Demon Hunting In a Dive Bar (2 page)

B
eck left Toby guarding the steps and went inside the bar, waving at Bill, the sound guy for Beelzebubba, the country band she’d booked for the weekend. The music wouldn’t start until later tonight after the ballgames. College football was a religion in Alabama, and Saturdays in the fall were holy days reserved for worshipping the boob tube.

Beck didn’t mind. Football was good for business. Plenty of folks came to the bar after the game to celebrate or mourn, depending on how their team performed. The food at Beck’s was a big draw, thanks to Hank, the new cook. So successful, in fact, that Beck had toyed with the idea of opening the bar to normals.

She’d quickly dismissed the notion. Beck’s was a bar for demonoids, the only one of its kind to her knowledge. The norms had a world of places to eat and drink. It was their tough luck that Beck’s had one of the best cooks in the state.

Speak of the devil, she thought as Hank stuck his head out of the back.

“Need you to look at tonight’s menu,” he growled in a voice like a train rumbling over a trestle.

“Sure,” Beck said, veering toward the kitchen. The menu at Beck’s changed like the weather, depending on Hank’s mood. She gave him free rein to keep him happy, “happy” being a relative term. Hank wasn’t what you’d call the bubbly type.

He was built like a bulldozer, with hands and feet like concrete blocks. With his shaggy black hair, thick black beard, and surly manner, he reminded her of Beorn, the skin changer from
The Hobbit
. He’d been raised by his mother; that much Beck knew. Nothing unusual in that. Most demonoids were raised by single parents after their demonically charged mother or father disappeared into the sunset, on the prowl for the next high, the next party.

Or the next kill.

Demons were creatures of the spirit world that craved physical sensation. That’s why they were attracted to humans. Drugs, sex, and violence were irresistible to them. Mortals taken by a demon never lasted long, a few months, a year at most before their poor, beleaguered bodies wore out and the demons left them to die.

Demons were no damn good; miserable, self-serving parasitic bastards out for themselves and their own pleasure, without a thought for their victims or their unfortunate offspring. A demon was the reason she’d never known her mother, and a demon had killed her best friend. Latrisse Jackson had been a waitress at Beck’s back when Daddy still ran the place for norms. She’d been working at the bar a year when she got possessed. Toby and Beck searched for her for months. By the time they’d found her, it was too late. Latrisse was all used up. She’d died in Beck’s arms, a broken, wasted thing riddled with disease and aged far beyond her twenty-three years.

Beck had hated demons with a fiery passion since.

And she was half demon.

“Whatcha got?” she asked, plucking the menu from the cook’s beefy fingers.

Hank glowered at her but made no response. Mr. Personality he was not. Beck figured him to be around forty years old, but it was hard to tell. Half bloods like her and Hank didn’t age, although they sometimes disguised the fact from the norms by adding wrinkles and gray hair to their appearance.

Beck noticed the entry at the top of the page. “Shrimp étouffée? That’s something new, isn’t it?”

“New for this place, maybe. You think all I’m good for is cooking burgers and dogs?”

Yep, he was Beorn, all right, a bear in human guise—a bear with a sore tail, and just as ornery.

“And wings,” Beck reminded him. “Best dang chicken wangs around. That’s what everybody says.”

Hank harrumphed and stomped back to the kitchen.

“Nice talking to you, too,” Beck said.

Shaking her head, she walked behind the bar, a glass block semicircle that dominated the center of the room.

Ora Mae Luker, a pudgy widow with an uncanny knack for growing things, wandered in. Ora Mae was a regular who toodled across the river every afternoon, Monday through Saturday, to have a drink and a little conversation.

Ora Mae’s gray hair was freshly washed and styled. She wore polyester slacks with an elastic waist, and a loose, eyelet cotton shirt. Taking a seat at the counter, she blinked at the empty bar from behind her wire rimmed glasses. “Where is everybody? This place is dead.”

“Watching the games,” Beck said. “We won’t get busy until later.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I should have realized. How silly of me.”

Ora Mae was one of those rare creatures, a Southerner who didn’t give a hoot in Hades about football.

