It was a whole lot of coincidence, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was right here before me, and the only reason he’d have to break the wards would be to leave town. Why break them and stay? It didn’t make sense.
“Well, come on then your infernal majesty. We’ll give you a lift back to the hotel.” Bronwyn gestured toward her truck. “Can’t have you walking around with your shirt torn up. Half-naked demon that looks like you would probably drive half the town crazy.”
We went back to the truck and I realized our dilemma. Bronwyn’s vehicle had only the front bench-style seat. I couldn’t exactly ask him to ride in the back of the bed. First, it would be dangerous. Secondly, it would be illegal. I doubt the first would be much of an issue since I was assuming demons weren’t as susceptible to injuries from being tossed out of a moving vehicle as humans were. And normally the second one wouldn’t have bothered me, but I figured Lucien had done enough breaking of the law in the last twenty-four hours. No sense in pushing our luck further. Although with my luck, it would probably be Bronwyn and me with the tickets and not him.
Deciding I’d rather be in the middle to safeguard my sister in case this demon got any crazy evil ideas, I climbed in first and scooted over. This way if he did anything horrible, I could kick him out the door. Or set his pants on fire. Either one.
Lucien climbed in, making the truck extra cozy. His leg pressed against mine. His shoulder likewise. And he basically had a choice of putting his arm along the side of my boob with his hand on top of my thigh, or wrap it around my shoulders.
He chose the latter.
It had been a long time since a hot guy had his arm around me. He was warm. He smelled good. And being pressed against him like this was making me imagine how nice it would be to press other parts of my body against his. Naked. In bed.
By the time Bronwyn pulled up to the hotel, I was more than a little hot and bothered. Lucien took his time in the process of exiting the car, doing everything but feeling me up as he shifted around, finally managing to open the passenger side door.
He got out. I got out, intending to escort him to his room, then leave.
Leave. Not stay and have sex with him on that lumpy mattress. Not take him back to my house. Leave.
“Think you should lock him in?” my sister asked me from the truck.
“Huh?” I was too busy wondering how I could get away with sleeping with a client. Was he technically still a client? Marcus did say he intended to drop the charges. Even though the paperwork wasn’t done, I might be able to rationalize it all as a done deal.
Bronwyn rolled her eyes, knowing full well where my mind, and my hormones, had gone. Sharing a bedroom with me for my entire childhood meant she knew me far better than any of my other sisters.
“If you’re worried about him going out and getting in fights before you can get the charges dropped and him out of town, then maybe he should be on house arrest.” Bronwyn nodded toward the door.
“Hey. The only way I’ll be on house arrest is if I get to stay at Cassandra’s house.”
Oh, so tempted. “It’s just until morning,” I told him. “I promise I’ll come get you after breakfast.”
“That’s not part of the terms of my bail.” His eyes glowed that eerie red-orange again. “I agreed to stay in the town until my hearing or until the charges were dropped. Never did I agree to remaining in a hotel room. You’ll make a lousy demon, Cassandra, if you can’t be specific in your contracts. As a lawyer, I would have thought you would have known that.”
“Well for normal folk, the anklet works. Actually, for normal folk we don’t even need the anklet.” I glared at him. “I’m considering using extraordinary methods because you’re not just going out for pizza or getting a beer at a local bar, you’re fighting. Again. You’re going to end up back in jail. Don’t you want to get back home?”
He gave me a slow smile. “No, not really. I’m kind of liking it here. I might stay.”
“Well, you don’t have any money. And don’t you have a job to get back to torturing souls in the third circle?”
“Third, fourth, and sixth,” he corrected me. “And demons don’t need money. No, I think I’m going to stay. This town is far more interesting than I’d thought. I clearly owe Charon a debt of gratitude when I see him next.”
“Well staying here won’t be as much fun if you’re in jail,” I reminded him. “I’m going to lock you in the hotel room and I’ll return in the morning to get you.”
That glow was back in his eyes. The air felt oddly heavy. We were about to have an argument, and the thought turned me on even more. Yes, psycho me. I had anger management issues, and I got hot and bothered disagreeing with others. Maybe that’s why I’d become a lawyer.
