So I Married A Demon Slayer

by Love, Kathy; Fox, Angie; George, Lexi

  It was a lovely thing to say, Bunny thought wistfully, although she suspected it wasn’t true. Rafe always seemed to be in perfect control. Sometimes his perpetual calm bothered her. He was so disciplined and she was all over the place with her emotions, especially lately.

  Rafe deepened the kiss and Bunny forgot everything but the heated joy of his touch. His tongue brushed hers and she tasted honey and spices. The taste of him, the heat radiating off his big-muscled body and his special, masculine scent made her lightheaded with longing. A delicious ache started in her breasts, then spread to her belly and between her thighs. She wanted him now. Heck, with a little encouragement, she’d do him right here in the rosebushes behind the Mount Carmel Methodist Church, with half the town and her entire family within shouting distance.

  Not exactly the photo spread she’d envisioned for the Hannah Herald.

  The crunch of approaching footsteps brought her to her senses; Mr. Hardy, returning with the fresh batteries. Blushing, she slipped out of Rafe’s embrace and turned to face the older man with a welcoming smile.

  Her smile quickly faded. A pleasant, round-faced man with thinning silver hair, Spence Hardy was Hannah’s unofficial photographer, even though his business was thirty miles away in Paulsberg. He had taken her baby pictures and the gap-toothed photograph of her in the first grade. The formal portrait of her in a white dress at sixteen that hung over her parents’ mantel was a Hardy original. He was there when she and her classmates graduated high school, taking snapshots of them in their caps and gowns. But the person walking toward them looked nothing like the man she’d known all her life. His skin was sickly gray, his facial features stretched and rubbery.

  And his eyes . . .

  His eyes were blank, dark pools above his grinning slash of a mouth.

  “Mr. Hardy?” Bunny squeaked.

  To her shock and surprise, Rafe produced a lethal-looking battle-axe out of nowhere and stepped in front of her. He twirled the battle-axe, and the thing wearing Spence Hardy’s skin hissed.

  “Did you think to find me unprepared, fiend?” her new husband asked Mr. Hardy in a cold, dangerous voice she’d never heard before. “I protect what is mine.”

  Fiend? Unprepared? What on earth was he talking about?

  She peeked around Rafe. Mr. Hardy looked bad, really bad, like something out of a horror movie. But monsters don’t exist, so he must be sick. Yeah, that was it. Mr. Hardy was ill. Maybe he was coming down with the flu.

  Or he had something worse like the plague, the nasty, flesh-eating kind that made random body parts fall off.

  Oh, good Lord, she’d hired a plague-infested photographer. Everybody at her wedding was going to die of a pernicious, infectious disease, and there would be dead bodies and stray body parts everywhere.

  Eww.

  The caterer would be pissed. She’d probably lose her deposit.

  She tapped Rafe on one broad shoulder. “Rafe, what are you doing?”

  “Anon, Bunny. Stay back. I will deal with this foul creature.”

  Anon and foul creature. His speech was always formal and proper, a bit stiff and old-fashioned, and he never used contractions. He reminded her of something out of one of her books, a knight errant of old. Usually, she found it charming, but not in the face of an honest-to-goodness, bona fide wedding emergency.

  Bunny stepped around Rafe. “Mr. Hardy, you obviously aren’t feeling well. Why don’t you go ho—”

  Mr. Hardy rushed at her with a horrible gobbling noise.

  Rafe waved his hand, and Bunny shrieked as she was tossed into the air and turned end over end. She lost a shoe on the third rotation. When she stopped spinning, she was hanging upside down. The voluminous skirts of her wedding dress and petticoat fell down, covering her head in a suffocating swathe of tulle and netting. It was hard to think with the blood pounding in her temples. What was happening?

  A cool breeze fanned her nether regions. Good Lord, she realized with a spasm of mortification. I’m mooning half of Behr County.

  She wasn’t wearing much. A scrap of lace here, a couple of bows there, held together by a narrow strip of ribbon and not much else. She’d spent a great deal of time picking out this particular pair of panties and imagining Rafe’s reaction to them on their wedding night. This was not the “reveal” she’d planned. But who could plan for a thing like this?

