Demon Night

by Meljean Brook

  Ethan nodded. “I owe you some explaining.” He seemed to smile at her snort of agreement, though his lips didn’t move. But she saw it at the corners of his eyes, the slight lift of his brows. “And I’d be much obliged if you’d help me out while I’m doing it. How strong is your stomach?”

  Blinking quickly didn’t make his question make any more sense. “What?”

  “The bullet’s giving me some trouble, and it’s coming out too slow. I can’t protect you like I should if my arm don’t function when I need it. But if the bullet’s out, it’ll heal up quick and clean.”

  It took her two more blinks. “You want me to get the bullet out of your back?”

  “I reckon it’ll hurt like a son of a bitch if I go in through the front,” he drawled, and she closed her eyes, pressed her lips together. “Now, Charlie, don’t you start laughing and lose your mad, because if you’re angry it’ll be easier to use a knife on me. Though I must be all kinds of a fool, hoping you’re riled up before I give it to you.” He paused, and the drawl slipped away. “But only if you feel up to it, Charlie.”

  That was the voice she’d heard from him the night on the roof. Still slow and long, as smooth and warm as a sip of scotch, but without an exaggerated flavor to it. “You’ll tell me who you are? What you are?”

  “Yes. But we’d best do this in the kitchen.”

  Charlie looked down at the pale rug, realized that they were moving to avoid staining it with blood, and wasn’t sure if she was up to it. But Ethan was already walking that way, so she hurried after him. He stopped just inside the kitchen, in front of a security panel. Light flooded the room.

  And maybe her stomach wasn’t all that strong, because it began roiling when he laid a knife on the butcher-block island top and pulled a ladder-back chair in from the breakfast nook. He straddled it, crossing his forearms on the backrest.

  She took a deep breath, stepped up behind him. The hole in his coat centered above his right shoulder blade. Charlie gingerly touched the skin showing through the tear. “Right here?”

  “Yes.” His muscles shifted under her finger, and she looked up to see him tilting a black felt-tip pen her direction. “Mark it, so you won’t have to cut more’n once or twice.” He turned his head in profile to her, his brows drawing together. “That hole pisses me off more than getting shot, Charlie. I don’t have a talent for creating my own clothes, particularly something that fits me this well. You got that marked?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t say anything else. His jacket, suspenders, and shirt disappeared, leaving his broad shoulders naked and exposing tanned skin over long, rangy muscles. Her fingers itched to run the length of his back, from the short thick hair at his nape to the tight ridges of flesh hugging his spine and narrowing down to his waistband.

  But she didn’t want to touch him like this.

  The knife gleamed wickedly on the countertop.

  “Forgive my blushes, Miss Charlie. I’m so awfully modest and bashful.” He grinned and rested his chin against the top of his shoulder, watching her sidelong. “And you’ll have to pardon any groaning I do. It’s not becoming for a man to cry, so we groan real loud instead.”

  “I know you’re trying to make it better, Ethan, but you’re just freaking me out. Do you want a drink or something first?” She could make a drink, that would be nice and comfortable—

  “I doubt Colin and Savi keep any around—liquor doesn’t do anything for me, in any case. Nor would medicine or painkillers. I’ll talk myself through it.”

  And her, too, she hoped. “How deep is it?”

  He rolled his shoulders, grimaced. “About two or three inches. Just dig in there until you hit lead and then use the tip of the blade to wiggle it on out.”

  Oh, Jesus. “That doesn’t sound like a good plan.”

  “It’s likely not, but—” He sat up straight, and his jacket was suddenly in his hands. He lifted the sleeve up from the rest of the bundle; from the wrist to the elbow, it was dark with blood. “That’s mine, Charlie. Nearly lost my hand to a demon. Now, I can reattach it, or wait until I return to Caelum and get a Healer to fix me up, or eventually grow another one—but next time it might be my head, and I can’t put that back on. And next time might be the moment I let the shield down around the house, because there’s no way for me to know if a demon’s waiting for us when the spell is up.”

  Demons, spells, being constantly prepared to defend himself…Charlie could barely imagine life at that level or think in those terms.

