by Lyn Gala
“Yeah, you were kind of unpolished,” she said fondly.
“That’s the nice way to put it. The guys in the locker room had a few other descriptions. I’m just lucky I’m cute because otherwise, I never would have dated.”
Paige snorted. “And you’re clueless.”
“Well, thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“Brady, women dated you because you were unpolished and adorably uncomfortable. No woman wants to think she’s dating some horn dog. You put yourself on the line and risked some serious humiliation to ask a woman out. And anyone as uncoordinated as you in the flirting department didn’t have a long string of conquered women in his past. You don’t, do you?” Paige asked.
“Do you want my resume?” Brady uncrossed his arms only to promptly cross them again as he gave her an unamused look.
“No,” she said quickly. She really didn’t want to think about Brady’s sexual conquests, especially since the need for condoms had sort of slipped into the background the second Brady touched her. Either he had lusty powers or she’d lost her good judgment along the way. Maybe both. “But the fact is that women are drawn to that honesty, including me. If the guys gave you shit, it was because they could see the women falling for you. Most of the women were either eyeing you or wanting to mother you. You just had that edge of bumbling cute on top of all the absolutely adorable.”
Brady was blushing now.
Shifting around on the bed, Paige struggled to say the next bit. She might not want to rip Brady’s heart out, but he had to know how he affected her. “But I could control myself. I never sat in the middle of the station and wondered if I could keep my hands off you for one more minute. Hell, I would have resigned as your training officer if it had ever gotten that bad. But now…” A heavy silence fell on the room.
“The demon makes you want to lose control?” Brady guessed. He sounded thoughtful rather than insulted, so maybe she had softened the blow.
Paige turned to look at the computer. The CPU was blinking, so they’d forgotten to shut down last night and it was only in sleep mode. “So we need to look for a demon that inspires those sorts of feelings.”
“Succubus.”
“What?”
Brady frowned. “Or incubus. I could never keep track of which was male and which was female.”
“Would you like to make a little more sense, Brady?”
He stepped into the room, but before Paige could start to panic, he backpedaled and stood in the doorway again, his face confused. Paige had no idea what that had been about, but as long as he kept his distance, she was happy. Clearing his throat, he asked her, “You really aren’t into horror books, are you?”
“No, I’m really not,” Paige admitted. Everything she knew about vampires came off the television and she was starting to think the writers were all stupid.
“When I was thirteen, my very Catholic babysitter used to tell me that if I didn’t stop masturbating in the bathroom that I was going to get hairy palms and a succubus was going to come and suck my life force. They’re sexual demons, attracted to lust.”
Paige thought about some babysitter scaring the shit out of a thirteen-year-old Brady with that story. It made her skin crawl. “Seriously, that’s creepy. That’s borderline sexually inappropriate creepy.”
Brady shrugged. “Yeah, well my parents are very good Catholics and masturbation did not exist in their world view. Shit. Can you imagine their faces if they knew I’d turned out to be a succubus? Well, I guess I was always a succubus, but can you imagine if they found out I’d taken up residence in their son’s body?” Brady was clearly amused, something that disturbed Paige to no end.
Paige pulled the sheet up higher. “You can stop now. I really can’t handle talking about how you aren’t Brady.”
“A wise woman once told me that ignoring a fact doesn’t change it.”
“I was talking about your shooting scores,” Paige pointed out. Brady just looked at her. Last night she’d gone out to see other demons, to see whether Brady really was one of them. She’d come home with no answers and several years scared off the end of her life. Brady still looked like Brady to her. He talked like Brady and got embarrassed like Brady and said stupid shit like Brady.
Brady’s gaze fell to the floor. “I’ll keep my distance.”
“We need to get you out of this house altogether.”
Brady’s head snapped up and he frowned at her.