  “Rafe,” she said, equal parts terrified and humiliated.

  If she hadn’t been so scared and confused, she would have cringed at the shrill sound of her voice. She sounded like a squeaky toy in the jaws of a frustrated Boxer.

  Without warning, she turned right side up. Slapping her skirts back into place, she swatted the gauzy folds of her wedding veil out of her face. Her stomach did a queasy flip-flop. She was suspended high in the air with a bird’s-eye view of the river and their wedding guests milling around the white tents.

  Bunny hated heights. It was all she could do to climb a ladder to reshelve books in the stacks. She always sat on the bottom row of bleachers, she avoided balconies and she never had dreams of flying.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she said, flailing her arms and legs about in panic.

  To her surprise and relief, her clumsy movements propelled her forward. She floundered weightlessly through the air until she reached the church steeple. She grabbed it and held on. Looking down, she saw her family and friends mingling around the champagne fountain. A line of live oaks separated the church from the river. No one at the reception could see the drama unfolding several hundred yards away. The orchestra was playing. The party had started, but the bride was stuck on the roof like an abandoned Frisbee, and the groom . . .

  The groom and The Thing That Was Mr. Hardy were engaged in a death match in the rose garden. Or what was left of it. Rosebushes, statuary, great clumps of dirt and sidewalk pavers exploded as Rafe and the possessed photographer hurled lightning bolts at one another.

  “Rafe,” Bunny screamed, terrified for him.

  Terrified of him, this godlike creature with the blazing eyes who hurled death from his fingertips.

  The ornate, three-tiered fountain at the center of the garden flew through the air and crashed to the ground at Rafe’s feet, narrowly missing him.

  He’s going to be killed. He’s going to be killed. The singsong litany ran through her mind.

  Rafe threw his double-headed axe. It sailed across the garden toward his opponent. Bloop, Mr. Hardy disappeared from sight with a high-pitched giggle. With a metallic whine, the axe made a wide circle and returned to Rafe’s outstretched hand. Bloop, Rafe disappeared, too. Bloop, bloop, he and Mr. Hardy reappeared on the other side of the garden.

  This was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. Spence Hardy was a gentle man who filled his pockets with Tootsie Rolls and Smarties for the kids. At Christmas, he would set up a backdrop in front of the hardware store and take pictures of people in a sleigh pulled by eight Basset Hound reindeer wearing jingle bells and felt antlers.

  This was not the Spence Hardy she knew.

  This was not the Rafe Dalvahni she knew either, this hard-faced man with the glowing eyes and the supernatural powers.

  He was unrecognizable, a stranger, and that frightened her most of all.

  To Bunny’s shock, Brand materialized on the roof beside her. As Rafe’s only family, he was a member of the wedding party. He looked sinfully handsome in his tuxedo—in a dark and deadly I’ll-kill-you-if-you-so-much-as-look-at-me-cross-eyed kind of way. His long, dark hair gleamed in the sunlight.

  “I heard a noise over the obnoxious clamor that passes for music here.” He briefly observed the mini-war being waged below them in the devastated garden. “I see my brother has things well in hand.”

  To her astonishment, he vanished. Left her on the roof with no explanation and without offering to help her or Rafe. Like possessed photographers and fireball-wielding grooms and people popping in and out of thin air were everyday occurrences. They were so not.

  To a
dd insult to injury, he had dissed her wedding band.

  “Obnoxious clamor?” She shook her fist at the empty spot where he’d been standing a moment ago. “Do you have any idea how lucky we were to get a band at all on such short notice?”

  Brand was long gone, but yelling made her feel better.

  Her relief was temporary. Clinging to the steeple, she returned her attention to the fight below. Super Rafe was stalking his enemy. Bloop, he popped into view near the rear entrance of the church. Bloop, the Hardy monster materialized in the far corner of the garden. The monster was outmatched and his powers seemed to be waning. His arms hung limply at his sides, and he no longer threw fiery orbs of energy. His gray mouth hung open and he was heaving from exertion. Some of Bunny’s terror for Rafe eased. It was going to be okay. It was all going to be okay.

