Dad slammed a hand down on the desk. Several of the boxes wobbled, one toppling over the side, and I jumped about ten feet in to the air. “You shadowed in front of him?”
“Um, I didn’t realize we were keeping it on the demonic down low…”
He whirled on Mom. “We need to find out who came out of that mirror.”
She threaded her fingers through his and nodded. “Anything not killable with quartz is going to be a problem, though that doesn’t sound like an Elemental demon. They’re quartzable on their best days.” She fixed her attention on Lukas. “We’re going to check out the basement at Town Hall. You’re in charge.”
My mouth fell open. “Seriously? Put the embodiment of rage in charge? I’m deeply wounded.”
“The ex-embodiment,” Lukas corrected with a shift of his shoulders. He was trying not to grin, but I saw the smirk anyway. “I’ve proven myself to be the more responsible one.”
Was he kidding? He’d nearly leveled half the town a few months ago. Granted, he’d been toting Wrath around, but still. “Give me one example.”
He folded his arms. “That harpy a few weeks ago.”
“No way,” I said, jabbing a finger at him, then turned to Mom. “He’s the one who instigated the whole thing.”
Lukas ignored me and kept going. “Last month, there was the nest of hellhounds behind the park.”
“Oh no. I’m not taking the blame for that one. You totally looked at them crooked. Then set them off by sneezing. We would have been fine if you’d been quiet.”
He didn’t waiver. “And then, last week, there was the gulan.”
“Oh. Well, that one I take a little credit for.”
Mom balked. “A little credit? Didn’t you throw a soda can at it?”
I had, but it’d only been half full. Not like I chucked a rock or fired a bottle rocket at its head. “It was going to charge.”
“It was eating!” Lukas exclaimed.
He seemed to be forgetting a crucial detail. “It was eating a person.”
Mom grabbed her coat and poked me in the arm. “Am I going to have to separate you two?”
I rolled my eyes and threw an arm around Lukas’s shoulders despite the fact that both my parents were standing right there. He didn’t like touching me with parental supervision. Especially Dad. “Aww, that’s my mom. The Drama Diva.”
“Anyway,” Mom said. She was fighting a grin. “There’s some research that needs to be done. All the information is in the file on your desk.”
“Consider it done,” Lukas said.
“Suck up,” I whispered as they walked out the door.
…
Since my parents left about an hour earlier, we’d been answering phones and doing drone work. Verify this. Check out that. One hundred percent mindless and boring. So boring, I was thinking about knocking over one of the Darker trinkets from Town Hall in hopes that something exciting would pop out.
Finally, we’d finished most of what Mom wanted us to handle. Well, Lukas had. I’d supervised while surfing the Internet. Found a really cute pair of boots, too. Sadly, I lacked the funds to follow through. Mom and I were in better shape than we were a few months ago financially, but we weren’t out of the woods. Dad offered to chip in, but Mom refused, too independent for her own good.
I shook my head at Lukas and made my way into the small kitchenette area at the back of the office waiting room. The song blasting from the speakers on my laptop changed, and Lukas gave a satisfied grunt.
“Thank God,” he said with a sigh. “That was horrific.”
I rolled my eyes. “You haven’t been around long enough to form that kind of opinion.”
His brown eyes grew round as he leaned against the fridge. “I’m over one hundred years old. How can you say I haven’t been around long enough to know good music?”
“Spending time locked in a stuffy old box doesn’t count.” I nudged his arm. “Unless you neglected to tell me about a picture window or a radio with really good reception?”
“Smart ass,” he said. Tried to do it with a straight face, too. He failed. Lukas was funny. Some things he’d adapted to so well. Modern food and television—he loved television—and all kinds of transportation. He’d helped Dad restore the Mustang and was already saving up to buy his own car—not that he could drive yet. Kendra let him practice with her car once. After he took out a tire on the curb in the old Shop Rite plaza, that’d been the end of that.
