Her brows knotted over her dark eyes and she looked confused, but at least she was still listening. Dax ran his fingers through Bumper’s curly coat. The dog was a hard-muscled, frilly contradiction—she had a powerful body with strong jaws, yet she was covered in a curly blond coat that made her look utterly ridiculous. Dax couldn’t imagine anyone creating an animal like Bumper on purpose, yet somehow the combination worked.
Sort of like Earth. “Your world is mostly populated by a mixture of different kinds of humans—some who will always try to do the right thing as well as those who are set on doing something evil. The best of you and the worst of you are balanced by the vast majority who are sort of like this dog of yours, a blend of both good and bad, beautiful and ugly.” He laughed. “Smart and stupid. Somehow, it all works and, on the whole, humans get along and live their lives.”
She snorted. He grinned at her. “Well, most of the time, anyway.”
Shaking her head, she set her cup down. “I beg to differ with you, but people don’t get along that well. There are wars going on all over the world, people are starving and dying, we have to worry about terrorists blowing things up, and . . .”
“I know. That’s why I’m here. Evil has grown too powerful on your world. It’s giving Demonkind a foothold. Balance has reached a tipping point. It’s slipping over to the side of darkness. The people of Eden recognized the danger, but they’re incapable of fighting. Their nature doesn’t allow it. They can, however, hire fallen demons to fight their battles.”
She ignored his reference to himself and instead asked the one question Dax didn’t want to answer.
“What happens if the balance slips too far?”
He didn’t want to think about that. Couldn’t allow himself to consider failure. Bumper raised her head, stared beyond Dax, and growled. Dax looked down at the dog, but he spoke to Eddy. “Then the demons of Abyss take over. If Evergreen falls to the demons, they gain a powerful foothold in your world. If this town falls, others may follow. The fear is that all of Earth will fall to darkness and demons will rule. There’s a risk that eventually even Eden will be overrun.”
“Dax? I think you need to turn around.”
He snapped his head up at the quaver in her voice and caught Eddy’s terrified gaze. He spun around on the couch and his feet hit the floor just as the stone owl by the fireplace stretched its gray wings and clicked its sharp beak, as if testing to make sure things worked.
Willow shot up from the bookcase so fast she left a trail of blue sparkles in the air behind her. Dax leapt to his feet, pulled in the energy Willow sent him and pointed both hands at the owl, fingertips spread wide.
Fire burst from his fingers in long twin spikes of pure power. He caught the owl as it prepared to take flight, trapped the creature in a blazing sphere of heat and light and blew it right through the wire screen and into the fireplace.
Eddy screamed. The creature screamed louder, sounding eerily like the garden gnome Eddy had flattened. The cry cut off the moment the flaming owl hit the back of the firebox and shattered. A dark wisp, stinking of sulfur, coalesced in front of the broken pieces, but before it could race up the flue to freedom, Dax called on Willow’s power once again.
This time a blast of icy air caught the amorphous mass of darkness, freezing it before it could make its escape. It hovered a moment, quivering in midair, then fell to the hearth and shattered into a thousand tiny pieces of black ice.
Dax hit the ice with a burst of flame. The pieces sizzled and disappeared in puffs of steam.
He took a deep breath and turned away from the mess. Eddy sat on the end of the couch, with Bumper caught in her shaking arms. Both of them gaped, wide-eyed, at the fireplace. Before Dax could assure Eddy that everything was all right, at least for now, she raised her head and stared at him.
“Okay.” Her voice cracked and she took a deep breath. “I take back what I said. You won’t need to point to Willow for proof. I promise to believe anything you tell me. Explain, please, what the hell just happened?”
About the Author
Kate Douglas is the lead author of Kensington Publishing’s Aphrodisia imprint and the author of the popular erotic paranormal romance series
Wolf Tales
, as well as the Zebra series
DemonSlayers
. She is currently working on her newest Aphrodisia series,
Dream Catchers
, as well as her online serial,
Demon Lovers
. Kate and her husband of almost forty years have two adult children and five grandchildren. They live in the beautiful mountains of Lake County, California, north of the Napa Valley wine country.