The son of a bitch had known all along. Knew the kind of danger he was putting her in because Hildegard had nefarious connections.
And he’d lied.
Thus, the fuming began. Clenching her fists, shoving one into her mouth, she battled for self-control. Oh, she’d kill him. Yep, yep, yep. Set him on fire—rub garlic all over his hotter-than- lava body—turn on the church channel and superglue his eyes open so he was forced to watch a full Catholic mass.
“I know you heard us, Casey.” Clay’s voice from behind the door didn’t hold a hint of resignation, or even an apology. He was merely stating a fact.
Flinging open the door, she poked a finger into his wet chest. “Oh, you bet your dark and dreary ass I heard you.You know something, Clayton Gunnersson, I’ve taken this pretty well thus far, don’t you think? I haven’t cried or carried on or blamed, not much anyway. I’ve been a real peach. A total champ. In the meantime, I lost my job because I could barely keep my clothes on while I humped a stripper’s pole like it was my reason for living. I’m doing and saying things the old Casey never would have done or said. I’m ready to take on anyone and anything without thinking it through before I blow a gasket. I’m hot and cold—cold and hot with no in between. And all because I have your promiscuous, schizophrenic wife’s blood running through my veins!” Flicking his shirt collar, she stomped to the dresser, grabbing her purse.
Flying past Clayton and a very concerned- looking Darnell, she rushed to the front door. “I just knew something else was going on, and all I asked for was your honesty. I mean, really, how much worse can it be than horns and levitation? So no more playing nice, quiet, noncomplaining Casey.You got that, you demon maker! You dumped that blond, very angry, very jealous, homicidal nutcase’s blood on me. Now all of her partners in felonious acts could crawl out of the woodwork, looking for me, and you didn’t have the common courtesy to tell me. Nice. Very nice. So hear this: I almost don’t give a rat’s ass why you were carrying around Hildegard’s blood. It’s probably just another wing- nut paranormal ritual I’m better off not knowing about. In fact, you can stick your demon blood up your lying ass! I’m going out for some personal time—away from you and your hokey bullshit. And I warn you, stay far away—far, far away!”
With a grind of her teeth, and a tingle in her fingertips, she rushed out the door, pumping her knees high to get to the elevator and escape Clay.
Punching the button, she seethed while she waited, not caring where she ended up, not caring who she ran into on the way. So help her God, if she came up against one of Hildegard’s sexual liaisons, she’d fry his jingle bells.
Out the lobby door and into the frosty night air, Casey clomped along the sidewalk, and headed straight for the nearest bar.
While probably not the wisest choice when one was tweaked beyond reason, reason wasn’t involved in her decision making at this point. Though, the farther she walked, the less appealing getting snockered seemed. It would be stupid to get shitfaced if she needed to have her wits about her should one of Hildegard’s former partners show up. Jesus, it sucked to always be the one with your head on straight.
Well, for the moment anyway. Who knew if there wasn’t another demon delight she had yet to experience, and her head wouldn’t be crooked from spinning around on her neck.
So she settled on a diner instead. The neon flash of its sign hurt her tired, gritty eyes. This demon business was work.
Reaching for the glass door, a hand stopped her. Clinging to her purse, she lifted it high in the air, preparing to clock the living shit out of a man she thought surely was Clay. But a long-ago-familiar voice stopped her.
“Casey?”
When she heard his voice, throwing herself on the ground and kicking her feet became very appealing. “Rick?”
Rick’s chuckle had that same old deep timbre to it. Like it’d been washed with a warm cinnamon glaze over freshly baked buns. “In the flesh.”
Her eyes rose, meeting his, green and fringed with thick, dark lashes. The gray at his temples had spread, but not enough to make him anything less than distinguished—as was the usual for Rick Mason. College professor, teacher of all things pre-law, not to mention bed-sport-like, liar, married with two-point-five kids, a golden retriever named Winston, and a fucking cheat.
She’d had lots of time to think over a meeting like this. Years of creating scenarios in her head where she told him to crawl back to the hole he’d crawled out of for humiliating her. “Does your wife know you’re here in the flesh? Because as I recall, she wasn’t too happy about your flesh being around my flesh.”
