by Kat Simons
The Trouble with Black Cats and Demons
A Cary Redmond Novel, Book 1
Kat Simons
GOT TROUBLE?
Cary Redmond sure does. This time with a particularly sexy leopard shifter who seems to think she’s his mate, a faery mentor who’s suddenly made himself scarce, and an ancient demon searching for a mysterious, mystical source of power in the forest outside of town. Throw in a vulnerable kid for her to keep safe and it’s just another day in the life of Portland’s resident Protector—save the innocent, manage her private life, keep all hell from breaking loose, and try not to die.
Easy, right?
Oh boy.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Thank You
Excerpt
Books By Kat Simons
About the Author
THE TROUBLE WITH BLACK CATS AND DEMONS
Copyright © 2019 by Katrina Tipton
Cover design: EJR Digital Art
Published by: T&D Publishing
T&D Publishing: http://www.tanddpublishing.com
Kat Simons Website: http://www.katsimons.com
Kat Simons Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/OxQQL
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
For my mom, who helped me see a bigger picture.
For all the people who encouraged me to get this story published.
And for my whole family, for all the fun and pizza.
1
“Not again.” Cary Redmond ducked as another fireball clipped over her head. “You don’t think fireballs are a bit over the top,” she shouted up at the ceiling then had to duck again as a dagger whispered past her ear.
Close. Her heart pounded. Way too close.
She needed to find the damned cat and get out of here. She scanned the apartment from her dubious cover behind a table piled high with unopened mail. Fireballs, daggers, gusts of preternatural wind, freezing hail and the occasional lightning bolt dropped around her, roaring through the living room in a bright cacophony of magical mayhem.
The lightning bolts flashing in the small confines were pretty spectacular. If they hadn’t been trying to fry her, she might have enjoyed the show.
“Jaxer, I’m going to kill you for this.”
Normally, this kind of thing was just part of her job. She was a Protector and literally got paid to run around keeping people safe, mostly from magical bad guys. Not that she’d asked for the job, but that was another story. It was her job, so she faced off against dangerous stuff because her bosses told her to.
Tonight, however, was not an official assignment. Tonight, she was doing a favor for her demented faery mentor. The bastard knew exactly how to get to her. All he had to do was mention a defenseless little black kitty cat and she was done for. How could she refuse to help a kitty? People did rotten things to black cats on Halloween.
Jaxer had forgotten to warn her about the fireballs.
She screeched through her teeth and dove behind the couch as one of the aforementioned fireballs barreled toward her. She cursed Jaxer as she took a quick look under the couch for the cat. Where the hell was it?
She’d called out to it when she’d first entered the apartment but hadn’t gotten any irate kitty responses. After her lurching hunt of the living room and kitchen, the only place left was the bedroom.
She pulled in a deep breath as she contemplated the long space of unprotected ground between her hiding spot behind the couch and the bedroom door. Once she found the cat, this would be easier. When she was actively protecting something, very little of the magical dangers could get to her, and nothing deadly would touch her. She just had to find the cat first. And quickly. They had to be out of this cursed apartment before midnight. Before the wizard got home and all hell broke loose.
Again.
She ducked flying objects and ran to the bedroom, squealing when a lightning bolt hit the ground right behind her. Crossing her fingers there were no nasty spells waiting for her, she lunged through the half-open door and cringed in anticipation of magical repercussions as she fell onto a red-carpeted floor. She held perfectly still, waiting. When nothing happened, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and shook her head.
All this for a cat. That bastard Jaxer had a lot to answer for.
She rose to a crouch, trying to calm her racing pulse, and froze.
In front of her sat a huge bed, which she barely noticed because the naked man lying in the middle of the enormous mattress stopped her heart.
Holy hell.
He was absolutely magnificent. Tan skin, well-defined muscles, thick, black hair hanging down over his forehead. He was lying against a giant headboard with his head hanging forward so she couldn’t get a good look at his face, but his golden eyes seemed to glow up at her from under his brows. Piercing and stunning and breath-stealing.
Cary swallowed. Hard. Because even the captivating gold of his eyes wasn’t enough to keep her gaze from wandering over the breadth of his naked chest, the corded muscles of his shoulders and arms, the flat expanse of his stomach. It took a great deal of will power not to follow the line of dark hair arrowing down his abdomen…lower.
The man straightened and Cary heard the clink of chains at the same time as she got a look at his neck—and the thick, metal collar covering most of it.
