InsistentHunger (30 page)

“You were. You were too weak to protect yourself, so you
just told yourself it was normal. You got out of that situation and now you
think you can come in and fuck with my life.” Brady’s voice was rough with
emotion and his eyes were turning red. The second they got out of this safely,
Paige was going to head-slap the boy until his brain rattled. If this was his
idea of talking his way out of a situation, he needed to take the negotiation
class over. Bitch-lady looked ready to fly into a rage and Brady seemed ready
to follow.

Paige looked around and couldn’t spot much in the way of a
weapon. Unfortunately, with her bare hands, she couldn’t do much damage if it
came down to a fight.

“You have come into this world knowing only what was in the
human mind. You don’t understand—”

“I know I won’t play your fucking game.” Brady arched his
back, and lowered his head. His body language screamed his fury and the hairs
on Paige’s arms stood up straight.

“You will—”

“Rip you apart,” Brady finished. His words were a growl, and
before she could react, Brady threw himself forward. He grabbed her arms and
slammed her head back into the wall. The sheer force would’ve killed a human,
but this woman brought her hands up and wrapped fists around Brady’s arms.
Pushing off against the wall, she slammed Brady into the far wall. Since the
room was only about six feet wide, neither of them had room to really maneuver.

“You’ll learn your place,” the woman snarled.

Paige remembered something that Hunter had said. He said to
shoot demons in the head because staking them in the heart meant getting too
close. However, that implied that staking them through the heart worked.

Darting out from behind the bed, Paige wrapped up the
nearest good-sized shard of wood and swung at the woman’s back. At the last
second, the woman flinched, her eyes scanning the room behind her and going wide
when they spotted Paige. Paige didn’t hit her heart, but she sank the wood deep
into the woman’s lower back. The woman screamed in pain.

Paige fell back out of the way, her eyes searching for
another stake. Taking advantage of the distraction, Brady wrenched himself free
and grabbed the woman by the neck, slamming her head into the wall next to the
door. He repeated that three times, and each time the woman’s head hit the
wall, it did so with a sickening thump.

Her hands came up and clawed at Brady’s face and Brady gave
a bellow. However, he didn’t let go. Pulling the woman away from the wall, he
spun them both around so that her back was to Paige.

“Now!” he yelled, holding her there.

Paige grabbed another shard of wood and this time she had
her mark, driving the impromptu stake deep into the woman’s back. Paige’s hand
burned with pain as hundreds of little slivers dug their way into her flesh,
but that was nothing compared to the damage done to the demon.

Brady let go and backed away as the demon woman twisted and
shrieked. Her skin seemed to shrivel, her bones protruded gruesomely and then
her whole body seemed to fold in on itself. Flesh melted away and bones
clattered to the floor, bits of shriveled mummified skin and hair settling
slowly on top.

Paige stared at the mess, her stomach churning.

“Don’t look.” Brady crossed the distance between them and
caught her in a hug. With his hand behind her head, he pulled her close enough
that all she could see was his strong chest. “Don’t look,” he repeated, his voice
softer the second time.

Paige stood in his arms for a second, her heart pounding.
Even the lust that normally assaulted her when Brady touched her only scratched
the surface of the horror she felt watching the woman die. The woman hadn’t
been some random demon. She’d known the woman, or she knew about women like
her, anyway. She wasn’t some faceless creature. Watching her die like
that—Paige’s stomach gave another little flop before Paige pushed her feelings
to one side. They didn’t have time for this.

“Focus on the scene, Brady,” she said in her best training
voice. Brady’s arms loosened and he looked down at her fondly.

“The scene?”

“Yes, the scene. This is a scene, and until I have time to
properly freak out and seek psychiatric medicine, I’m only going to think of it
as a scene,” she said firmly. She didn’t have time to do anything else. “And
shit, my hand hurts.” Looking down, she could see dozens of trails, some with
blood smears, from where the rough edge of the wood had sunk splinters into her
flesh.

“I can—” Brady started to say. He reached for her hand.

