Midlife Demon Hunter: The Forty Proof Series, Book 3 Page 7

  I wrinkled my nose again. “You smell like”—I sniffed the air as if I were indeed scenting him, but a different smell caught my attention—“fresh grave dirt? Is that a thing? Because you smell like it.”

  Davin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you accusing me of?”

  I lifted both hands, turned, and walked into a cravat I’d seen earlier. Roderick looked down at me, his face a careful neutral, and the smell of whatever cologne he wore dispelled the odor of fresh grave dirt. I put a finger to his chest. “This guy smells good. You should ask him for his cologne. Or Corb. Corb’s cologne is also lovely.”

  “It’s because of what Corb is that he smells that way. No one can duplicate it,” Davin snapped. As if maybe he’d tried and failed? Yeah, I could see Davin trying to pull off Corb’s allure.

  I was about to ask just what he meant by that, but Roderick stopped me with a lifting of his hand. The third guy from earlier, the one who wasn’t a goblin, burst through the doorway leading to the stairwell. His eyes were wild with anger, and the intensity that rolled off him was enough to steal my breath. That had to be Bruce, the last council member Feish had named.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and not in a you’re so damn hot, my panties are on fire way. No. More in a holy crap what demon have you made a deal with to give you all that dark energy kind of way.

  I kept looking at him, but his face didn’t stick in my mind. Like from one second to the next, I couldn’t have told you what he looked like, only that he was there. “Who the hell is that?” I pointed at him, but Roderick and Davin ignored me.

  Roderick focused hard on me. “Where is your friend?”

  The words were spoken in a neutral tone, but they vibrated through my bones with a power that spoke of deep magic that even I, a relative newbie in some ways, could recognize. I gritted my teeth and looked up at him.

  “Mage?”

  He gave me a subtle nod. “One of the best.” No arrogance there at all. I tried to look at the third council guy, but again, his face seemed to slide away. Every instinct in me said to keep my eyes on that one, to try to pin him down.

  I gritted my teeth again as my eyes were drawn back to Roderick. “She didn’t like the feeling of the ghosts, so she left. Too cold. River maid.”

  “And yet you stayed?” Roderick’s words continued to knock through me like a tuning fork shaking the inside of my bones and turning them into jelly.

  I do not like this, Sam I am. I do not like Rod’s bing-bang-bam.

  Maybe I had a little bit of Dr. Seuss in me after all.

  “Working. Ghosts.” Whatever magic Roderick possessed, his power pulsed through me in a way that made the hair on my neck want to crawl off. That alone was reason enough for me to try to defy this macho crap and give him sideways answers.

  “On a ghost hunt?” he asked, and the power in his voice just about set me back on my ass. He frowned and shook his head. “Why are you fighting me?”

  “On principle,” I whispered. It was taking everything I had to keep my thoughts to myself. Except . . . was that even the right thing to do? Shouldn’t I tell the council about the vampire and the ghosts being afraid? Should I tell them what the Silver Lady had shown me?

  No. Somehow I knew I had to keep it to myself for now. They couldn’t know, or something bad would happen. Just like I couldn’t tell Crash.

  Secrets abounded, and I was keeping most of them.

  “She is difficult. I told you we should bring her in and let the council have a round at her,” Davin said. “She thinks she’s something special. But she’s nothing but a washed-up divorcee. She’s only here because she had nowhere else to go and nowhere to hide. I heard the bank has her address now. It won’t be long before they take everything, including that house of her gran’s. Terrible pity that, but once they have everything she owns, she’ll be forced to move on.”

  My eyes shot to him, his words slamming the final pieces of the puzzle into place. I was the queen of guessing, and I had a real doozy to drop. “You helped Alan, didn’t you?”

  His smile said it all and the rage that shot through me repulsed Roderick’s magic as if I’d taken a stick and walloped him a good knock to the noggin. He stumbled back from me. “Dav, I don’t think you should piss her off.”

  The third council member crept closer to Roderick. “What is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Roderick said.