What the hell had Jaxer gotten her into?
“Who’re you?” she asked, breathless and embarrassed.
“Who are you?”
His voice carried a deep reverberation that made her spine tingle. Oh boy.
“I’m looking for a black cat,” she said, knowing the explanation sounded inane. Jaxer had told her about Sheldon the wizard, but this? This was something else all together. What was this guy doing here? He wasn’t Sheldon, she was sure of that, but then who was he? And where was the cat?
She blinked and a black leopard lay on the bed where the man had been. She sucked in a sharp breath, blinked again. And the man was back.
“Whoa.” Cary swallowed. “You’re the black cat I came to rescue?”
Oh, she really was going to kill Jaxer now. He hadn’t said anything about a fully grown man who happened to be a leopard shapeshifter. He’d made sure she thought she was after a little, harmless kitt
y cat, not a deadly dangerous big cat who shifted into a beautiful, naked, very large man.
The faery was dead. Not that she knew how to kill him, but that was beside the point.
“Jaxer sent you?” The man’s eyes narrowed and his features took on a dangerous edge. He hissed a curse under his breath and shook his head. “Stupid.”
“Hey!” She stood, the better to face his gorgeous disgust. No one should look that good while insulting you. “You could have done worse, buddy.”
She took a step toward the bed, wiping damp palms on her jeans. The chains she’d heard earlier linked the collar on his neck to the headboard, which was brass twisted into a scrawl of symbols she didn’t recognize but looked like they might mean something if she stared at them long enough. He wasn’t bound anywhere else that she dared peek, and the chains appeared flimsy enough. So the power keeping him confined must be in the collar.
“What is that?” She gestured with her head toward the thick band of metal.
“A binding ring,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a child.
She frowned, both at his tone and the news. “But you just shifted.”
“It’s been designed to contain both my forms. Any other questions before you get me out of here?”
“Yeah, what crawled up your butt and put you in such a pissy mood?”
“Being held captive for sacrifice by a wizard and having a child sent to rescue me has dampened my day a bit,” he said.
She grinned and enjoyed watching his eyes narrow suspiciously. “Child, huh? You know, at my age that’s considered a compliment.”
“How old could you be? Twenty?”
She shook her head. She’d actually turned thirty-two last April. But when she’d gotten tricked into becoming a Protector at twenty-six, she’d stopped aging at a normal rate. One of the few things about the job that didn’t irritate her.
She took a quick moment to glance around the rest of the room. The red carpet wasn’t the only gaudy element. Lots of black leather covered the walls and an animal skinned rug, which she was afraid to think about too closely given the captive on the overlarge bed, was tossed across the floor in front of what she thought might be a closet. A wood and metal trunk sat against one wall, red silk drapes covered the single window, and the overhead light was covered by thick, dark metal chains which gave the room strange shadows.
Fortunately, there were no nasty attack spells in here, which meant Sheldon didn’t want his captive accidentally hurt by a stray lightning bolt. That worked in her favor, giving her time to solve the binding ring problem without being pelted by hail.
Though even if there had been spells in here, now that she was officially protecting someone, she could keep them both safe.
She did wonder why Sheldon would care if his shapeshifting captive got hurt before the midnight sacrifice. Obviously, he didn’t want him killed too early. You couldn’t sacrifice something that was already dead. But an additional warning spell in here probably wouldn’t have killed his prisoner. Maybe. If Sheldon had enough control.
If he didn’t, and was as powerful as Jaxer claimed, they really needed to get out of here. Fast.
She eased up to the bedside, still leery of traps, and leaned in close to the shifter, trying to ignore the yummy, stomach-fluttering male scent of him as she studied the binding ring. It was a thick band of silver and copper intertwined in a complex pattern of twists and folds. Over the silver, tiny runic symbols danced and shimmered so they were impossible to read.
“Oh good,” she said, “a hard one.”
The prisoner shivered, a low growl rising from his throat. The sound made Cary’s heartbeat jump.
Speaking of hard ones.
She could feel his glare on the side of her face, but she resisted looking. She had other things to worry about at the moment.
Like how the hell she was going to get this damned spelled containment brace off his neck without alerting the entire mystical neighborhood.
“You did that on purpose,” the man snarled.
“Huh?” She glanced at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t breathe on me again,” he said.
