Devil's Thumb

For my brothers, who, like Anna with Luca, have tested my patience but never my love. I am proud to call myself your sister.

Published by S. M. Schmitz

Copyright © 2015, by S. M. Schmitz.
All Rights Reserved
.

This e-book is licensed for your enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

Colin ducked into the shadows of a nearby building, tightening his grip on his dagger as the low rumbling growl of the demon drew near. Without his ability to feel its presence, he had to rely on his normal senses and listened as the sound of the demon’s own hunting got closer. The stench of the beast surrounded him and Colin held his breath. He could tell by the overpowering smell that it was close to him now.

The setting sun cast a long slithery silhouette in front of the approaching demon as it crept closer to the building where Colin hid. His fingers twitched with the anticipation of thrusting his dagger into this monster’s bristly crimson neck. He saw one of its long curved tusks first as it had disguised itself as a massive warthog, and the low rumbling growling it had been making stopped. It knew Colin was nearby. Colin lunged at the demon and drove his dagger into the back of its neck, trying to pull the blade toward its back but this demon’s hide was thick and fibrous. It was like trying to cut through a block of wood.

“
We need to get it away from these buildings. We can kill it if we can get it in the open,”
Anna told him. She stepped out of the shadows of a building on the opposite side of the street and Luca followed her. Colin pulled his dagger from the demon’s neck and ran.

“
Follow me then
,” he told her.

The demon immediately chased Colin but Anna and Luca were right behind it, and if it got too close to him, they would reach out to swipe at its hind legs. They usually missed, but when they made contact, it would distract the demon long enough for Colin to get a better lead on the crimson colored warthog chasing him through a small business area of midtown Baton Rouge.

“
There’s an empty lot ahead. I’ll lead it there,
” Colin told Anna. She saw the lot Colin had mentioned and pointed it out to Luca. As they entered the grassy lot, Colin stopped running and turned on the demon, pushing his dagger into the side of its thick hide. He knew it wouldn’t kill the demon, but he needed to slow it down now. Luca and Anna each plunged their daggers into its back and it let out a shrill and gruesome scream.

“
You ready?”
Anna asked.

“
Yeah.”
Colin felt like even his internal voice was panting. This demon had exhausted them all.

The now familiar tingling warmth spread throughout his body as he prepared to help Anna obliterate this bastard. With only Luca here and no buildings around, they didn’t have to worry about hurting anyone. They released the power within them and the warthog disintegrated, leaving nothing behind of its sinister existence. Colin sat down on the ground and rested his head between his legs. He was so damn tired.

Anna looked over her shoulder where Luca had been thrown across the lot. He was sitting up, shaking his head at her. His shoulder length black hair, sleek and smooth, was pulled back and tied in a low ponytail, and his dark southern Italian complexion and deep brown eyes gave him the appearance of a man filled with mystery and intrigue, but Anna knew better. The most mysterious thing about Luca was his immortality and ability to fight demons. He wasn’t nearly as enigmatic as he thought he was.

Anna crossed the lot to help him up, even though he didn’t need help. But he seemed to be waiting for it anyway. Anna stared down at him. “Don’t pretend like you’re hurt.”

Luca smiled back up at her. “I am. I’m actually quite hurt that I’ve been doing this far longer than you two, but I don’t have this superpower.”

Colin could hear their conversation through Anna. “
Tell him he’s a whiney asshole.”

“You tell him that. I’m a lady. I don’t speak that way.”

She heard Colin laughing from across the small field. Anna held out her hand to help Luca stand up, and he studied the space where the warthog impersonator used to be. “These demons here don’t make any sense. This whole city doesn’t make any sense. For the past two weeks, nothing has been working the way it’s supposed to.”

Anna sighed with exasperation. “That’s what we’ve been telling you, Luca.”

Colin groaned as he struggled to his feet and Anna winced for him. She hated seeing him in pain, but she knew it would pass quickly. They just needed to get home so he could rest. He joined Anna and Luca and tucked his dagger into the sheath in his jeans. “After six hundred years, haven’t you figured out how to get your angel to show up when you want him yet?” Colin asked Luca.

