A Demon Bound (Imp Book 1) (11 page)

“And that matters to me why?” Did I look like the Lone Ranger or some kind of super hero? Demon Zorro to the rescue?

Candy switched tactics.

“You’ve got Gregory on your trail right now. He was there in the bar for you. You know this. You’re going to need to go home real soon. Imagine going home with this feather in your cap. What would this do to your position in the hierarchy? There’s a reason the angels end up deferring to Gregory when it comes to demons. None of them can handle more than the weakest among you. You could take Althean out and go home a legend.”

Now, that
was
tempting. It was also absolutely insane to even dream that I’d be strong enough to take out an angel. Plus, I was hoping I could lay low and Gregory would go hunt down some other demon. A huge battle with another angel wasn’t exactly laying low.

“We’d be blameless, and there wouldn’t be any retaliation on us. That’s important because we have to live here. You can go back and forth. You can take the blame and the fame. And the other angels would believe it was you who took out Althean and not us because they truly fear you. That’s why you were banished.”

We weren’t really banished. It was a stalemate with a division of realms. Kind of like North Korea and South Korea.

“You’ll just get another angel assigned to you,” I told her. “Maybe a worse one. If this is their grand plan to exterminate your species, this will only delay that not prevent it.”

Candy looked pained.

“I hope that the other angels don’t care as long as we follow the rules. If this is a segment of a larger campaign though, then killing Althean will buy us time. Give some of us a chance to try and go underground or prepare to take as many of them out as we can until we’re dead. I’m hoping the former.”

I snorted. This whole thing was insane.

“What makes you think I could possibly take out an angel?”

Candy smiled grimly. “You’ve got the talent and power to do this.” She looked at me speculatively with those shrewd eyes. “You’re smart. Most demons could never be here this long posing as a human and remain undetected. Clever and enterprising. I think you’ve got great power, but you may be rusty since you haven’t used it in so long.”

She was good. Flattery to butter me up, then subtle insults to manipulate me into doing what she wanted. I was full of admiration. And I was NOT rusty.

“Even if I could, that Gregory guy is nearby. He would be on me like flies on shit. He’d probably kill me before I could finish the job. No deal. Think of something else for weregeld. Maybe I buy those canal properties at fair market value?” Michelle would kill me for paying so much for those things. Ugh.

Candy took a breath and looked at me cautiously.

“I’ve let every pack leader in North America know about you. Your appearance, your financials, your smell signature, everything. It just takes one call and the angels will have you. They’ll kill you, disburse your assets, eliminate the humans you’ve marked as yours.”

I winced. I normally don’t care about humans, but Wyatt. . .

“If you leave, we’ll let the angels know about you and wipe clean everything you’ve put together,” she continued. “You’ll never be able to return, either. They’ll be on the lookout for you, and we will too. Doesn’t matter what form you take, we can smell you and turn you in.”

Fucking bitch. I might only be an imp, but I’m still a demon. I envisioned Candy in my basement with duct tape, her skin hanging in strips from an oozing body. Of course, I’m sure every werewolf in the nation knew exactly where she was. One werewolf I could take, more than five, probably not.

“He was there,” she added. “At Bobby’s house. The angel. Not Althean, Gregory. He’s closing in on you. He sensed your energy usage, and he’s coming for you. Any day now, he’ll be sniffing around your house. You’ll come home and find him standing over your dead dog, waiting for you.”

I felt my heart pound. I’d used a small amount of energy at the tenant’s house, plus what I’d done to heal Boomer, and the electricity at the werewolf house. On their own, they might not have brought attention, but all together and with an angel close by. . . I was so fucked.

Either way, I was dead. One, I go after Althean and go out in a blaze of glory. The other, I run and hide under rocks until this bastard, Gregory, finally hunts me down. I was so tired of being just an imp, a lowly cockroach.

Candy leaned forward, her face sympathetic and friendly.