Paige felt a flash of guilt as Brady laid his pain and fear of rejection out in his every expression. He insisted he was a demon, but Paige was fairly sure that a demon wouldn’t have the expressions Brady did. “Last night Hunter had a partner. He went running out the door, but here’s the thing…I don’t know how many partners he might have. I do know, however, that he suspects I’m not telling the whole truth. He kept suggesting you were in the house.”
Brady snorted. “He was trying to manipulate you.”
“Trying, hell. He did manipulate me,” Paige pointed out. “However, he was trying to see how I’d react to the suggestion you were in the house and my gut says that he suspects I know where you are. That means either Jim or his partner are going to snoop around the house the second I’m gone.”
Brady’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “Good.”
“Not good,” Paige said. Last night she hadn’t commented when Brady had sicced the eighties vamp on Hunter, but she’d been pretty sure he was already gone. He didn’t seem like the sort to stick around after the shooting was over. If Brady killed him in Paige’s house, she was going to have a guilt-inspired nervous breakdown.
Brady’s face turned mulish. “He almost got you killed.”
“Almost only counts in horseshoes. I’m not dead.”
The noise Brady made left no doubt about his opinion on the issue.
“And he knows how to kill demons. He knows more about demons than you do, Brady, and going into battle without information is just plain stupid. You aren’t stupid, so you aren’t going to go to war with someone without understanding yourself and your powers. I don’t care if you are some higher-level demon.”
Brady drew himself up a little straighter. “You think I’m a higher-level demon?”
“I think if Hunter waved his stupid little balls in front of your face, you’d eat him.”
“I would.” Brady’s voice was dark and cold and utterly demonic, but Paige was trying hard to repress that knowledge.
“You need to be somewhere else, somewhere safe and private where you can get control of your hunger—maybe eat a goose or two or a few chickens.”
Brady made a squinchy face. “I can’t believe you’re telling me to eat animals.”
“Hey, I happen to like burgers and ribs and steaks and any number of animals. I’m not going to question your food, just your table manners. But until you know you’re strong and you know what Hunter is going to throw at you, you need to avoid him.”
He tilted his head and studied her for long enough that Paige started to feel uncomfortable and the heat started to gather in her body. “I don’t feel strong. If I wait that long, he might die of old age,” Brady pointed out. “But I can take him if he challenges me.”
“Let him die of old age then. He’s not important,” Paige suggested. She didn’t want Brady trying to take Hunter and she really didn’t want Brady getting killed. She wondered if it made her evil that she was more concerned about the second than the first. Hunter had chosen to fight. Brady had been shoved into the middle of a war he didn’t understand, so she was rooting for Brady on this one.
“We might have another problem,” Brady said. The tone more than the words caught Paige attention. “There was a vampire last night.”
“Lots of them,” Paige agreed, not understanding Brady’s concerns.
Brady shook his head. “No, not there. Here. I could…” Brady tilted his head to the side as though struggling for words.
“Hear, smell, see—” Paige prompted him.
> Brady’s head tilted the opposite direction. “Smell maybe. I knew he was here. Male. Something about him made me want to avoid him.”
Paige blew out a breath. There had been the man on the street, but she was too good of a cop to jump to conclusions. It made more sense for a vampire to stay hidden. However, a male vampire raised a new question. “Do you think our rapist could be a vampire?” Paige asked.
Brady blew out a breath. “I don’t know. If you’re right and I’m creating a cloud of lust, why would he need to hurt them?”
Paige closed her eyes. The simple answer was that some people just liked to hurt others, but Brady always had been a little too slow to understand that kind of sadism. But he was right that any demon who had Brady’s ability to inspire lust wouldn’t have victims that fought the way these had.
“Maybe it’s a different kind of vampire,” Paige said slowly. She hated feeling ignorant and right now all she had was a huge pile of it. Right now she needed to do a little digging into this case and into vampires and into Hunter and she couldn’t do that with Brady close enough for her to smell his musk. Her body would launch another revolt against her common sense sooner or later.
