InsistentHunger (32 page)

“Not now,” Brady said softly. “She was afraid of going back.
Why would she fight me? Why would she even risk bringing a rival into her house
if she was afraid of going back?” Brady might be watching the zombie-vamps in
the yard, but he was talking about the bitch.

“Power,” Paige said softly. “If you learn about the world
through people, then demons or vampires or alien spirits possessing the dead or
whatever the hell else freaky thing you want to call yourself, you’re going to
inherit human flaws. She wanted power, Brady. I mean, she had power over the
vamps outside, but having power over those things—”

“Not all that impressive or powerful,” Brady finished for
her. “They’re everywhere, filling any spot not claimed by a stronger force.
They’re the kind of demon that will happily sit in the same six square feet of
ground forever and be…content. I don’t think they can do happy.” Brady sighed.
“At least they can’t be miserable.”

“But you can be.” Paige rested her cheek against Brady’s
back and ran her hand up and down. She wasn’t one for comforting, but then most
of the guys she’d dated who wanted comforting hadn’t suffered more than a
wrecked car or lost job.

Maybe she was jaded and a decade of therapy hadn’t been
enough, but she’d never actually felt pity for those schmucks. But Brady had
lost his world—or escaped it—and now he had to figure out a way to exist in a
new one, and worse, his only lifeline was the memory of the man whose place
he’d taken. Paige’s issues had to bow in defeat to Brady’s. His issues were the
sort to rise up out of the ocean and eat Tokyo.

“I can be,” Brady agreed. “Which is why I don’t want to piss
you off. You make me happy and I like making you happy.” Brady continued to
look out the window and Paige continued to rest against his back, grateful for
a chance to not look him in the eye during this conversation. She wasn’t sure
she could look a man in the eye while getting this mushy.

“I like you too, Brady. You aren’t going to piss me off, so
stop assuming you will. Hell, you keep trying to convince me you’re evil, and
if that didn’t drive me away, using the word sex won’t either.” She watched one
of the vamps rock back and forth in time with the tire swing that lazily swayed
in the breeze. “So, you definitely aren’t one of them,” she prompted him.

“God no,” Brady quickly agreed with a little huff of
laughter. That sounded more like the Brady she knew. “I was…” His body twitched
under her. “I was like her,” he said slowly. “She’d been here longer and had
better control, but we were the same.”

“Incubus?” Paige guessed, although unless the bitch had
hidden a very small penis under her dress, she’d actually be a succubus.

Brady shook his head. “I don’t know. The words, the way
things change when we’re all in human bodies—I don’t know these things.” He
took a deep breath and something shifted. Paige stepped back and immediately,
Brady turned to look at her.

“I should go check the other directions, make sure we aren’t
about to get a nasty surprise.”

“Good idea,” Paige said, a little relieved to get back to a
subject she could understand. “The other vamps might be coming back now that
the sun is down.” Paige frowned as something occurred to her. Either the sun
killed lower-level demons or it hurt bad enough to force them into the shadows.
So why didn’t Hunter attack during daylight? Hunting at night seemed stupid and
Jim Hunter was not a stupid man. Manipulative and arrogant and annoying, but
not stupid.

“Paige?” Brady looked alarmed.

“We should watch for Hunter,” Paige said, even though her
logical mind told her it was stupid. She loved to preach about trusting the gut
and her gut kept sending up thoughts of Jim Hunter.

“Hunter?” Some of Brady’s alien body language had returned.
“I’ll check the other windows.” Before Paige could offer to check some herself,
Brady was out the door.

Looking out into the yard, Paige could see the vamps, each
sluggishly pursuing some amusement. Thinking of them trapped in the world Brady
had described—it didn’t make her feel any better about killing them.

Jim Hunter might think he had a right to kill demons, but
Paige wasn’t so sure. While she’d kill any demon who came after her, she wasn’t
in a rush to send anyone home to a version of hell that terrified her. Reverend
Ward’s hell with fire and brimstone didn’t scare her nearly as much as the idea
of being jammed in some space where she would never escape other people or find
a moment of peace.

