealer in Vegas. I wondered what a bolt of lightning would do to an angel. Could I use conversion on him? Turn bone to liquid? Harden joints and shatter them? I had thought I might have to fall back on just heaving raw energy at him. Very crude, but when you don’t know your enemy it’s difficult to be flashy.

Craig didn’t look wowed at my vague answer, but he kept silent the rest of the ride. We exchanged cell phone numbers in the hotel parking lot and agreed to call each other if any new developments emerged.

Chapter 12

C
andy and Wyatt were back before I was. I had to stand outside muddy and wet while Candy carefully laid towels from the door to the bathroom. I wondered if we had any towels left for showers. There was a good possibility they might not bring us anymore. This wasn’t exactly the Hyatt.

“Take off your shoes and socks,” she instructed, “and walk across the towels to the bathroom. There you can shower and dry off. Leave your clothes in the sink. I’ve already put a clean set in there for you.”

“Why don’t I just take off my clothes here?” I asked. I’d drip less mud if the clothes stayed on the outside of our room.

“No. I don’t need to see anymore of your body, and the other patrons do not need to see your naked backside standing on the balcony here. Just try not to get anything on the carpet.”

I obeyed walking the tightrope of towels. Wyatt had wires and plastic things strewn all over the bed (not Candy’s bed), and barely grunted a hello. I wondered if he was still mad about not getting to drive my Corvette.