InsistentHunger (20 page)

“Fuck that,” Paige said firmly. “If you don’t tell me—”

“This isn’t an open community, Silver. You’re asking for
shit that’s way above your pay grade.”

“Hunter,” Paige said softly, her voice controlled as she
chose her words carefully, “I will track you down. I will find you and I will
shoot you in the kneecap so you never get to play vampire hunter again and I
won’t even feel a twinge of guilt. This guy probably killed my partner and you
will not withhold information.”

“Damn, you are a cold woman.”

Paige didn’t answer at all.

Hunter sighed dramatically. “Look up
Pijavica
.
P-I-J-A-V-I-C-A. And if anyone asks, you didn’t get that from me.”

The phone went dead before Paige could even scramble for a
piece of paper to write down the word. Since he’d conveniently hung up, she
entered the word into her phone’s memory. Now she needed to get Brady and
figure out what the clues meant. She looked at the clock. Well, shit. If she
went out to the farm, they couldn’t look up
pijavica
. But if she went
back to the house, she wouldn’t have him there to bounce ideas off.

Paige started the car and headed for home. At this point she
didn’t know whether Brady was a vampire or a demon or an incubus or a human-demon
hybrid or just Brady Ross with a few demonic upgrades. However, she did know
that when he wasn’t around, she missed him. And considering that he wasn’t even
in the car to infect her with that special brand of lust she felt when he was
too close, she couldn’t blame that on his powers.

Somewhere along the line, she’d let Brady past her defenses,
and as uncomfortable as it was to admit, she wanted him. God help her, she
wanted him.

Chapter Fourteen

Paige pulled the car up to the closed fruit stand and turned
the car off. An afternoon at the library had left her more shaken and confused
than ever. Google had more on vampires than Paige had expected and
pijavica
had opened a world of disturbing. She still wasn’t sure what the hell she
should do, but she’d figure something out. She always had.

If she had half a brain, she’d go buy a huge load of fresh
garlic and tell Brady to get the hell out of town. If she could believe the
stories from mythology,
pijavica
and
vrykolakas
and
jiangshi
didn’t even need to drink blood. For the most part, they absorbed life energy,
which sounded a lot like what Brady did with her.

Yeah, if she was even a little smart, she’d run for the
hills but there was this part of her that couldn’t. Some of that was probably
the fact that she wanted him. She hadn’t gotten a case of lust this bad for a
lot of years. But more importantly, Brady stood by her, needed her, trusted
her. She couldn’t turn her back on that.

Getting out of the car, Paige leaned against the hood,
soaking up the warmth. The air was turning chilly as the sun sank below the
horizon. Pink and orange light streaked through the trees so they looked like
black statues standing against the sun. The world looked just as beautiful as
it had two days ago.

Considering that the world hadn’t changed at all, that
shouldn’t surprise her. It did anyway. The sky should be purple or the trees
twisted—something should mark the fact that the way she saw the world had
completely changed.

“Paige?” Brady’s voice was soft and Paige turned to see him
easing his way around the closed fruit stand.

“I didn’t expect you this soon.” Paige glanced over at the
sinking sun.

Brady gave her a boyish smile and Paige could feel her body
tighten in desire. “I’ve been practicing. I can go out in the sun as long as I
stay to the shade, and it’s not bothering me much.” He sounded as proud of that
as he had of the first time he’d gotten all of his bullets into the five-point
zone on the paper target at the shooting range.

As much as she didn’t want to burst his bubble, she really
would prefer it if sunlight killed demons so she could feel safe for those
twelve hours a day.

“Congratulations,” she said with a plastered-on smile.

Brady’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head to the side.

“So, are you ready to go?” Paige hurried to add as she
turned back toward the car.

“Is something wrong?”

“Why would anything be wrong?” Paige swallowed an urge to
laugh at her own words. They did sound ridiculous.

“Maybe because you’re not acting like you?”

“How am I supposed to act, Brady?” Page opened her car door
and got inside, sitting with her hands wrapped around the wheel.

