Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series

by Holley Trent

  “She’ll help,” he said. “If I can’t talk her into it, the girls will.”

  “Claude, I think the girls would tell her to run far and fast, and not to come back until the coast is clear.”

  Claude sighed. Charles was probably right. He knew he shouldn’t hold out hope of an easy transition for Gail, but he wished it for her—and him. “Wait …” He closed the front door and set down the cat carrier. “Why is everyone awake? What happened?”

  Charles tipped his head toward the kitchen and walked toward it. “Come on. You might as well save your I-told-you-so for all to hear.”

  Well, shit. Did he even want to know?

  They strode into the bright, roomy kitchen where the head of household, Clarissa, sat with her daughter Lottie, Lottie’s husband Sylvester, and their two daughters, Ariel and Marion. Marion stood as Claude and Charles walked in and handed Claude the fidgety infant, his niece and goddaughter Ruby.

  “Hello, tiny. Why are you awake?”

  Ruby was nine months old. She had no answer for him beyond grabbing a chunk of his hair and pulling it.

  “Missed you, too.”

  “It’s that nephew of yours,” Clarissa said. She rubbed tired red eyes and yawned brazenly. Claude didn’t know her exact age, but she was old enough have retired from her job as a school janitress years before John hooked up with Ariel. She didn’t look it, though. Thanks to Papa, she had the same countenance she’d had as a thirty-year-old. She looked younger than Lottie and could pass for Ariel’s and Marion’s sister. When Papa couldn’t take who he had set out for—Ariel—he’d settled on Clarissa as a consolation prize. He’d given her back a few decades of life in preparation of taking her, but she’d grabbed him by the demonic balls, figuratively, and he’d had no choice but to let her go. Since then, he’d avoided coming near her home, though he hadn’t given up on seeking revenge. Instead of taking it out on the Mortons, he sought to make the sons who’d sided with them suffer.

  “What about my nephew?”

  He didn’t have to ask which nephew she meant, because there was only one he knew by name.

  Charles settled into a chair next to John and sighed. “He escaped.”

  Claude sat, too. Ross had escaped? That wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do. He’d been under guard by werewolves for more than nine months out in the mountains. Charles hadn’t known his quarter-demon son existed until Papa had threatened to sic the groveling upstart on him as an overseer. Ross had gotten too close to Marion and had made insinuations that he’d harm his unborn sister if he could. Because Charles wasn’t wired to be a killer, instead of dispatching Ross at that time, he agreed to let their brother-in-law Calvin and his wolf pack keep him under guard. Ross had been holed up in the mountains for longer than Ruby had been alive. Perhaps they’d become complacent with the arrangement.

  “Well, that’s not quite accurate,” Marion said. She dumped two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee mug and rolled her eyes. “It’d be more precise to say that my stepson was sprung.”

  “By whom?”

  “A wolf, surprisingly,” John said. “I teleported out to there a couple of hours ago after Julia called. She went out to the little bunker they kept him in to take him his dinner and found the door was wide open and the shackles that kept him from leaving the structure had been cut off.”

  “So, someone who didn’t have access to the keys.”

  “Yes, which is a fuck-load of people, but we don’t need to worry about it. Calvin and a couple of the other wolves he trusts sniffed around. She wasn’t hard for them to find. When they caught up to her, she started crying and mumbling something about how the devil made her do it. Best they could figure out, she got too close to the room they kept Ross locked up in and he used what little incubus pull he had to lure her in. Shouldn’t have worked, but some folks are more susceptible than others.”

  “The devil made her do it? Are we certain Papa’s not involved?” Papa had a well-known aversion to werewolves. He couldn’t stand the smell of them. It must have drove him apeshit that Julia married one, and that revulsion must have made Julia very happy because it kept her dangerous daddy far, far away.

  “Nope. At least, not directly. He can’t teleport onto that property nor walk onto it, so he would have had to have someone else do it for him … if he even cared that much about Ross.” John turned his gaze to Charles. “No offense, bro.”

  Charles shrugged.