“My father has a farm about fifteen miles out on Pipe Road. Before he leased out most of his land, he had a permanent farmhand who lived in an apartment over the storage barn.” Shoving aside her many fears, Paige grabbed a piece of mail from her side table and started to sketch out a map. “It’ll be dusty, but my father doesn’t stir from the house much, and even when he does, he’s drunk more often than not. Hell, you could eat a chicken in front of him and I’m pretty sure he would chalk it up to some hallucination.”
“Your father?” Brady echoed in confusion.
“His farm. You need to go to his farm. The storage barn is the smaller one, farther south than the main barn. You could stay in the main barn too since he got rid of the last of the animals when I left for college, but the apartment in the storage barn has a bed and table and some books. The neighbors all have livestock, and if you limit yourself to a couple of animals, they’ll blame foxes or wild dogs or something.”
“So I should run away.” Brady’s voice was utterly flat.
“So you should retreat during the day,” Paige said. “You should get strong and push a few limits. You said you didn’t know if the sun felt so wrong because you were young. Well, how wrong does it feel? Can you stay out in it? Are you weaker in the light? Does feeding make the light easier to bear? Brady, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re not going to be able to research. We don’t know who’s full of shit and who knows the truth. So I’m not telling you to run away. I’m telling you to make a better tactical choice.” She held her rough map out for him.
He looked at the paper without taking it. “So you think I should do this from twenty miles away?”
“Yes. I think it’s the safest thing for you.” Paige didn’t insult Brady’s intelligence by laying out all the reasons. Hunter suspected Brady was here. A strange vampire had found him here. There were too many questions and too many dangers.
“And what about you?”
Paige swallowed and looked up at Brady’s sincere expression. Whatever else was going on, he was still her partner. “Can you promise me that you aren’t taking my life force when we have sex?”
Brady’s eyes darted away. Yeah, that’s what Paige thought.
“And I’m telling you that if you stay here, we’re going to have sex,” Paige warned. Even if Brady drained her life with every orgasm, Paige would not be able to say no for long.
“We are?” Brady looked so adorably confused that Paige could feel her defenses weakening already.
“No, we aren’t,” Paige said firmly. “Brady, go to the farm.”
Now Brady looked really confused. “And what if Hunter comes here? What if the other vampire comes here?”
“Then he can look through my empty house. Make sure you take that bloody shirt and then either one of them can look through to his heart’s content.”
“But where will you be?” Brady took the scribbled map, even if he looked unhappy while doing it.
Paige pulled her quilt closer. “I’m going to work. We’re missing something, Brady, and I’m not going to confront anyone until I figure out what we’re missing. I mean, how the hell does a nest get started around here? I’d think someone would notice a bunch of people dying. Wouldn’t they? You’re the only case of a missing person around here.”
“The immigrants,” Brady said softly. Paige had come to the same conclusion. Either their rapist was a vampire or the rapist was using the same hunting grounds as the vampire. “But the vampires didn’t all look Hispanic,” Brady protested.
“And you look Hispanic when you aren’t,” Paige pointed out. “Looks aren’t everything.”
“That’s true.”
“So I’m going to go to work and poke around. You’re going to go to my father’s farm and do some testing.”
“But I’ll come back at sunset.” Brady sounded uneasy as he waited for her answer to that.
Paige nodded. It’d be stupid for her to be in the house alone if bad guys had targeted it. “I’ll drive out to Pipe Road…the fruit stand at the corner of Rural 72. Be there after sundown.”
“You’ll meet me.” Brady still sounded unsure.
“Yeah, I will,” Paige promised. She was uncomfortable about being in an enclosed space with him, but she wouldn’t turn her back on him. Maybe he was Brady Ross, her partner. Maybe he was Brady Ross, a demon. Either way, he cared about her and she couldn’t turn her back on that. Brady nodded at her and turned to leave.
“Brady!”
He turned to look at her. “Yeah?”
“Do you need the car?”
