“You are mistaken.” The demon shook her head. “There is likely more than one lord with a desire to harm you.”
“Thanks,” I replied dryly. “You’ve really put me at ease.” The whole reason we were tromping around the PD at night was because there’d been several attempts to summon me to the demon realm. Usually I was the one who did the summoning. I had the ability to summon to this world supernatural creatures known as demons from another plane of existence. Not hell—these weren’t the demons of any sort of religious mythos, and the reason they were even called thus was lost to history. There were twelve species—or levels—of demons, and the higher the level, the more powerful they tended to be, both physically and in their ability to use and shape arcane power. And above the twelve levels of demons were the demonic lords—beings more on the level of demi-gods—who ruled the demon realm. Generally speaking, one did not summon a demonic lord without extensive preparation, planning, and loads of arcane power, since the lords had an annoying tendency to slaughter anyone who dared do so.
But eight months ago, or so, I’d summoned Lord Rhyzkahl by accident and survived. Since then—through a variety of circumstances and favors owed—I’d become his sworn summoner, bound by oath to summon him to this world at least once a month.
And someone in the demon realm didn’t seem to be too happy with that arrangement. Or rather, several someones, if Eilahn was to be believed. And I had no reason not to trust her.
A cruiser pulled into the parking lot, and I quickly pulled my jacket back on to hide the blood on my arm. A moment later Tim stepped out with two laden plastic grocery bags, abject apology written all over his face.
“Ellen, I tried three different stores, but most everything is still closed, and all I could find was some cheap Kitty Kibble at the 24-hour drugstore, and so I got a bag of that just in case, but then I also got some tuna, and went to the all night deli and got some sliced turkey.” He crouched and began unloading the bags onto the ground in front of her, like a cat presenting a dead mouse as a trophy. He looked up at her. “Y’think any of that might work?”
I turned away in a sudden “coughing” fit as the demon blinked in discomfiture. “I…cannot thank you enough for going to such effort,” she managed after an odd few seconds of silence. The look she sent my way was nothing short of desperate, and I felt a brief surge of ridiculous satisfaction. As capable and kickass as the demon was, it was a relief to see that there were some situations that she had no idea how to handle.
“I think we’re about done searching for the night, Tim,” I said, stepping between the two since I wasn’t sure if he was even physically capable of tearing his eyes away from her on his own. A gust of wind blew my hair into my face, and I shoved it back behind my ears. The eastern sky held ominous red and purple streaks as clouds churned across the coming dawn. “The weather’s turning. It’s time to pack it in for now.”
Worry shadowed across his face. “What if she gets caught out in it?”
Oh, hell no. There was no way I was going to tromp around in the rain—and early December in south Louisiana meant it would be cold rain—on a search for a cat that didn’t exist. Not no, but fuck no.
“Fuzzykins is a tough girl,” I assured him. “She’s just biding her time until she comes on out. I’m sure she has a warm box to curl up under.”
He blinked and focused on me. “Oh, sure, Kara.” He stood and looked down at the various supplies with a crestfallen look, and I felt a stab of guilt for sending him on this wild goose chase. “Well, maybe y’all can use all this next time you look for her?”
“I know we can,” I said brightly. “Fuzzykins absolutely loves turkey. Isn’t that right, Eilahn?”
“Loves it,” she agreed.
He brightened at that. “All righty then!” He adjusted his gun belt, and I had no doubt that if he’d had a hat he’d have tipped it to Eilahn. “I’ll see y’all around then!” Whistling, he returned to his cruiser. We watched him drive off, and Eilahn shook her head.
“Humans are weird,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You pretty much nailed it.”
My cell phone rang. “Now what?” I moaned. I didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know it was the Beaulac PD dispatcher. I was on call for the weekend, and I’d yet to get through a Sunday on call without getting a message from the dispatcher. It wasn’t always a murder—in fact it rarely was, fortunately—but it never failed to be something I had to actually go to the scene for. Luckily, I didn’t pull weekend call more than once a month. Plus, it wasn’t as if I had anyone at home who wanted me around on the weekends.