  It was probably hard for him to take offense. Charles had spent most of his first century in a drunken stupor, so whichever woman he’d seduced who had borne his psychotic son, he couldn’t identify. He’d tried to feel something for his son, and the best he could do was revulsion. Ross had been born bad, and didn’t try to be otherwise.

  “None taken. We do need to find the fucker, though, because he knows too much about our locations, and who all is on them. We’ve done too much work trying to get people to safe places in the past two years for this to all fall apart because he’s holding a grudge against me. I’m getting some psychic static from him, and John, Calvin, Sylvester, and I are going to go out after him at daylight. Helps that he can’t teleport, so unless he boarded a plane, which I doubt, he couldn’t have gotten too far.”

  Claude shifted Ruby to his other arm and scanned around the table. There were so many grim expressions being worn by a group of folks known for laughing at entirely inappropriate things. He understood, though. This lifestyle of theirs was tiring. Just when they thought they could have a taste of normalcy, some shit like this happened.

  And although they hadn’t explicitly asked, Claude would have to abandon Gail to the Morton women and go with the boys. They could probably take Ross down by force, but quarter-demon he was, he was scrappy. The only way to keep him down for a while was administering a cocktail of ingredients only Claude knew how to manipulate.

  Fuck.

  He traced the silken swirl of dark hair around Ruby’s soft spot and said quietly, “Daylight, then.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gail dragged her tongue across dry lips and swallowed. Her throat was tight, and mouth like cotton. Did she get a contact buzz at the bar last night or something? What the hell were those country bumpkins cutting into their weed nowadays, Quaaludes?

  Forcing her eyelids open, she tried to sit up, but found herself wedged against a sofa back with someone lying in the opposite direction in front of her. That person wriggled tanned toes, polished with bright orange lacquer. A little butterfly tattoo popped in living color atop the woman’s right foot.

  “Where the hell am I?” Gail’s voice came out hoarse and gravelly, as if she’d spent the better part of the—wait a minute.

  She picked her head up, and honed her gaze on the closest light source: the wide, bright window to her right. Not her window, or even Ellery’s. The last person she’d seen had been that snake of an incubus Claude, and Claude sure as shit didn’t seem like the kind of guy to have lace curtains.

  She swiveled her aching head to the left and stared until her eyes focused on the stunning brunette with the remote control.

  Gorgeous. But why were they cuddling?

  “Yay, girl, you’re awake! I always wondered how you’d grow up. You like cookin’ shows? I like the ones that come on PBS because the hosts haven’t gone all commercial yet.”

  “What the honking hell are you talking about, how I’d grow up? And where the fuck am I?”

  “Frickin’ Claude, knocking you out like that. That was some downright Sleeping Beauty shit, minus the wake-up kiss. Don’t worry, you’re safe here. Goddamn, your sister has been texting you nonstop all morning. Please let the poor girl know you’re fine. Your ringtone is annoyin’. And why does she call you heifer?”

  The brunette crossed her legs at the ankles and set the remote on the coffee table, calm as she pleased.

  Finally, Gail managed to sit up. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and the blue-and-white stripes of one of her throw pillows—stol
en just like she’d been, apparently—came into focus beside her hip. “Am I fine?”

  “Oh yeah, girl. Ain’t nobody here gonna let anything happen to you.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know. Great. What time is it? I’m supposed to be at work at four.”

  The brunette snorted and swiveled her green gaze toward Gail. “Girl, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. Better call out and let your boss know he’d better find someone else to work the deep-fryer tonight.”

  “I do more than deep-fry!” Gail felt like she was getting upset at the wrong thing, but she was sensitive about her job.

  The brunette nodded sagely. “Mm-hmm. I bet you can bake the hell out of a potato, not that anyone in a county-western bar is eating a baked anything unless they’re trying to make the guy who took ’em there believe that being skinny is their full-time job.” She rolled her eyes, and something about that eye roll rang as familiar to Gail. She couldn’t put a finger on what, though.

