Home > Hellion (Relentless #7)(6)

Hellion (Relentless #7)(6)
Author: Karen Lynch

“You’ll love Sara. I can honestly say there is no one like her.”

Vivian set her cup down on the counter. “I believe you. It would take a very special woman to claim Nikolas’s heart. Seems like only yesterday we were setting out into the world, and now he’s mated with a baby on the way.”

I made a face. “Having seen the way he is with Sara, I can’t wait to see how protective he’ll be over his daughter. If we could go gray, I think this would do it for him.”

Vivian burst out laughing. I wasn’t sure what it was about her, but I liked her. I could see how Nikolas had liked her, too. She had to be very good to work directly for the Council, but she wasn’t as serious as Aaron or Eugene.

“So, this is what you do, traveling all over the world to investigate for the Council?” I asked her. “Sounds like you’re not settling down anytime soon.”

“Lord, no.” She wore a look of mock horror. “Although, don’t say that to my mum. She wants grandchildren, but I’m perfectly content with my life.”

“Me, too,” I declared. “I have enough people trying to tell me what to do without adding some overbearing male to the mix.”

Vivian raised her cup to me in a toast. “Amen to that.”

* * *

“What was it like on your first official Council investigation?” Mason asked.

“First and only,” I corrected him. “And it was interesting.”

I took a bite of my hot dog and chewed slowly as I watched people walk by on the boardwalk in Venice Beach. It was good to be back on patrol after spending the last two days tagging along with Vivian’s team. I hadn’t lied when I said the work was interesting, but I much preferred to be in the action instead of observing.

I had to admit, the Council investigators were nothing if not thorough in their work. We’d started with Chelsea’s apartment in Burbank, which she had shared with her boyfriend of three years. He’d told us the night she died, she’d gone out with some girlfriends to celebrate a birthday. He was adamant she had never done drugs even though that was the official cause of death. The poor man was devastated, but there was nothing we could do to make it better. Neither the Council nor the human officials wanted the public to know a woman had died throwing up a parasitic demon. It would cause a panic, and that was something we didn’t need.

After going through her home, we’d checked out her workplace, a dental practice where she’d been a hygienist. That turned up nothing, as did the interviews with Chelsea’s friends who’d gone to the club with her. We’d gone through Chelsea’s neighborhood, visited her favorite coffee shop, and even scoured the little park where she walked her dog.

While the investigation had turned up nothing, Vivian and I had hit it off and she’d entertained me with stories about the jobs she’d done over the years. She led an exciting life, traveling all over the world, staying in five-star hotels, and driving fast cars. Not to mention the things she’d seen. The lifestyle held more than a little appeal for me, except for the part where she worked directly for the Council.

A phone rang nearby, and I peered past Mason at Brock as he answered the call.

“Yeah. We’re not too far from there. We’ll check it out,” he said to the caller before he hung up and looked at us. “Command picked up a nine-one-one call from a woman who claims a giant spider tried to eat her dog. The police aren’t taking her seriously, but Raoul wants us to have a look.”

“A giant spider?” It didn’t sound like any creature or demon normally found here, but anything was possible after the Hurra incident and the Geel appearance in Alaska.

“How big is giant?” Mason asked as we tossed our food wrappers and walked to our bikes.

Brock picked up his helmet. “As big as the woman’s collie.”

It took us less than ten minutes to reach the address Raoul had given Brock. The elderly woman looked surprised to see us instead of the police, and Brock told her we worked for animal control. That seemed to appease her, and she told us she’d been walking her dog like she did every evening, when that thing came out of nowhere and went after her dog. She described a brown, furry creature with six or eight legs and pincers for a mouth. Brock asked how she’d gotten away from it, and she proudly showed us the stun baton she carried on her walks.

She told us where she was when the attack happened, and we left her to investigate. When Brock found several drops of blood on the street, we started searching from there. It didn’t take long for me to find a broken basement window in what looked like an empty house. The glass fragments outside the window indicated it had been smashed from the inside.

I alerted Brock, who made short work of the lock on the back door, and we quietly entered the house, weapons drawn. The door opened into the kitchen where we discovered an assortment of pewter bowls, candles, and packets of brown and red powder. I knew without asking that these items were used by warlocks in spells. But what kind of spell, and where was the person who had cast it?

“Stay together,” Brock whispered. He led us from the kitchen and into a living room that looked untouched. A search of the first and second floors turned up nothing, but we needed to make sure there were no humans in the house.

As soon as Brock opened the door to the basement stairs, the stench of blood and sulfur hit us, and I had to put a hand over my mouth. The grim look on Brock’s face when he shut the door again told me it was bad.