“Cassandra Nicole Perkins, the only way you’re locking me in that hotel room is if you’re on the inside with me.”
I sucked in a breath. How the hell had he known my middle name? But that was a minor concern. I was rusty. I wasn’t anywhere near as skilled as I’d be if I’d been regularly practicing my witchy arts. Wards aside, I was pretty sure if I went head-to-head with this demon, I was going to lose.
I’d lock him in. He’d walk right out. And I was pretty sure he’d show up at my house just to make sure I knew how ineffective my spell had been. The wards around Accident might have stripped him of most of his demon powers, but I had no doubt that there were a few things beyond sprouting a set of leathery wings that this demon still could do.
“Will you please promise me you’ll stay inside the hotel room until I come get you tomorrow?” I had a weird feeling that he’d be good to his word. Maybe there had been something in Grandma’s books about demons and making promises, but I was sure I could trust him to do as he said. Although if demons were like lawyers, he might find some way to wiggle out based on vague contract terms, so I’d need to keep it simple and make sure anything I asked couldn’t be interpreted another way.
“Now why would I promise that?” he purred.
Hell if I knew. “Because I asked you to? And said please?” I gave him my best smile, hoping that might help.
“Quid pro quo, darling. It’s not a deal unless I get something of equal value in return.”
Damn it. “I’ll buy you lunch,” I offered.
He stepped up to me so close that I could feel the heat of his body against me, feel his breath stir the hair next to my ear. “Fuck me and I’ll stay in the room until dawn.”
Oh, I so wanted to do just that. But I didn’t end up on the review board of my law school for lack of negotiation skills. “Lunch and extra fries. I am representing you pro bono, and I did give you back your coin that you somehow lost. Plus, I gave you a ride back to your hotel.”
“Your sister was technically the one who gave me a ride back here. It’s her truck, and she’s driving.”
He never looked at Bronwyn, every ounce of his attention still firmly on me. I was so hot I thought I was about to burst into flames. All of me, not just my pants.
“How about I buy you lunch and I give you a kiss in return for you agreeing to remain in your hotel room until dawn?” I have no idea what made me propose that. Drawing in a shaky breath, I evaluated the state of my willpower and found it sorely lacking. Oh well. I’d need to hold strong and wrench myself away from this guy with only one kiss. Good thing my sister was here watching, as backup in case I started shucking my clothing, or climbing all over this guy.
“You have to walk into the hotel room with me and give me the kiss with the door closed behind you. The kiss, and/or kissing session, cannot be less than thirty seconds long, and there are no restrictions as to what my hands, tongue, or other body parts do during said kiss.” His mouth brushed my ear. “And you cook me breakfast in the morning. At your house.”
I turned into him, my lips lightly touching his cheek. “I’ve already got a breakfast date to get Clinton to drop his charges against you. And trust me, babe, you don’t want to eat my cooking. Witch. Caldron. Eye o
f newt.”
“Maybe I like eye of newt,” he breathed.
“Can I leave? Are you guys going to boink right here on the pavement, or in the hotel? If so, then get it done because I’ve got a rather impatient centaur that threw a shoe over at the golf course.”
“Thirty seconds once I’m inside, Wynnie,” I told her. Then I pulled away from the warmth of Lucien’s body and boldly walked to his hotel room, unlocking the door with the spare key Hollister had given me when I’d checked my client in, and throwing open the door.
What I saw inside drove all thoughts of sex right out of my mind.
Chapter 11
Cassandra
“Well, housekeeping services here leave a lot to be desired,” Lucien announced cheerfully as he urged me forward into the trashed room.
“What happened?” I stared open-mouthed at the wreckage. The mattress had been slashed, foam and torn springs littering the floor. The mirror was smashed as was the television. All the drawers in the dresser had been pulled out and crushed. The lamp was bent, as if someone had use it to bludgeon a granite statue.
Lucien shrugged. “Party? Hell if I know.” He came around the front of me, drawing me into his arms.