  Gail cleared her throat again, and pushed her back against the sofa’s armrest. She scanned the room she was in—a living room. Peach walls chock-full of Bible verse plaques, a couple of praying hands oil paintings, a “Last Supper” tapestry, several crosses in a variety of materials, one Star of David, and a few other things that seemed religious, but not from any religion Gail could identify off her the top of her head.

  All of that seemed out of place with the umbrella stand behind the door filled with shotguns, baseball bats, and—

  She squinted.

  Was that a fucking sword?

  “Ooh. Lydia’s making chicken parm. I’ll eat fried chicken any way it comes, even with the red sauce.” The brunette drew her legs beneath her, freeing the space in front of Gail, so Gail set her feet on the floor.

  Could she make a run for it? That front door was open.

  She checked in with her gut. Witches were taught from early on to listen to the voices in their heads because those were from their guardian spirits, who obviously saw and knew more than they did. Sometimes, though, parsing what those guardians had to say was like trying to decipher binary code with no prior training. Gail wasn’t so great at figuring out what her guardian had to say, and that was part of the reason she had the cat.

  Wait—where was her cat?

  As if called, Candy Corn jumped up onto the sofa between Gail and the brunette and plopped her furry ass down, settling in for a tongue bath.

  “I’m surprised she’ll sit so close to me,” the brunette said. “Werewolves don’t tend to keep cats, for obvious reasons.”

  Gail put up a hand. “Wait. You’re a werewolf?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  Gail shook her head. “I should be able to, I’m guessing, but my brain is in a bit of a scramble right now. Give me five minutes. Or not. Hell, I couldn’t tell Claude was a witch, so who knows?”

  The brunette chuckled and scratched Candy Corn behind the ears. “You haven’t changed one bit. You’re so calm and cool about things. Anyone else would be freaking out right now.”

  “Cat’s not freaking out, so maybe I’m curious to know why. And what do you mean, I haven’t changed? You seem to know far more about me than I know about you.”

  The brunette squinted. “You really don’t know who I am?”

  Gail assessed her once again, from the top of her dark hair, her bright eyes, the olive skin visible from her minimal clothing, down to her bare feet.

  Nope. Gail didn’t remember her, and she would have liked to think she would have because she was that pretty, but nothing about her beyond that eye roll stood out as familiar. Maybe she was some customer from the bar who’d seen Gail numerous times. But that didn’t explain how Gail had gotten to—well, wherever she was.

  “I shoulda expected it. Last time you saw me, I had just started puberty. I’d recognize you anywhere, though, because you look the exact same way you did sixteen years ago.”

  Sixteen years ago? That would have been when Gail was thirteen. Thirteen: the year she’d learned that werewolves weren’t just villains in storybooks.

  But this couldn’t be that werewolf, could it?

  The brunette erupted into a deep, throaty chuckle. “You make that same damn confused expression you and Ellery made way back then. Girl, it’s me. Sweetie Wolff!”

  Couldn’t be, but all the pieces fit. That sassy green eye roll. All that dark hair and burnished skin. The werewolf aura that was battering into Gail now that her wits had come back to the party. The air was thick with it, and any witch worth her salt would have recognized it.

  “Sweetie? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Sweetie snorted. “Okay, well, that’s complicated.” She raised her well-groomed eyebrows and reached for the remote control. “In a nutshell, my brother Calvin is married to your boyfriend’s half-sister, and I live out in one of those little houses near the woods. Moved in about three months ago because my mother wouldn’t stop nagging me about taking a mate, and trust me—if I found one that pushed all the right buttons, I wouldn’t have a problem doing so. I’m not going to hitch myself to any old furball, though. A girl’s gotta have some standards.”

  Gail blinked. Standards? What were those? After all, she’d slept with a stranger who’d claimed she was his reincarnated love, and it’d been wonderful, but then he’d abducted her. That was creepy, right? Candy Corn didn’t seem to think so. Maybe Gail’s familiar was defective.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Gail said lamely.

  “Right, right. Sure.” Sweetie pursed her lips nodded. “Of course he isn’t. Pretty ring, by the way.”

  “Ring?”

