by Renee George
He looked down now, his face stark and determined. “I love you, Charlotte. You’re the only thing that matters.”
“I’m not.” I threw my arms around his neck. “If you love me, don’t do this. I won’t forgive you, Jared. I promise, if you do this, I’ll never forgive you.” The tears warmed my cold cheeks. “I’ll hate you,” I half whispered, hearing the lie as I said it. “I’ll hate you until the day the die.”
He smoothed the hair from my face. “If it means you get to live a life free of all this, then I’m okay with your terms.” He kissed my forehead and held me close for a minute before releasing me.
I tried to grab him again before he could walk away, but Kobal caught me in his arms and restrained me. He put his face close to my ear. “This is a performance you’re not going to want to miss.”
“Jar—” Kobal’s hand covered my mouth before I could finish the name.
“Now, don’t distract him, little belle. Giving life is thirsty work.” He chuckled. “Not that I would know. I’m more of an ‘I’ll see you once you’re dead’ kind of talent.”
Jared put his palms on Aloysius’s chest and shoved him against the wet stone wall. “Live,” I heard him say. “I give my life for you to live.” Jared closed his eyes and I watched horrified and helpless as Aloysius’s skin began to lose its gray pallor.
I struggled against Kobal, squirming and kicking, but it didn’t faze the devil holding me.
Kobal’s voice was amused. “Don’t you know, dear Charlotte? I like it when you squirm.”
The smell of sulfur on his breath made me sick to my stomach and I gagged. He moved his hand away from my mouth. “Let me go,” I begged him. I was terrified for Jared. “I’ll do anything you want if you just leave him alone. Set him free.” If I could just get away from him. If I could just reach Jared, if I could stop the magic, I could save him. I needed to save him.
“He’ll be free soon enough.” Kobal smoothed my hair back as if soothing a child. “Free of all his cares and worries.”
I couldn’t fight a demon lord, at least not fight and win. But if I could get out of his grasp, even for a moment, maybe I could do something to help Jared before Kobal destroyed me. I used the only arsenal I’d brought with me. The cowboy boots. Desperate, I slid the inside of my boot against Kobal’s pant leg. To my relief, the blade popped out. I lifted my leg and tucked it before driving the blade straight down into Kobal’s red patent-leather shoes.
The demon bellowed and shoved me aside. I yanked my leg back, almost losing the boot in the process, but the blade gave way from the shoe, finally, and I kicked at Kobal again, slicing into his calf.
“Charlotte!” he roared as I scrabbled across the cavern floor to Jared and Aloysius. Jared skin had taken on a yellow waxy appearance, his eyes milky in color. I didn’t let the shock of seeing him in such a weakened condition stop me from reaching out and ripping him away from Aloysius. He staggered back and fell, taking me down with him. The weight of him pinned me to the ground.
I heard Aloysius laughing. The next few precious seconds would be all I had before Kobal claimed his prize. What had Temperance said about the resurrected? Something about making a necromancer’s magic more powerful. Could I do that now for Jared? He was so cold and his breath shallow as I wrapped him with my arms, my fingers finding purchase on any bare skin I could find. “My life is yours, Jared Jackson.” I shook him. “Find me. Take whatever power I have to save yourself. Please, baby. Please don’t leave me.” An awful noise poured from me, a cry of grief and emptiness as I felt him fading away from me. “Please, I love you, Jared. Please don’t go.”
I felt his body raise from as if by levitation, then grabbed hold of him tighter, when the horrifying realization that Kobal was lifting him into the air. I felt my strength ebb as my body weakened beneath Jared.
“Fight, my love. Don’t give up.”
“You’re too late, Charlotte,” Kobal said, when I let go, unable to hold my arms up or keep my grip.
I withered to the floor, my heart dying as I watched the only man of my life carried to the center platform. I reached out. “Don’t,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“He’s almost gone now,” Kobal said. “It won’t be long.” He was hovering his hands over Jared’s body in a way that made me think of death vigils and rituals of some primitive cultures.