  Rafe blinked from sight and reappeared next to Hardy. He swung his axe. The blade whistled through the air in a shining, silver arc.

  It was soooo not going to be okay.

  Her husband was about to commit murder on their wedding day. Not an auspicious beginning for a marriage, any way you sliced it.

  Somehow, Bunny was off the roof and running across the garden.

  “Rafe, no.”

  The blade came down. It missed Mr. Hardy and shattered a marble statue of Saint Francis instead.

  Bunny skidded to a halt, staring in horror at Mr. Hardy. His head swelled, his mouth fell open, and his lower jaw stretched to the ground. Black smoke poured out of the gaping hole. Mr. Hardy’s body crumpled to the ground like an empty balloon. With an eerie howl, the column of smoke flew over the church and disappeared in the direction of the river.

  The battle-axe in Rafe’s hand winked out of sight.

  Mr. Hardy groaned and sat up. “What happened?” Rafe made a slashing motion with one hand. “You will sleep.”

  Mr. Hardy’s eyes rolled back and he slumped over.

  “Mr. Hardy!” Bunny cried, running over to the photographer. She glared at Rafe. “What did you do to him?”

  “He is unharmed. When he awakens, he will remember nothing of this.”

  “Lucky fellow.” Bunny checked Mr. Hardy’s pulse. It was steady. “I don’t understand anything that just happened.”

  Rafe stalked over and yanked her to her feet. “I will tell you what happened. You interfered where you should not have. You will not do so again.”

  Bunny gasped. “You almost killed Mr. Hardy!”

  “ ’Twas my intent to kill him. I would have succeeded but for your screeching.”

  “You can’t go around killing people willy nilly, especially at a wedding! It’s bad luck!”

  “I do not kill in a random fashion—”

  “The proper response would be I don’t kill people at all!”

  “—but in accordance with my preordained purpose. This was not a person. It was a demon in the Hardy human’s flesh, likely the same demon that attacked you.”

  Bunny tried to process what he was saying, but it was difficult. Too much had happened, too quickly.

  “Attacked me?” she repeated, frowning. “Are you talking about that night at the library? You told me it was a mugger.”

  He glared down at her. “It was not a mortal assailant. You were attacked by a djegrali. A demon, you humans would call it.”

  She shook her head in growing confusion. This was all unreal. She couldn’t process any of it. Her brain was mush. She must be in shock. Or maybe she’d had a stroke. Yeah, that was it. She’d had a stroke. That would explain a lot.

  “You say ‘you humans’ like you’re not one.”

  “I am Dalvahni.”

  Bunny stamped her foot. “I know who you are, for crying out loud! I’m Mrs. Dalvahni. I married you.”

  He gripped her shoulders. “Dalvahni is not my name, Bunny. It is what I am. The Dalvahni are demon slayers, warriors who seek the djegrali through space and time. Kill them, if need be, lest they wreak havoc upon innocent beings.”

  “I thought you worked for INS!”

  “I am unfamiliar with this term.”

  She twisted free of his grasp. “Immigration Services? You told me you rounded up aliens, for Pete’s sake!”

  “So I do. The djegrali are alien to this world.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “You’re telling me you’re not human.”

  “I am not human.”

  “And that you don’t work for the Federal Government.”

  “I do not.”

  “And you’re a demon slayer.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I’m not listening to any more of this.”

  She spun on her heel and stomped off. Her exit would have been more dramatic if she weren’t limping on one shoe.

  “Stop. That is not all,” he called after her. “The demon inflicted a mortal wound upon you that night. If not for my intercession, you would have died.” She limped faster. His voice rose, following her. “Do you hear me, Bunny? I gave you a portion of my essence. You are no longer human.”

  Bunny picked up her skirts and ran.

  Chapter Two

  Rafe watched Bunny flit down the tree-lined path away from him, the train of her white dress trailing behind her.

  He scowled. She was running from the truth.

  She was running from him.

  The knowledge made him feel hollow inside.

  He shrugged the thought aside. The Dalvahni did not have feelings. They were immortal demon hunters, created for that purpose alone. They experienced battle lust and sexual desire—particularly in the wake of battle—but little else in the way of emotion.