“Focus on the scene. It isn’t cleared yet.” Paige jerked her
hand away.

“Yes ma’am,” Brady said, his voice amused.

“Hey, I don’t want to beat the demon only to get killed by
the freaked-out human flunky with the big-ass gun,” she pointed out.

“You have a point there,” Brady admitted. He turned back to
the doorway, his body on alert again. He stopped and looked down the hallway
before he stepped out. Paige stayed in the room and pulled the largest of the
splinters with her teeth as she waited to give him a head start. If she had a
gun, she’d be on his six, but since she was unarmed, she didn’t want to be so
close on his six that he tripped over her when he needed to move.

After two splinters, she moved into the hallway. Brady
checked the other two doors. Placing his hand flat against the heavy wood, he
cocked his head to the side. It wasn’t exactly by the book, but Paige trusted
he could hear if there was anyone in the rooms. The staircase was more modern
than the basement itself. It was standard two by four framing and plywood and
the first step creaked when Brady put his weight on it.

Brady and Paige both froze, but the house was silent as
Brady hurried up the stairs. Paige hung back. The hallway lacked any good cover
and she felt the loss of her gun. Even if she wasn’t one of those cops who
named their weapon and bought it ammunition for a Christmas present, she was
still pretty damn fond of it.

When Brady reached the top, the door came open and the human
servant appeared in the open door, his mouth falling open. Brady reached up,
caught him by the shirt and yanked him forward. The man made a small cry, and
then Brady snapped the man’s head to the side. The neck bone breaking sounded
loud in the silence that followed.

Paige swallowed, watching as Brady continued to hold the
body, his back arching and his neck stretching up in that same inhuman body
language she’d seen from him before. Then, after about ten seconds, he dropped
the man and stared down at him. Brady looked lost.

“Escape now. Angst later,” Paige said as she hurried up
behind him. While she’d never killed in the line of duty, she knew the drill.
You focused on clearing the scene and maintaining your position until backup
came. Since backup wasn’t coming, they couldn’t afford to get emotional now.

Brady blinked at her, and then he moved up into the main
house. Paige waited as long as it took her to pull a splinter in the junction
between her palm and her trigger finger, and then she followed.

For one second, she considered grabbing the flunky’s shirt
since Brady was running around bare-chested, but her sense of practicality
didn’t extend to robbing the dead. That would be creepy. When she got to the
top of the stairs, the house was silent. Paige wanted to find her weapon, but
she had no idea where to start a search. She also didn’t know how many bad guys
were in the house, how strong they were or whether the vamps outside would come
inside if they saw her. That was a lot of not knowing. So she followed Brady.

He stalked into the room where the woman had Paige brought.
Paige stood with her back to the wall and watched the exits while Brady paced
the room, his body language alien to her. When he finished, he glanced over to
her. “I’m just following you and hoping I find my gun,” Paige pointed out.
Brady cocked his head to the side, but he didn’t answer.

Turning his back to her, he pushed the pocket doors open and
strode into the next room. It looked like a mirror image of the first room,
only this one had a formal, cushioned chair that looked like it was out of some
fancy house, a rough table and two side tables with small drawers.

Paige waited until Brady had paced the entire room before
she went to the tables and opened the drawers. One had papers that belonged to
a Mrs. Ethel Biltmore. The other was empty. No luck.

Paige looked to Brady, and before she said anything, he was
out another door on the east wall. Paige followed him back out into the central
hallway and through an arch into a damn big dining room. The table in the
middle looked like it had been there since the Civil War. Worms or termites had
eaten tunnels in the legs, the wood had turned gray with age and one leaf had
fallen, leaving a hole in the middle. Brady circled once and then they were
through into the world’s biggest closet. This place had as many cupboards and
drawers as Paige’s entire house.

She pulled one drawer after another while Brady paced back
and forth in the hall. On her tenth or eleventh try, she found success. She grabbed
her Glock and a bag of sparkly toys she’d brought for the idiot vamps.