Rick laughed, the amusement reaching his eyes where they crinkled at the corners. “You’ve grown spirited, Casey. I like that.”
“And you’ve grown old, Rick. I’m not so much into that.”
Thumping his chest with a closed fist, he shot her a mockingly pained look. “You hurt me. I wasn’t too old for you back when.”
With eyes filled with venom, she cast him a cool glance. “No. You were too married for me back when. You just forgot to mention that.” And the devastating humiliation I’d suffer all over campus because of it.
His reply was as smooth as he’d been. “Why don’t we let bygones be bygones and start over? I’m not married anymore.” To prove it, he held up his now- barren left hand. He said it as though she’d waited all these years to hear exactly those words.
As if.
“Did the wife catch you at the dorm panty raid?”
“Why so angry, sugarplum?”
The use of his old endearment for her made her skin crawl. “Look, I’m not much for revisiting the past. How did you find me and what do you want?”
“I have old friends at the private school you ran away to.They led me to your prior place of employment. After that it was cake.”
But no one knew where she’d gone once Calvin Castalano had booted her out on her ass. . . . She kept her body rigid, shrinking away from the warmth he offered. “Which still begs the question, what do you want?”
Rick’s smile was wide, infectiously so. “You, of course. I’ve never stopped thinking about you in all these years.”
Tipping her head back, she feigned disinterest. “I can’t see how I could possibly interest you now, Rick. I’m not a nubile college student anymore. I’m much too old for the likes of you. You like ’em virginal, right?”
“You’ve grown sassy, too.”
Yeah. And I can float. “I’ve grown up. The grown-up me doesn’t like the same old you. So go back to whatever college dorm you hang your tighty whities in now, and leave me the hell alone.”
“Now don’t be like that, Casey,” he teased, reaching out a hand to gather hers up in his warm one. He pulled her to him, taking her by surprise when he clamped his lips on hers, pushing his tongue between her teeth with a vigorous thrust.
One hard shove later, and he was almost across the street. Next, she’d set all that distinguished hair on fire.
Casey ran the back of her hand over her lips, stalking him. Cornering him against a tree, she lifted him by the lapels of his smart tweed jacket and rammed him hard against the base of the trunk. “If you ever touch me again, I’ll kill you. You trashed my entire fucking life back when, you lying puke. So go the fuck back from whatever hole you slithered out of, and leave me alone. Feel me, Rick?”
“Caseyyyy,” a low, husky warning called.
A roll of her eyes left her forgetting about Rick, who she dropped like she’d just been caught with her hand in the secret money jar. He slumped to the ground at her feet at an awkward angle, mashed up against the tree. Jamming her hands into her hair in utter frustration, she said, “Didn’t I tell you I needed some personal space? Personal has only one meaning, and it has nothing to do with together time.”
Clay shot her his best sad face. “Oh, c’mon, now, Casey. We’ve been apart for at least twenty minutes. Admit it. You missed me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and snorted. “I missed
you and your lies like a dog misses fleas. Like a girl misses that thingy her gynecologist uses in an examination—or a—”
“I think you’re not being truthful, and you’re hiding your deep longing for me by hurling insults. No doubt, a very fetching attribute in a woman.” Clay chucked her under the chin with a laugh.
“Like you’d know truthful if it slapped you in the face.”
His smile teased her. “I’m hurt.”
Her lips thinned. She would not be won over by his humorous attempts to cajole her out of her foul mood. “You’re infuriating.”
“But cute, right?”
Ugh. Right. All the more reason to resist. “Would you just go away and let me have two seconds of peace?”
“Yeah. I could do that. But you know that guy you had by the throat?”
“What about him?”
“He’s awake.”
Movement at her feet rustled along the pavement. “So what? I think I just proved I can take care of him, didn’t I?”
“I know that’s what you’d like to think. I’d go on letting you think that but for one small fact.”
“And that is?”
“I don’t smell a human.” Rick had risen and scrambled to his feet, backing away, but Clay caught him with one sharp snap of his hand, his eyes blazing when he hauled him upward with one hand. And she’d be impressed with his Conan-like strength if she wasn’t so hacked off at him. “Who do you think this is?”