I pushed him off. “Did you do this? Was it like this when you left?”
“No. No. I don’t care. I’ve slept in worse. Now about that kiss…”
I held out a hand to stay him and stared at the very wet and very red stain on the carpet. “That’s blood.”
“Yep. Sure looks like it.”
It was a lot of blood. As in, a volume of blood the loss of which would be fatal to a human, and most likely severely debilitating to a supernatural being. Why wasn’t Lucien bothered about this? His hotel room was torn to bits, someone had possibly bled out on his floor, and he was acting as though this was not only commonplace, but a non-issue.
Oh. Demon. A dude with leathery wings who made his home in hell and had a job involving torturing and punishing condemned souls wasn’t likely to be shocked by what appeared to be a crime scene.
But I was no demon.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed. “I’ve got to call this in. If you didn’t trash this hotel room, then someone else did. And I’m not feeling like we should ignore the fact that there’s a huge blood stain on the rug here.”
I dialed the Sherriff’s office, not really wanting to call 911 when as far as I could tell there was no one requiring immediate medical attention. Unless…
“Lucien, can you check in the bathroom and on the other side of the beds. Oh, and in the closet? Just in case there’s some guy bleeding out still here?”
His lips twitched. I’m glad he found my stoic indifference amusing because most guys didn’t. Marcus didn’t care as long as I was sleeping with him and giving him all my emotional attention. The fact that I wasn’t screaming and shaking over a huge blood stain or panicked over the thought of a possible dead body somewhere in the room was exactly the sort of “emotional distance” that had bothered any human boyfriend I’d ever had.
I chalked it up to being raised in a town full of supernatural beings for whom “bleeding out” wasn’t necessarily fatal, and most of whom would have been making jokes right now.
“No dead guy. Or injured guy,” Lucien cheerfully informed me. “Now get off the phone so I can have my kiss. Although I’m not relishing the thought of spending the night in this mess. Perhaps I should take this as an occasion to renegotiate our deal.”
“I’m not spending the night with you,” I told him before turning my attention back to the phone. “No, not you Fred. I was talking to someone else. Yes, Hollister’s Hotel. Room six. No, I haven’t identified what kind of blood it is.”
I hung up, then dialed the one person who could identify what sort of being this stain had belonged to. Yes, I could do it, but it would take a whole lot of components that I didn’t carry around on me. And I didn’t practice magic. Unless I could help it anyway.
“Ophelia? Can you come over to the hotel, room six?”
My sister sighed. “Should I bring my medical bag? Did you knife someone, Cassie? What did this one do, pull your braids in first grade or something?”
Did I mention my sister was a paramedic, probably trying to catch a few winks on a cot at the firehouse between calls? You’d think a town full of supernaturals wouldn’t require much in the way of emergency medical help, but we were just a day away from the full moon, and things did get rather messy around here at that time of the month.
“I just need a quick divination,” I told her.
“You do know I’m on tonight, right?”
“Quick, I promise. There’s a blood stain on the carpet here and I need to know who might be dead.”
She sighed and I heard a noise as if she were putting her pants on. “If I’m lucky I can tell you ‘what’. The ‘who’ is beyond my ability.”
“I’ll take it.” I hung up just as Sheriff Oakes came through the door, followed by Bronwyn.
“Christ, Cassie. I figured you’d just decided to screw the guy, but then the cops show up and I’m worried that maybe you set his pants on fire. Or set something else on fire.”
“We screw and this whole hotel is burning down, I promise you that,” Lucien told her with a grin.
“Out,” Oakes instructed us all. “Not you,” he told Lucien.
“I’m his attorney.” Which meant I got to stay as well.
The sheriff shook his head. “Fine. First off, where was your client while this was going on?”
“I don’t exactly know when this happened,” Lucien told him. “I was with Cassie at an anger management meeting, then went with a cyclops and a troll to have a few beers. I’ve got witnesses. Or is it an alibi? What do you all call it?”