How was she supposed to act? Part of her wished that she
could go back in time and not see that website, go back and tell herself to not
go to the library, to not look this shit up. “I think I may have a lead on our
killer,” she said, neatly sidestepping his whole line of questioning.

Brady got in the passenger-side seat, looking at her with
confused eyes. Staring out the front, she tried to ignore how much he still
looked like Brady. After all, hadn’t he told her that he didn’t feel like Brady
anymore? “What’s the lead?” he asked.

“Have you ever heard of a
pijavica
?”

“A what?”

“
Pijavica
. It’s…” Paige tried to sort the various
information she’d found into something she could discuss without getting sick
at the thought of it. “It’s a human being who dies and turns into a demon
spontaneously because of how evil they were. At least, that’s what a bunch of
the websites said. There was one website that suggested it was a cream for
‘itching in skin places’ made out of leeches, but I think Google translate may
have gotten that wrong.”

Paige gave Brady a crooked smile, but he cocked his head and
stared at her with all this worry practically oozing out of him. The websites
had also said that the demon took over after the soul had left, but looking at
Brady, she still had trouble believing that. For example, right now he was
worried sick that she had lost her mind. She could read that in his expression.

“Leech cream?” Brady asked.

“Either Eastern Europeans have issues or someone needs to
update Google’s translation dictionaries,” Paige agreed. “However,
pijavica
are vampires known for viciously attacking former family members. There was a
rapist named Monagas. He was a real son of a bitch who tortured Hispanic women
before the police shot him in the back, but I think he’s still around.”

She started the car and pulled out onto the road, the gravel
pinging the underside of her car. Brady reached out and placed his hand on her shoulder.
Despite the fact that Paige was uncomfortable with this whole situation, her
body still tightened in anticipation. She was so royally screwed. Actually she
wasn’t getting screwed, and that was the problem, because she really still
wanted to be. And wanting to get laid when she had a job to do…there was just
not enough therapy in the world to fix her.

“Paige, what happened?” Brady sounded worried and his
fingers tightened against her shoulder. The touch was meant to comfort, and she
knew that, but she flicked her shoulder to push him away.

“I just don’t think I can right now.” She kept her eyes
focused on the road.

This was familiar territory for her. Her father lived just
over the hill behind the line of trees. The gravel road that led west was where
her mother had died. Some drunk driver had made a bad choice and so many lives
were never the same.

She remembered her mother pushing her, shoving her out of
the way right before the truck’s bumper crashed into that vulnerable body and
broke it. Either therapist three or four had told her to appreciate every
moment in life because every moment led up to the present. If she liked herself
in the present, then she had to appreciate that everything that happened in her
life had created the person she’d become. It sounded good on paper.

In reality, she would never be grateful for having watched
her mother die. And more and more she was starting to realize that she could
never be grateful about what had happened to Brady. He wasn’t human. Doing all
the research this afternoon had reinforced that.

“Okay,” Brady said slowly, clearly not willing to push.
Maybe he feared Paige would just have one giant break from reality if he pushed
too hard. She certainly felt emotionally raw. A line from the research floated
up in her memory.

A priest in 1898 had said, “After the separation of the soul
from the body, there enters into the latter an evil spirit which takes the
place of the soul…it keeps the body as its dwelling place.” Wasn’t that what
Brady claimed? He claimed to be a demon who had moved into Brady’s body and she
had insisted he wasn’t. She’d insisted.

“Let’s focus on the suspect,” Brady said firmly. She nodded,
grateful for anything that distracted her from her thoughts.

“He was the oldest son of an illegal immigrant father who
abused the shit out of him, at least he was before dying,” Paige amended
herself. “His father kept getting deported, and his mother was a weak-willed
woman who kept taking the bastard father back in. Hispanic blood on both sides,
so he’d fit into the neighborhood.”

Brady sucked in a breath. “You think he’s going after women
because he has mother issues.”

“Maybe,” Paige admitted. “The websites said that
pijavica
went after their families, so maybe he even thinks they are his mother. If he’s
a demon, I’m not sure he cares all that much.”