Other things weren’t such a smooth transition. He still didn’t like today’s language. Slang literally made him cringe. And although he thoroughly appreciated the view several of my tighter shirts offered, he was, for the most part, scandalized by today’s clothing. He didn’t expect women to wear bonnets and floor-length tweed skirts anymore, but no amount of coercion brought him around to the yay side of the miniskirt fence. And the sagging pants thing? I couldn’t count the times he’d gone up to strangers on the street, and in all seriousness, politely told them their pants were falling down.
“I thought you had better taste in music.” He gestured into the main room, toward the laptop on my desk, where “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” drifted softly from Sirius Radio’s Octane channel.
“I do. Just because you don’t like anything other than classical… I know you’ve been away for a while, but the world’s changed and it’s got a lot of cool things going on.”
“The dying elephants aren’t a cool thing,” he said wryly.
“It’s Cage the Elephant, actually.”
I’d pulled up music videos on YouTube after getting bored. It took all of about ten minutes, and Lukas, with his stuffy work ethics, had been appalled. “It’s a song about doing illegal things.”
“The meaning is deeper than that. It’s saying that there’s always something to do. Always bills to be paid, chores to tackle. Yadda, yadda.” I rolled my eyes and flipped on the small television on the counter next to the fridge.
“Do us both a favor. Never listen to rap. Your head would explode.” I flipped the channel again. Those stupid Law and Order shows were on every damn station. Game shows. Talk shows. Court shows.
The phone on Mom’s desk started to ring, stopping the argument cold. I stretched across, knocking the receiver off its stand, then pulled it closer by dragging Mom’s calendar along the desk. She would call it lazy. I called it creative. “Darker Agency.”
“We didn’t find much at Town Hall. In fact”—Mom’s voice floated through the receiver. Even though the connection was horrible, I could hear the taint of annoyance—“we didn’t find anything, actually. There wasn’t even any glass.”
“It’s definitely there… The frame for the mirror was huge.” There’d been a pile of glass when we left. “Maybe you just didn’t see it in all the wreckage?”
A horn blared, and Dad mumbled a string of colorful words, presumably from the driver’s seat.
“That’s what I’m telling you. There was no wreckage. The place was spotless. Like nothing went down.”
An uneasy knot twisted in my stomach. “Um, that’s odd…”
“A little too odd. Your father sensed witch magic, so he and I are going to head over to the Belfairs’. Cassidy might have some insight.”
“Good luck.” Cassidy Belfair was the least helpful person on the planet. She also wasn’t a fan of the Darkers.
“In the meantime, I just got a call from Paulson. We have a problem at the lake.” Paulson, necromancer extraordinaire. He tended to keep an eye on the comings and goings on in Penance through the help of the dead, and called us whenever something potentially bad was going down. “I need you and Lukas to do a quick takedown.”
Chapter Seven
The smell was starting to get to me. Pickle juice and rotting fish baking to perfection on the dashboard of a car in mid-July. It overwhelmed the smell of the bleach I’d poured in a circle a few feet from the lake, next to the tree.
I’d been excited at the prospect of going out on a takedown o
f my own. Well, I was, until I found out what Mom had set us up against. While taking a walk, Paulson had spotted a smelly swamp thing-like monster lumbering around Dobbs Park Lake. He’d called Mom’s cell, and she’d sent Lukas and me to deal with it, stating that it was to give him more practice in the field. I knew that was a steaming load of harpy crap. This was payback for me letting Smokey, my demon doggie, into her room. He’d left a present in her bed. A human femur. She didn’t quite understand that it was an expression of love. Granted, it was morbid, icky love, but still. Love.
Smokey style.
“Over there!” I screamed, waving like a lunatic at Lukas, who was running across the field.
Lukas kited the Dirt demon in a wide circle around the lake with one hand clamped across his nose and mouth. He skidded to a stop in the slightly overgrown grass, pivoted, and changed direction on a dime. I had to give the boy props. He was crazy agile.
“Over there is neither left nor right,” he yelled from behind his hand.
All we had to do was get the thing inside the bleach circle I’d poured and get clear. “Bring it over to the tree.”
