Must Love Hellhounds

by Harris, Charlaine

  “The reason your uncle hired me was that a few demons found out he was different from other vampires, so he needed that extra protection from them. And that if your family has been different for two hundred years, there will be a pattern that shows up. No matter how hard he tries to hide it. If a demon looked at him first, then looked at his family . . .” Maybe Blake’s pattern wasn’t as easy to establish. But his sister—“Katherine’s cases-solved rate is incredibly high.”

  “And they took blood from us both.” His grim tone matched the lines of tension beside his mouth and nose. “So that’s how they knew. But that still doesn’t tell us where she’ll find dragon blood now.”

  Her stomach seemed to sink lower. Maybe Katherine didn’t have to find dragon blood. Maybe the demon thought she already had it. “Do you know about the grigori?”

  “No.”

  That was no surprise. Ames-Beaumont, she knew, had only learned of them recently, too. “Demons can’t have children. But before the war with the angels—when the dragon was killed on Earth—Lucifer made some demons drink dragon blood. They were changed by it, and they mated with humans. The offspring are the grigori.”

  She watched his face, and saw the horrified realization that his family had been changed by dragon blood. His voice was low and furious. “Is he trying to experiment with her? To see if he can impregnate her?”

  “If he is, there is one silver lining: it has to be of her free will.” As in everything else, the demons’ Rules had to be followed.

  “And so he does the nice-guy routine before he tries to—” He bit the rest off. Anger and horror battled for equal play in his expression.

  “Yes.” She focused on the road again. “But maybe we’re wrong. It just might be . . . Oh, Jesus.”

  The SUV sped past them, heading the opposite way, but she was certain she hadn’t mistaken the driver. James. Her heart began pounding, but she fought the impulse to slam the brakes, to whip the vehicle around and follow him.

  She pressed the button that lowered the rear passenger window. “Sir Pup. It’s the black Land Rover that just passed us. Do you have your locator?”

  “Is it James?” The fury hadn’t left Blake’s voice.

  “Yes.” A tracking device landed in her lap. “All right, Sir Pup. Just lead us to him. If you can do it where no one can see it, detain him. But don’t shape-shift.”

  The hellhound gave a disappointed whine.

  Maggie slowed as soon as James’s vehicle was out of sight, then pulled off onto the shoulder. Sir Pup jumped out the window.

  “Can he catch up at highway speeds?”

  “Yes.” She watched the dark blur streak across the road. “If he’d run from San Francisco instead taking the plane with me to New York, he would have arrived before I did.”

  “He’d have . . . Bollocks.”

  Maggie met her own flat stare in the rearview mirror. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “I don’t know. I’m with him. And he’s running . . . very fast.” Blake reached forward, braced his hand on the dash. “It’s a bad amusement park ride. Oh, hell. He’s purposefully running in front of oncoming vehicles.”

  He probably was. Maggie pulled back onto the road and headed after the hellhound. And hoped that whatever chaos Sir Pup left in his path didn’t delay them too long.

  And that he didn’t interpret “detaining James” as “eating his legs.”

  At least, not yet.

  Chapter Seven

  James is a lucky man, Maggie thought. He’d stopped at a beachfront park, a location too public for Sir Pup to do anything more than lie in the sand a hundred yards away and stare at him.

  Maggie parked and turned to Blake. “You can see him?”

  “At one of the tables. He looks to be on the phone.” He held up his hands, moved his thumbs. “Not talking. Texting.”

  And she would have to cross an open expanse to reach him. After a quick check of her gun, she said, “You’ll stay with Sir Pup while I talk to him.”

  “Not a chance.”

  She knew he’d say that. “He won’t talk with you there.”

  “We don’t need him to talk. Just to point out the house.”

  “Geoff, I need you to trust me.” And to be out of James’s line of fire. She couldn’t trust James, not until she knew what his role was.

  And even then, it would be difficult.

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. “This isn’t about trusting you, Maggie.”