Well, except for my demon roommate, but she was pretty good at fending for herself.
I listened to the dispatcher’s terse delivery, confirmed that I would be on my way, then hung up. “I guess we won’t be finishing the warding up tonight,” I said.
“We will finish it tomorrow,” Eilahn stated, voice firm. “It is even more evident that you require multiple sanctuaries.” With that she turned and strode toward the motorcycle parked beside my car. I frowned down at the blood on my jacket. I had a spare in my office that I could grab. That should be enough. And I had an umbrella in my car if it started to rain.
I even had a demon bodyguard. I was set for anything.
Chapter 2
“This is wrong,” I stated, infusing my words with as much emphasis as possible in order to convey to anyone listening just how intensely I felt about this. “So so SO wrong.” I zipped my spare jacket higher as a shiver wracked me. “It’s unnatural. It’s worse than unnatural. It’s…” I struggled to think of an appropriate word.
“It’s snow, you weirdo,” Sergeant Scott Glassman retorted.
“This is the Deep South!” I wailed. Fluffy little flakes of madness swirled on the chill breeze and dotted the knit cap covering Scott’s bald head. “It was nowhere near this cold an hour ago.”
“It’s called a cold front. Ninth grade science.” He stood with a hip cocked and a thumb tucked into his belt by his gun, looking every inch the “good ol’ boy” street cop that he was. We’d been teammates when I was on the road, and Scott had taught me more than a few tricks for dealing with the rural mentality. He made sergeant about the time I became a detective, and I had no doubt he’d someday be in charge of the Patrol division.
“Yeah, well,” I grumbled, “we’re not supposed to have snow down here!”
Scott let out a snort. “Would you rather have freezing rain?”
“I’d rather not have anything freezing, thank you very much.” I scowled and dug my hands deeper into my pockets. “I put up with hurricanes and the misery of Louisiana summer so that I don’t have to put up with snow or sleet or any other form of frozen wetness.”
“My god, you’re a weenie,” Scott said.
“I don’t like the cold!”
Scott turned to eye me, pursing his lips. “Well maybe you should try, oh, I don’t know, dressing for the weather?”
I hunched my shoulders in a vain attempt to keep the nasty little snow-bits from wiggling their evil way down my collar. “I didn’t know it was going to be this cold. Or snowy. ”I hissed the last word.
The stocky cop gave me a suitably withering look. “What, you don’t own a computer to check the forecast? A smart phone? A television? And is that really a Members Only jacket? I didn’t think anyone wore those anymore. Were you even born when that thing was made?”
I couldn’t exactly tell him that I’d been too busy putting a magical security system on the PD to check the weather, or that my other—warmer—jacket had been clawed by a demon. “Bite me,” I snarled instead.
His only reply was a laugh.
We were in the parking lot of the Beaulac Nature Center—which was a fancy name for a trail that wound through the woods and swamp. The “Center” part of it consisted of a shack not much bigger than a utility shed, and a Plexiglas-covered map of the immediate area. The lot was a mostly flat stretch of old gravel an
d sparse grass—barely big enough to hold the two Beaulac PD police cruisers, crime scene van, my unmarked and two other vehicles—an ancient and battered Peugeot, and a spanking new silver BMW.
The sight of the crime scene van pleased me. That meant that Crime Scene Technician Jill Faciane was already on the scene and doing her thing. A transplant from the New Orleans PD, who’d moved to Beaulac after Hurricane Katrina, she knew her shit, worked quickly and efficiently, and was my kind of smartass. Procedure dictated that crime scenes had to be processed before detectives could go tromping all over them, but if Jill was working I had solid hope that I wouldn’t have to stand out in the cold any longer than necessary.
I dug into the pockets of my jacket in the desperate hope that I’d left some gloves in them from last year, but all I found was an old wadded up Kleenex that probably had some ancient germs on it. I didn’t see any trash cans around, and I didn’t feel right casually littering out here, so I reluctantly stuffed the old tissue back down into my pocket, hoping that any germs it carried were long dead.