“I’ll have the usual,” Ora Mae said.

“One dirty martini coming up.”

Beck sullied the vodka with olive juice, added extra olives, and set the frosted glass in front of the plump matron, listening as Ora Mae rattled on about the bumper crop of squash, pumpkins, and cauliflower in her garden.

Twenty minutes later, Ora Mae finished her drink and got to her feet. “I guess I’d better head home. It’s almost time for the news, and I do like the looks of that new weatherman.”

Beck smiled. Ora Mae had butt lint older than the new guy on channel 5. “Be careful crossing the river.”

Ora Mae waved good-bye and left, and Beck set the empty martini glass in the sink. She was wiping down the bar when she saw
him,
sitting in his usual spot at a table in the corner, surrounded by shadows. Shadows he brought, Beck thought with a surge of annoyance. Conall Dalvahni carried his own black hole of gloom with him wherever he went. With his dark hair and eyes, and his brooding expression, he was the freaking Grim Reaper, if Death were a demon hunter.

Beck couldn’t stand the guy, and the feeling was mutual. So, why was he back? The last time she’d seen him, he’d made it clear he thought she was pond scum, an insult to decent, right-thinking creatures everywhere.

He was a demon slayer and she was a demonoid. Polar opposites. Oil and vinegar. TNT and a lit match. I got it, she thought, giving the bar an angry swipe with the cloth.
Loud and clear. So why the hell can’t he leave me alone?

It had been nearly a month since she’d last seen him. Twenty-one days, to be exact. Three whole weeks without Mr. Dark and Gloomy, and good riddance. She should have shrugged off his icy disdain by now, forgotten him, and moved on. But his obvious contempt for her and her kind stuck in her craw. She couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that pissed her off.

Everything about him pissed her off. His forbidding, humorless demeanor and his arrogant, holier-than-thou attitude.

And now he was back. Not for long, though. She threw down the bar towel. This was her place. She’d kicked him out once, and she’d do it again.

Hefting a liquor bottle with a metal pour spot in one hand, she stalked over to his table.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“That depends.” His deep, rough voice grated on her nerves and made her stomach knot. “What have you to offer?”

“Nothing you’re interested in.”

His dark gaze raked her up and down, casual and insolent. Beck’s grip tightened on the bottle.

“You are mistaken,” he said. “You have information about the demon activity in this area, information that I require.”

“Get your information someplace else, mister.”

“I am more than willing to recompense you for your trouble.”

A flat leather pouch appeared in his hand. Opening it, he tossed a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills on the table between them. Beck stared at the pile of greenbacks. It was a lot of money, several thousand dollars at least.

“There is more where that came from, Rebekah. Much more.”

Something hot and hurt flared inside her. On top of being lower than dirt, he thought she was for sale. She pushed the feeling aside. It didn’t matter what he thought. She was an idiot for letting the guy get under her skin.

“The name’s Beck and I don’t need your money.”

“Your name is not Beck. It is Rebekah Damian.”

“Who told you my—”

“You are thirty-one years old,” he continued, as though reciting a series of well-memorized facts. “Although you appear much younger, no doubt due to your demon blood. Your father is Jason Beck Damian, a nice enough fellow, but otherwise a quite unremarkable human. This bar belonged to him—thus the name—until he married and started another family. His wife does not drink and disapproved of her husband running a tavern. At her encouragement, he sold the place.”

“Encouragement?” Beck made a rude noise. “Brenda nagged his ass until he caved.”

“At eighteen, you were too young to purchase Beck’s on your own,” Conall said. “So you bought the place with the help of your partner, Tobias James Littleton, and turned it into a bar that caters to your kind. The name you kept.”

“My goodness, Daddy’s been running his mouth, hasn’t he?” Beck drawled, clamping down on her rising temper. “At his age, you’d think he’d know better than to talk to strangers.”

“I have supped at his eatery several times in the past few weeks,” Conall said with a shrug. “The name of the place eludes me.”

“Beck’s Burger Doodle,” Beck ground out.

“Ah, yes. The Party Burger is a favorite of mine.”

