Blood Magic by Laken Cane

Chapter Seventeen

Halfway back to the office I realized I’d forgotten to ask Bastien if he knew what had happened to Brenda Ferguson. I hoped she was still alive, but if she wasn’t, maybe he could at least tell me where to find her body. Her husband and mother needed to know.

So I texted him, even though the mere thought of sending a text to a vampire made me angry all over again.

Brenda Ferguson. Do you know if she’s still alive?

He texted back quickly. I do not know her, but I will find out.

I didn’t bother sending a thanks. Asshole owed me. Also, I blamed him for showing me that underground club and what it held. I had been naïve. Or maybe I’d just refused to consider something I knew had to be true.

“This has been fun,” Remy said, “but I believe I’ll take it from here. I don’t investigate. I find killer vampires, and I kill them. I’m going to start with that Bastien freak.”

I figured he was lying. He had a reputation he wanted to uphold in the supernatural community—he had to keep the monsters scared, after all—but if he really went after any nonhuman he came across, Bastien would already be dead. And there wasn’t a bouncer alive who could have kept Remy out of Scarlett’s.

I did believe he’d go to Alexandria and attempt to find the vampires who’d killed his sister. But I didn’t want them dead—not yet. I needed to get to the bottom of the mind-control. Could only certain vampires do it? Was it a technology they’d created? Who were the ones involved? And most importantly, could I destroy it?

I believed Axton was keeping it to himself as much as possible. He wanted to be the one in power, and he did not want to share that with any other vampire. That was my hope, anyway. The fewer who understood how to use such a power, the better.

“Don’t be hunting and killing just yet,” I told Remy. “I need to know who created this mind-control shit first. They are the ones who need to be wiped out.”

He didn’t reply.

And before we could drop him at his car, the detective called. I answered immediately, my heart beginning to thump. I thought I’d probably always associate Rick Moreno’s phone calls with the demon who wanted to own me.

I was right to.

“Kait,” he said, his voice strained and a little too loud, probably because of all the screams, shouts, and gunshots in the background, “the demon is at the station. Get here as fast as you can. He’s going from one person to the other, and—” There was a loud crack, and I figured he’d dropped his phone. He was back in seconds. “Get here fast, Kait. I don’t know what you can do, or if you can do anything…”

“Hold on, Rick. I’m five minutes away.” I ended the call and gave Joe the location. “Kick it, Joe. There’s a demon I need to kill. Remy, you want dropped here?”

“Fuck that. I want some demon action.”

“You may soon regret that decision. He’s a real son of a bitch.”

“So am I, Kait.”

That was the truth. “Tonight,” I said grimly, “I’m going to end this fucker once and for all.” The tour of Scarlett’s had shored up some bad energy inside me, and there was no better way to work it off than on the demon.

The familiar joy for a fight began to grow inside me, and by the time we reached the police station, I was vibrating with eagerness. Remy took note. I opened the back of my car and began to load up on items, buckling on belts and sheaths, filling pockets and loops with holy water, spirit traps, and charms, shaking with impatience.

When I looked up from my stash, both Remy and Joe were watching me—Joe with a carefully blank face, and Remy with more of a cold curiosity. He didn’t quite believe that I was a hunter, or that I could walk into the building and fight and kill a demon boss, but he saw by the look in my eyes that I was…

“A stone-cold killer,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”

I paused as I slipped an extra blade into an empty sheath, and looked at him, a little surprised.

“Like recognizes like,” he murmured, and there was the barest hint of admiration in his voice.

Rick jogged to the car to meet us—unfortunately the area was already crowded with police, reporters, and bystanders who’d apparently heard that something crazy was going on at the station.

“Tell me,” I said.

He gave both Joe and Remy a quick once over, missing nothing with his experienced cop’s stare. “He came in an hour ago, but he was quiet and slippery. I didn’t know what was happening or I’d have called you sooner. He’s tearing through the place, shooting, killing…” He ran his hand over his face. I’d never seen him so rattled and honestly, it scared me a little. “These are my friends, Kait.”

I handed him a chain from which dangled a rather large, ugly piece of metal.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Anti-possession,” I said, then gave one to Joe. “I’d rather you both wait outside.” Neither one of them bothered to reply. I looked at Remy. “You good?”

“I am.”

I nodded. I figured he’d gotten inked up a long time ago. “Let’s go kick demon ass.”

Rick grabbed my arm. “He wants you, Kait. Be careful. If he takes you, is there anything at all I can do to bring you back?”

I jerked my chin at Remy. “If he takes me, get with Remy. He’ll know what to do.”

Remy said nothing. He knew as well as I did that if the demon took me, there wasn’t shit anyone could do. I just didn’t want the detective to know that.

We ran across the parking lot and though I let fear lend me some adrenaline, I didn’t let it rule me. I’d trained for moments like this my entire life. I lived for moments like this, truth be told. Maybe that made me crazy, but that was who I was.

Good thing, too, or else I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Demons were fucking terrifying.

“Joe,” I said, “try to get people out of the building.”

“How will I know one of them isn’t the demon?”

“Because the demon is exactly where he wants to be. He’s not going to run out the door.”

He nodded.

Reporters attempted to talk to us, but what few policemen were on the outside were keeping the bystanders as far away as they could, and we completely ignored them.

I had two spirit traps, and I tossed Remy one of them and a piece of white chalk. “While I’m keeping him occupied, do what you can to draw a trap.” Then I tossed him a bag of salt. He’d know what to do with it.