  But she had to now, didn’t she?

  “All right. All right.” She shrugged out of her coat, tossed it onto the island. The ivory-handled knife was as cold as her fingers, and gooseflesh crawled over her body—but Ethan’s skin was smooth, as if he didn’t feel the chill in the air. “Do we need to sterilize this?”

  “No. Just quick and deep, Charlie. And soon, before I turn yellow and embarrass myself.”

  “Just hold on a second, Ethan. Jesus.” She thought his lips twitched before he turned, facing straight ahead. “I need a towel. Or five. You’ve got some of—”

  A rainbow of her neatly folded hand towels appeared on the island.

  “My tweezers, too.”

  After a second, Ethan said, “They in something?”

  “A brown makeup bag. It’s got a fleur-de-lis design all over the outside. Yeah, that one.” God. Just wiggle the bullet on out, Charlie. He was crazy. She wiped off the tips of the tweezers and laid them next to the towels. “Are you ready? You’d better start talking. You said you’re a Guardian—what does that mean?”

  “You ever play DemonSlayer?”

  “The video game? No.” She held the blade over the black circle she’d made on his skin. Just stabbing wouldn’t let her work in there; she needed an incision.

  “Good, because it’s mostly bullholy fucking whoreson—!” His jaw clamped together and he dropped his forehead to his arms; his knee lifted and he slammed his boot against the floor.

  Charlie felt the vibration in her feet, and she stared in shock at the deep wound she’d made, the blood pouring from it. She’d convinced herself it wouldn’t really hurt him. For God’s sake, he’d been shot and she hadn’t heard him complain about the pain, just the inconvenience. “Ethan—”

  His voice was muffled against his arms. “Get in there, Charlie, or it’ll close up and you’ll have to do it again.”

  He was right; it had bled hard the first second, but it was already slowing. She grabbed a towel and her tweezers. “Guardians?” she prompted.

  “Yes.” He hissed when she probed the incision, and she thought she heard wood splinter. “You’ve heard about Lucifer and his rebellion in Heaven?”

  “I think so.” She couldn’t see anything inside the wound, and looking at it was just making her sick; she closed her eyes and gently felt around for the bullet. She’d forgotten what a distinctive odor blood had. “Lucifer and his followers were turned into demons and thrown into Hell—but Lucifer decided to trick humans into wearing clothes instead of leaves, so he turned into a snake and made Eve eat the apple and then humans were eternally screwed.”

  His back shook under her hand, like he was holding in laughter. “I don’t know if the snake and the apple is true—but the demons did begin tempting humans, and angels remained on Earth to stop them. Except it wasn’t long before humans started thinking the angels were gods, and the demons got almighty jealous.” He sucked in a long breath. “You’ll have to open it up again. Deep as you can. Poke around in there, Charlie. You don’t need to be gentle, because it’ll only hurt for a second—I can hardly feel the cut you made now. And you aren’t doing any damage.”

  “Okay.” Charlie wiped the blood from her hands, the tweezers, then his back—cleaning the work space. “It’s all over your pants.”

  “I’d take them off and sit here in my skivvies, but—sonofabitch.” He gripped his knees, the muscles and tendons in his hands and arms standing in sharp relief. “But I ain’t wearing any
.”

  He’d probably meant that to be teasing, instead of sounding like it had been ground between two jagged stones.

  “Sorry,” she murmured, and swiftly got the tweezers going. When the steely tension in his back eased, she said, “So the demons were jealous?”

  “Enough to wage another war against the angels. Only this time Lucifer had creatures from Chaos, a dragon and demon dogs and such, and they just about slaughtered the seraphim—that’s the angels—until humans began fighting with them. I felt it there, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, I found it.” She bit her lip and held her breath as she carefully dragged the tweezers against the bullet, searching for the edge. “So the demons started killing people, too?” She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “It’s slippery.”

  “You’ll get it.” Her probing must have been hurting him; his thumbs were working circles on his thighs, though the rest of him was still. “Demons can’t kill humans—it’s against the Rules. No killing or hurting them, no denying them free will.”

