Demon Huntress: Book 3 of the Venandi Chronicles ( An Urban Paranormal Romance Series) Read online

  The worry wouldn’t go away, and sitting there trying to picture happy memories instead of chasing after him only made it worse. I tried as hard as I could, knowing this was the only way we’d be able to go after him at all. I took a deep breath and ran his face through my mind, thinking back to our conversation in the car before everything went to shit, thinking about how it felt to be held in his arms when I cried. I remembered the feeling of his lips against mine that first time we kissed, then the last. I remembered how scared I was when Olympia said he’d been taken and how my heart ached at the thought of him being away from me. I thought about Carter covered in bruises, tied up somewhere dark, Paimon’s dark shadow cast over him.

  No. Don’t think about that. Not helping.

  I forced myself instead to remember the feeling of him on top of me in the training room, the way our bodies slotted together so perfectly, like they were made to be that way. I imagined the warmth of his hand in mine. Above all else, I imagined how happy I’d be when we found him and I could see that smile again.

  Olympia seemed to be using whatever connection to him I was conjuring up in my head quite effectively. I wasn’t sure if it was my demon-half being sensitive to the magic, but I could swear I felt an electric charge passing through us—more accurately, passing into her, like she was drawing energy from me. I marveled at the strangely tingly feeling.

  Time seemed to pass without notice as I focused intently on Carter, almost forgetting where we were and what we were doing until Olympia was jostling me. When I opened my eyes again, she looked haggard, her eyes burdened with bags and lines creasing her face. I could recognize her, but her crone-like appearance startled me for a moment.

  “Georgia,” she was saying as she shook me by the shoulder. “Let’s go, girl.”

  “Carter…” I whispered with cautious optimism. “You found him?”

  “Who do you think I am? Of course I did, and we better get a move on.”

  I scrambled to my feet, and as if on cue, tires screeched to a halt at the roadside, the engine idly rumbling as Jacob got out, leaning against the car with his arms crossed.

  “Well, ladies? Where’s our dear Prince Charming of the Night?”

  “Well, well, well, just in time for the good part,” Olympia remarked. “They’re taking him back to Chicago.”

  “Chicago? Are you sure?” I gasped.

  “Very. I couldn’t make out all the details, but I heard one of the demons mention it. I can’t say exactly where, but they should be en route to the city as we speak.”

  “What are we waiting for, then? It’s twenty-two and a half hours from El Paso to Chicago if we don’t stop,” Jacob called to us. “After all this, though, we’re going to need to stop. No way around it. We need to hit the road ASAP.”

  I helped Olympia to her feet, watching as she dusted grass and dirt off of her jeans. Just as we emerged from our hiding spot, the clanky old sound of a shopping cart rattling along the sidewalk startled us. We were stopped dead in our tracks, nearly colliding with an old, ashen woman clad in rags as she pushed her cart through our path. Jacob seemed just as surprised as we were to see her. We didn’t have time to apologize, so we circled around her. Suddenly, her bony hand gripped my wrist tightly.

  “Hey, what the hell?” I cried. This was not the time for some weird homeless woman to try and kill me again.

  I was more surprised when she silently pulled a piece of cardboard from the mess in her cart, putting it in my hand before releasing me from her grip and shuffling on. I peered down at it, Jacob and Olympia rushing to my side to get a look. My heart sank when I read the words, my stomach twisting into knots. For a second I thought I might puke.

  Three more sunrises the vampire will live if my daughter doesn’t return to me. - P, it read.

  “Paimon…” I growled, his name slipping through my teeth like a poison, nearly crushing the cardboard in my tightening grip. The chain-link fence surrounding the nearest building began to rattle and the tree branches shook viciously. Even the car began to shift back and forth on its axles. I quickly remembered myself and willed it all to stop. Silence overtook the air again.

  Jacob took the message from me, probably saving it from whatever way I’d have destroyed it in my sudden rage. But more than that, it was worrying. We’d already pretty much known this was how it would go down, but with such a tight deadline I felt anxiety constrict my chest.

