Releasing the Hunter (Harlequin Nocturne)

by Anna, Vivi

  “Yup, no problem.” He hefted the bag over his shoulder. As he walked it swung and hit Ivy in the side of the head. It had enough impact to send her sprawling over the sofa. She had no doubt in her mind that he’d done it on purpose.

  Balling her hands into fists, she followed him out of the house, down the front steps and to the truck. After he swung the bag into the back of the truck, she rounded on him. She poked him in the chest with her knuckle.

  “Listen to me. I told you this was my way or the highway. So either do what I say or you can get lost. I don’t need your running commentary about what I am doing or not doing.”

  He regarded her with his lips twitching. She didn’t like how he was looking at her. As if she was an amusement to him. “Do you ever relax?”

  “No,” she sneered. “Relaxing gets people killed.”

  “You know what else gets people killed? High blood pressure.”

  Grinding her teeth, she spun on her heel and jumped into the truck. Ronan got in on the other side. She started the truck, put it in gear and drove away from the house.

  Under her breath she counted to ten slowly. When she reached ten she looked over at Ronan and asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Inner East Bay, down by the harbor.”

  “Once we do this, then what? What’s your next big idea?” She opened her window a crack. She felt like she was suffocating. Ronan’s presence was crowding on her. He was a big guy and took up a lot of the space inside the cab. “Sallos knew we were coming. How?”

  Ronan rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. “I don’t know. Maybe because he knew what you would do next.”

  “So this is my fault?”

  “He obviously made you the second you walked into that club. You don’t exactly fly under the radar, Ivy.”

  “What about you? Maybe he made you,” she suggested. “Or I know, how about, you’re working with him, so he knew we were coming because that was the plan.” She thought about his stolen car. Maybe that had been the reason, so it would be easy for him to hook up with her. Except as a hunter she’d stolen plenty of vehicles. It was part of the game.

  Cocking his head, he regarded her. “I know there’s a brain in that pretty head of yours. So maybe you should use it. What you’re proposing is just ridiculous.” She hated the mocking tone in his voice.

  Without a thought, she yanked the steering wheel to the right and pulled up onto the curb. “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “I said get the hell out of my truck.”

  “You’re being overdramatic, don’t you think?”

  That was it. She had enough of his lip and they’d been together for only two hours. She balled up her fist and punched him in the side of the face. The force was enough to snap his head back. She had the satisfaction of seeing him bump the other side of his head against the door.

  He turned his head back to her, then rubbed at his jaw where she’d clocked him. “Feel better? Got it out of your system? Can we move on now?”

  She nodded. “Definitely feel better.”

  “Good, because we need to keep moving. A cop just pulled up behind us.”

  Ivy glanced in her rearview mirror. He was right. A police cruiser had just pulled onto the street where they were parked. It would be very bad if he found their big bag of body parts in the truck bed. She suspected that even she wouldn’t be able to talk her way out of it.

  She put the truck back in gear and pulled out onto the street. The cop car followed her. She kept glancing in the mirror, holding her breath, hoping she didn’t see the flashing lights come on.

  After they drove another four blocks, the cruiser put on his signal and turned right. Ivy let out the breath she was holding.

  Ronan rubbed at his chin again. “You punch pretty hard. Not like a girl at all.”

  She swiveled in her seat to tell him a thing or two, but the smile on his face had her biting back the words. She couldn’t help the grin that lifted her lips.

  “Aha, I knew you could smile.” His eyes sparkled in amusement. “There’s a running rumor out there that it would never happen. That it couldn’t.”

  She shook her head, but she couldn’t help the laugh bubbling out of her. “Well, I’m happy to bust that rumor to hell.”

  “Yeah, I wonder what other rumors we can bust along the way.”

  Her smile faded then and she turned back to the road. “Keep dreaming.”

  Although his words bothered her, it was the lusty gleam in his eyes that worried her more. Because truth be told, the butterflies in her stomach had not stopped fluttering since setting her eyes on him in the back alley. And that was always a sign of bad things to come.

  Ronan made her body react in ways she hadn’t felt for a long time. Lusty thoughts finger walked their way through her mind when she looked at him. He had that dark and dangerous swagger about him that sent her libido into a tizzy. This job was going to be one of the toughest of her career so far. And it had nothing to do with the mark.

  Chapter 4

  Ronan directed Ivy down to the bay. He knew of a perfect spot to dispose of a body. He’d unfortunately had to use it himself a time or two.

  She didn’t speak as she parked the truck near the water’s edge. She got out and went around back, pulling down the tailgate so they could get at the bag of body parts. Ronan slid out of the truck and then jumped into the back. He thought he surprised her with his agility because she looked at him with those wide blue eyes and a snarl on her lips.

  Fog swirled around the tires of the truck. It gave the whole area a creepy vibe. The fact that they were dumping a body just upped that vibe to the nth degree. Moisture settled onto the back of his neck and the backs of his hands. A shiver rushed down his spine as he breathed in the cool night air.

