Demon's Hunger

Book 2: Compact of Sorcerers

by Eve Silver

Genres: Fantasy Romance; Paranormal Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

The Compact of Sorcerers, a brotherhood sworn to protect the wall between the human and demon realms, is thrust into battle with an unseen evil that threatens to destroy them all...

Forensic anthropologist Vivien Cairn fears she's losing her mind. Her libido has kicked into overdrive, and she's blacking out, leaving hours of her life unaccounted for and no memory of where she's been or what she's done. But when a sexy stranger rescues her from a demon attack, Vivien realizes there's more than just her sanity at stake.

A seductive killer is luring victims, and Sorcerer Dain Hawkins finds himself walking a dangerous line between ancient duty and sizzling desire when the brotherhood--and Vivien herself--begins to suspect that her mysterious symptoms may connect her to the crimes. Can Dain save Vivien from the evil that threatens to claim her? Or will they both succumb to...

Demon's Hunger

Release date: November 7, 2008

Publisher: Forever

Print pages: 368

Sample

Prologue

FROM THE SHADOWS, GAVIN JOHNSTON WATCHED THE play of expressions cross the girl’s face as she struggled to stay awake. He knew what thoughts tugged at her through the haze, knew that the alley spun and darkened as she struggled to focus, shape and form dancing beyond her grasp.

He’d tried three of the common drugs on himself first, just so he’d know what it was like. GHB, Rohypnol, ketamine. Rohypnol turned blue when he dropped the pills in liquid, which made it less than ideal for his use.

He liked GHB best. No odor. No color. He’d used it on a dozen women in recent months. The last one had died. Not his fault. She’d choked on her own vomit.

The girl on the ground moaned as her head lolled to the side. Her eyes moved slowly from left to right. She must be wondering what she was doing out here. Or perhaps she was too far gone for that.

Did she remember staggering to the bathroom? Did she remember that he’d looped her arm across his shoulders and half carried her out the back door to the alley, where he’d laid her down by the Dumpster beneath the dark night sky?

The rancid stink rising from the Dumpster slapped him. She must have smelled it, too, because she tried to roll away but managed only to shift from her side to her back before her body betrayed her.

He smiled, finding humor in her distress. Did she wonder how she’d gotten so drunk on only a single glass of wine? Or did she realize that he had put something in her drink?

Her eyes opened, drifted shut, opened again, then focused on him. She was pretty. Very pretty. Olive skin. Dark hair, sleek and smooth, fanning out against the ground. Great body, encased in a tight little skirt and low-cut top. No bra.

“Are you woozy, pretty girl?” he asked with a nasty laugh, knowing she was. Enjoying the fact that she was weak and vulnerable.

Earlier tonight, he’d been the weak one. Vulnerable. He’d been the one tormented.

It had been a mistake, allowing himself to be in that position, but this was his opportunity to remedy that, his chance to be strong.

The bare bulb over the bar’s back door cast a yellow circle of light, and he had no liking for that. Grabbing her under her armpits, he dragged her along the pavement into the shadows. A quick glance up and down the alley confirmed they were completely alone.

Hunkering down beside her, he stroked her hair back from her face. She stared up at him, her eyes wide, and for a moment, they looked far too lucid for his taste. Then her lids drifted shut, and he relaxed.

He undid the button of his jeans, then the zipper, metal sliding over metal with a dull rasp.

The girl’s eyes flicked open, pinned him with a hard, cold gaze, dark and glittering. Fever bright.

He froze, the first lick of unease touching him like the flicker of a flame.

“Don’t stop now,” she whispered, her lips curving to reveal animal-white teeth as she dropped her gaze to his crotch.

Whoa. Gavin’s thoughts slammed into each other. She shouldn’t be speaking. The drug . . . She shouldn’t be able to speak—

“I told you not to stop,” she murmured.

The air around her shimmered, like heat rising off pavement. He caught glimpses of talons and incredibly long teeth, and he jerked back, suddenly afraid that he’d accidentally given the drug to himself.

Unease turned to icy fear, even though he couldn’t say why. She was just a girl, a drugged girl, lying on the cold ground. Only, she was something more, something . . . dark. His heart slammed against his ribs, and his blood pounded hard in his ears.

What the hell? What the fucking hell?

He wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. He wanted to get up and run. But his muscles wouldn’t obey him, and, against his will, his hands stayed on the open fly of his jeans.

All he could do was kneel by her side as she reached for him, escalating fear congealing in his gut. All he could do was gasp as she tore his shirt open from neck to hem, then tore his skin, her nails raking him, leaving four deep furrows on his chest.

With a low hum of pleasure, she brought her bloodied fingers to her mouth, licked them clean.

Her teeth . . . What the hell was with her teeth?