She sighed in aggravation. “This is Rick.”
“The Rick you childishly refuse to talk about?” Clay asked, suspicion succinct in his tone.
Takes one to know one. “The one and only.”
Clay’s nostrils flared when he sniffed the air. “Who the fuck are you?” he shouted.
Casey frowned. “I told you who he is, now put him down. He’s just a pathetic, aging lothario.” She glanced at Rick. Take that! Tugging at Clay’s arm, she tried to pry him off Rick. ’Cause he was older now—brittle-bone disease could be a factor here, and she wanted no part of whatever they called senior citizen abuse.
But Clay only clamped his fist around Rick’s shirt that much tighter. “Who are you—speak now or I’ll drain you bone dry.”
Sinister. He threw that threat around often. Could you really drain one dry? “I said let him go, Clay! He’s my ex—nothing more, nothing less.”
Cocking his head in her direction, Clay’s sharp jaw shifted. “No, Casey. He’s not Rick. Not the Rick you knew. He just looks like the Rick you knew, and if you’d quit with the dramatic ‘I want to be alone’ thing, you might have noticed. Now, c’mere.”
She was wary. “Why?”
“Because school’s in.”
Huh?
“Give him a good smell, Casey,” Clay ordered, tipping his head in the general vicinity of Rick’s armpit.
She looked at Rick, pondering. “Did you use deodorant today?”
“Casey—I meant sniff the air around him, damn it.”
She moved in with a tentative step, taking a deep whiff. Oh. Oh, yeah.
“Do you smell that?”
“I think I do.”
“Good job, grasshopper. Now. A couple of things—first, kiss me.”
“What? I can’t kiss you. You’re married. Kissing isn’t allowed when you’re hitched.”
He grabbed hold of her waist with his free hand, hauling her close. “It is when dire circumstances are going to prevail.”
She placed her hands on his chest. “Dire circumstances?”
He grinned. “Yeah, like when a warrior’s going into battle, the fair maiden kisses him for luck. Now shut up,” he ordered, laying his lips on hers and blowing her already fragile mind with the firm, tantalizing press of his mouth against hers. Just as her breathing became ragged, he tore them apart. “Now, second—back away, and don’t give me any lip or your alone time will be spent chained to something. Something hard and uncomfortable.”
Casey did as she was ordered without question due to the force of his demand.
Clay eyeballed Rick. “Now who are you, and what the hell are you doing pretending to be someone you’re not?”
Wowzers. He looked exactly like the Rick she knew—a carbon copy. Right down to the mole by his left eye. If he wasn’t Rick, these demons had cloning hands down.
Clay shook him again, like a rag doll who was about to lose its stuffing. “Who are you, you bastard? Who—sent—you?” he roared, deep and blaring.
As still as the night had been was as loud as the night became in a flash of light and booming sound. Chaos erupted in the way of a harsh wind that began to gust in swirls, leaving Casey fighting to remain erect and Clay still clinging to her ex- lover. The Rick look-alike made a grotesque twitch of his limbs. The crunch of bone and the tear of flesh left Casey battling blowing chunks. A thick, gooey substance ran in rivers along his morphing body, oozing and dripping to the ground in fat globs of black, oily puddles. The shape he took didn’t remotely resemble anything human.
Mouth agape, knees buckling, terror struck her motionless.
When his horns popped out, Casey’s first wild thought was, she’d never, ever complain about her wee protrusions for as long as she was forced to live. Ringed with ridges that were deeply cut and deep purple in color, they sprang from his head like a jack- in-the-box. So tremendous in size, they caught the limbs of the oak tree she’d just had him pressed against.
He was bald, the skin on his head taking on a deathly chalky pallor, his eyes a silvery green that held a raging malice she wanted to fly low under the radar far away from.
Hookay. It was time to bail. “Clay!” she screamed over the howl of arctic air the demon summoned, blowing it from his gaping nostrils. “Let him go!” Bowing her head to the wind, Casey fought her way to Clay, hurling herself at his back to pull him off this thing that had once been Rick. Circling his neck, she tightened her arm and pulled upward. “Let—goooooooo!”