I shushed him. “My client can prove where he was all night. This probably had nothing to do with him. Someone got the wrong room number, and trashed the place, upset because they couldn’t find whatever it was they were trying to steal.”
“And stubbed their toe on the bedframe on the way out?” Fred scoffed. “Because that’s a lot of blood, Cassie.”
“Lucien was walking along the street alone when we picked him up,” Bronwyn added unhelpfully. “I’m sure there’s a gap between when everyone last saw him at the tavern and we saw him on the road. He’s a demon. Maybe he runs really fast or teleports.” She snapped her fingers. “Or flies. He’s got wings. I’ll bet he flew here, saw someone robbing the place and stabbed him a few times with demon claws, then flew back to make it look like he was just leaving the tavern.”
“Not helping,” I snapped at her.
Bronwyn had a fantastic imagination. I glared at her and turned back to the sheriff.
“My client is wearing the same clothes as when I saw him last. He doesn’t have anything else to wear. If he’d done this, he would be covered in blood. And he would have had no reason to be flying around, stabbing people with…alleged demon claws.”
“I do have demon claws,” Lucien announced.
“Not helping,” I retorted. What was with these people? Everyone needed to be quiet and let me be a lawyer here.
“Paramedic, divination witch, and occasional CSI coming through.” My sister Ophelia pushed her way past Bronwyn and stared matter-of-factly down at the blood stain. She and Sylvie were the twins of our family. They were equally tall, equally thin, equally dark-haired with somewhat pointed noises and definitely pointed chins. But where Sylvie was a gym-rat health nut, Ophelia looked as if she’d spent most of her life sequestered in a coffin with a vampire sucking her blood. She wasn’t Goth, she just naturally looked Goth.
I grabbed Lucien’s sleeve and pulled him aside as the other two took a step away from the crimson stain. Ophelia pulled a series of stones out of her bag, carefully arranging them around the edge of the blood-soaked section of carpet.
“Lotta blood,” she muttered. “Whole lotta of blood.”
“Is that the incantation?” Lucien whispered.
“No, she just likes to talk to herself as she casts,” I whispered back.
Once the stones were arranged to her liking, Ophelia pulled little twigs of dried herbs from her other pocket, putting them at key spots. Then she pulled out a Bic lighter.
“Hollister’s gonna kill you for burning holes in his carpet,” I warned her.
“He’s gonna have to replace it anyway with this big red spot,” she replied.
“Nah, he’ll just slap some bleach over it and move the bed over a few feet to cover it up,” Bronwyn said. “Burn away, sis.”
Eww. But she wasn’t wrong. Hollister wasn’t exactly known for running a five-star hotel, and with a wedding this weekend, he wouldn’t have time to replace the carpet. No way he’d lose out on a room rental just because of a huge blood stain and some burn marks. That’s why God invented bleach and Febreze, you know.
The herbs smoldered, sending the aroma of rosemary and burnt carpet fibers into the air.
“You know we’re all going to get cancer from this,” Bronwyn told her.
“Glenda will heal us,” Ophelia said. “Now hush. I’ve got to concentrate.”
The sheriff took a step toward the door and gestured for Lucien to follow. “I’m going outside. You might want to as well, buddy. Witch magic feels like someone poured itching powder down your underwear.”
Lucien’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll take my chances.” The demon did move closer to the door, though, clearly not as willing to have his nether regions itchy as he claimed.
Ophelia took a breath and began to chant. Unlike Sheriff Oakes had claimed, the magic wasn’t itchy, or unpleasant—at least not to me. Goosebumps raised on my skin as my sister’s spell shivered over me like a ghostly hand. My own magic rose from deep inside me, eager to answer the call. I pushed it down firmly, and glanced over to see Bronwyn, her eyes glowing electric blue, white light like a fog curling from her fingertips. Lucien watched, transfixed. As he looked at me, I saw the lust in his eyes. He was turned on. Our magic didn’t frighten him or make him feel like he was itching. It wasn’t unpleasant to him, it was an aphrodisiac.
Brimstone and Broomsticks: Accidental Witches Book 1 Page 10