The best-case scenario would be trapping the demon in one of the spirit traps, but if we could get him inside a drawn trap, at least that would neutralize him until I could pull him into the demon’s jar. The salt was a great option—if Remy got a chance to use it.

The demon was having a good old time. He hadn’t faded at all—he’d stayed quiet long enough to grow stronger, and I didn’t want to think about how he might have gained in power. He leaped from body to body—as soon as he left one, that person fell to the floor, unconscious. Cops were trying to shield themselves behind desks, their guns drawn, but the demon simply made them shoot each other.

No one knew what was happening or why their fellow cops were turning on each other. One of the possessed cops, a small, dark-haired woman, was currently pointing her gun at another cop.

“Jen,” he cried, his hands in the air, “I’m your partner. Don’t do this.”

But Jen couldn’t hear him.

“Stop,” I yelled. “You want me? I’m here, asshole.”

Jen jerked around to face me, grinning, her body riddled with bullets. Jen was dead, but the demon was keeping her body moving. I hoped he stayed inside Jen, because I didn’t want to shove my demon blade into whatever living human he jumped into next. I was pretty sure that demon or not, that would be frowned upon.

“And there she is,” the demon said, his voice so thick and full of broken glass that it was hard to understand him. “There’s my baby.” He dropped his stare to the blade in my hand and one of Jen’s eyes never came back up. “And there’s my blade.”

I curled my lip. I took a step closer to him, then another. “You can’t take me without the blade. So I guess you’re going to have to wrestle me for it.”

“I can do that, little girl. I can do that.”

The station was hushed, now, but there were still sobs and the occasional moan and cry for help. I heard Joe urging victims out the door, and the swish of wheels as paramedics slipped into the building.

I didn’t take my stare from the demon. This ended here tonight. One way or the other. I could’ve sacrificed myself for the good of the world. To keep more people from getting killed, I could have given myself to him. But I just wasn’t that good of a person. My wolf was clamoring to get out. She wanted to rip into him, eat him, kill him. But he could not be killed. Not that way.

I dragged the knife down my arm, and when it tasted my blood, the blade became so hot it would have burned me had I touched it. Smoke curled up from the edge, and the power of it slid through the handle, and up my arm. I could kill him with this blade. I just had to stick it into Jen’s dead body.

But he wasn’t going to let me get close enough for that. With my left hand, I gripped the spirit trap. I was seriously thinking about throwing the blade, but there was so much at stake, I panicked. I lost my confidence. If he got the blade, it was over.

And if I threw that blade, he would have Jen’s cold dead hands on it before I could move. Maybe it wouldn’t kill him before I could control him. Maybe it wouldn’t kill him before he took me. So I panicked.

Shit.

Maybe he saw something in my eyes. Maybe he saw me shrink with fear. For whatever reason, he came at me. Hard and fast. I didn’t have time to think, and that was a good thing. I just reacted. He drew back Jen’s fist as he flew at me, and I ducked, then came up under the blow, and slid the knife into Jen’s belly. I was off the mark, and I knew it. I would have to get her in the heart, because even though it wasn’t his heart, it was the heart that had to feel the magic. With every bit of strength that I had, I brought the knife up slicing it through bone and cartilage, and just before I reached the heart, he grabbed my wrist.

“Give me my blade,” he whispered. “Give me my blade so I can go home. Please. Little wolf. Let me go home.”

He had as much desperation as I did, and that made him strong, even though being here in my world for so long had weakened him.

I said nothing, just ground my teeth and put every bit of strength that I possessed into hanging on to that knife.

“I can tell you a secret,” he promised. “I can tell you a lot of secrets.”

“Secrets won’t do me any good in hell.”

He leaned forward. “Secrets about you, little girl.”

In the end, I won. I shoved the knife through his heart, and I could feel him in there. I could feel the end of him. The body dropped to the floor and then Remy was there, shoving the spirit trap against the dead cop’s mouth. In seconds, it turned black. It began to violently alternate between black and green, looking as though the demon was struggling. And he was.

I grabbed a tiny jar from its loop, and leaving the knife in the dead woman’s chest, I shoved the jar against the demon trap. Inside the jar was a charm. The tiny glass had been spelled by an old witch a long time ago. It suctioned the demon inside it eagerly, and red smoke splattered against its walls. I forced the cork back into the top of the jar, shoved it into my pocket, and then leaned down to pull my knife from the dead woman’s heart.

That might’ve been the end of it, but more cops ran into the building, saw me leaning over with a hand on the knife embedded in the dead cop’s chest, and they thought I was killing her. They thought I was killing her, so they shot me. At least, one of them did.

It felt like someone hit me in the back with a baseball bat, and for a few minutes, all I could do was lie on the floor and try to breathe. People were screaming once again, men were shouting, then the room was full of people.

It was chaos. Pure chaos.

I didn’t pass out, but I couldn’t move. Remy leaned over me. “Damn, Kait.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked.

But suddenly, Bastien replaced Remy. I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t, but the vampire picked me up and ran from the room—though ran was the wrong word. One second we were in the room, and the next we weren’t.

Somewhere in the middle of the dark field, he laid me down and undressed me, then stood back, waiting for me to shift. It was the only way I could heal myself.

And even though someone was watching, a vampire was watching, I called my wolf. She would save me, though I wasn’t sure how any of what had happened was going to be explained to the humans.

I guess I would just have to leave that up to the detective. He’d figure something out.

He always did.