by Lyn Gala
“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 i
llusion 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.”
Brady gave an exaggerated sigh. “You’re intentionally avoiding my actual question, aren’t you? You know, the one where I asked what’s really going on with you. I mean, I guess that’s okay. God knows you aren’t exactly one to open up and share a lot.”
“Brady.” Paige stopped, not sure what to say to him. The fact was that she didn’t open up a lot and she really didn’t feel like talking to him about how uncomfortable she was with him.
At this point she wasn’t even sure whether it was the sex or the demonic life form that was making her more uncomfortable and that probably didn’t say much about her mental health. It definitely didn’t say good things about her morally. She should probably be more bothered by the fact that he was a demon, but she never had figured out how to have a relationship with a man after having sex with him.
She knew how to have a relationship with a man while having sex, but once the sex ended, she pretty much didn’t know what to do with them. And since she didn’t plan on having sex with Brady again, that put him squarely in the middle of what-the-hell land.
“No, really, it’s okay, Paige. I know you’ve dealt with a lot here recently. So when you’re ready, you’ll tell me what’s going on. Until then, let’s go chase this John Monagas.”
Shit. Either Brady had a little Jewish mother in his head telling him what to say or he was just really talented with the guilt.
Brady stared out the window as the last rays of the sun crept across the world. Each tree created a shadow that seemed to crawl across the face of the planet, and the world seemed, for one fleeting moment, alien. Maybe that’s why it didn’t make any sense that Brady was still acting like Brady. The world had changed, she had changed, but he was still the young recruit, willing to listen to her and wait for her to make her move.
He’d never been the one to insist that, as the man, he had to go first. She’d had one or two recruits who were just that obnoxious. She never could figure out whether they were like that because she was a woman or because she was five foot one or because they didn’t trust her. In the end it didn’t matter.
However, Brady had never thrown around his power. Despite the fact that he was taller and stronger, he’d still respected her. And he was respecting her now. But if the website was right, this wasn’t Brady at all. This was some demon who had moved into Brady’s body, a demon who still respected her as a partner.
And that’s where the logic just fell apart.
Even if she didn’t read a whole lot of horror books or watch horror movies, it did seem like demons were not high on the polite scale. Polite demon sounded like an oxymoron. Patient demon sounded even more like one, but Brady was sitting with his hands on his knees, his body relaxed as he stared out the tinted glass. He wasn’t fidgeting as he tried to figure out some way to get information out of her.
“How are you feeling?” she blurted out.
Brady looked at her and smiled, his white teeth flashing in the low light. “A lot better. Your old neighbors may not be thrilled at the number of small animals that have gone suddenly missing, but I feel like I can think clearly, you know? And look.” Brady pointed down. “I found shoes that fit. That’s one for the win column. Now I just need to find clean underwear.” He also had on an ugly plaid shirt, but at least it was clean and it fit. It looked like Brady had raided more than a few hen houses.
Something occurred to her. “How often do you think you’re going to need to raid the neighbors’ farms?”
That made him grimace a bit. “Hopefully not that often. Do you remember how much I hated having to crawl in that dumpster for evidence? Yeah, that’s about how much I really hated having to go after livestock. Sure, they tasted great, but they’re messier than barbecued ribs.”
“Geez, Brady. There are some things I really don’t need to know.” She pulled onto Cooper Street.
“I thought you were fine with me eating your chickens.”
“I am. I just don’t want to know about the details. So you’re feeling better? I don’t suppose any new information has just floated to the top of your mind?”
“You mean like what pijavica is or how one is made?” Brady asked with just a touch of sarcasm. He probably had a right to be a little sarcastic since technically she was holding out on him.
“Yeah. Did anything like that float to the surface?”