“We can cover for you. Give you time to get away. You can probably still remain here, too, if you keep your energy usage low. We’ll offer you friendship with the werewolves. We’ll always cover for you and run interference between you and the angels. Think. You’ll have the status of taking out an angel, you’ll satisfy the weregeld, and you’ll have valuable allies that will be duty–bound to have your back.”

I thought furiously about how this might work. I could make the kill with as little energy usage as possible. If the werewolves stalled any other angels, and I held my energy tightly to myself, I’d probably have a few hours before they tracked me down even in the worst case scenario. That would give me time to get to a gate and get out.

“You need to vow to protect Wyatt, too,” I told her. “I’m under no illusions that I’d be able to stay after this. I don’t want the angels taking their fury out on him. I need to know that he’ll be safe.”

“Who is Wyatt?” Candy asked perplexed.

“My neighbor,” I said, not sure what to call him. “You werewolves, each and every one of you, vow to protect him with your life, or it’s no deal.”

Candy didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”

“If I do this, you and others need to be actively involved. You’re not just going to point me at him and shoot like I’m a cruise missile. I know you want to stay off the radar on this thing, but I need your knowledge and familiarity with this guy. We would need to work together to review intelligence and plan an attack. If I’m the muscle here, I’d need you to be the strategist and set up the actual event.”

Candy nodded in agreement and a look of relief began to dawn on her face.

“Let’s meet next week sometime for a planning session. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some zoning documents I need to review before this evening.”

“Tonight. We need to meet tonight. I’m afraid we’ll miss an opportunity if we wait any longer to review details and strategize.”

That seemed pretty fast to pull all this together. In fact, the whole thing seemed a bit fast and meticulously well planned. Like a carefully thought out game of chess. I began to suspect Candy had orchestrated this whole thing, vagrant guy and my dog and all.

I nodded in agreement. “Okay, let’s meet at The Eastside Tavern tonight then. It’s off Route 26, just a few miles east of here. Bring everything you have and we’ll see what we come up with.”

Candy indicated that she would be there tonight and left promptly.

I put my head in my hands.
How the hell am I going to kill an angel?
I’m assuming demons could. The wars had gone on for thousands of years and we’d managed to hold our own, so we must be able to take them out. Still, they’d killed every single one of us they’d encountered since the treaty. Not exactly good odds on my part. Then there was the pesky problem of getting away even if I’d managed to kill the damned thing and survive.

And Wyatt. Just when things were starting to get better between us, this had to happen. I’d never see him again. Even if I managed to sneak back over, it could be a hundred years or more. He’d be dead of natural causes if an angel didn’t bring vengeance down on his head for knowingly associating with me before. I needed to let him know about this, show him where everything was for when I left and what to do if the angels came after him. He was just starting to come to terms with my being a demon, and now I needed to tell him about angels and werewolves. Great.

“Sam, your stupid dog just bit me. Do you think he’s rabid? He did get bit by that bear or something. Please tell me you remembered to get him his shots this year.”

I lifted my head and saw Wyatt coming around the corner of the house holding his hand. Boomer was trailing behind him looking smug. I jumped up and went to look at his hand.

“Crap, I’m so sorry. I had someone here for a business meeting and I asked Boomer to guard against intruders. He should have known that didn’t mean you.”

Actually, I wouldn’t have liked Wyatt to hear the conversation between Candy and me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I looked at his hand. Boomer hadn’t even broken the skin. Even so, I looked over at the dog and sent a disciplinary burst of energy at him. It was the kind of thing we did to naughty children or household members who got out of line. Boomer yipped and looked at me with big hurt hound eyes.

“Bad dog. No biting Wyatt.” I told him.

I looked up at Wyatt and realized that while I had been occupied with his wound and Boomer’s discipline he was staring at me with raised eyebrows.

Oh, damn. I was naked.

“I was swimming in the pool and Candy just came by.” I trailed off unsure what to say. “I didn’t put on any clothes because she’s a repressed tight ass and it was funny to freak her out. She doesn’t swing that way.”

His eyes roved over me with interest and my breath caught. I was still holding his hand. And I was naked.