If Jim Hunter tried to send Brady back there, she would do
whatever she needed to in order to protect her partner.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Paige,” Brady called. His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried
urgency. Paige left the window where she had been watching the moon rise and
darted into the hall, her hand on her weapon. It took her a moment to figure
out which room Brady was calling from. When she did find him, he stood next to
the window with his back to the wall as he looked out.

His caution immediately put her on edge and she moved out of
the line of sight. It was dark in the house. The only light came from the moon,
but she didn’t want to risk someone or something seeing her shadow.

Moving to the far side of the window from Brady, she checked
the yard. At first everything looked normal. A vamp sat on the ground, his head
tilted up to the sky. It took her a second to realize that there was only the
one. She looked over at Brady with a confused frown.

“By the well,” he said quietly.

She looked and a half dozen vamps crouched near the well,
their fingers tangled in ribbons as they poked at something on the ground.
“Shit.” Paige backed away from the window. “It has to be Hunter.” That was
exactly the sort of thing he taught her to do.

“Or another hunter,” Brady pointed out. For some reason,
Paige had never really stopped to consider the fact that there were a lot of
demons and a lot of demon hunters wandering the world. She tended to think of
Brady and Jim Hunter and Monagas and then her imagination faded away and she
imagined the rest of the world as normal. Not that normal was normal. Clearly,
normal included a lot of demons. She really needed another word for normal.

Paige shook her head. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Do
you really think there would be another demon hunter in town?”

“Do you really think Hunter is the only one who knows about
this demon woman and her entourage?”

“You really need to stop being logical,” she said with a
sigh. “It’s annoying.”

He grinned at her.

“Look, unless we want to deal with getting stuck in a
burning house, we still have to deal with Hunter.”

The cold expression that settled on Brady’s face frightened
her. “Oh no,” she said. “There will be no killing of humans unless the humans
are actually bad guys. Hunter is not a bad guy. He’s a jerk, but a lot of
people are jerks. If I killed every jerk I’ve met, there would be a lot fewer
human beings of this world and I’d be in prison.”

Turning her back on Brady, Paige headed for the stairs. If
Hunter followed pattern, he would put some sort of bomb on the front porch and
then leave it to blow up. She intended to stop him.

“Paige, wait,” Brady called behind her. Paige kept going.
The bottom of the stairs ended in the large entry with old double doors that
led to a large veranda and Paige paused. If there was a vamp near the door, and
it saw her, she didn’t have much room to retreat.

She looked up at Brady who stood halfway down the stairs.
“You got my back?” she asked her partner.

“Always,” he agreed, even though he didn’t look too happy.
He hurried down the stairs and took up a position to the side of the door.
Paige had a clear line of retreat straight down the hall if she needed it.

She smiled at him and then reached out for the front door
knob. Rusted hinges squealed as she pulled at it. Moisture had swollen the wood
so that she had to pull hard. She wouldn’t be able to slam it closed fast, that
was for sure. Moving warily and keeping a hand on her gun, she checked the
veranda. The north end was clear, but when she checked the south end, she could
see a solid shadow moving among the dappled light created by an overgrown
trellis.

“Hunter?” she whispered. The shadow stopped.

“Silver?” Hunter moved toward a slice of moonlight that fell
across the veranda. “That you?” His voice sounded friendly, but he had his gun
pointed at her head.

“If you shoot me, I will find a way to come back and haunt
you to fucking death, Hunter. Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing?” Paige
fell back a step so she could use the door as cover. Brady moved closer to the
door, his lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Paige held up a hand toward him
palm out before he could move close enough for Hunter to see. She wished she
could just telepathically tell him to cool it because de-escalation was not a
skill he possessed. She wasn’t the best at it, but he just plain sucked.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Hunter’s eyes darted
around the house, checking all the potential ambush spots.

“Trying to not end up dead, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t
fucking shoot me.”

Hunter’s gun dropped a fraction of an inch, but he was still
prepared to pull the trigger. Paige could feel her palms sweating and Brady
practically vibrated with anger. “How did you get in that house?” he demanded.