Brady didn’t answer right away and the hesitation caught her attention. She gave him a sharp look. “Maybe one or two things,” he admitted reluctantly. “I remember being somewhere loud—somewhere very loud and very bright. It was too bright, like the air was strong enough to sink into your skin. And then I remember seeing…”
His voice trailed off and Paige waited for him to finish the story, but he stared out the window at the old houses and crumbling shops in this part of town. His body was stiff—his hands gripped his knees so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
“Brady?” she whispered.
“I remember seeing Brady’s back, I remember the letters carved in the skin and the blood and the smell. I remember that the room was dark and peaceful and something was calling. Someone. I can hear—”
Brady turned his head and looked at her. The red had faded from his eyes so that only their unnaturally light brown color betrayed his true nature. His face was twisted with guilt and pain. “I remember feeling Brady slip past me, his soul releasing from a body that hurt too much. Maybe I would’ve kept the truth hidden, except I think you already figured out the truth.” Brady shrugged. “I’m just too much of a coward to try to hide the truth from you. You’d kick my ass.”
“Yeah, I would.” Paige’s heart hurt at the thought of Brady in so much pain that he’d given up. The pain was physical, ripping at her chest so that she had to work to breathe. She turned down Pico Street into the poorest part of town. There were plenty of abandoned houses down here. Pulling the car to the side of the road, she parked.
Her research had shown her so much.
Vârcolac were wizards who, in life, had the power to become a wolf. In death they became a powerful race of vampires. Jiangshi were clumsy, awkward vampires who were more zombie than vampire, walking corpses that killed by absorbing the life essence of others. Strigoi were witches in life who became vampires in death.
And in every case, the demon came into the body when the human soul left it. She’d lost the first Brady, the trainee who had looked to her for protection and bumbled his way through asking Cindy on a date. However, this Brady had so many of the same traits. He trusted her, turned to her. He’d saved her.
She thought of his bare feet, swamp mud squishing up between the toes after he’d pulled her away from the vamps chasing her. He still cared about finding this rapist and he stood outside her bathroom door sounding just as awkward as the day human Brady tried to ask Cindy out on a date. The two weren’t separate in her mind, but they weren’t the same. Her head pounded from trying to find a way to make it all work in her head. How could she care so much for someone who wasn’t even human?
Brady silently watched her, his head tilted to the side as he waited for something. “I found
a website that might not be pure bullshit,” Paige admitted. “It said that demons take over bodies after the people are gone. It also said that pijavica are created when human beings are evil, particularly when sons and mothers have sex.”
“Okay, that’s just wrong,” Brady complained.
A rough bark of laughter slipped out of Paige. “Says the demon.”
“Hey, demon with some standards. Sex with your mother is never okay, not even for demons.”
“And you know this because?” Paige asked. What would a demon mother be like anyway? Her head was seriously going to explode from overuse of the brain.
“I don’t. However, trust me, I’m a demon and I’m not okay with sleeping with my mother.” A shadow crossed Brady’s face and he frowned.
“Do you feel like Brady’s mom is your mom?” Paige asked.
He shrugged. “No. My mom is just another person. His mom,” he corrected himself. “It’s like her and Dad don’t really matter much. I wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt them, but I’m having trouble caring about the fact that they’re crying over a dead son. I don’t really…” Stopping, he gave a sigh.
Turning off the car, Paige studied Brady. His mother was just some random person, but Brady had come to her, asked her for help when they’d only been partners for less than two months. Demons might sometimes be patient and polite, but the logic was not so logical.
However, that honesty deserved a little honesty in return. “Hunter told me about the pijavica. When I called him with the John Monagas lead, he admitted that he had heard of demons rising without a ceremony.”
“Are we sure there wasn’t a ceremony? I mean, if Monagas was that much of a badass, maybe some demon saw him and decided to turn him into a demon, which would not explain me because I was not the sort of badass to impress anyone with my demonic evil.” Brady sighed. “I’m demonic now and I don’t feel particularly evil. Chickens might not agree with that though.” Brady gave her a goofy, twisted smile. Yeah, demon logic was definitely way beyond Paige.