Aloysius, fully alive now, was a few feet from me, watching with macabre fascination. “I’m good now, right? We’re good? I’ve met the new bargain, and I’m free?”
“Yes,” Kobal said absently. “Go live your insignificant life until it is done. But don’t expect Heaven to greet you in the end.”
“I’ll take anywhere but Hell,” the old magician said.
Kobal laughed. “Making a deal with a demon isn’t the only way to land in hot water. You were heading there no matter what path your life took.”
“But you promised!” he raged.
“Silence!” Kobal snapped his fingers and put Aloysius on mute. “The instant the soul releases, it will be mine,” he said, his full concentration on Jared. “It has to be the exact moment.”
The last time I’d felt this listless and frail, I’d been five days in with yellow fever. I remember my limbs feeling like sandbags, my neck too feeble to hold my head up. But what strength I had, I used to kick at a sharp stalagmite until it broke from its base. I curled my fingers around it. I forced myself up onto my knees, crawling as my own pulse sounded like drums in my ears, blocking the dripping noises, the trickle of the stream, and the heavy breathing of one Aloysius Bernstein as I mustered all my effort to stretch up behind him and jammed the mineral spike upward into the base of his skull. Kobal had silenced him, so he didn’t even yell out as he dropped to his knees.
I grabbed his hair and yanked his head to me as the life left his eyes. “Go to Hell,” I said then collapsed next to his newly dead-again corpse.
“Jared,” I said, feeling feverish and slightly delusional. Was he sitting up on the rock slab? Why did Kobal look like he’d just swallowed a bug?
“I command you, demon. You will do my will.” The voice came from Jared’s mouth, or at least I think it did. I was about seventy percent certain I was hallucinating. I blinked several times, and Jared wasn’t there anymore. Neither was Kobal. I tapped the dead body next to me. “Where’d they go?” My voice sounded like the time Olivia and I had gotten into Pa’s elderberry wine.
“I’m here, honey,” Jared said. He scooped me up in his arms and held me tight. At this point, seventy percent moved to ninety percent sure I was hallucinating. The only thing missing was pink elephants and singing mushrooms. “Take us up,” I heard him say.
“Am I dead?” I asked.
“Not yet, honey. Not if I can help it.” His face looked handsome and healthy, his eyes clear blue again, not milky with dying.
We were in the dark again then, and I could hear my sisters, feel them, as they tugged on my arms and legs. Jared told them all to get back. Then a woman knelt beside me, her long black hair brushing my arm. “Hello, child.”
I stared into her dark eyes, sparkling like a starry sky. I smiled. “Temperance.” I turned my head sideways, the effort causing me to groan. “Your grandma’s here,” I told Jared.
“Yes, she is,” he said without argument. “She’s been with me for a while now. Ever since we were dropped into the cave.” He looked at the woman. “Can you save her?”
“She’s given herself to save your life,” Temperance said. “That’s powerful magic. There is one chance though.”
“Any,” Jared said. “I’ll do anything.”
“Bind her soul to yours. She will be yours then. Your necramantia.”
“Like a slave?”
“No, she will have free will, but she will never be able to part from you. Your life will sustain hers.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I won’t make her a prisoner. There has to be another way.”
“I can bring her bac
k after she passes if you are willing to make the reverse sacrifice,” Temperance said. She looked down at me. “I don’t think Charlotte will thank you or I for it though.”
“Do it,” Jared said.
“No.” I tried to put up my hand but only managed a finger. “Let me die or bind me to you, but I won’t let you kill yourself for me.”
“But Charlotte.”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake,” Eliza said. “Do you love her, Jared?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life with Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
“Then do the damn binding, you big oaf. And stop being so dumb.”
Jared’s eyes watered with emotion. “I want to more than anything, but Charlotte has a right to—”
“Love you,” I said. “Love you for the rest of our lives.”
“Are you sure, honey? I don’t want you doing this just for me.”