However, Clay clearly wanted a piece of demon ass, so he clung that much harder, rearing a fist up and jamming it under the demon’s jaw with a crack so loud, it jarred Casey with a hard jolt.
Then things got sorta hairy.
The demon smiled, his pointy, rotting teeth hanging from gums that were black and veined. With a war cry that surely was as good, if not better than, any she’d ever heard, he screeched. The howl so loud, it physically stung her eardrums.
So not a fighter, Casey put her hands to her ears to defend their sensitivity, thus dropping off Clay’s back to the ground like a brick thrown from a rooftop. She hit the pavement hard, scraping her hands when she braced her fall, and tearing a nail.
And just as terror had been her closest friend, fury took its place. A broken nail pissed her off. Not just because she had an owie, but because she’d just had a manicure, and she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to afford one again—if ever.
A well of out-of-control anger showed up by way of her fingertips. Twisting her wrist, she rolled it until her palm faced upward, then fired her first shot.
Okay, so she missed, but she’d been damn close to landing one in the demon’s mouth. Except for Clay, who clearly was a stubborn ass and had moved his head at the wrong time.
The back of his scalp lit up in orangey blue flames. Yet still, he hung on to the demon.
All reason gone, she was in the air, hovering above the two engaged in a roaring match of wills and superhuman strength. For all the good floating would do her. If only she’d learned how to summon icky things like snakes and big, ugly bugs. Panic was swift, while her thoughts raced. She wasn’t a force to be reckoned with. A lame fireball and some midair hovering were hardly an arsenal of pain waiting to be inflicted.
Fear sliced through her when Clay’s body arced in the air, shot with such force she felt the whiz of wind when he flew past her.
But then Clay was in the air, too, howling his rage, and steamrolling the demon, knocking him to his back. Dirt puffed up around them when they hit the ground, cloudi
ng her view. Panic had handed off its torch to desperation while she tried to think of what she could possibly do to help Clay.
“Evil be gone from this plane!” someone screeched, the words clear and drifting to her ears by way of the whistle of the ferocious wind.
The slosh of water and the howling hiss of the demon as he literally deflated and disappeared made Casey lose her concentration and flop back to the ground, though a pat on her back was well deserved for landing on her feet.
Clay grimaced, knocking the back of his hand against his jaw.
Darnell. It was Darnell. Oh, thank God it was Darnell.
He danced around, stomping his high-tops on the pavement and shaking off his hands. “Man, you know the kind of risk I run even bein’ near some holy water? Gives me the hives just thinkin’ on it.”
Clay clapped him on the back with a jovial grin. “Nice shot. Totally missed me. Who said you couldn’t play the majors?”
Darnell chuckled. “You okay?”
Casey launched herself at Darnell, throwing her arms around his thick neck and squeezing him. Never had she been so grateful to see someone. “Thank God. I didn’t know what to do! And this stubborn numbskull wouldn’t let him go.”
Darnell gave her an awkward pat on the back, reaching around and prying her locked fingers from his neck. She slid down his round body with a grunt. “I just gotta know, Darnell. . . .”
“What’s that?”
“Is that what I’m going to look like when I do this full change thing? Because I have to tell you—even having the ability to eventually look like Megan Fox isn’t ever going to make up for that. Did you see . . . it?” A violent shiver ran the length of her body.
“He’s a bad dude, Casey. Hardcore demon.”
“Then I never want to be hardcore.”
“And he’s not Rick,” Clay reminded her with obvious pleasure. “So who’s Rick, Casey? I think I deserve an explanation. I did just beat him up for you.”
She gave Darnell a pointed look. He shoved his fingers in his ears and looked away, whistling a tune. Glaring at Clay, she spilled. “Oh, fine. He was my college professor. We had a brief fling; then I found out he was married and because of it, I ended up labeled a slut all over campus, okay? I didn’t know he was married, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gone there. I’m no cheating enabler, which is why I’m so adamant about staying away from you. I left college to be a teacher’s aide at a private school because of him, met Lola and Lita, and that’s when I took the job with the Castalanos. Have we reached satisfaction?”
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