  Together they wrestled the bag out of the truck and onto the ground. From there, Ronan dragged it to the bay’s shoreline. He opened the bag and began to stuff it with rocks he found around the water’s edge. Once Ivy realized what he was trying to accomplish she helped out by finding big boulders to weigh the bag down.

  “I see you’ve done this before,” she commented as she dropped a particularly large rock into the bag.

  He nodded. “A time or two. Nobody that didn’t need killing, though.”

  “Uh-huh.” She barely glanced at him.

  He stood back and eyed her curiously. “Is it that you absolutely despise demons in any shape or form, or do you generally loathe everything?”

  She didn’t give an answer, just took a step back and wiped her dirty hands on her pants.

  Ronan tied off the bag and shoved it into the water. It buoyed at the surface for a second or two, then sank down into the inky depths. If it was ever found, it would be quite a ways down the shoreline.

  He wiped his hands on his pants, and then looked at Ivy. She was watching the water ripple where the body had gone down. He couldn’t read the look on her face, but it wasn’t a happy one. Guilt, maybe. Remorse? Interesting considering her hard-assed reputation for slaying demons and the like.

  “Now what?” he asked her.

  “Regroup, I guess, and try to figure out where Sallos has gone to ground.”

  “We could go to my place and—”

  “Not likely. We’ll go to one of my safe houses.” She smirked at him. “You’ll be blindfolded, of course.”

  “Well, of course I will.” The sarcasm rolled off his tongue.

  She ignored it and headed toward the truck. Ronan followed her. “You don’t trust much, do you?”

  “I trust only one person. And he’s unfortunately not around.”

  Ronan knew she was talking about her brother, Quinn. He’d heard that Quinn had gone to ground a couple of years ago. No one knew where he was or why he was hiding. He wonde
red if Ivy even knew. And if she didn’t, why not?

  Maybe this was why she had misgivings about everyone she met. The one person in her life she probably thought she could rely on had left her. Or at least, Ronan could speculate. There were rumors floating around about the Stroms and their lives and how they’d been born into the hunting community. He didn’t travel in those circles, just on the fringes, so he heard things now and then. Which is how he’d known where to find Ivy in the first place.

  Ronan thought it was kind of a lonely way to go about life. Always looking over your shoulder. Always wondering who was going to stab you in the back. Never being able to let down your guard for one second just in case someone or something came calling to kick your ass.

  He supposed his life wasn’t all that different. He didn’t always have to look over his shoulder to see if someone was sliding a knife into it, but he did have to be cautious. He survived by procuring things. Usually the hard-to-find type of things. Items that were not for sale on eBay. Things like ancient talismans and old lost documents written in Aramaic. And most of these things he had to steal. He was good at what he did. He moved like the shadows and had never been caught. And he never planned to be.

  His career wasn’t perfect. Most of his clients were ruthless and manipulative and shrewd. People he needed to be wary of, or he would be the one always looking over his shoulder.

  She started the truck and they pulled away from the deserted spot near the water. As she pulled out onto a gravel road, she glanced at him. “There’s a blindfold in the glove box. Put it on.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “If you don’t want to wear it, I can pull over and you can get out right here and now.”

  He pressed the button on the compartment. It sprang open and he reached in and took out the black cotton blindfold. He ran it through his fingers. “You know the rumors didn’t say anything about you being so kinky.”

  “Did they say anything about me killing you for talking too much?”

  “Why, yes, yes they did.”

  She turned her head to look back at the road, but he caught the little smirk on her lips. Interesting. Maybe she wasn’t so indifferent to him after all.

  “I’ll play your game,” he said, wrapping the cloth over his eyes and tying it in back, “but only because I find you quite fascinating.”

  “I should have brought a gag for your mouth.”

  “Next time, we can experiment.”

  He heard her little chuckle and smiled. He then turned his head to the left and listened to the sounds outside the truck—the gravel crunching under the tires, a blast from a ship’s horn, the thump of music from one of the dive bars nearby. He may not be able to see where he was going, but he certainly could hear it. Despite her fears about him, he wasn’t about to tell anyone where her safe house was located. He needed her trust. If he was to achieve his grand plan, he needed her more than she would ever know.

  An hour later, the truck slowed, turned left up onto a cement pad then eventually came to a soft rolling stop. Ronan heard the telltale drone of a garage door closing. They were in a suburb somewhere to the north. Since pulling away from the bay he’d known what direction they were going and had adjusted his inner compass with every turn she took. It wasn’t an exact science, but he felt more secure knowing roughly where he was in the city. Just in case he needed to disappear in a hurry.

  Once the door was fully down, his blindfold was yanked from his eyes. He blinked at Ivy and smiled. “Are we there yet?”

  She shook her head at him, then opened her door and got out. He did the same. He looked around the garage, noticing the starkness of it. There was no lawn mower parked in the corner, or workbench with tools spread across it. No lawn furniture or boxes of past things stacked in a neat pile along one wall. There was nothing there. No memories, nothing to hold a person to a place.

  It suited Ivy to a tee.