“So what’s the deal here, Sergeant?” I asked Scott. “Let me guess, I’m going to have to take a nature hike to get to the body.”
He gave me a sad shake of his head. “You really are a weenie, aren’t you?”
I grinned. “Go with your strengths!”
He lifted his chin toward an officer standing near the head of the trail. “I’ll let Gordon give you the rundown. He’ll be able to tell you a shitload more than I ever could.”
I slid a look toward Officer Tracy Gordon. If I didn’t have a rule against dating coworkers—and if my love life wasn’t already way too complicated—I’d have been all over him. Tall and dark-skinned, he had a smart-hunk look about him that pushed my buttons in all the right ways. “He still your trainee?”
“Nope. He finished up last week, and I pulled every string I had to get him permanently assigned to my shift.”
“Enjoy him while you can,” I said, clapping Scott on the shoulder. “We’ll be stealing him soon enough!”
He sighed. “I keep telling him that you detectives are joyless pricks and that going to investigations would be terrible for his career, but I’m not sure he’s buying it.”
“Imagine that!” I gave Scott a parting smile and then trotted over to where Tracy Gordon stood at the start of the trail. I knew it was the start of the trail because there was a deliberately crude sign that said “Start of Trail.” I glanced quickly around. There were no other trails or paths or anything else that could possibly be mistaken for the nature trail, but I was willing to bet that the sign existed because at some point someone decided to simply charge into the woods and then complained that it hadn’t been well marked.
Or maybe I was too quick to assume there were a large number of stupid people in the world.
“You need a better coat,” Tracy said with a frown as he held the crime scene log for me to sign. “Scarf and gloves too. You’re going to freeze your ass off dressed like that.”
“Yes, Mom,” I replied as I handed the pen back to him and stuffed my hands back into my pockets. Who was the stupid one now? “It wasn’t this cold when I left my house,” I added petulantly.
“Don’t you ever check the weather?” he chided. “Cold front moving through today. This morning was the high temp for the day.”
I scowled at the sky. Living in south Louisiana meant that snow was a rarity, but in the past few years there’d been a scattering of snow days—more than I’d ever remembered when I was a kid. Only two years ago we’d had a surprise dumping of nearly six inches—which had been awesome for everyone who didn’t actually have to go out in it. St. Long Parish didn’t have anything resembling a snowplow, and the best the parish officials had been able to do was spread salt and sand on the bridges and tell everyone to stay off the roads. As someone who usually did have to go out regardless of the weather, my dislike of driving in snow more than outweighed my inner six-year-old’s desire to make a snowman. “I shouldn’t have to put up with brutally hot summers and snow,” I whined.
He chuckled. A rich sound. “It’s not so bad if you actually dress for the weather.” To my surprise he pulled off his scarf and draped it around my neck, looping it with practiced ease. He gave me a grin before I could speak. “I’m from Colorado. I won’t freeze like you delicate southern flower types.”
I knew I should protest the offer and at least try to give the scarf back to him, but it was lovely and warm and it stopped the breeze from diving down the collar of my coat. Plus it smelled very faintly of whatever his cologne was, and I had to resist the very unseemly desire to bury my face in it and take a deep whiff. “Thanks,” I said instead. “I’ll give it back on my way out.”
“No hurry. So I take it you want the rundown?”
“Please.”
He pulled a small notebook from his front pocket and flipped it open.
I quickly held up my hand before he could start speaking. “Just the Cliff Notes version for right now,” I said. “I want to get through this before hypothermia sets in.”
He smiled. “Fair enough. About a hundred yards down the trail is a small picnic area, along with our victim, white male. ID in his pocket says that he’s Barry Landrieu, age thirty-seven. The Peugeot is his. No obvious sign of trauma on initial visual examination, though there appears to be blood around his nose. Coroner’s office is on the way, and crime scene is already doing their magic.”
Barry Landrieu. That name was maddeningly familiar, but my frozen brain didn’t want to tell me why.
“The witness who found the body is in the shack,” he continued before sliding the notebook back into his shirt pocket. “The BMW-Z4 belongs to him. I verified.”