  Sweetie took Gail’s left hand in hers and brought the new bauble up to her face for closer inspection. She whistled low. “Claude’s tastes seem to run more toward disposable and cheap, but that there looks heirloom.”

  “Heirloom or not, I can’t get it off. It’s charmed, although I don’t know to what end. No man is that possessive.”

  “Not true. Most wolves are, but I don’t think that ring has anything to do with possessiveness.”

  “It doesn’t.” The new voice came from another brunette, leaning against the doorway between the living room and what looked to be the kitchen. She was around thirty, had dark hair cut into a Barbra Streisand pageboy, and wore an apron reading When I wake up and put my feet on the floor, the devil says, “Shit! She’s awake.”

  “Yay, another stranger,” Gail muttered.

  “No use trying to yank it off, either. You’ll just bruise your knuckle. The only way that ring will come off is one or the other of you dying.”

  “And why do you know that?” The other woman should have hit Gail’s radar as perfectly human, but she wasn’t. There was something about her that Gail was starting to get, but in a different way, from Sweetie, too.

  Usually, Gail didn’t call an “other” out on his or her weirdness, but hey—she’d been knocked out, dressed in clothes that didn’t match, taken from her home along with her cat, and deposited God-knows-where with a werewolf she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Gail wasn’t feeling too polite at the moment.

  The woman stuffed her hands into her pockets and fixed her gaze on the cook on television who was lifting golden brown chicken breasts out of a frying pan.

  Gail probably would have been more impressed if she weren’t a trained chef.

  The woman cleared her throat, and suddenly that torrent of energy she’d been holding back barreled into Gail all at once. It was so familiar, yet so different than anything she’d ever encountered before. It was comforting, yet terrifying. It wrapped around her like arms in a hug and squeezed, stealing her air, and then gave it right back. It was as if it were testing her—no, probing her. Seeing where she was broken, and then filling those places in with her concern.

  She pulled her energy back from Gail, leaving her cold. Gail wrapped her arms across her chest and rocked, looking first to Sweetie, who seemed wholly unaffected to the stranger in the apron.

&nbs
p; “I know that because in the three years I’ve known Claude, I’ve become his sounding board. He told me about the ring and what it could do, and I told him if he could get it onto your finger, it’d be a good idea,” the woman said blithely.

  How the hell could she be so calm when in less than thirty seconds she’d given a quiet but effective warning that if she wanted to, she could break Gail. She didn’t want to, and thank God, because Gail didn’t think she could defend herself against the woman’s power.

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s his ring, honey. I’ll let him explain it.”

  “Fine, I’ll ask him.” Gail turned the ring around and around on her finger. “Where is he?”

  “He and his brothers, my son-in-law, and Sweetie’s brother are out looking for a bratty quarter-demon. Just relax. He’ll be back sooner or later. He needs you.” She started to move away, back into the kitchen.

  Gail shoved against the sofa cushion and got to her feet. “For what? And I’ve really got to go to work.”

  “Call out sick, honey,” the woman called back.

  “I can’t. I don’t get paid unless I clock in, and I’ve got to pay rent on the first.”

  “We’ll take care of it.”

  “I’m supposed to trust that? I don’t even know who you are or where I am.”

  “I’m Clarissa. You’re in Onslow County boonies, and this is my house.” She swept an arm demonstrably around the bright, white kitchen. “Isn’t it pretty? John renovated it. Charles paid for it. Claude … well, Claude brought booze. He does the best he can.”

  “Sounds like a scrub to me.”

  Sweetie snorted.

  Clarissa scrunched her forehead. “I understand the words you’re saying, but perhaps not in the right context. Must be some of that incomprehensible slang y’all young people are so fond of.”

  Young people? “Wait, did you say you had a son-in-law? You mean, like, step-son-in-law and you’re married to a sixty-year-old. That has to be it, because if that’s not the case, it’s means you’re either a”—she counted off on her fingers—“a vampire, or b, some type of warm-blooded immortal.” Gail was pretty sure vampires didn’t exist. Her parents said they didn’t, but they had misled her about other things before, so what the hell did she know?