“I totally forgot why I came over,” he said in a rather distracted tone.

I sighed with regret. I was meeting Candy tonight and had to prepare. No time for sweaty heart–pounding sex right now. Hopefully later.

“I gotta meet Candy later tonight about a business deal,” I told him, pulling away and throwing on my clothing. “Come with me. There’s something important I need to show you.”

We walked through the huge glass doors and past the kitchen into the living room. I grabbed his hand and pressed it against a photo of an old farmhouse sending a jolt of energy through the pair of us. I thought he would yelp, or at least flinch, but he just looked at me puzzled.

“This is my safe. I’ve just keyed it to you so you can open it. Go ahead and put your hand on the picture so I’m sure it works smoothly.”

Wyatt placed his palm on the picture and it dissolved into a blur before an open space appeared in the wall.

“If I’m missing more than two weeks, check the safe. I’ll have instructions for you and power of attorneys along with directions on what to do with my assets. I’ll also have a list of all my aliases and off shore accounts so you can safeguard them. I’ll indicate some way in which I’ll contact you.”

“And why would you be missing more than two weeks?” Wyatt asked.

“I’ll get to that in just a minute,” I replied.

I showed him how to close the safe and make the picture reappear then lead him over to a large mirror surrounded by cabochons. It looked very shabby chic.

“This is a communicator. It’s sort of like Skype with an answering machine. Each of the cabochons represents someone I know, or a member of my household. The blue one here is a kind of ’other’ indicator. The white one here is me. If you need to open the safe, take the mirror to your house. I’ll light up the white one and try and contact you if I manage to jump a gate into home. All you need to do is touch the cabochon and it will work. If you touch the white one, it will try and contact me at home. Don’t ever touch any of the other cabochons, even if they light up.”

“The red one is glowing” Wyatt pointed at it.

I touched it to ignore.

“That’s Dar, my foster brother. He’s a pain in the ass and he calls me all the time. I never call him back.”

“Why are you showing me this? What’s wrong, Sam?” he asked. He was starting to get angry.

“I’m trusting you to take care of things, to cover for me and make it so I can come back if the shit hits the fan and I need to run for it.”

“Sam, what are you into? This is not just some real estate deal with Candy is it? Are you in trouble? Involved with the mafia or a gang? If you trust me enough to ask me to do this for you, then you need to trust me enough to let me know what you’re involved in and what you’re up against.”

I planned on telling him everything. He needed to know everything so he could be safe.

“There are angels here. They are enemies of my kind. They kill us on sight and have no mercy when it comes to demons. I’ve been lying low for forty years, now, living as much as a human as I could to avoid detection, but that may have come to an end.” I paused, wondering how much background he needed to know.

“Look, I kill zombies for a living, if you tell me an angel is after you, I’ll believe you.”

Wyatt seemed sincere, and concerned. I didn’t realize killing zombies in a video game constituted making a living, but I could see that he was willing to suspend disbelief in this instance.

“Over two and a half million years ago, my people were in a very long war with the angels. I don’t know what life was like before the wars, but there seem to have always been differences between us and fighting between our races. In the end, there was a stalemate and we divided the realms between us. We demons live in Hel. The angels have the homeland, Aaru, and they also rule this world.”

“Is Aaru like heaven?” Wyatt asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “The treaty forbids us from crossing into each other’s territory. We take great joy in sneaking here to give the angels the finger before dashing back home, but no angels have ever tried to cross over to our world. We have no way to get into Aaru, otherwise we’d be sneaking over and playing ring and run there too. Anyway, if they catch us here, we’re dead. No one has ever survived a fight with an angel. When it gets too hot, we get out of the kitchen. We cut and run. It’s about to get really hot in my kitchen. I may have to leave, and I may not be able to return.”

Wyatt looked grim.

“Does this have something to do with your meeting with Candy?”

I took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to like this one bit.

“Candy is a werewolf and they are being exterminated by the angels. She has enlisted my help to kill one.”

Wyatt looked up at the ceiling. I think he was beseeching his god for something.