“Daddy makes a good hamburger. So what?”

“Your father has told me much about you.” Conall reached across the table and toyed with the salt shaker. The sleeves of his cotton sweater were pushed back, exposing his strong forearms. His shoulders were broad and heavily corded with muscle. He had beautiful hands, strong and bronzed, the hands of a warrior. And not just any old warrior, Beck reminded herself, a demon killer. “He confided, for instance, that he had a three-day dalliance as a young man with a woman named Helené.”

Her mother? Daddy had told Conall about her
mother
? Beck stared at him in disbelief.

“She was a dark-haired beauty like you,” Conall said, lifting his gaze to her face. “He did not know it at the time, but she was demon possessed. Some months later, Helene returned, changed almost beyond recognition from the excesses of the demon. She had a child with her, an infant girl with a strawberry blotch on one shoulder, a birthmark common in the Damian family. That baby was you. She shoved you into your father’s arms and left, never to be seen again.”

“Daddy told you all this?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit. My father never talks about his freak of a daughter. He’s an upstanding citizen now, a member of the Civitan Club, and a good Baptist. What did you do to get him to spill the beans?”

Conall sat back in his chair. “You think I wrested the information from your parental unit by supernatural force?”

“Figured that out by yourself, did ya? My, you are the bright one.”

“You do not like me.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” Beck said, tapping her forefinger in the air. “Right again, genius.”

Conall’s black gaze slid from her face to the bottle in her hand. “I see. And what do you mean to do with that flask?”

“I was thinking of bashing you over the head with it if you don’t leave.”

His black brows rose. “You wish to hit me? Why?”

“Mister, the last time you were here, you all but said you think the kith are nothing but vermin to be exterminated, and now you’re back.” She jabbed her finger at him. “Seeing as how
I’m
kith and you’re a demon hunter, I take your presence as a threat.”

“Kith? This is the term for your kind?”

“It’s
our
term,” Beck said. “For some reason, we like it better than scum-sucking demon spawn.”

“Are you always so sarcastic?”

“Only when I’m awake.”

He regarded her without expression. Nothing unusual about that; the guy had about as much expression as a two-by-four. “You think I came here to kill you.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“And yet you confront me with nothing but a bottle in your hand, and I a demon slayer.”

“I can take care of myself,” Beck said. “I’ve been doing it a long time.”

Conall sprang at her in a blur of movement. The bottle in Beck’s hand clattered to the floor as she was swept up and pinned against the nearest wall by more than six feet of hard-muscled male.

“You fascinate me,” Conall said. His dark voice was rough. “I cannot decide whether you are brave or foolish. Perhaps both.”

Beck went still. The heat from his big body and his crisp, woodsy scent surrounded her. He smelled like a little bit of heaven, she’d give him that.

“Let go of me.” She felt the weight of his stare but kept her gaze fastened on his wide chest. She couldn’t breathe, not with him so close.

The alpha male jackass ignored her, of course.

“You smell of jasmine and spices. Sweet and exotic,” he murmured. His warm breath whispered across her skin. Beck began to tremble. “How . . . interesting. I expected the stench of demon to be upon you.”

His last words hit her like a slap in the face. Anger washed over her, bright and hot, followed by an overwhelming urge to escape. Shifting into a column of water, she flowed from his grasp. It was easy, this close to the river. Water strengthened her powers. It was one reason she hadn’t wanted to sell the bar and move into town.

The stunned look on Conall’s face as she poured out of his arms was priceless, almost worth the aggravation of being around him.

Almost.

She glided across the wooden floor and resumed her former shape, taking care to place the table between them before she re-shifted.

“Out.” She pointed to the door. Her chest heaved and angry tears burned the back of her eyes. She would not let him see her cry. She refused. “And this time don’t come back.”

“We must talk.” He stepped around the table. “You remember Ansgar?”

She edged away from him. Distance, she needed distance.

“Yeah, I remember him,” she said. “Big, blond guy. Carries a bow and arrows. Here a couple of weeks ago.”
With you,
she wanted to add.
The night you found out what I am and acted so disgusted.
“What about him?”