I tossed the Clorox bottle aside and started running, jabbing a finger at the large pine tree to the right of the lake. Aside from being stinky and fairly gruesome looking, Dirt demons were a pain in the ass to bring down. The usual quartz powder cocktail and flick of a lighter wouldn’t do the trick. They needed a little more purifying than that.
The thing grunted and lumbered forward, unnaturally long arms swinging toward Lukas. They made a sort of squishing sound as it moved. Mom always said it was the sound more than the smell that turned her stomach. I didn’t agree. The stench was enough to induce yakking. Lukas sidestepped the demon’s reach and sprinted for the tree line. The thing followed.
Unfortunately, this particular Dirt demon was smart. Well, as smart as a walking pile of festering mud and gunk could be. It must have caught a whiff of the cleaner, because it pulled up a few yards short of the circle and whirled on me. A hacking sound, followed by a sick kind of slurping, and the thing spit a glob of foul smelling black mucus in my direction.
“Craps,” I cursed and danced to the right, skirting the globule without landing on my butt. I was thankful. The Dirt demon?
Not so much.
It let out a garbled roar and charged. I was no fool. I ran like my butt was on fire. Over the park bench and around the right side of the lake. Every few feet another black glob hit the ground, each time getting closer and closer to my sneakers. If it hit my bare skin, I’d be paralyzed. They were kind of like spiders. Incapacitate their prey, then suck out the gooey insides. I liked my insides just fine where they were.
“I’m coming, Jessie,” Lukas shouted. A second later, his footsteps pounded the earth behind me.
It was times like this that I was thankful Mom made me start running a mile a day. I raced across the field and rounded the lake to the left with the intention of circling back around to where I’d made the circle. It was a solid plan, but I didn’t make it.
Lukas let out another yell, and as I came around the last corner at the edge of the lake, I saw him leap. He crashed into the Dirt demon from behind, taking them both onto the grass. He had the open bottle of bleach in his hands.
Oops. I’d never explained what happened when these things came in contact with bleach. Lukas wrestled the thing for a second, gaining the upper hand, then raised the bottle.
“Don’t—”
Flipping it upside down, he jammed the nozzle into the demon’s mouth. The thing made a horrible sound and began to thrash. I tried to get away, but I was paying too much attention to Lukas and planted my foot directly into a puddle of mucus, sending me inelegantly to my knees.
“I got it!” Lukas exclaimed with pride as the thing stopped moving. He got to his feet, beaming, just as the body of the Dirt demon convulsed once, then exploded. A blast of fetid air blew through the clearing and gunk torpedoed me in the side of the face as a long piece of something—the demon’s arm—crashed into to my right. It was a damn good thing I had a strong stomach, or I’d be losing more than just cookies.
“Well,” I said, choking back a gag and flicking liquefied demon mush from my hands. The field was a mess, patches of Dirt demon scattered everywhere. Bits of it even made it into the trees to our right. “I guess that could have been a lot worse.”
Thankfully, Lukas shrugged off his slime-covered jacket and let it fall to the floor with a grimace before reaching out to help me up. “Do I dare ask how?”
I ignored the subtle increase of my pulse when our hands touched—he had a way of doing that to me by simply being near—and skimmed a chunk of goop from his chin. With a grin, I said, “I could have had my mouth open.”
He turned his back to me, ever the gentleman, and spit out a mouthful of demon guts. When he faced me again, his lips pulled downward at the corners. “That’s a very good point.”
I grabbed the empty bottle of bleach from the ground and started back to the tree where I’d dumped my bag. There wasn’t much we could do about the demon bits—they’d dry up and blow away in an hour anyway—but Mom would feed me to demon dogs if I left litter on the ground.
“Jessie,” Lukas called, following me across the field. I slowed my pace. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Talk?” I asked, nervous. Talking was never a good thing. When someone said they wanted to talk to you, it was usually followed by bad news. Or, in Mom’s case, a good ass chewing. I stuffed the empty bottle into my bag and zipped it closed. “If you’re gonna try to sell me a magazine subscription, save your breath.”