I sighed. “You really are a big oaf.” I struggled for the next breath. “Do it,” I rasped.
“Take her hand,” Temperance said. “I’ll guide you through it.”
“I’ve got this,” Jared said. “Set me and thee as seals upon our hearts. For love is strong in life and death. My soul to yours I freely give, bound to you, that as I breathe, you breathe, and if I should ever hurt you or disappoint you, my life is yours to take. All that I am, I am yours,” Jared finished.
I inhaled as the air inflated my lungs with more ease than it had since I’d broke free from Kobal. My arms tingled, my sluggish pulse quickened, and I could lift my hand. I touched Jared’s face. “I am yours,” I told him.
He lifted me in a cradle and kissed my lips so tenderly I thought I would break with the joy of him. “Are you happy?” Jared asked.
“Yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
“I thought we just did that,” I teased.
He laughed and kissed me again. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
I nodded and crossed my hands behind his neck. “Is it sad that I’m so ridiculously happy to have almost died again?” Then it dawned on me who was missing from the picture. “What happened to Kobal?”
Temperance cackled. “There is a reason demons are both fascinated and frightened by necromancers. We can call and command them for short periods of times. Kobal seemed to forget that. I followed you all here because I could sense the treachery in the ghost when I bottled him. I cast stones after, and they told me Jared would need me. Our connection brought me here nearly too late. If you hadn’t given him your life force, he wouldn’t have been able to command then banish Kobal.”
I felt a spring of hope well inside me. “Am I free from him then?”
“Not exactly. The banishment was temporary. And the demon lord may still get you when you die, but now that Jared has bound his life to yours, there is no telling how long the demon will have to wait. I’m more than a hundred, after all, and I will live until I choose to do otherwise. That is the power a necromancer has over death.”
Olivia crouched down next to me. “I am really happy for you, sister.” There was a tightness in her eyes I hadn’t seen since after Poppa died when she was trying to keep all of us together at the farm.
“Thank you, Liv.”
“Well, I hate to be the buzzkill on this lovefest,” Eliza said, “but we need to get this hole filled in and out of here before daybreak. And Frank says the prune juice he drank at dinner is starting to work its way through him, so step it up!”
Chapter 16
Seven months later…
“I can’t believe I get to look at your beautiful face every day for the rest of my life,” Jared said.
He sat at our kitchen table in the cabin we’d built within the perimeter of David and Olivia’s farm, shuffling through a deck of cards, flipping them every which way, and then doing it again. I’d asked him once what was so fascinating about shuffling cards, and he told me, that it was his second most favorite thing to do with his hands. He’d said it with a wink and a lot of innuendo. I’d blushed appropriately, and then let him demonstrate the first favorite thing. It just happened to be my favorite as well.
As long as we stayed on the farm, Kobal couldn’t show up unannounced in my life, which suited me just fine.
"That bacon sure smells good, honey," Jared said. He leaned forward, our kitchen small enough for him to reach me. He grabbed my hips and pulled me back onto his lap.
I squealed with delight as he took me in his arms and kissed me like he meant it. After he bent down and placed a kiss on my swollen belly. "Hey, little guy," he said. "Your mamma sure knows how to love. You're going to be one lucky fellow."
We knew it was a boy, because, spoiler alert, apparently, necromancers have a little foresight, and then Temperance came to visit once and confirmed Jared's suspicions. I was okay with knowing. I'd have me a strong son just like my pa, and just like my husband. I gazed at Jared then pressed my forehead to his. "His daddy sure knows how to love as well. He'll never be alone. Never." I looked at the cards. "You used to headline at the Hot Tin Roof Revelry. Do you miss performing?"
"There's not a damn thing I miss about my life before you."
I smiled. "Good answer."
"Something's burning!" I heard Olivia shout from the front door. She barreled into the kitchen with a nine-month-old Johnny on her hip and took the bacon off the stove. "Char, you need to quit cooking when Jared's in the room until you two can figure out how to be in the same place without crawling all over each other."
"We may starve to death before that happens," Jared said.