  “Why?”

  “Used to be, they got dragged back to Hell by Lucifer, then Punished or destroyed.”

  “Used to be?”

  “The Gates are closed now. But that’s another story, Charlie, and not nearly so old. This one, the men who joined in the battle turned the victory back the angels’ way.”

  “How?”

  “One of them—Michael—killed the dragon.”

  “Got it,” she breathed, and slowly began to draw the bullet out. She lost it, and fished back in, trying to work under it instead of squeezing this time. “Damn. It’s going to take a second, though. And then what?”

  “And then the angels gave Caelum—their home—to Michael, gave him a Guardians’ powers, and left him to recruit others.”

  “When did all of this—Oh, shit, here it is.”

  The slug landed with a plop in her cupped hand, and she held it over his shoulder, grinning.

  Ethan whistled low and picked up the mushroomed bullet between his thumb and forefinger. “A forty-four hollow-point—unfortunately, only the light cartridge behind it. If they’d used a Magnum round, it’d likely have punched right on through, made it all a bit easier for me.” The slug vanished, and he slanted a glance up at her. “Thank you kindly, Miss Charlie.”

  The darkness of his lashes only made the impact of his amber eyes more intense, knocking the wind out of her. She swallowed, forced a reply. “Sure thing. Just give me another minute, and I’ll get you cleaned up.”

  Herself, too. Blood covered her fingers, pooled in her palm. She didn’t want to look down and see how much was on her shoes and pants.

  “It ain’t necessary, Charlie. I can…” The rest of it was lost beneath the sound of the faucet, and by the time she’d soaked a towel with warm water and lathered soap into it, he’d apparently decided to let her help.

  His elbows were resting on the seat back, his posture easy, his booted feet flat against the floor. He tensed beneath the first swipe of the towel over his skin. His right boot slid back a couple of inches, his heel lifting, and she paused, remembering how he’d reacted on the first cut. But the incision had healed; only a four-inch pink line remained against his tan, and that was fading quickly.

  The triumphant haze of getting through the operation without fainting was fading, too.

  “That didn’t hurt, did it?” It wasn’t really a question. And now she recalled how he’d vanished the blood from her hands in the booth.

  “Not a bit. I suspect there’s more hurting to come, though.”

  She wasn’t so slow that she couldn’t interpret that. “Yet you’re still sitting here,” she said, and wiped another section of skin clean. Efficiently, though she was tempted to take her time, to make that hurt just a little worse—maybe even bad enough he’d want to relieve it.

  “Well, Charlie, I just ain’t man enough to walk away when a pretty woman offers a warm bath.”

  A dark emotion grabbed at her throat. She’d been pretty enough to kiss, too. And apparently pretty enough to get his dick hard, but she’d bet that if she walked around the chair and took any of that for herself, he’d push her away and tell her it was for her own good.

  She let the towel drop to the floor. “But I don’t think I’m woman enough to keep nurturing a man who doesn’t need it.”

  She backed up to the island, lifted herself up onto the wooden surface, and kept her hands clenched on the edge of the counter. Her fingers were screaming to do something, and she’d have done just about anything for a cigarette—anything but ask Ethan for one.

  Even something as innocent as asking for her knitting seemed too much a giveaway of her hurt, so she just squeezed the wood instead.

  Ethan’s gaze lifted from her hands to her face. “Charlie—”

  “So you can fly, and you heal fast,” she interrupted, because she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about anything else. Didn’t want to hear him say again that she was needy, or to think about how easily he saw into her.

  Didn’t want to think about how simply knowing that she’d aroused him had created an ache that centered much lower—and was much warmer—than the one in her throat.

  She was good at wanting things that she shouldn’t…and equally good at denying herself them.

  Ethan watched her carefully as he stood. A blue cotton shirt appeared in his hands. “Yes. I can run quick enough a human can’t see it, lift a city bus if it needs to be lifted.”