Ignoring the pain in her hand, she checked the weapon and
made sure it was loaded before putting it in her holster. “Just let me pull
some of these splinters. I can’t aim if I’m flinching in pain,” she said. Brady
frowned, like he couldn’t quite understand her. However, when she started
working at her hand with her teeth, the alien body language softened and he
took a step into the small room.

“Let me,” he offered, holding out a hand.

“I’d be more comfortable if you kept watch.” Paige mumbled
the words as she tried to get her front teeth into the end of a nasty splinter
that followed the line of her palm.

“Two perps, upstairs, west corner. Neither is moving around
much and there’s no sign they know about any trouble. Eight or nine outside.”
Brady cocked his head. “I think nine, but one is really quiet. The rest are
just pretty damn quiet. None of them show any interest in doing anything at
all.”

“They aren’t what I expected from vampires,” Paige admitted.
While the bitch lady had been scary, vampires or demons or aliens or whatever
they wanted to call themselves—they weren’t a terribly impressive lot as a
whole. If anything, Paige felt herself feeling a whole lot of sympathy toward them.

“They aren’t all the same, Paige.” Brady took her injured
hand in his and studied it. “She was a strong demon.”

“Not as strong as you,” Paige pointed out.

“Stronger than me,” Brady corrected her. He shrugged. “But
not as strong as the two of us together.” He brought her hand up to his mouth
and gave it a small kiss of apology before he sucked at it. Paige gritted her
teeth and barely swallowed the surprised yelp when Brady used his teeth to pull
one of the splinters. He spit it out on the ground. For a second, they just
stood there, him holding her hand, neither looking at each other.

Brady finished pulling a particularly large splinter and
paused, his gaze on Paige’s hand. “She was like a lot of abused women, huh?”

Paige sighed. After seeing the woman die horribly, she
really didn’t want to have sympathy for her.

“You always said domestic calls were the worst. You told me
that if I ever put my back to a battered woman that you’d kill me yourself.”
Brady looked up and gave her one of those lopsided smiles he was famous for.

“Women like that often want to feel powerful, even if
powerful means defending their man against the cops who showed up because she
called,” Paige said. She told all her trainees the same thing. Hell, they heard
it at the academy, but that rule bore repeating several times until new cops
got it in their heads. People who’d been denied power weren’t the most stable
sort. “Yeah, maybe she was like that. I’m still not sorry we killed her,” Paige
said firmly.

Brady nodded. “Me either. She wanted us dead, and since we
can’t exactly have her arrested, it seems fair.” Brady went back to work on
Paige’s hand. Brady worked quickly, each splinter bringing a little flare of
pain that Brady gently kissed away until Paige’s growing desire started to override
the pain.

“Brady,” she warned. He paused, his lips still pressed to
her palm.

“Right,” he said in a tone that made it clear he knew
exactly what she meant. He let her hand go after a pause. “I think I got all
the ones I can.”

Paige pulled her hand back and flexed it. It was sore, but
there weren’t splinters in any vital spots that would keep her from pulling the
trigger. “Good enough. You need to give me a little space to get…cooled down
some,” Paige said. She waited for him to back out of the small space. Her body
was tight with lust and she had to have a stern word with her internal
self-control before she could even look up at Brady. He held onto the sides of
the doorway and watched her with those amber eyes that made her want to stare.

“I feel it too,” he confessed.

Paige laughed. “No way could you feel it this strongly. If
you did, you’d be jumping every woman you met, and a disturbing number would
probably let you.” Brady had been a flirt even before the demon. He might have
described himself as a clumsy flirt, but Paige figured most of the women in the
station would disagree. Now Paige figured he could charm his way into any
woman’s bed, including hers.

With a shake of his head, Brady stepped forward, pinning
Paige in the corner. Immediately, she could feel her body start to get hot. “I
only feel it with you, Paige.” He stared into her eyes and Paige’s self-control
struggled to keep her from saying screw it and jumping Brady’s bones.

“And exactly how many women have you tested this with?”
Paige asked with a laugh.

“When I was going to your father’s farm, I stopped and
talked to women. I would ask for directions or tell them their dress was
pretty.”