She scowled. “What am I supposed to do? Hold my breath until I get your collar off? Just relax, big guy. You’ll be out of here in a minute.” To herself, she mumbled, “Wouldn’t have gotten this much grief from a proper black cat.”
“You some kind of witch?”
“No.” After a moment, she sighed and shook her head. “Well, there’s no help for it. I’m gonna have to use brute force. It’ll take too long to get this off subtly.”
“We don’t have much time. It’s nearly midnight now.”
“Gee, really?”
He ignored her sarcasm. “Brute force?”
“Hold onto your valuable body parts,” she said and tried not to think about his exposed valuable parts. Then she wrapped her hands around the collar, easing her fingers gently under so the backs pressed against his neck. His skin was warm and another shiver danced down her spine.
“Wait.”
She met his gaze.
“What the hell are you doing? If I can’t break that with my bare hands, you can’t—”
He stopped short when she tugged and the collar came away with a quiet click.
“I’m not without some talent,” she murmured.
“Who are you?”
“Come on. We have to get you out of here. I just made a lot of magical noise with that little stunt.”
“Hold on.”
He grabbed her hand. The feel of his warm palm wrapped around her fingers sent tiny sparks of electricity dancing over her skin. He dropped his hold, but she saw his eyes widen with the same shock she felt. He inhaled deeply, and against her will, she watched the strong muscles of his chest rise and fall.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Cary.”
“Cary. I’m Deacon.”
“Nice to meet you.” Did that sounded as stupid to him as it did to her given the circumstances?
He smiled, a slow, deadly grin that made her pulse race. “Nice to meet you, too.”
She blinked and shook her head. “Come on, Deacon. We need to move.”
As he slid to the edge of the mattress, Cary turned her back to avoid embarrassing them both—despite the temptation to look over every inch of him. The sound of material moving over skin behind her didn’t help curb her less polite impulses, though, so she hurried to the door to see how the lightning bolts and fireballs were doing.
Slipping into his jeans, Deacon watched the woman as she peeked around the edge of the doorframe toward the living room and the still popping spells Sheldon had set to keep help from reaching him.
She wasn’t the rescue he’d been expecting. He’d expected the damned faery to come himself.
Jaxer had convinced him to let the wizard “capture” him, so they could find out why Sheldon was kidnapping shifters. They’d only found a few of Sheldon’s victims—their bodies anyway. And they’d been little more than desiccated husks. The rest, even their bodies had vanished.
Wizards didn’t go after shapeshifters for sacrifice very often. They were too hard to contain, and most of them didn’t have the kind of magical energy an average human wizard could absorb through ceremonial magic. Shapeshifting wasn’t typically magic. It was just biology.
Deacon knew none of the shifters killed so far had had any actual magic. He was a different case, but he wasn’t sure Sheldon knew that. Jaxer did, which was why he’d come to Deacon in the first place, and Deacon had felt obliged to help even though none of the shifters taken so far had been leopards.
He suppressed an irritated growl. This was the last time he’d let the faery use him for bait. He’d been chained to that fucking bed all day with no sign of help. Then Jaxer went and made things worse by sending this…woman to rescue him instead of coming himself. How dare he endanger someone else when this crusade against Sheldon was his own personal business? Bad
enough he dragged Deacon into it.
But as Deacon watched the woman straighten away from the doorframe when a lightning bolt flashed, he realized there was something about her. He couldn’t deny the power she must have to break through the binding ring. Yet she looked and smelled like a normal human woman.
Her blond-brown hair hung in a long ponytail down her back over a battered brown leather jacket. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a purple t-shirt with a glittery Happy Halloween emblazoned over a manically grinning jack-o-lantern. Her blue eyes had sparkled when he’d called her a child, then flashed with irritation when he’d insulted her.
And for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he’d found it hard to look away from her, especially when she’d knelt next to him on the bed.
Something about her…something about her scent tugged at his instincts.
Who the hell was she? What was she? She had to be more than human, but none of his senses picked up anything particularly preternatural about her. So where did all that power come from?
Jaxer had some explaining to do.
Deacon shook off his preoccupation and walked up behind her to stare at the living room over her head. Black scorch marks marred the hardwood floors, and a layer of frost covered one side table. The air was heavy with electricity and the smell of burning ozone.
Despite the multiple magical eruptions, the apartment was in remarkably good shape. As he watched, a dagger flew toward the bedroom, dropped harmlessly a foot from the doorway, and disappeared as if it hadn’t existed.