  “She’s only got the knives that Crash gave her. And those won’t hurt me,” Davin sneered. “Fae magic is nowhere near as strong as that of a true mage. Shall I show you how it’s done, Roderick?”

  Roderick cleared his voice. “I don’t think you should push her. If you do, you’ll be dealing with something other than fae magic in the form of knives.”

  I didn’t even look at the other council members. All I could see was Davin offering Alan a deal that would free him from any debt, from his wife, from any responsibility whatsoever. A deal meant to destroy me.

  I clamped my hand around Davin’s wrist. He looked down at where I was hanging onto him.

  “Take your hand off me, hag.”

  “Hag?” I whispered the word as something within me clicked open wide like a treasure chest letting me see a hint of what I was capable of, a glimpse of the possible. I called the magic to me, feeling for the first time since I’d landed in Savannah that there was more to me than the “washed-up divorcee” some people like him saw. Gran had told me as much, but this was the moment I knew down to my bones it was true.

  The Silver Lady appeared behind Davin, solidifying until she looked as alive and real as I did. My rage appeared to be feeding her strength—lines of magic or maybe energy spooled between us, connecting us, as silvery as the name I’d given her.

  Roderick let out a low muttered curse and pinned himself against the far wall—apparently, he could see what I was doing. The third faceless one that still gave me the willies, even in this rage high, watched with great interest. I didn’t like the feelings that swirled around him, but he wasn’t my focus. Not today.

  The Silver Lady held her chin high, watching me and waiting for me to speak. “I think you should stay with him,” I said. “Keep him company. Don’t let him sleep. Let him know what a hag can truly do.”

  Her smile was slow and wicked, and I found myself answering it.

  Davin’s face paled as he yanked out of my hold. The Silver Lady put a hand on his shoulder and sunk into him. He shivered, and sweat broke out on his forehead that I was sure was cold as ice.

  “You will come before the council before the week is up,” said Roderick’s voice.

  I found myself giving him a mock curtsy. “I have no idea where you losers meet, so you’ll have to give me the address.”

  Davin shivered and jumped when he looked into the shadows of the hall. The lights flickered and the hallway went dark. He squealed, high-pitched like a little child. “Roderick, Bruce, get some light in here.”

  “You’re a mage, why don’t you turn your own damn light on?” I said, feeling the ghosts in the walls, knowing they were the ones messing with the lights.

  “Because that is not where his abilities lie,” Roderick said from within the dark hall. I assumed that Bruce was the one whose face was sliding all over the damn place.

  Roderick’s hand glowed a light purple, and flames prettier than they had any right to be lit his outstretched palm. His eyes turned to me. “I will come gather you for the meeting when they decide to speak with you. It was lovely to meet you, Breena O’Rylee, granddaughter of Celia.” Formal, he was being super formal, and I didn’t like it. Bruce said nothing, which I liked even less.

  Call me suspicious, but he was going to be trouble, Mr. You-can’t-see-my-face-no-matter-what-angle-you-look-at-me-with.

  “I would say it’s been a slice, but I’d rather not lie.” I stood there waiting while the three council members reached the stairwell and headed down, Roderick all but holding Davin together. Bruce stopped in the doorway to look at m
e.

  I put my hands on my hips. “What are you looking at, No Face?”

  He might have growled at me, but I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t see what the hell his face was doing. And then he was gone too.

  I didn’t ask why they didn’t take the elevator. Maybe they (correctly) assumed the ghosts had control of it. The second they stepped into the stairwell the hallway flooded with the ghosts that had been hiding in that one room.

  “I’ll be back,” I said to them. Because whatever the heck was going on was surely tied up with the ghosts in the Marshall House. I just had to find a way to discuss it with them. And I knew the person to ask how best to go about it.

  Louis from the Hollows Group was about to get a visit from me.

  8

  I hadn’t been to the cemetery where the Hollows Group trained since everything had gone down with the O’Seans. After I’d faced down O’Sean Senior (His first name had been Patrick. I’d learned that after I’d killed him). Since I’d sort of died and had come back after a chitchat with Robert as he would have been in life. Which meant I’d only been back once after the whole Sarge-firing-me-while-under-a-spell debacle.