This was why I adored Officer Gordon. He saw the loose threads and checked them out without being told to do so. One of these days he was going to be a fantastic detective. “I’ll deal with the witness after I see the body,” I said. At least this witness was willing to stick around, which would save me the trouble of having to hunt him down later for a statement. Detention of witnesses was one of those things that was legal only under certain circumstances. “I’m afraid that if I go inside now,” I continued, “I’ll never be able to convince myself to come out.”
The skin around his eyes crinkled attractively as he smiled. “Probably a good strategy.”
I headed down the trail and, as described, in another hundred yards the trail opened out into a clearing that had been made into a picnic site. Beyond this area I could see that the trail continued on to a deck where one could look out over the marsh. A concrete barbecue pit held old ashes and a dusting of snow that was melting into slush. A pair of picnic tables had been there long enough to collect an assortment of carvings in their surfaces on the order of “Jenny wuz here” and “Buddy N Chelsea 4eva.” And in the scruffy grass between the tables and the barbecue pit was the dead man.
A gangly male officer wearing a jacket with Beaulac PD Crime Scene emblazoned across the back crouched by the body, snapping pictures. Brown curls peeked out from beneath a black Beaulac PD baseball cap, and when he turned I saw a scattering of freckles across a slightly crooked nose. I didn’t recognize him, but I sure as hell knew the slim, red-haired woman in a similar jacket standing beside him. This was Jill, one of my best friends and one of the very few who knew about the demon summoning. I had a feeling the crouching officer was a trainee of some sort—a guess that was somewhat confirmed when he straightened and looked to her for guidance.
His eyes shifted to me as I approached, and Jill turned, flashing me a smile. “Heya, darlin’,” she said. “Lovely day for a nature walk!”
I couldn’t help but note that she wore a dark blue knit hat, a black scarf wound around her neck and leather gloves. Apparently she had checked the weather before leaving her house this morning. And hadn’t been distracted by a demon attack. “Nature and walk should never be in a sentence together,” I retorted, grimacing as a burst of wind whipped through the tre
es and around us. I hunched my shoulders in an attempt to bury my ears in the borrowed scarf. “This sucks ass. Tell me what you’ve found so I can finish up and get the hell out of here.”
She laughed. “Okay, grumpypants. Tracy already gave you the gist?” At my nod she continued, “It looks to me like our vic has been here since maybe late yesterday, but the CO folks will have to give the word on that. He wasn’t dressed for cold weather. No flies, but the cold is probably keeping them away.”
I crouched by the body. He was lying on his stomach with one hand up near his face and the other down along his side. One leg was cocked awkwardly over the other in a way that made me think he might have stumbled and collapsed. I peered at what I could see of his face. Blond hair. A mustache stained red. “Looks like he had a nosebleed,” I said. “Not a whole lot of blood.” I skimmed my gaze over the rest of him, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious sign of trauma. No jacket, just a long-sleeved Henley-style shirt, jeans, and boots. “Maybe he overdosed, or had a stroke. Do those cause nosebleeds?”
Jill shrugged. “Ask Dr. Lanza,” she said, referring to the parish pathologist. “Who knows, maybe there’s a big knife that we can’t see sticking into his belly. We won’t know anything for sure until the CO dudes roll this guy over.”
I nodded. There’d be no touching the body until the coroner’s office personnel got here and everything was properly photographed and documented, which meant there wasn’t much I could do except interview whoever found him. “Does his name sound familiar to you?” I flicked a glance up at Jill.
She frowned in thought then shook her head. “I don’t think so. Why? Do you know him?”
“Not sure. The name Barry Landrieu rings a bell, and I kind of get the feeling I’ve seen him before, but…” I sighed and straightened. “Hell, I probably arrested him once or something.” Though even as I said it I knew that wasn’t it. Damn it, this was going to bug the ever-loving crap out of me until I figured it out.
I turned my attention to the gangly young man. “Hi. I’m Kara Gillian. I’d shake your hand but I don’t want to take it out of my pocket.”
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