  “No. You’re angry on behalf of your sister, so it’s about you wanting to break your fist on his face.” She touched his hand, the tight, white-knuckled clench. “We can’t charge blindly into the house. We can’t take that risk.”

  The fingers beneath hers loosened slightly.

  “You can start punching after we get her out.”

  He released a heavy breath and nodded. “All right, then.”

  The relief that swept through her was too strong, she thought as she spotted James at the table. Relief like that came from caring.

  And she wasn’t going to be careless with Geoff.

  She knew the moment James spotted her. The expression on his boy-next-door face didn’t change, but beneath the table, his booted feet shifted slightly wider. Getting ready to dive to one side or the other.

  She didn’t sit on the bench and offer an easy gut shot below the table. She leaned her hip against the tabletop instead, her arms casually folded beneath her breasts, her right hand on her weapon and concealed by her jacket.

  “This can be easy,” she said. “But it’s up to you.”

  He laid the phone down and placed both hands flat on the table. “I’ll make it easy.” With his chin, he gestured at the phone. “I sent you another message. You found me faster than I thought you would.”

  And she’d never tell him how. “My employer has interesting friends.” Let him wonder about that. Wonder and worry. “And yours is a demon.”

  “He used to be yours, too, Maggie.” He leaned back slightly, looking up at her face. “The demon is Langan.”

  Their handler—her superior—at the CIA. The one who’d given her James’s kill order. She didn’t allow her surprise to show. And wondered if he was lying, just to make her stumble.

  But it was possible. If Langan had been a demon, he couldn’t have killed James; giving Maggie the kill order would’ve been the only way to get rid of him without breaking the Rules. And Maggie didn’t know Langan’s current status . . . but she would have Savi check into it the moment the vampire came out of her daysleep.

  “Langan,” she repeated flatly. “And what does he have on you?”

  “A bargain. I help him find what he needs, and he doesn’t tell the agency that I’m alive . . . and that you faked the kill.”

  A demon or vampire could have heard the pounding of her heart, might have sensed the fear that spiked through her. A human couldn’t. Her smile was thin. “I could make it real now.” She waited a beat. “That kill order was bogus. You know it, and if the agency looked close enough, they’d know it, too. Even if they dragged us back, we’d get the equivalent of a slap before they started hunting for Langan. So what else does he have that would make you stupid enough to bargain with him?”

  Sweat beaded above his upper lip. “I took an assignment. A leadership change.”

  A political assassination. “So?”

  “I couldn’t complete it. I took the shot, but couldn’t complete the assignment. So I disengaged and reported to Langan. Reported everything.”

  Maggie frowned. Failure wasn’t reason to—

  Ice slid through her veins. “Couldn’t? Because he healed? Because bullets couldn’t kill him?”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “A vampire or a demon?”

  He blinked. Was going to lie. But she knew, didn’t she?

  A political assassination.

  “Stafford,” she breathed. And James hadn’t known Stafford was a demon. An American citizen, on American soil. Oh, God. Sh
e had made a mistake. She should have followed through on that order. “What was in it for you?”

  “A promotion, and a desk.”

  Disgust poured through her. She didn’t attempt to conceal her reaction.

  James sat back. “Goddammit, Maggie. I was tired of seeing my—our—friends shot in the field. Tired of seeing them killed. And it was a demon.”

  One that Maggie would have killed herself, if she could have. But James hadn’t known Stafford had been a demon until after he’d tried to kill him.

  Not that it mattered now. Katherine did.

  Maggie swallowed, forced herself to relax.

  “A demon, yes. Okay. And another demon has you in this bargain now.” And if James didn’t fulfill it, his soul would be trapped in Hell. Which was, she thought grimly, enough incentive to make James do almost anything. “You just have to help him, is that right? You don’t have to actually give him whatever it is he’s looking for?”

  “Right.” Almost tiredly, James nodded. “Just help. But he decides what ‘helping’ is.”

  “Then we’ll make it simple. I’ll go after Katherine when you aren’t there, so that you don’t have to help him stop me. Like now.”