  All in all, those were great reasons not to go back. But the thing was, Louis, the resident necromancer, was one of the mentors. If anyone could help me understand the whole ghost episode in the Marshall House, it was him. Maybe he’d even have some insight into the book of black spells. What was it with that line Silver moon is the time for the demon skin to be found, and bound, and used to be bidden?

  It circled around my brain in a way I didn’t like.

  At least, I was hoping Louis knew something. Because if he didn’t, I didn’t know where to turn to next.

  I patted my bag on my hip. I’d stopped back at Gran’s house to find Feish freaking out that she’d left me behind in a room full of ghosts.

  I’d calmed her quickly and suggested that perhaps she and Kinkly—who lived in the big oak tree out front—should stay in the garden and do some weeding even though it was after dark. Because I heard things going on upstairs.

  Jaysus lordy, Suzy and Eric were still going at it? I didn’t want to know. I really, really didn’t want to know.

  A small smile tripped over my lips as I imagined Gran walking in on them. Just floating through the wall like she was prone to do. Yeah, I was going to do some serious apologizing to my gran after this.

  I blinked and shook myself as I drew close to the cemetery gate that led into the Hollows. In the distance, I heard yelling, and my hand dropped to the knife strapped to my thigh. But the shouting was from Eammon, and it took me a moment to register that he was barking at the remaining recruits to move their sorry asses faster.

  That made me grin. I was oh-so-glad I didn’t have to do the run around the graveyard anymore. I mean, Suzy and I still worked out, but it was different and more suited to a woman’s body. We did cardio, sure, but we also did things like yoga for flexibility, climbing fences for obvious reasons, and exercises to increase our upper body strength. Not just running around a graveyard for miles and miles.

  I let myself in through the gate, and Robert popped up to my left, appearing as he so often did. “Hey, I thought you were going to stay at the house?” He’d already returned my bag when I’d checked in, so I figured he would stick behind with Kinkly and Feish. I still had Grimm’s pages and his family’s silver coin, so they were safe with me, for the moment.

  “Friend. Trouble,” he said as he swayed in time with my steps forward, his shoulder bumping mine here and there.

  “Great,” I mumbled, feeling the dull fatigue that had begun to eat at me. Really, you’d think that finding out that I was a quarter fae, plus half something else, courtesy of my father, would have given me some respite from things like body aches, fatigue, running on empty. Nope, not me.

  I felt as human as ever despite the whole seeing ghosts and such.

  I walked down the pathway to the center of the training ground. A massive tomb with a standing angel on top, one wing broken—not broken as in broken off, but actually carved broken and hanging limp from its back—marked the center of the Hollows’s training grounds.

  As I drew closer, Eammon was easier to spot. Being a leprechaun had its disadvantages and being invisible in a crowd of taller men was one of them.

  But he’d dragged up his waist-high stool from the interior of the tomb and stood on it in the grass, waving his fists about, making him taller than everyone else there. Something had put him in quite the rage.

  The other mentors were with him, standing back, letting him do his thing. Tom, the resident mage, saw me first. “Breena, what are you doing here?” He strode toward me and pulled me into a big hug. I hugged him back.

  “Couldn’t stay away. All these old guys are such a draw, am I right?” I grinned up at him, and he put his hands on my arms.

  “You look good, no more bullet holes?” His dark brown eyes were inquisitive as if the question wasn’t quite rhetorical. The hole in my leg from Sarge shooting up Eric’s cabin had healed to a tiny scar.

  “None today.” I shrugged. “But the day isn’t over.”

  Eammon flagged me over. “Come on, Bree. Don’t be shy. We’re all still friends even if we’re in direct competition, right, lass?”

  Oh. I hadn’t really thought of that. I shrugged. “I promise only to take the jobs you turn down, how about that?”

  Eammon gave me a sharp look and I smiled. Because the Hollows Group had scoffed at the job that had earned me the most money, and they’d flat out turned down the one that had secured my reputation in the shadow world.