She wasn’t human. He could see that now. Oh, God, she wasn’t human.

He was going to be sick. The fear inside him kindled and swelled until it grew to a roaring blaze.

He was still on his knees at her side, and he swayed, dizzy with fear and horror, desperate to get up and run, to be anywhere but here. Only, his limbs wouldn’t do what he told them, wouldn’t obey the commands of his brain.

“Not a very nice feeling, is it?” she asked, her voice so incredibly sexy, making him hard even through his terror. And that frightened him even more, until all he knew was the great crashing waves of his panic.

She kept talking, low murmurs of encouragement and reassurance. With a smile, she struck, her fingers curled like talons. Pain rocked him, sharp and deep.

At first, he thought she’d punched him.

The breath whooshed out of him in a quick exhale. He doubled over, feeling as though not just his breath was dragged from him, but his life, in one great, sucking pull.

He looked down. Stared at his belly in mute horror.

She hadn’t punched him.

Blood spurted over her wrist, her forearm. His gut was ripped open, her hand inside him. Inside him. His head jerked up, and he looked into the swirling depths of her too-black eyes.

Wrenching agony exploded inside him.

Rearing up, she cupped her free hand against the base of his skull, pressed her mouth to his, and swallowed his agonized screams.



Chapter One



HE WAS ALONE, HORNY, AND IN POSSESSION OF A PARtially scorched demon bone. Perfect.

Only the last of the three problems was new, but it sure wouldn’t provide a solution for the previous two.

Dain Hawkins raked his fingers through the shaggy layers of his dark hair and gave a low, mordant laugh. Moon-spun purple shadows and pale gray light sliced across his denim-clad thigh, then fanned along the row of brick, stucco, and marble vaults of New Orleans’s oldest cemetery. St. Louis #1.

He crouched, waiting, hidden by the white Greek- revival tomb at his side—the voodoo queen’s tomb. It was covered in small x’s drawn there for luck and festooned with the offerings of the faithful: votives, flowers, hoodoo money—coins left to buy favors.

But Dain wasn’t here for voodoo magic tonight. As a sorcerer, he didn’t need that kind of help.

He was here for hybrids, brutish creatures that had been human once. Faced with death, they had chosen to allow demon will to overtake their souls, to become slavish minions of the Solitary, a malevolent demon of immeasurable power that wanted only to cross the wall between dimensions and turn the human realm into his own personal feeding farm.

Dain smiled mirthlessly. Not while he breathed.

The air was crisp with a hint of winter chill. He smelled the faintest trace of brimstone, sensed the ripple of evil that hung over the graveyard, a fetid mist.

Yeah, he’d come to the right place.

He rose, the material of his long black coat flowing behind him, an undulating shadow. Walking to the end of the row, he turned and moved on through the city of the dead. Some rows were straight, some twisted, and still others led to blind ends in a tangled maze of family tombs: miniature houses for the dead, complete with low iron fences. Many tombs had been restored since the hurricane; others still bore their crumbled corners, decimated by time and storm, jutting out like barren bones.


Bones. Dain’s lips twisted. He was here for more than the hybrids. He was here because of the blackened bone that sat heavily in the pocket of his long coat, burning through the layers of cloth and into his skin like a brand. He hated the feel of it, the revolting aura that was so strong it sucked the breath from his lungs. Demon stink and terrible demon power clung to it.

Weeks past, Dain’s contemporary, Ciarran D’Arbois, had slammed shut a portal between the demon realm and the dimension of man, and in so doing had maimed the Solitary. The demon’s foot had been severed when the door closed, leaving the powerful demon trapped in the pit that had spawned it. Dain had found all that remained in the human realm—a single burnt and blackened bone that carried vestiges of horrific, dark magic.

Since that night, he’d kept the thing locked away in a vault in his home, but he’d dared not leave it unattended while he came to New Orleans. Still, he wondered if he was crazy to carry it about.

Choices, choices. No one to trust but himself. That lesson had been hard learned.

Reflected in the smooth surface of a puddle were the outline of a cross and the round bright shape of the moon. Dain looked up at the top of a nearby vault, at the cross there, and at the statue of the weeping woman on the tomb next to it. His booted feet scattered the reflections as he walked on.

He made no effort to hide his progress. Let them hear him. He was spoiling for a fight, had been for weeks, ever since the night the Solitary had almost crossed over. That night, Dain had learned that the Ancient—the oldest and most powerful of the Compact of Sorcerers—had betrayed them, choosing to ally with the demons. The Ancient had been his mentor, his friend.

Now, his enemy.

Following instinct, Dain navigated the maze of vaults and low iron fences. At length, he came upon a wider space with a lone, black tomb, brick and plaster torn open to reveal a musty, gaping hole. An old rotting casket had been dragged out into the moonlight, the lid ripped off; around it crowded a half-dozen hybrids, casting long, menacing shadows.