He studied her for a second before shaking his head. “No, I can get there no problem.” He gave her a sheepish grin. “I can actually run about as fast as you drive, so I’ll be fine.”
Paige’s brain went off-line for a moment as she thought about the power it would take to run that fast. Before she could recover, Brady turned and headed out of the room.
The second he left, she could feel the gathering heat in her belly start to dissipate. Pulling her quilt off the bed, she wrapped it around her waist and headed for the computer. A quick poke to the space bar woke it up. The screen was still on Wikipedia’s entry for Strigoi. Great, she was trying to understand the dark forces of hell using Wikipedia. The sheer stupidity of the whole situation suddenly hit her and Paige felt like she’d been run over by a truck.
Using the search bar, she decided pretty quick Brady wasn’t a succubus, since that was a woman. He definitely wasn’t a woman. Incubus, however, might be possible. They laid on women, usually when they were asleep. Well, Paige hadn’t slept through the sex. She’d have to be dead to sleep through sex that good. Most of the time, her sex was mediocre at best. An incubus often wanted to father a child. Paige’s stomach dropped. Shit. Part of her wanted to blame the lack of birth control on Brady; her lust had driven her past her ability to think. However, when she’d put her mind to it, she’d turned him away. She had her share of the blame if she turned up pregnant.
At least if she got pregnant, Wikipedia claimed her child would be cunning and beautiful. It wouldn’t be human, but hey, no child was perfect. Paige’s stomach churned unhappily as she thought about getting an early pregnancy kit.
The best thing she could say about her Wikipedia was that it admitted when it didn’t have the answer. Some people said exorcism or excommunication or the sign of the cross could drive incubi away. Others said that words had no effect on the demon. The suggestion that she look for a breathing hole in the top of his head because he might be a Boto with the power to turn into a river dolphin during the day—that just made her roll her eyes.
This whole thing was seriously screwed up. However, as far as she could tell, an incubus didn’t kill women, just slept with them. And there wasn’t anything to suggest that incubi needed to drain energy fr
om victims. That still sounded more like a vampire.
Paige stared at the screen and wondered how you searched for life-sucking demons that existed in real life. After a second of staring at the screen, Paige turned the power off to the screen and headed for the kitchen. Hopefully some breakfast would make things clearer, because right now she was feeling pretty much overwhelmed.
She stopped at her bedside table. Hating the fact she didn’t feel safe in her own home, Paige pulled out the drawer and opened the gun safe. Until she solved this mess, she couldn’t afford to make any more dumb mistakes.
Chapter Twelve
Paige went through McDonald’s and got the biggest cup of coffee they offered before heading in to work. She parked, and for a long time, she just stared out the window.
How could she go into a room full of cops—all of whom wanted to stop the bad guys—and not tell them about this dangerous new gang that had moved into town? How could she let them continue to chase a rapist who might just be the walking undead? How could she not tell them that their friend and colleague had been tied down and inhabited by a demon or turned into a demon or something?
On the other hand, how could she get them to believe that demons were real? Sadly, if she asked Brady to do a show and tell, he just might. However, Paige didn’t think these people wanted to know this particular truth.
John had a wife and two-year-old little girl who broke anything she stood near too long. Veronica had three kids and two ex-husbands who paid child support when they felt like it. Would they want to come to work knowing vampires existed? Would they want to leave their kids at home knowing that monsters lurked in the shadows? And that was a little melodramatic for Paige to even think it.
Obviously the world turned just fine without people knowing. If she told them the truth, they’d send her in for psychiatric evaluation, and Paige was pretty sure she wouldn’t pass at this point. She questioned her own sanity.
Sitting in her car with her hands wrapped around a giant coffee, she realized that for the first time in her life she had no idea what to do and she absolutely hated the feeling. It reminded her too much of what it felt like to be young and helpless. She didn’t do helpless and she hadn’t been young for a very long time. She took a gulp of coffee to brace her and got out of the car.