Luca shrugged. “He claims to be awfully busy. Can’t imagine how. We’re the ones who seem to be doing most of the work down here.”

Colin snickered. “Well, somebody has to babysit guys like us in Heaven.”

Luca nodded sagely. “Ah, good point, my old friend. One day, we may even tempt some of them into falling just to get out of that job.”

Anna crossed her arms indignantly and glared at them. She never thought joking about angels was funny. Colin shot her a sheepish, apologetic glance, but, admittedly, he really liked having Luca in town with them. They’d known him since he and Anna became hunters themselves, which made Luca their oldest friend.

“When are you planning on quitting, Luca?” Anna asked. Unlike Colin and Anna, he wasn’t bound by a contract. He could quit whenever he wanted.

“When we’ve won,” Luca smiled. And Anna believed him, because his faith in their side of this oldest of battles was that strong.

Colin stretched and exhaled a drowsy breath. “Well, this one’s dead. Let’s head home.”

They had to walk almost a mile to get back to their car, and Luca clicked his tongue as he strolled along the sidewalk, deep in thought. “You still have that box of artifacts in your apartment or is it back at the hunters’ headquarters?”

Colin wanted to lie, because he
really
wanted to go home, but he couldn’t lie to Luca. “We brought it back. You’ve already looked through it though.” He was hoping that last part would get him out of having to take Luca downtown.

“I feel like we’re missing something. And I’m at least 642 years old. I’ve learned to trust my instincts over the years.”

“
Can’t argue with that,
” Anna agreed.

“
I can actually. This is the same guy who dragged me to a bullfight in Spain. I’ve questioned his judgment ever since.
”

Anna snickered and Luca shook his head at them. “You two stop that. It’s bad manners.”

Anna smirked at Luca and reminded him, “Colin just questions these powerful instincts of yours when you still find something as macabre as bullfighting entertaining.”

Luca stopped walking and pointed a finger at Colin, but he was just messing around with him. “Hey, that was almost a hundred years ago, and what the hell else were we going to do in Spain? And how was I supposed to know you were so girly about seeing blood?”

“It just seems cruel to have picadors wound an animal and piss it off just so a matador can kill it. I thought we’d progressed beyond the gladiatorial days,” Colin retorted.

Luca rolled his eyes and muttered something in an old dialect of Italian but neither Anna nor Colin spoke Luca’s Italian. Based on what they knew of modern Italian, though, whatever Luca said wasn’t complimentary. So Colin uttered some equally uncomplimentary things about Luca in Gaelic and they continued bantering in languages neither understood for the next three blocks. Anna tried to ignore them, but it was difficult when she couldn’t get Colin out of her head.

Colin sensed her frustration with them and finally gave up on harassing his friend in a language very few people even spoke anymore. Of course, the Italian Luca spoke wasn’t used anymore by anyone else. Anna enjoyed the quiet for a couple of minutes before Luca thought of something else to badger them about. “How can you stand it down here? This humidity is killing me.”

Anna sighed. Luca bored easily and apparently thought the best form of entertainment for his boredom was finding something to complain about. Then again, after six hundred years, she’d probably get bored easily, too. “It can’t kill you, Luca. You’re immortal.”

“Metaphorical, my sweet, Anna,” he waved a hand in the air as if to literally brush off her comment.

“You should become a matador then,” she replied, even though she knew it would probably lead to more arguing in languages she couldn’t speak. Luca thought about it.

“Do you think women still find matadors sexy?” he asked.

Colin groaned, and was relieved that their car was at least in sight now. The last conversation he wanted to have now was about Luca’s sex life. Anna rescued him. “No,” she said, “I think they’d avoid you on grounds of animal cruelty.”

Luca’s dark eyes got a speculative look then he decided, “No
torero
for me, then. Maybe I’ll go to Africa next and save some lions and elephants.”