“What is it?” I asked, following him back to the kitchen.

“Looks like a summoning gone wrong,” he said as he pulled out his phone and called Raoul.

I suppressed a shudder. Warlocks summoned upper demons and held them captive to strengthen their magic. Summoning was dangerous because it required a powerful spell to pull a demon through the barrier. More than one warlock had ended up dead – or wished they were – because they’d messed up the spell and lost control of the demon. Just because summoned demons weren’t in their physical bodies, it didn’t mean they couldn’t inflict a lot of damage and pain.

Brock hung up and looked at us. “Raoul and the Council team are on the way.”

“Why would Vivian’s team care about a summoning?” I asked. As dangerous as they were, summonings were commonplace among magic users, and not something the Council bothered with. Unless, they thought this was more than a normal summoning.

Mason leaned against the doorframe. “You think that spider thing is a summoned demon that got loose?”

“Not possible,” Brock and I said together. He smiled at me and continued. “Even if the spell went wrong, the demon wouldn’t have an actual body. It could possess the summoner, but it would look human. That spider might have come from this house, but it wasn’t summoned.”

“Well, there goes that theory.” Mason’s brow creased. “By the way, shouldn’t we be out there looking for it?”

Brock nodded. “We’ll go out after Raoul gets here. He wants us to sit on this place until then.”

Over thirty minutes later, an SUV pulled into the driveway. Los Angeles traffic is a bitch unless you’re on a motorcycle that can maneuver easily around the other vehicles.

Not exactly the most patient person, I was pacing when they entered the house.

“Have you been down there?” Vivian asked Brock.

“No. Raoul said to wait for you.”

“Good.” She turned to Mason and me. “Ever been to the site of a failed summoning?”

Mason answered for us. “No.”

She smiled grimly. “It can be messy, and there might be residual magic, depending on what happened. We’ll go first, and once we give the all clear, you can come down.”

“Got it.” I watched Eugene set a metal box on the counter. He opened it and pulled out a rectangular device, which he switched on. Seeing my curiosity, he said. “It’s warlock-made, and it detects magic so we don’t accidentally walk into a spell.”

“Handy device.” I’d never seen one before, and I wondered if it was new technology they were trying out. I thought about how Sara could see through glamours, detect magic, and neutralize spells. Maybe our tech guys were trying to replicate that ability in a device.

Raoul opened the basement door, and Eugene went first, holding the device in front of him. Raoul and the others followed, leaving Mason and me alone.

I was more than happy to stay up here for now. It wasn’t that I had a weak stomach around dead bodies. I detested magic. A warlock named Orias had bound me with magic once, a few years ago, and I hated how helpless it had made me feel. The only magic user I trusted was Sara because I knew she would never use her power against me.

“Crazy shit, huh?” Mason said.

I kept my gaze on the open door to the basement. “At least it never gets boring.”

He snorted. “I swear I’ve seen more action since I came to L.A. than most new warriors see in ten years.”

“You picked the right assignment.”

“Actually, L.A. was Beth’s idea. If I’d had my way, we would have gone to Westhorne.”

“Really?” Why would anyone want to go to a stronghold over a place like Los Angeles? Sure, Westhorne was home to Tristan and Nikolas, but nothing beat being in the field.

He smiled as if he’d read my mind. “I wanted to go there to work with Nikolas, but Beth refused to go because of Chris. We all know how that worked out.”

“What about now?” I asked. “You still think about going to Westhorne?”

“And give up all of this? And surfing?” He gave me a look of mock horror. “Not a chance.”

“All clear,” called Raoul.

Mason and I hurried down the stairs. I braced myself for whatever was waiting for us. As a warrior, you had to have a strong stomach, but I’d heard how gory a failed summoning could be. I prepared to see blood and body parts everywhere.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around the open basement in surprise. There was a body and some blood, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.

A large circle was painted on the concrete floor in what looked like dried blood. Outside the circle, symbols had been drawn with a crystal placed in the center of each one. At the center of the circle was a smaller one done with more crystals. The inner circle was broken by the body sprawling across it. Based on the white robe he wore, he was most likely a warlock. Or he had been before his chest had been ripped open.

My eyes took in the trail of blood from the circle to the broken window. Could the warlock have been killed by the thing that had attacked the woman and her dog? And what kind of creature was present at a summoning? My gut told me it was a demon – maybe even a new one – despite what we’d said to Mason about it being impossible to summon a physical demon.

I shivered at the thought. Our people had spent a millennium identifying and documenting every species of demon on Earth. We knew their strengths and weaknesses, how they killed, and more importantly, how to kill them. If someone had figured out how to bring new demons out of their dimension, the implications were too great to consider.

   
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