  Sentiment had no place in their existence. Feelings were a human indulgence.

  Rafe still found it unbelievable that Brand had fallen so completely under a woman’s spell. Never before had a warrior surrendered to sentiment. That it had happened to Brand, a stalwart, courageous warrior, ferocious in battle and unswerving in purpose, sent a ripple of unease through the ranks of the Dalvahni.

  It was the reason Rafe accepted this assignment from Conall, the captain of the Dalvahni. He needed to find out for himself why one of their finest warriors had done something so unprecedented.

  He had filed his initial report. Brand’s passion for Addy Corwin was an anomaly, he informed Conall, a form of madness confined to Brand. The incident was unfortunate, but it would not happen again.

  His decision to marry Bunny was the practical solution to a problem: he could keep her safe from the demon that attacked her. Nothing more. True, he enjoyed coupling with her, but that was an added benefit. The pleasure they shared was physical and of little consequence. He, in turn, protected her from the djegrali.

  Having marked her, the creature would be irresistibly drawn to her. When it came for her, Rafe would be there to slay the demon. Once Bunny’s safety was insured, he would return to the Hall of Warriors.

  Yes, his marriage to Bunny was a simple business arrangement. Certainly, his emotions were not involved.

  His scowl deepened as she disappeared from view. Bunny still did not fully comprehend the situation. She had received a severe shock. He would give her time to think things over. Then they would discuss matters in a calm, rational manner.

  Calm, rational, unemotional, that was the Dalvahni way. Now that Bunny was Dalvahni, it would be her way too.

  He felt an enormous sense of relief at the prospect. He had been off balance since he met Bunny, a feeling of disorientation he attributed to the unusual amount of demonic activity in this place and the circumstances of their initial encounter.

  He had been on the trail of one of the djegrali the first time he saw her. Stalking the creature through the streets at dusk, he had noticed a small building ablaze with lights not far from the center of town. Curious, he had paused in front of the structure and spied Bunny through the window.

  That first glimpse of her had been like a hammer blow to the head. His already heightened sens
es sharpened and his body tightened in awareness.

  Ah, he remembered thinking. Something buried deep inside of him stirred to life, as though he’d waited for this moment throughout the long, dark tunnel of his existence. It was a ridiculous notion, of course. Proof positive that unwholesome forces were at work.

  He could see her from the waist up. She had her back to him. Standing on tiptoe, she placed a book on a shelf. The small movement made the muscles of her back and narrow shoulders bunch against the thin fabric of her blouse. His throat went dry. By the sword, he needed to slake his lust in the House of the Thralls if the sight of a woman’s back was arousing him. And a fully clothed female at that.

  He moved closer to the window, wanting to see more of her.

  She was not to his usual taste, too slender and pale. Not golden-skinned and sumptuously curved like Xedra, his favorite thrall.

  But her hair was glorious, like dark silk. She wore it in a careless knot on top of her head. A few wispy curls escaped their moorings to dangle at the back of her neck. He stared resentfully at those silky ringlets, fortuitously positioned against her tender nape. He wanted to whisper kisses along her creamy skin, lick the delicate shell of her ear, and feel the teasing caress of her dark locks upon his naked body.

  She turned, as though she sensed his scrutiny. She could not see him. He was Dalvahni and invisible for the hunt. Still, he felt her gaze upon him like a physical touch.

  And her eyes . . .

  They were large and round, surrounded by a fringe of dark lashes. He could not tell their color.

  Frustrated and curious, he moved closer still. She came to the window to look out. They were face to face. All that separated them was a pane of glass. The light was behind her, her face in shadows. He gazed at her, fascinated by the satin planes of her high cheeks and the soft curve of her wide mouth. With his finger, he traced the outline of her lips on the glass, memorizing their lush shape. She was not a beauty, perhaps. Her face was more heart-shaped than oval, her chin too stubborn, but she was fascinating to him all the same.

  She stared out the window for a long moment, searching the darkness before turning back to her cart of books. He suppressed a growl of displeasure. She had abandoned him.