  Jacob huffed, clearly impatient with the situation. I knew he didn’t exactly care for Carter, but the toll this took on the group would no doubt be causing him stress. “Alright. We know the ‘what.’ Now we know the ‘when.’ Now we just have to wait for Paimon to give us the exact ‘where.’ We should get a move on. It’s a long drive back,” he said.

  “What are we going to do, though? We only have seventy-two hours to find him, and it’s going to take us half of that just to get back. That doesn’t leave us much time to figure out where he is and get him out,” I pointed out, trying not to sound as panicked as I felt.

  “Paimon wants you to join him, Georgia. He’ll tell us where to find him. He’ll have to if he wants you to return to him.”

  I gulped. Jacob was right. The idea didn’t bring me the least bit of comfort, though, as I could only imagine what kind of terrible conditions Carter would face until we could reach him. I only hoped that he could hang on until then. He was a tough guy, and usually that would make me feel a bit more confident in his resilience, but Paimon didn’t seem like the type to let a tough guy come out on top.

  A shudder ran through me as I climbed into the car with the others, trying to push the gruesome fear from my mind as Olympia innocently suggested a preliminary stop to grab road snacks, like she was hoping to distract everyone from the situation.

  Just hang on, Carter. I’m coming to get you.

  Carter

  Everything seemed to come back to me so slowly. Grogginess had taken over my brain and I couldn’t seem to think clearly, my head absolutely pounding. I felt a jolt where I was laying as my surroundings shook confusingly around me. I tried to open my eyes to get a sense of my location, hoping to regain my bearings, but when I opened my eyes to blackness, I feared the worst. Had I gone blind? Was that why my head hurt so damn bad? What in the hell happened? As I rattled my brain trying to piece everything together, I realized that the air I was breathing was constricted by something foul and dank encircling my head, laying limply over my face. I tried to reach up to investigate further, but I couldn’t move my arms. I realized that they were bound behind my back, pinned beneath my body. Just great. I focused again on the material over my face. I turned my head discreetly to the side, letting it brush over my cheek. The motion sent jolts of pain down my neck. I clenched my jaw, trying to keep quiet. I focused again on the material. It was rough, almost like canvas, but not as stiff. Thicker.

  Burlap. Amazing. Just what I needed.

  Alright, so I wasn’t getting out any time soon. I could deal with that. I shifted my focus to figuring out how I got myself tied up with a burlap sack over my head. I thought hard, trying to conjure up the images of everything leading up to this. The church, the graveyard… I remembered Abalam standing over me, but I could hardly move. Ah, that was it—I’d hit my head on the gravestone. Hard. Ok, so that explained the excruciating thumping in my brain. I’d managed to get up and then… And then? What happened next?

  Georgia.

  Right, okay, I’d heard Georgia’s voice. She called out to me. I racked my brain, trying to remember what she’d said.

  “Carter! Kingston’s hurt—bad!”

  Kingston!

  God damn it, that was right. Kingston was hurt. I was so preoccupied with Abalam that I’d never gotten the chance to find out what happened to him. Georgia had sounded so scared. The memory made my stomach twist as the possibilities ran through my brain. There was no time to fear the worst, though, and I pushed the guessing out of my mind. I had to stay on track. Figuring out where I was was crucial.
r />   I remembered Georgia calling my name. Then an incredibly powerful heat. It was so scorchingly hot I thought I’d lose my eyebrows. That must have been Georgia, too. That’s right, she’d set Abalam ablaze before he could get his stake in me, thankfully. It stung a little to think that she hadn’t rushed to my side after that. A feeling told me she went to Kingston, and again I began to fear the worst. If she’d thought Kingston’s state was more dire than mine, then…

  No. Don’t go there. That line of thought isn’t going to help you right now. Focus.

