Dead Demon Walking (33 page)

“
We were warned to always
be on our guard.”
Gelpha didn’t trust
Cousins to keep their word. Did they think the Dark Cousins would
try to infiltrate Bel-Athaer?

The Cousins, as a race, are ancient.
According to Royal, Gia is a youngster. Like Gelpha, they can have
children with humans. Is anything of the Cousins passed down to
their half-breed children in blood and genes?

We heal at a rate your
mind cannot encompass.
Gia was right, the
Dark Cousins are so close to humans in appearance, I tend to place
human restrictions on them. It makes me wonder if I see them as
they really are, or do they wear a human skin like I wear a sweater
and blue-jeans? It makes me wonder what is beneath their
skin.

Why did Gia tell me?
“Knowing our Miss Banks, do you doubt she will
eventually reach a conclusion, the correct conclusion?”
Something about that didn’t ring true. Gia didn’t
give out sensitive information, for any reason. She had a
motive.

I felt it in my gut, both thrill and
foreboding. One of these days not too far in the future I would
solve the mystery of the Dark Cousins.

A sharp little wind gusted
over me. I paused and looked up to see a cloudbank smother the
peaks.
A
storm
rolled in, fast. I stopped walking and made Mac’s leash taut. “Come
on, boy. Time to go home.”

I turned in the opposite
direction, but Mac dug in his feet, looking back down the trail as
if to say
but we haven’t been down there
yet!
I tugged gently on the leash. “I know,
but we’ll get wet if we don’t head back.”

The clouds came lower, bringing a
light rain. You would think the way Mac hates getting wet, he would
pick up his pace, but he put his ears back on his skull and walked
slower, so I did too. That, or carry him, and Scotties are hefty
little animals.

As we passed a copse, I looked at the
man-sized slab of quartz among the trees; seams of red, bronze,
brown, cream, gold, copper, a streak of black near the top. The
Clarion Trails Volunteers put a fence around to stop people
chipping off pieces, but they climb over.

The rain hit the striated side as sun
still shone in the west, making the rock and air around it sparkle.
I stared, and like a Magic Eye picture the colors fused into
something else. My imagination took flight. For a brief moment I
saw a tall shape with skin like gilded leather, hair like metallic
threads, eyes of faceted black gemstones.

Mac growled deep in his
throat.

“
Stupid,” I chided. “It’s
just a rock.”

The sky darkened, the storm churned
down the mountainside. Mac yipped, and dragging me, took along down
the trail as if all the demons in hell were on our
tails.

Perhaps they were.

***

I burst through the front
door to the hall. As I shook my damp shoes off and hung my coat,
Mac trundled in the kitchen leaving smeared paw prints in his wake.
I heard him shake.
Great.
I should have hung onto his leash and kept him in
the hall till I could towel him down.

I used paper towel instead, ignoring
the slitty-eyed glare and lip curled to show the tips of Mac’s big
canines. When the towel absorbed the moisture on his rough brindle
hair, he shook again and looked wet as before.

Mel and Jack were at the backdoor. I
walked over there dabbing at my hair with a sheet of paper towel.
“What’s up?”

“
Something out there’s
burning,” Jack said as he peered at the dim backyard.

“
In the rain?”

“
Not raining
now.”

I pulled the neck of my wet
shirt away from my damp skin.
Damn
firecrackers!
Kids here think tossing a
handful of snaps in your yard is highly entertaining. They buy as
many as they can when they’re legal and hoard them through the
year. As my dog snuffles around out there, I don’t take kindly to
firecrackers in my yard.

I knew where the brats were, too.
Throwing their ammo in the damp grass wouldn’t work, so they
climbed the wall and aimed at the old metal garbage can in the
northeast corner of the yard.

I groaned and headed for the kitchen
cabinet where I keep my big flashlight. A spent firecracker
couldn’t get anything alight on wet ground, but Mac might decide to
chomp on it. “I’d better check out there. Did you hear a bang? Was
it a flare, or kind of sparkly?”

”
Both,” Jack
said.

Mel shook her head. “It looked like a
man, burning.”

Acknowledgements

A huge debt of thanks is owed to LK. I
trust she knows how deeply I appreciate the many ways in which
she’s helped and supported me because this page isn’t long enough
to list them all. Glinda, Don, Sharon and Paula, for casting their
eagle eyes over this book, giving me some super suggestions and
pointing out the nasty little boo-boos which would have made
readers scratch their heads in mystification. Ryan, for showing me
a side to a character I should have seen myself. My husband Tom,
for understanding I’ve better things to do with my time than
housework, and for not commenting on the dust bunnies and grubby
bits. My wonderful, wonderful readers - without them there would
not have been a second book, let alone a third.

Angus, my baby, my little boy, my
MacKlutzy. I miss your chunky body on my feet as I type, the
occasional encouraging whuffle. You live on in these pages, and
forever in my heart.

Books by Linda
Welch

Whisperings
Novels:

Along Came a Demon

The Demon Hunters

Dead Demon Walking

Meet the Author

Linda Welch was born in Hampshire,
England. She lived in Idaho, California and New Mexico before
settling in Utah. She now lives in a mountain valley, more or less
halfway up the mountainside, with her husband and Scottish terrier.
She is not tall and silver-haired and does not see dead people.
What she does see are moose, deer, fox, raccoon, skunk, wild
turkey, a huge bird population and a ridiculous amount of snow.
When not writing and depending on the season, she is usually
walking her Scottie, filling the bird feeders, futilely attacking
the weeds in her garden or shoveling out after a snowstorm. Dead
Demon Walking is the third book of her Whisperings series. You can
visit Linda at http://lindadwelch.com.

Linda is working on Whisperings book
four: Demon Demon Burning Bright.

Demon Demon Burning
Bright

Royal has disappeared, leaving Tiff
with a clue which takes her nowhere. He is a demon with inhuman
abilities who moves between worlds at will; he could be anywhere.
Steeling herself, she ventures into Bel-Athaer, home of the Gelpha.
But she finds no help there.

Her instincts tell her the Gelpha High
Lord lied to her, so Tiff is going back in. She needs backup,
someone who is as fast and strong as the powerful Gelpha, someone
she swore she never wanted to see again, someone who frightens
her.

As they venture deeper into
Bel-Athaer, Tiff discovers more about the Dark Cousins and Gelpha
than she ever wanted to know.