Their clothing was stained, mottled, heavy with the metallic scent of fresh blood. Dain could tell they had fed recently. Not on the long-decomposed remains from the casket. No, they had hunted and killed before coming here to the cemetery. Hybrids liked their prey alive. Their meat bloody.

And human.

It was the only thing that offered even a temporary relief from the endless physical pain of their existence—a small matter that the demons invariably failed to mention when they tempted the dying to become hybrid.


With narrowed eyes, Dain studied the group. They had no idea he was here. Normally, they would have sensed the herald of his light magic long before this, but the malevolent power of the charred bone was so great it obscured much. Hell, he was slathered so thick with the demon aura, they probably mistook his presence as just another of their own.

A valuable stealth tool.

Problem was, he was having trouble sensing them, as well. The longer he carried the bone on his person, the more inured he became, less attuned to the current of demon magic. A danger, to be sure, but one that could not be avoided. Hybrids were robbing graves all over the world without subtlety or discretion, but with what Dain suspected was a definite plan. Until he figured out what the hell was going on, the scorched demon bone wasn’t going anywhere without him.

Yeah, him and his bone, inseparable.

Hanging in the shadows, Dain clenched his teeth, battling the urge to call his full power and step into the circle of hybrids. While a fight might relieve his tension, it wouldn’t get him answers. He’d wait and watch just a little longer. Whatever the hybrids were after, it had something to do with the Solitary—and with rotted human corpses.

With a high cackling laugh, one of the hybrids yanked something from the open casket before him: a bony forearm and hand, stripped of flesh by years and inevitable decay, held together by fragile remnants of desiccated tissue. Dangling from the moldered fingers was a tattered and rotting cloth pouch.

Frowning, Dain stepped closer. A voodoo gris-gris? A charm bag buried with the dead?

Whatever was in that pouch had demon stink all over it. The damned bone in his pocket heated, the sensation burning, bright and hot, through his coat and jeans and into the skin and muscle of his thigh. Evil called to evil.

The hybrids were after that charm bag, which meant he was, too.

Dain stepped forward into the moonlight. One of the hybrids jerked its head back and spun to face him.

So much for the covert approach.

The thing lunged with a feral cry. In a smooth execution of movement, Dain tucked, rolled, and rose, avoiding the attacking creature, coming up next to the one that held the gris-gris. He plucked the cloth bag from the hybrid’s grasp. It was red velvet, stitched with red thread.

Old. Very old. Bound by spells to protect the contents and stave off decay in the moist heat of New Orleans. Dain felt rank evil ooze from the small bag and into his hand’s flesh and bone. The continuum, the dragon current—an endless river of energy that flowed between dimensions—shifted and writhed in protest of the unnatural disruption in balance.

With a howl, the hybrid he’d robbed swiped at him, a rake of clawed fingers. Dain jerked aside, shoved the pouch into his pocket—the one that didn’t hold the demon bone—and leaped back so he was at the edge of the open space, a tomb at his back.

The hybrids advanced on him in a loose semicircle.

Dain called up a little more of his power, enough to let the hybrids sense his magic, let them know for certain that he was a light sorcerer. That was his warning to them, his single offer of reprieve. They could flee and he would not chase them, or they could attack and he would cut them down.

They hesitated, confused by the impossible mix of light magic and demon aura that clung to him, darkness oozing from the scorched bone that had become his constant companion.

He conjured a six-foot staff of acacia wood, ancient, deadly, and he waited.

Snarling, the closest hybrid fell on him like a rabid dog. Declining to summon more of his magic, Dain fought, preferring for now the physical release of punch and thrust and kick, even when they piled on him, six-to-one.

Claws sank into his chest, raking deep, and a fist to the jaw rocked his head back. He gave as he got, a jab with his staff, and then he tossed it high in the air, twisted a hybrid’s head from its neck, and snapped out his hand to catch his staff on the descent, his fingers slick with black blood.

The hybrid’s remains bubbled and hissed and, finally, disintegrated in a stinking gray sludge.

Another hybrid moved into the place of the first. Dain let emotion take him, rage and pain at the Ancient’s betrayal, the memory of his mentor’s treachery still cutting as sharp as a finely honed blade. Grief was there, too, and a centuries-old hatred of demons and their ilk, feeding his actions until there was a thick morass of bubbling ooze at his feet.

A single hybrid backed away, the only one left standing. It stood shivering, frozen in terror, then fell to its knees before him. Dain stared at it, chest heaving. The charred bone in his pocket heated with a gruesome energy, a forbidden magic, and the continuum writhed at the insult.

Temptation wheedled through him, and with it came a foreign and ugly craving for just one more kill.