  His lashes flickered. “I’m due back in a few minutes. If I stay much longer, he’ll be suspicious, and ready for you. This evening, I’m supposed to pretend to argue with him, leave the house angry and stay away for several hours. I’ll contact you then, and give you the address.”

  Maggie straightened. “All right. Tonight.”

  She waited at the picnic table until she saw the Land Rover pull out of the parking lot. The ocean seemed louder than it should have, filling her head with noise. The sand was deep and soft. Her feet were hot inside her boots and her body bathed in a light film of sweat by the time she made it to Geoff’s side.

  Geoff was cold, pale with anger, his voice ice. “What the bloody hell was that?”

  A small directional microphone lay in his lap—no doubt from Sir Pup and the supply of equipment in his hammerspace.

  Well, that made everything easier. She wouldn’t have to repeat her entire conversation with James; she’d just have to explain it.

  Geoff stood. “You let James go. Might as well have told him to tell the demon we were coming.”

  No, he wasn’t cold. He was close, and he was pissed, and she could feel the heat coming off him as well as she could the sun. Sweat trickled down her back, between her breasts.

  Maggie glanced at Sir Pup. “Follow him. Detain him gently. But don’t let the demon see you.”

  White still edged Geoff’s mouth, but color was returning to the rest of his face. A breeze pushed at his dark hair and cooled the back of her neck. “What was that, Maggie?”

  “He’s bound to help the demon. I won’t force him to break his bargain and damn him to Hell.” She had a feeling James was doing a good job of getting there on his own. “But if he’s heading back to tell the demon—to help the demon—and Sir Pup prevents him from getting there . . .”

  “He doesn’t break it.”

  “Exactly.”

  She turned toward the parking lot. Geoff caught her arm. “And the rest?”

  Langan, Stafford. Kill orders that Langan must have known would never be completed. And the certainty that she had narrowly escaped the trap James was ensnarled in now.

  “I . . . can’t,” she said. “I can’t think of it now. It’s too much, it’s too big. Maybe after we get Katherine.” She closed her eyes. “And for just one moment I need to . . . this.”

  She leaned in, buried her face in his throat. Tension held Geoff stiff for a second before his arms slid around her.

  “I’m tired,” she admitted, and let herself rest against him. Not physical exhaustion. Emotional. As if she’d been slowly wrung out since receiving that e-mail. “I haven’t been this tired since I left the agency.”

  His voice was a soothing rumble against her cheek. “We’ll be finished soon.”

  “Yes.” She stepped back. Her hand drifted down his arm until her fingers linked with his. Then she let her hand drop back to her side. “We need to go.”

  Chapter Eight

  Maggie drove just above the speed limit, her gaze constantly returning to the device tracking Sir Pup’s location. He and James weren’t too far ahead—but not, Maggie had said, so close that James would spot their vehicle.

  Geoff nodded, casting ahead in an attempt to find Sir Pup, and was surprised when she admitted, “It’s almost a relief. To know I was wrong about him.”

  She’d said that she couldn’t talk about it yet, that it was too much. But maybe, Geoff thought, too much not to. At least a bit. “Wrong, how? The kill order was a setup.”

  “Yes. That’s not what I—Not exactly.” She checked Sir Pup’s position, still on a steady course north. “I was afraid I’d have to choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  “I didn’t know.” He heard the long, shaky breath she drew. Saw her hand make an open gesture, grasping at air. “Choose something. Something that would turn out to be karma coming back to bite me on the ass. Something that meant I wouldn’t be going back home.”

  Home. She glanced over at him, and he wondered if she saw his face. If she knew what she was looking at when she did.

  “But now,” she continued, “I feel I’ve done what I could for him. And the rest isn’t my choice, or my responsibility.”

  Geoff didn’t point out that it never had been. Saying it wouldn’t mean she hadn’t felt it hanging over her head.

  “Anyway.” She took another of those long breaths, but this was deep, steady. “I don’t feel so tired now. Thank you.”