Olivia glanced around. "The place looks really nice. You all have made it a home."
I got up and patted my belly. "That's the goal."
She gave me a quick hug then handed the forty-five-pound child off to me. "You sure you're okay watching Johnny today?"
"I am." I ticked his pudgy neck, and he giggled. "It'll be good practice for Jared and me."
Eliza had been in Hannibal, Missouri for two weeks, and last night, Olivia had gotten a call from our baby sister asking for a laundry list of items she needed to complete her mission, including Wolfsbane, silver bullets, and holy water.
I handed Johnny to Jared, and my soulmate mesmerized the child with magic.
I smiled, my heart swelling so big I thought it would burst. I turned my attention back to my sister. "You tell Eliza to be real careful. Being a minion does not guarantee safety.” As both Olivia and I knew personally.
"I will," Liv said. "I'm ashamed to admit, I'm kind of excited to be going out on a job. I love being a mom, but I miss kicking ass."
I laughed. "I don't miss it one bit," I said.
She hugged me again. "And that's why you're going to be a kick-ass mom."
The End
A Street Car Named Demonic
By Renee George
What happens when you make a bargain with Hell's version of Cupid, and he wants you to play matchmaker to the furry for his own evil purposes? You follow in your sisters' footsteps, and stop his demonically diabolical plans, of course!
Eliza Madder, former ghost and newly minted minion for Demon Lord Leonard, has her work cut out for her when the demon sends her to Hannibal, Missouri to broker a marriage contract between the werewolf alpha of the Ralls County Pack, Grady Conrad, and the daughter of a rival pack. Leonard, who created the original werewolf lines before his fall, wants these two mismatched shifters together and making babies before the end of the month, and he threatens to revoke her twin sister Elise's human existence if Eliza doesn't deliver.
To make the task even more difficult, Eliza finds Grady extremely growly and gorgeous, and the attraction goes both ways. How can a minion do her job when she can't keep her hands off the merchandise? On top of that hellish complication, the rival pack leader has his own deadly plans for Grady.
Eliza will have to use all her resources, including her sisters, the Psychical Society of Paranormal Researchers, and a
reluctant bride and groom to thwart the threats and save the only innocent person in her life. What's a minion to do when she's caught between a demon and a heartache? She puts on her big girl minion panties and gets madder than hell.
* * *
Chapter One
When my twin Elise and I were thirteen years old, Poppa paid for us to take piano lessons from a local instructor, Mister Jeffrey Bellamy. Jeffery was young and handsome, and he had a way of looking at a young girl like she was the only person in the world. Even at such a tender age, I knew his charm stemmed from a need to not live in poverty. But poor Elise. Well, she thought he was in love with her. Worse, she thought she was in love with him. We saw Jeffrey twice a week for six months, and while he was flirtatious in manner, he was never inappropriate, which for Elise, meant he was truly worthy of her affections. Until the day came when the young musician informed us he was marrying a local seamstress and moving to Tennessee. Elise was devastated. I cried for two weeks with Elise, feeling every ounce of her heartbreak as if it were my own.
I'd been called sensitive more times in my life than I wanted to count, but that was the first time my older sister Olivia told me that I felt too much. One hundred and fifty-seven years later, I was still feeling too much. Like Grady Conrad, the hulking man currently sprawled on top of me and sandwiching me between his body and the cold, stone floor.
"Oh, my goodness," I gasped. "I've never been good with tight spaces." My breath and pulse quickened as the space seemed to get even tighter. I regretted shoving my phone in my back pocket as it dug into my hip. Reflexively, I squirmed beneath him and felt something grow between us. Literally. "Are you getting excited?" I whispered harshly.
Grady gritted his teeth. "If you'd stop moving, my…um, it would stop moving."
The bulge in his pants was pressed against my right thigh, and I tried really hard to stop the shaking that came with panic. The phone was starting to really hurt. "I don't know if I can." I gulped. The small space cut into the cave wall barely accommodated one person, let alone two.