“Huh?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. What’s on your mind?”
“Elaine,” he said without hesitation.
Wow. My pulse spiked, and I wasn’t sure if it was relief or worry. Elaine/Lucy/pain-in-my-ass was really not a topic that needed discussion in my eyes. “Um, okay. Something you need to get off your chest?”
“Back in Town Hall, with Elaine, you seemed upset.”
“Having things thrown at me by a dead girl will do that,” I said wryly. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but my heart was thundering anyway.
“I just wanted to make sure you understood. About Elaine and me.”
“What’s there to understand?” Avoiding his gaze, I swung the bag over my shoulder and started toward the entrance of the park. “You guys used to be a thing.”
“Used to.” He grabbed my arm and dragged me backward, spinning me to face him.
“Well,” I said, shifting from foot to foot. “Obviously. I mean, if you were planning to dump me for her, you guys would have some awkward challenges to work through. I mean, think about how silly you would look kissing her in public. It would look like you were tonguing air.”
He took my hand and squeezed. “Elaine and I were close as children, and yes, we were courting. She would have made a fine wife.”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “Not loving the direction this conversation is headed. Just so you know—”
“Let me finish.” He smiled. “She would have made a fine wife, but that’s not what I ever wanted. Not really.”
“So, you wanted a crappy wife?”
His grin widened and my pulse spiked. How could he do that with just a simple smile? Take me from the edge of despair to the threshold of giddy with a simple twist of his lips? “I wanted someone who would challenge me.”
I couldn’t stop my own grin. “What are you saying, Mr. Scott? That I’m difficult?”
“I’m saying that I was never interested in easy. You, Jessie Darker, are truly unique. You are stubborn, and strange, and brilliant. And yes, you are difficult, and I love that about you. You don’t accept things at face value. You question and learn and rebel.”
Warmth rippled through me, and my heart swelled. “Aww, you know just what a girl likes to hear,” I said, punching him lightly on the arm.
He caught my wrist and
held tight. “My overall point is, you have nothing to worry about.”
“I kinda figured since, yanno, Elaine is dead and all.” Unless of course he had another hundred-year-old ex waiting in the wings.
His voice softened. “From anyone, Jessie. Do you really think I waited all this time to find you only to have my head turned by someone else?”
I sucked in a breath. Confession time. I fished into my pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, then handed him a piece. “This whole relationship thing,” I said, trying hard not to cringe. I hated slapping a label on what we were. Sure, I’d already told him I loved him, but I was willing to bet my toes he hadn’t heard and that was fine by me. I so wasn’t ready for that. “It’s new for me. All of it. The letting myself fall for someone, the jealousy…”
“Ahh,” he said, snickering. “So you were jealous.”
“Of course,” I admitted. “Which was obviously ridiculous because, really, who other than me could possibly put up with you? You’re stuffy and old-fashioned, and—”
The rest of my sentence was cut off by Lukas’s kiss. He pulled me close, winding his arms around my waist with a ferocity that sent a tingle down my spine and ignited an explosive fire in my stomach.
I kissed him back, threading my fingers through his hair, the taste of peppermint gum teasing my tongue. This was rare. Lukas was the perfect gentleman. Granted my influence sometimes caused him to cave, but for the most part, I had to be the one to push things. Of course, when I did, and he got going…fireworks.
He backed me up against the pine tree and slipped his hands beneath my coat, fingers knotting into the material of my shirt. The warmth of them was like an inferno that threatened to spin me out of control. Suddenly the frosty January air was aflame.
When we’d first kissed, I’d been terrified to do it wrong. Kissing wasn’t exactly in the pro column of the Jessie Darker skill set. But I’d gotten through it. Lukas was the first guy I’d ever locked lips with, and each time since then, I got a little more courageous. A little bolder.
Lukas made a move to pull away, arms sliding from beneath my coat, but I stopped him by grabbing one of his hands and guiding it down to my butt. Okay. It was more an inelegant shove than what I’d envisioned to be a sexy slide, but the outcome was the same. Lukas’s hand. On my butt.