  Surprise shot through him again. “What for?”

  “For caring.” She searched his features, and this time he was certain she saw. “Don’t get careless, though. Or do anything stupid. And I won’t, either.”

  She was in an emotionally weak moment. It was probably unfair to press her now. “After we retrieve Katherine, I want a week with you. Or two. Time set aside every evening. Even if we’ll do nothing more than sit in your garden.”

  “I killed all of my flowers trying to discover if I had a green thumb.”

  “I’ll not look at them if you don’t.”

  The mirror caught the corner of her smile. “All right.”

  He should have asked for a month. Geoff pushed ahead, found a driver, went farther—slipping into more than thirty people before the world exploded around him in sharp, brilliant detail. Each flap of a bumblebee’s iridescent wings as it flew past Sir Pup. Minute particles swirling from mufflers, the pits in the pavement rushing beneath his feet.

  His head began to throb, but he didn’t want to lose the connection. Narrowing his own focus on the Land Rover helped.

  “I have him,” he told Maggie, and that was all that was said between them until, ten minutes later, Sir Pup began to slow.

  “James is turning right. It looks to be a shared drive, marked with a stack of yellow stone blocks. I—” He clutched his head, fighting nausea as everything blurred.

  A house rushed by, a second. Then a glimpse of the boathouse Katherine had seen from her window before Sir Pup was standing, peering through green-leafed shrubbery at the driveway.

  Low, Geoff thought. Lying or crouching.

  “I believe . . .” He swallowed hard. “I believe he looked over the layout of the area. There are three houses, but they are a good distance apart and separated by trees and plantings of some sort.” His thumb was no greener than Maggie’s. “The driveway is lined with the same. He’s waiting there now, on a bend. He’s past the lanes for the other two houses.”

  “We’ll be at the turnoff in about a minute.”

  Geoff nodded. Good timing. “And there’s James,” he told her.

  The vehicle moved along the driveway at a good clip. Sir Pup seemed to rise from the ground—then darted forward.

  Tendrils of smoke rose from the tires as they skidded over the pavement. Ge
off didn’t hear the crunch of the metal hitting flesh, but he saw the bumper dent from the impact, the drops of blood that splattered the black paint.

  The world spun once, twice. Sir Pup rolled to a stop twelve feet from the vehicle, his unfocused gaze directed under the Land Rover.

  Playing dead, Geoff thought.

  His own body had clenched, he realized, as if braced for impact. He drew in a deep breath, then another. “Does he heal quickly?”

  “Sir Pup?” Her voice had a sharp edge. “Why?”

  “He jumped in front of the SUV.”

  “Oh.” Her short laugh was high, relieved. “Yes.”

  James’s booted feet appeared beside the Land Rover and jogged over to Sir Pup. The hellhound lay still until James knelt beside him.

  To Geoff, it only appeared as if Sir Pup batted James with a forepaw. Then Geoff lost sight of him until the hellhound rose to his feet and looked over at the Land Rover. The windshield had shattered. James slid down the hood and crumpled to a heap on the driveway.

  Geoff’s heart pounded and echoed in the suddenly hollow space between his ears. “And you say that while my uncle sleeps you’re alone with that dog?”

  “I’ve never said that. Is James still alive?”

  Sir Pup was sniffing at the man’s legs, his arms. At James’s throat, his pulse beat faintly beneath his skin.

  “Yes,” Geoff said, then slipped back into Maggie’s eyes when she next spoke.

  “There they are.”

  Maggie rolled James over and stripped him of his weapons. Nylon cable-tie handcuffs bound his wrists behind his back, his legs at the ankles. With Geoff’s help, she loaded him into the back of the Land Rover.

  She pulled off her jacket and tossed it on the front seat. “Can you shoot a gun?” When Geoff’s brows lifted, she said, “If the demon looks at you, you’ll be able to aim and shoot him. The bullets won’t kill him, but they’ll hurt him a little.”

  And with luck, provide enough distraction that Sir Pup would be able to do his thing.