  I moved through the events again and realized that things had gone foggy around there. Clearly my head injury was doing me no favors in recalling the rest of the battle. That must have been why they were able to take me so easily. As my surroundings jolted again, I realized where they were dragging me before everything went black—a car.

  Alright, so with everything taken into account, I was bound and in a car on the way to God knows where. That realization wasn’t as reassuring as I thought it’d be. I tried to wriggle just a bit, testing the strength of my bonds, but every part of my body was screaming in pain, and I was still struggling to even regain all my faculties. Clearly someone—or something—else in the car noticed my movement as I heard a gravelly chuckle nearby.

  “No use in that, kid. You’re not getting out of those.” The voice was deep and gruff, sounding incredibly amused at my helplessness.

  “Thanks for the heads up,” I groaned sarcastically, my throat aching. “You gonna tell me where we are? Or where we’re going?”

  “We’re going home. Right back to the Windy City for you.”

  I was surprised he told me so easily. That didn’t bode well for me. I figured that if they were willingly offering up information like that, my prospects for surviving this ordeal were bleak. There are two things bad guys never do when they expect you to live: they never show you their face and they never tell you their plan. If they did, then they already knew how things were supposed to turn out for you.

  I straightened up in my seat a bit, my limbs burning and sore. “So what then? You gonna eat me? Or do I get the pleasure of being Paimon’s meal?”

  “Oh, no one will be eating you, I promise you that, little vampire.”

  Oh good. Something worse, then.

  “I’m on the edge of my seat here, come on. You gonna let me in on the plan or not? Seems like I’ll be dying anyway, so just tell me already,” I groaned. This game was getting tiring.

  “Who’s to say if you’ll die or not? It’s not up to me. It’s up to your gal—that cambion.”

  “Georgia?” I bolted up, ignoring the pain. “What do you mean, how is it up to her?”

  I could practically feel the creature grinning through his words. “If she comes back to join her daddy’s side and swears allegiance to him, we’ll let you go. Easy as that.”

  Easy as that, huh? I wanted to laugh in his face and tell him that obviously Georgia would never do that. That they picked the wrong girl to fuck with. That she’d rightly let me die before giving in to that asshole of an overlord.

  Part of me did have to wonder if she’d be able to stay away knowing I was in danger. She was lots of things—confident, strong, ambitious. Deep down, though, I knew she was also headstrong, naive, and excitable, and those things began to worry me. Clearly joining Paimon was a terrible idea. I was sure that she knew that. In her overconfidence, though, I had a creeping fear that she might try to think of something clever—no, I knew she’d try to think of something clever—and wind up in a bad position herself. She would probably be thinking up some rescue mission right at this very moment. The idea was sweet and part of me was glad to think that she was thinking of me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was going to end terribly, though.

  Best case scenario, Georgia continued her training with Kingston and the others and grew strong enough to defeat Paimon. He would kill me, but he’d also lose his leverage over her.

  Worst-case scenario, Georgia attempted to rescue me and failed, being captured by Paimon and forced to swear allegiance to him. They’d try to take over the world together, and I’d have to—

  Well, I didn’t want to think about what I would have to do. I only thought of one thing after that: how the hell I was going to get out of there before any of that could go wrong.

  Jacob

  “I want to go back to the cemetery before we leave for home,” I said as we stood behind the protection of those trees off the road. Georgia and Olympia just blinked in confusion at me. “No demons have come for us yet, and it seems like their focus at the moment will be on getting Carter back to Chicago to Paimon. They probably figured we’d scry his location and come after them, so their security on the car he’s in is going to be heavy right now. We should be safe to go back. They won’t be coming for us this time around.”

  Georgia seemed to wrap her head around my words. “Okay. Okay, we can go back, but Jacob…”

  “I know, Georgia. We’ll be careful. There’s just something not sitting right with me about how we left everything there. I know we’re in a hurry, but…” I hesitated a moment, wondering if I was being selfish. “I have to see my dad. I need to say a proper goodbye.”