  A thin scar bisected his navel horizontally, rippled across the left side of his abdomen. She swung her legs out so that she had something to stare at besides his stomach. Her shoes were spotless; so were her pants. Considering how much blood had spilled, and how close she’d been to him, that was impossible. “And you make stuff disappear.”

  “If I can get my head around it, I can store it. Blood doesn’t feel good, though.” He slid into his shirt, frowned at the length of the sleeves. He met her eyes again as he rolled up the cuffs. “If I have the opportunity, I choose to clean it off in the normal way.”

  She didn’t know if that was an apology or an explanation, or just an excuse—but it helped that he offered one. “Do you drink blood?”

  “No. Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t sleep.”

  “That must be nice,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Not to need anything. Then it wouldn’t hurt so much when you didn’t have it.” Or when you had to give it up.

  His lips tightened. “Well, the lack of sleep is more difficult than the others. Close your eyes, Charlie—I’m about to make new britches, and I don’t always get it right the first time.”

  She did, but an image of his body appeared behind her eyes anyway. “Where’d you get that other scar?” Not as a Guardian—he’d said the one on his lip was from when he was human.

  “Which?”

  How many did he have? “Here.” She lifted the hem of her shirt a couple of inches and ran her finger in a quick line over her stomach.

  She heard him swear lightly and fabric rip before he said, “A saloon in Cheyenne. I’d tracked…hell if I remember his name, but he’d swindled a nice bundle out of some society matron in New York. A little dude, and I never expected he’d pull a—Now, Charlie, what about that is so almighty funny?”

  It took her a second to stop laughing, but she finally managed, “Dude?”

  His voice suggested that he was smiling again. “Ah, well, a ‘dude’ back in my day was a fancy man who had no business being out west. And I’m decent now.”

  Indigo denim jeans—not formfitting, but falling straight from his hips, like the old-fashioned Levi’s she’d seen miners wearing in pictures. His suspenders looped the length of his thighs, and Ethan had his head bent, working a metal button on his waistband through the end of the leather strap. His shirt was still unfastened, exposing a wide swath of skin. Dark hair roughened his chest, arrowed down the center of his stomach.

  Nothing about that v
isual was decent; it embodied some kinky fantasy Charlie hadn’t even known she’d had. She picked up her makeup bag, began digging through it to distract herself.

  “You tracked him—you were a cop?” Old Matthew hadn’t been wrong, after all.

  He shook his head. “I was employed by a detective agency.”

  “Like…like…” Dammit. “It starts with ‘P.’”

  “Pinkerton’s?” He glanced up from his buttons, and she nodded. “Similar to it, yes. I worked with Pinkerton’s for a spell, but they mostly wanted thugs to hassle unionizing workers. So I moved on to a smaller agency where I could be put to better use.”

  She leaned to the side and turned on the faucet in the middle of the island, rinsing her tweezers. “You’re big enough to be useful as a thug.”

  “But I’m more useful thinking like a thief and murderer.” His eyes narrowed. “What’s it with you and letters? ‘Starts with “P.” ’”

  “I remember the sound I associate with the thing easier than I do the actual word or name.” She kept her focus on her hands as she dried the tweezers and replaced them in the makeup bag. Hopefully, the threat of a unibrow would overpower the memory of where they’d been. “They teach you that in conservatory—mnemonic devices so that you don’t forget the lyrics, or where to come in. Except words don’t pull so easily for me. Not unless you set them to music.” She pursed her lips, finally glanced up at him, and was glad he wasn’t staring at her throat. “I can’t spell, either.”

  “Hell, Charlie, ‘reckon’ and ‘ain’t’ trip off my tongue like I was born saying them, but the truth is, my ma would have whupped me something fierce if she’d ever heard me speak like this.” He smiled when she laughed, and it softened his face, as if mention of his mother had struck a sweet memory. His fingers began working up his shirtfront. “But it served me well to start, and I don’t figure I’ll stop anytime soon. My ma ain’t going to protest, at any rate—and I can sum up my human life by saying that I was born on Beacon Hill in 1854, where I learned to talk a certain way, but by the time I died thirty-two years later in a no-account Arizona town, I had speaking habits that would make my parents roll in their graves.”