  “I never pictured you as a suburbanite.”

  “Which is exactly why this is the perfect cover.” She grabbed her bag from the truck and headed for the door to the main house.

  As she approached it, a rush of adrenaline kicked in Ronan’s gut. He nearly doubled over from the shock of it. Something was off. Something was wrong. He could feel it crawling over his flesh like angry army ants.

  Before Ivy could grab the doorknob, he grabbed the back of her jacket and yanked her backwards. He wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides.

  She struggled against him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Something’s wrong. I can feel it,” he said between gritted teeth.

  She looked around the garage. “Are you sure? I don’t smell anything. No sulfur, no brimstone.”

  “Sallos has revenants working for him, remember.”

  “Do you smell decomp, then?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just a sense of impending doom.”

  “Let me go and I’ll check the door for any signs of disturbance. I put wards on it before I left. I salted it, too.”

  Instead of letting her go, he picked her up and carried her back to the truck. He opened the driver’s door and shoved her in, following right behind. He grabbed the keys from her hand and stuck them in the ignition.

  “What the hell?”

  Ronan started the truck and put it in Reverse. He didn’t even wait for the garage door to open. He busted through the metal, tearing the door off the frame, and screeched into the street backwards.

  “Are you crazy? You just wrecked my place,” she shouted, balling her hands into fists, looking like she was going to wail on him.

  But she didn’t get the chance. By the time he put the truck into Drive, there was the smell of hellfire in the air. It was acrid, like the odor of vinegar.

  Ivy must’ve noticed it, too, because she turned to look out the side window just as a huge fireball erupted from inside her garage.

  Chapter 5

  Ivy couldn’t believe her eyes as Ronan raced down the street away from her soon-to-be destroyed house. Flames were licking the outside of the garage, engulfing it in an orange ball of light.

  “Is there anything in the house that’s incriminating?”

  She shook the daze from her head, and looked at Ronan. “What?”

  “In the house? Are there weapons or illegal substances that will lead to your arrest? There’re going to be firemen and police all over that place in minutes.”

  “No. Not in the house. I have a safe buried in the backyard, under the shed.”

  “We can come back for that later.”

  She just nodded, then turned around in the seat to face the front and the road ahead of them. Sirens could be heard a few blocks from them. Ivy saw flashing red lights coming from her right about two blocks away.

  She remained quiet as they sped away from the scene. She chewed on her finger as the anger built inside. The house was a write-off. She’d spent three months cultivating that safe house. Signing a lease, under a false name of course, moving in, making friendly with the neighbors. Putting up a false wall for others to see. She kept it up so that nothing would seem out of the ordinary. That no red flags went up for the people living next to her. The last thing she needed was nosy people asking about her business.

  Now it was all gone. Her cover was blown.

  “How did you know?” she asked him without taking her eyes off the road.

  “I can sense things. My sixth sense is more advanced than yours.”

  “Maybe you knew ahead of time.” This time she did look at him.

  He shook his head. “Jesus, woman. Get your head out of your butt. I am not the bad guy here. I saved your ass.”

  She sighed, knowing she was just grasping at straws and lashing out at him because she wanted to destroy something. And he was the
closest something, even if he did make the butterflies in her belly stir and the muscles in her thighs clench annoyingly. “I thought I covered my tracks pretty well. I didn’t think anyone could find that safe house.”

  “Sallos isn’t just anyone. He’s a very powerful demon.”

  “I know that,” she bit out, angry that he would assume she hadn’t done her homework on the demon she’d been tracking for months. “But I’m good at what I do. I’ve been a hunter for almost my whole life. No demon has ever tracked me to my safe house before. No demon has ever gotten the best of me.”

  “Well, there are first times for everything,” Ronan muttered. “You said you never work with a partner, and here I am.”

  “Yeah, and I regret it every second that ticks by.”

  This made Ronan chuckle. He rolled down his window. “I think our next step is to find a place to hole up, get cleaned up and figure out how to take this bastard down.”

  She nodded. Too angry, upset and tired to do anything else. Besides, he was right and it wasn’t worth starting an argument over.

  About forty minutes later, Ronan parked the truck in front of room 106 at the Lazy Day Motel just outside of San Francisco on the I-880. The place looked old and run-down and the sunny yellow paint didn’t do anything to hide that fact. It didn’t bother Ivy. She’d stayed in worse places. It was the nature of the business—the life of a hunter constantly on the move.

  Ronan had booked them in, gave a false name, paid with cash and unlocked the door for her. Carrying her duffel bag, Ivy shuffled into the room, then tossed her bag onto the big bed. Ronan came in after her, shut the door and bolted it.

  He handed her a bottle of water. “I grabbed these from the vending machine in the lobby.”

  She took it, uncapped it and took a swallow. “Thanks.” She set the bottle down on the worn and scarred table and looked around the room, trying to avoid looking at the bed too long. She had no intention of using it for anything other than sleeping and Ronan wasn’t going to be joining her.

  “Why do they insist on decorating these places in puke yellows and greens?”