Brady stayed silent for some time, watching the farmland
through the side window. “Why are the other vamps here then? If this is some
demonic serial rapist with mother issues, why the vamp lairs and why me?” He sounded
honestly confused by that and Paige didn’t have a lot of answers.

Paige could only offer guesses. “Maybe they want to recruit
him for their pack. Maybe they want to kill him before he attracts too much
attention.”

“Too late for that,” Brady said softly. Paige glanced over,
and Brady’s eyes were bloodshot again. “Why would a man like that kill me? Why
the ceremony to let me into the body?” Brady asked. His questions had him
claiming to be the human Brady one second and a demon the next, so clearly he
was as confused as her.

“I think we have more than one high-level vamp in town.”
Paige thought about that woman on the balcony. She still couldn’t remember
where she’d seen the woman before, but it would come to her. “The house Hunter
attacked…there was a woman there.”

“A woman?” Brady’s voice sharpened.

Paige nodded and focused on the memory of her standing on
the balcony. “She was on the second story and she didn’t move like the other
vamps. I think she might be one of these powerful vampires Hunter described.”
Paige slowed for a four-way stop in the middle of nowhere. A young man sat on
the top rail of an old wooden fence and Paige watched him nervously. What was
he doing out here? “Brady?” she asked softly.

“Yeah?” Brady’s mind was clearly somewhere else, but Paige
nodded toward the dark-haired man sitting on the fence.

“Is he one?” Paige held her breath as she waited for the
answer.

“One what?”

Paige gave Brady a sharp look and he frowned in confusion
for a second before answering. “Oh. No. He’s human.”

Letting out a breath, Paige accelerated away from the stop,
the sound of gravel pinging somehow reassuring her. The world might change, but
these roads would still tear up the underside of your car. Some things were
constant.

“Where are we going?” Brady put his hands in his lap and
looked out the front window. The problem was that Paige didn’t exactly have an
answer for that, not in the long run, anyway. What she had was an MO for John
Monagas.

“We’re going to go check out abandoned houses. Memphis had a
rapist by the name of John Monagas. They shot the son of a bitch, but I’m not
so sure he stayed dead.” Brady started by nodding at her comments, but the last
bit brought a frown to his face.

“Are you sure someone can just come back as a demon? I mean,
if evil people come back as demons, shouldn’t the world pretty much be buried
in demons by now? I know I’m not technically human anymore, so maybe this is
offensive, but humans aren’t exactly nice.”

Paige snorted. She knew that one already. “None of this
seems very likely to me. If you’d asked me two days ago, I would’ve said that
anyone who believed in demons should be put on a seventy-two-hour psych hold.
Hell, even now there’s a little part of me that still thinks that’s true, and I
wouldn’t exempt myself from that rule.

“You do know there’s a good chance that I’ve just completely
lost my mind and I’m hallucinating all of this shit. Maybe I just saw one
tragedy too many. Maybe I’m going to wake up strapped to a bed in a little
rubber room.” She thought about that. “Sadly, that might even be a relief.”

It was a long time before Brady answered. “I’m sorry.”

“Guys aren’t supposed to apologize. It’s in the genome.”

“Yeah, but most guys don’t stick their partners with as much
shit as I’ve stuck you with the last two days.”

“That’s true.” When Paige agreed with him, Brady seemed to
shrink. Paige could feel her guilt rise up, but she didn’t know how to make him
feel any better. He had pretty much shredded her illusion of security and she
needed a little time to grieve for it. She’d liked her illusions. Part of her
felt really angry at him for dragging her into reality.

He swallowed several times and looked out the window. “So,
we’re going to go check out abandoned houses. It’s a lead. Would you like to
tell me why you think we’re going to find this John Monagas in an abandoned
building? There’ve got to be a lot of evil dead guys, so why do you think this
one managed to come back from the dead?”

“It’s the same MO. Up in Memphis, the son of a bitch tied a
woman so tightly that the doctors had to remove her hands because of gangrene.
He was a sadistic son of a bitch and he didn’t mind if women died in the middle
of the rape. He targeted the same victim group as our guy and he was just as
hard to catch in Memphis. If you believe in demons, and if you believe a human
being can come back as a demon, he would be the guy to do it.”