“Weren’t you just in Nigeria?” Colin asked.

Luca nodded and opened his car door. “Yeah, but I didn’t know hunting lion hunters could make me such a rock star. I should go back.”

Anna and Colin both climbed in the car and decided to ignore Luca’s plotting to turn himself into an animal savior simply to attract more women. Like he needed help attracting more women. He was a good looking, southern Italian man in his late 20s with six hundred years of experience in flirting and convincing women to sleep with him. His Africa escapade was simply out of the same sense of boredom that kept him complaining about inconsequential things such as humidity.

Colin drove them to the hunters’ headquarters and Anna’s heart sped up as she recognized the car in the parking lot. Dylan was here. They hadn’t seen him that often since Jeremy’s transformation. Between Jas’s death and losing Jeremy, Dylan had needed some time off, and they’d left him alone, but as far as Colin or Anna knew, this was the first time Dylan had actually come to the hunters’ headquarters. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to jump out of the car, run inside and hug him, or stay in the car and hide from him because they hadn’t done what they’d promised they would. They’d had a chance to kill Jeremy and they’d let him live.

Luca wasn’t even aware of Anna’s internal deliberations, so as soon as Colin parked, he opened his door and walked inside the building. Colin took a deep breath because he wasn’t sure what to say to Dylan either. “We have to face him sooner or later.”

“I know,” Anna agreed, “but I was hoping it would be at a time when we had some warning. Not unexpected like this. I don’t know what to say to him.”

Colin shrugged. “We tell him the truth. He already knows Jeremy isn’t dead. We may as well tell him why.”

Anna really liked Dylan, and she didn’t want to lose his friendship, but she was afraid telling him the truth would end whatever personal relationship she and Colin had with him. Maybe even their professional one. What if he wouldn’t trust them anymore and refused to work with them?

“Anna,” Colin said gently, “let’s just go in and find out.”

Anna followed him inside the building, which hadn’t changed since Jeremy’s transformation into a demon. His office was still the same: filled with boxes of files from the past six years he’d led the hunters here, his computer still sat on his desk, a notepad and pencil beside it with his scrawling handwriting across the top and a few doodles down the side. Nobody was willing to clean it out, and no one in Jeremy’s family had known about his job here as a hunter. That was the kind of information most hunters kept secret, if only because most people tended to think they were crazy when they claimed they could see and kill demons.

Dylan was in the break room, sitting at the oblong table with one of the boxes of artifacts in front of him. He was cataloging them, taking pictures and writing careful descriptions of each one, where it had been found and what kind of demon had left it behind. All of that information had been scribbled onto notecards at the time the relics were collected, but Dylan was creating a database for a network the hunters shared. Luca had already sat down at the table across from him and was studying a few of the pieces Dylan had finished cataloging.

Colin and Anna sat by Luca and Dylan hardly glanced at them. He kept working. Luca held up a long curved claw and studied it under the fluorescent lighting of the break room. “Resembles a beast of Valac’s. Kind of looks like a dragon’s claw.”

Dylan stopped typing to look at Luca and the claw he was holding up to the light. “Dragon?”

Colin nodded, wanting a chance to speak to see if Dylan would even acknowledge him. “Valac is believed to ride a two headed dragon. So his minions sometimes manifest as dragons.”

Dylan’s eyes flickered to Colin briefly then back to the claw and Luca. “So do you think it’s one of Valac’s? Should I put that in here?”

Luca turned to Colin and Anna. “You two look at it. Something’s not quite right, but I can’t place what.”

Anna and Colin both studied the claw closer, and they agreed with Luca: it was
almost
like the dragons they’d fought in the past, but something was off. Just a little bit different.

“
Same size,”
Colin noted.

And Anna couldn’t help herself. “
Just like a man to notice size first.”

Colin snickered and Luca and Dylan both looked at him with that annoyed expression most people got when Anna and Colin spent too much time talking in their minds. Colin ignored them.