  “Smart ass,” he muttered.

  “Short stack,” I threw back.

  Louis sniffed. “What are you doing here?”

  Corb smiled but I didn’t look at him. I would deal with him and his games later. “I actually came to talk to you, Louis. You game for a chat?”

  Louis startled and pressed a hand to his chest, fingers splayed wide. “Me? Why me?”

  “Are you not the resident necromancer? I need some help deciphering something to do with ghosts.” I wasn’t sure how much to tell him. Because he and Eammon were right. We might still be friends, but they were not obligated to help me, not one bit. “I can pay you for your time.” I did grin at that.

  Louis did not grin. “I am not some cheap whore peddling my wares.”

  “Expensive call girl?” I offered. “I’ve got twenty bucks with your name on it. Another twenty if you’re really good.” I couldn’t resist even though it was likely he’d spit on me now. The truth was I could already see that he’d say no, no matter what I offered.

  A string of curses in French were thrown my way and he bit his thumb at me. I rolled my eyes. “That’s an Italian move, isn’t it?”

  Louis stormed off and his trainee—Chad, if I remembered correctly—was right behind him, trailing his mentor closely. The thing was, when I was around Louis, there was no sense of the dead like there had been at the Marshall House. No sense of ghosts or anything . . . and then there was the fact that he couldn’t see Robert. I’d always thought that was strange. Shouldn’t a necromancer be able to see an undead skeleton? Hell, even Roderick could see Robert.

  I turned to look at Eammon. “Is he even a necromancer?”

  Eammon seemed as shocked by my question as by the possibility I raised. “Well, of course he is. He is one of the best—”

  I held up a hand. I’d learned recently that the Hollows wasn’t the well-regarded group I’d initially believed them to be. They were considered the duck-ups of Savannah. They only took on trainees not desirable to the more prestigious Savannah Council Enforcers or SCE. “Okay, fine. Maybe I’ll ask Annie.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” I frowned. “Annie’s one of the good ones.”

  Tom shook his head a second time. “She’s been off lately and been downright mean with a few patrons. Not like her, but something has her o
n edge, so just steer clear would be my suggestion.”

  Beside Tom, Corb gave the slightest nod. “I agree with him, steering clear of Annie if you can would be best, at least until someone talks some sense into her.”

  Well, so much for that idea. I was disappointed. Annie was one of the few people I would’ve liked to have known better.

  “All righty then. I’ll find someone else to talk to. Nice to see you all. Come by for tea sometime.”

  I turned my back on them and started back the way I’d come, stopping after a few feet because a rather large handsome man hurried to get in front of me.

  “Sarge. How’s the leg doing?”

  His golden eyes swept downward as he looked at his feet. “I am so, so sorry I tried to kill you, Breena. You have to believe me. And I won’t stand in the way of you and Corb getting together. I—”

  I put a hand up. “Sarge, stop it. That spell wreaked havoc on everyone, not just you.” Also I didn’t know what to say to him about Corb. No. That wasn’t true. I did have something to say. “Besides, I know Corb was just getting close to me to use me—Davin said so himself. None of it was real.” I winked up at Sarge. “We’re all good, okay?” A sigh of relief slid out of him, and I patted his massive bicep as I strode past him. “But you owe me.”

  He grunted as if I’d punched him in the belly. “That’s it?”

  I shrugged and kept walking. “That’s it.”

  In the shadow world, favors were as good a currency as money or gold. And a favor from a werewolf couldn’t be a bad thing as far as I was concerned.

  I made my way to the gate, Robert swaying to my left. He collapsed at my feet, and I scooped up the finger bone and tucked it between my boobs.

  Might as well give some man a thrill, even if he was a skeleton.

  Corb caught up with me just as I reached the gate. I saw him from the corner of my eye and slipped through the iron rods so we had that between us.

  He put his hands on the bars. “Hey. Are we still on for tomorrow?”

  I shook my head, snorting. “No, I don’t think so. I ran into Davin earlier, and he let spill that you’ve been using me. I think I’ll pass on anything else with you beyond professional courtesy.”