“Oh I tracked down someone’s car.” Paige crossed her arms.
“And when I couldn’t find a certain someone, I thought he might be in trouble.
It turns out that creating a distraction near a vampire house is probably not
smart.” The last part was true. And if Hunter wanted to assume that the man she
was looking for was him, she wasn’t going to disagree. Not when he had a gun
pointed at her.

He pulled back a little. “You created a distraction?”

“Fireworks, sparkles, pretty little toys and hollow point
bullets. It was a pretty good distraction, if I do say so myself.”

“Okay.” Hunter said that slowly, as if he was trying to
process her words. “So how did you end up in the house?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. It might have something to do
with the hit to the back of my head and potential concussion.”

“They captured you.” His voice went flat and the weapon came
up again.

“Stop jumping to conclusions, Hunter. Well, actually the
conclusion where they captured me was right, but you’re assuming that I’m now a
demon. I’m not. However the two demons who were fighting over this house
created enough chaos for me to get out of my little basement prison.” She
rushed to tell a highly edited version of the truth.

“Two demons?” Hunter took another step closer, which would
seem to be a good sign, only the gun was still pointed at Paige’s head.

“A woman and a man,” Paige agreed. “There were more, but
they’re upstairs dead, and a human servant’s dead in the basement. That just
left me with a big mess of vamps outside and I really didn’t think I could make
a run for it.”

Hunter snorted. “You didn’t do half bad last time.” Shaking
his head, he dropped his weapon to his side. “Shit, woman, you are just a
walking, talking trouble magnet. I don’t know how you’ve managed to avoid a
good case of death.”

“If you start telling me how you like trouble magnets, I’m
going to knee you in the balls. I’ve had a very bad day,” Paige warned him.

With her hand hidden by the door, she gestured. Out of the
corner of her eye, she watched as Brady’s face contorted with anger. He shook
his head, but Paige gestured again. Brady fisted his hands and shook his head
more vehemently. Paige didn’t dare look his way. Hunter was too observant to
miss that kind of clue. So instead, she flipped Brady off and then gestured for
a third time for him to get out of sight.

From the thunderous expression she could see out of the
corner of her eye, she figured she’d be hearing about this later, but he fell
back into the drawing room. With the multiple doors, he could avoid Hunter
easily as long as he stayed downstairs and kept ahead of the man. No one needed
to die.

“You’ve had several bad days, Silver.” Hunter moved toward
the house and Paige fell back to allow him in the door. “So, any vampires
left?”

Paige shook her head without answering verbally. It was like
a half-lie. Hunter still hesitated at the threshold and Paige kept her own hand
near her weapon, so clearly there was more tension than either of them was
willing to acknowledge.

“I can’t believe you’re not dead. I mean, don’t get me wrong,
I’m happy about it. I just can’t believe it.” He gave her a good long look and
Paige let him. She was guessing that there were ways to tell if someone had
turned, even if the weak moonlight didn’t let him check her eyes. Eye color
would give Brady away in two seconds if any of his old friends saw him. That
and the fact he’d left six pints of blood behind in his apartment. No one could
survive that.

“Where’s your partner?” Paige asked.

Hunter chuckled. “He’s a trainee, not a partner, but he told
me you blew his cover.”

“He blew his own cover. Besides, it’s not like I stood in
the middle of the police department and accused him of being a vampire hunter.”
She might have threatened to do that, but she didn’t follow through.

Hunter gave her a long, amused look. “No, but the cops
aren’t too happy with him. He helped them catch their killer and they still
hate his guts. You see, their beloved fellow officer came up with this theory
that Monagas had a partner or a copycat. And then their beloved fellow officer got
in some pissing match with the profiler. And then their beloved fellow officer
vanished on them. You can see why the cops in this town are not throwing him a
parade. And Kent can’t exactly explain that you had a falling-out over
vampires.”

“So where is he?” Paige asked, refusing to get sidetracked.
Hunter threw out a lot of information and she was interested, but she wanted
her question answered first.