  She and Olympia both held back tears, and I was quickly reminded that they, too, lost someone important to them. I hated that they were also hurting, but some part of me felt less alone, since I had someone to share my grief with. Especially since one of them was Georgia. The girls simply nodded and we headed back.

  The air in the cemetery reeked of sulfur and bloody iron, the air thick and pungent with it. We strode through the stones to the place that my father had been stabbed. Or at least, where I thought he’d been stabbed. I scanned the area, and my mind reeled in confusion, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. My gut wrenched when I saw a dark patch of grass just in front of my feet colored black with stained blood. I knelt down, touching it, and I felt it immediately. We were in the right place.

  “Where did he go?” Georgia piped up.

  “Are you sure he was here? These stones all look the same, maybe it was somewhere else.” Olympia asked skeptically.

  “Of course we’re sure,” I snapped, perhaps a bit too aggressively. “Sorry… But yes, he was right here.” I held up my fingers coated with the bloody residue to show her, and Olympia clasped her hands over her mouth.

  Where could he have gone? Did he regain his angelic form? And if he didn’t, then what did happen to fallen angels when they died? I couldn’t help but wonder if someone who’d already been kicked out of Heaven would be able to get back there without reascending to a divine form. And if he hadn’t, then did that mean that he was…

  No. There’s no way my dad is in Hell. He can’t be. I won’t believe that.

  I felt the grief crawling into my throat, choking me. I stood and turned from the girls, stalking down the row of headstones, furious that my last goodbye had been taken from me like this. It wasn’t fair. I just wanted to see him one last time, but I couldn’t even catch a break there. Nothing seemed to be going my way anymore, and this was the cherry on top of the shitstorm that had been the last hour of my life. Anger welled in my chest and before I knew it, a sharp pain radiated through my knuckles and up my arm as I slammed my fist into a nearby headstone, cracking it down the side. It was probably the same one that had incapacitated Carter if I had to guess by the large fracture already set down the center next to the one I’d just created. Sorry, Mary A. Phillips: 1937-2012.

  “Damn it!” I roared through gritted teeth. “Damn it all!”

  I toed at the flattened earth where Carter had probably laid, ready to be impaled by Abalam. The grass around the area was singed where Georgia had set Abalam ablaze, saving Carter’s life. The blades of grass broke off beneath my toes, crumbling into ash at my feet and it occurred to me suddenly that everything here was truly dead. A kind of stupid realization to have at a cemetery, but it really sank in then that my father was gone.

  As I massaged
my sore fingers, I could only hope that the absence of his body meant that he’d managed to finally regain his full angelic form. I didn’t know what the odds of that were without his having destroyed Paimon’s army, the Tenebris yet, but that was an easier truth to accept than the idea that we’d failed him in his ultimate goal and he’d paid the eternal price for it. He’d always thought that his return to divinity would be reliant on the Tenebris’s defeat, and the thought that he’d lost his chance to regain his old self because of us would only drag us all down. It’s not like I’d know the truth any time soon either way, so I couldn’t see the harm in telling myself a little optimistic lie. If it turned out not to be true, then so what? It wouldn’t change anything. He was dead, and I wouldn’t see him again. Heaven or Hell, he was gone.

  Just when I turned to return to the girls, Georgia came over to me and rested a comforting hand on my shoulder.

  “We’re going to get Paimon for this,” she said. Her voice was steady, but I knew she was fighting off tears again. I nodded.

  Her beautiful violet eyes glistened and I couldn’t help but feel overcome by the urge to take her in my arms and hold her. I knew how important my dad was to her and I wish that she hadn’t had to lose two parental figures in such a short time. And now, to make it all worse, we had to kill yet another of her parents to stop things from getting much worse. I wished I could take all that pain away from her. I just wanted to stroke her soft black hair and give her all the comfort she needed. If anyone could get her through this, it was me. It had to be me. Even if she was thinking of Carter, I was the one who was standing in front of her. I could take her hand, tell her it’s going to be okay. I could reassure her and give her the support she needed. I could be everything to her.