Kill, kill, kill.


That was new.

What the hell was wrong with him?

The bone, the goddamned demon bone.

Well, it would be disappointed if it wanted to lure him to the dark side. Sorcerers were guardians, not indiscriminate murderers.

Pressing a hand to the deep gouges that scored his chest, Dain spat blood. He was breathing heavily, and his pulse pounded a hard beat in his ears.

“Go,” he snarled, and the hybrid didn’t wait for a second invitation. It scrabbled back like a crab, then rolled and stumbled to its feet, weaving as it ran through the graveyard, the sound of its footsteps echoing hollowly.

Standing in the roadway, Vivien Cairn watched the taillights of her mother’s rental car grow smaller and smaller in the distance. She took the first easy breath she’d had in days. Why had she imagined that moving entire time zones away would alter her mother’s schedule?

Araminta arrived like clockwork, three times a year: one visit on Vivien’s birthday, one visit on Halloween (no explanation for that particular date, but Vivien had long ago ceased pondering the strange workings of her mother’s mind), and one visit on the anniversary of the day Vivien’s father had walked out. She would call a half hour before her arrival on Vivien’s doorstep, and then she would simply appear, her straight dark hair bobbed to her chin, perfectly dyed and trimmed, her thin lips radiating her disapproval, her lush figure and gorgeous face never showing any signs of age.

They never discussed it, but Vivien couldn’t imagine her mother surviving in a time before Botox. At least, she assumed it was Botox, because Araminta held on to her youth with amazing tenacity. She looked young enough to be Vivien’s sister.

Rubbing her knuckles lightly along her breastbone, Vivien sighed in half relief, half regret. This visit had ended with the exact sentiment that every such visit had ended with for the past fifteen years.

“Vivien,” her mother had said moments ago, taking her daughter’s hands in a firm grip. Her eyes had been narrow and intent as she tipped her head back a little and studied Vivien under the overhead porch light, her voice ringing with the hollow echo of vast disappointment and despair. “You are your father’s daughter in every sense. There is nothing of me in you. Nothing.”

Vivien Cairn—BSc, MSc, PhD, assistant professor of Anthropology at UTM (University of Toronto at Mississauga), currently on sort-of sabbatical—was the bane of her mother’s existence.

“And why did you do this to your hair?” Araminta had reached up and flicked the edges of Vivien’s spiky new cut.

“I cut it. It’s easier this way.”

After a paralyzing moment where Vivien had considered physically moving her mother into the car, Araminta had heaved a weighty sigh, the sort of sigh that meant that a nuclear holocaust was about to fall upon unsuspecting humanity. Then with a perfunctory kiss to Vivien’s cheek, which Vivien had dutifully stooped to accept, Araminta had turned and left. Thank God.

There was something to be said for routine.

Now, the red taillights winked and disappeared completely as the road was swallowed by the night, and Vivien walked back toward the house.

At the bottom of the stairs, she slowed, glanced about, the winter air cutting through her sweater. Unease crawled through her like a centipede.

She continued up the stairs, then paused on the porch and wrapped her arms around herself. Turning slowly, she scanned the yard, her pulse speeding up just a little.

Something felt wrong. There was no particular reason for the chill that touched her or for the uncomfortable wriggling low in her gut, but instinct whispered that she was not alone.

For weeks, she’d been feeling off. As though unseen eyes watched her from the shadows. It was crazy. She knew that. There wasn’t actually anyone there. She’d even had a friend, Paul Martinez—an officer who’d worked with her on the ostrich farm case—stomp through the trees with her, searching for signs of hidden watchers. They’d found nada. Zip. Zilch. But they’d done it in the daylight. Maybe that was the difference.

Not for the first time, Vivien wondered what had possessed her to buy this relic of a house on Sideroad Sixteen, where her nearest neighbor was a tree farmer five miles up the road and where the road itself was an unpaved stretch of dirt with row upon row of tree-farm trees on one side and an endless field of six-foot-high uncut grass on the other.

She’d wanted privacy, and she’d definitely got it.

Pulling the front door closed behind her, she turned the dead bolt, locking out the night. She took off her sweater, hung it on a peg, and chose a red lollipop from the bowl on the entry-hall table. Popping it in her mouth, she savored the tangy sweetness and continued down to the basement. The overhead lights were bright, her work table clean and tidy, with six very old red velvet bags and their contents arranged in clear containers, lined neatly side by side.

Though she knew perfectly well the contents of each and every pouch, she washed her hands and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, ready to examine things she had looked at innumerable times. It wasn’t a mere urge; it was a compulsion. Great. She wasn’t just imagining people watching her; she was starting to show signs of OCD. She sighed. What was next? Washing her hands fifty times a day? Checking the stove in triplicate before she believed she’d turned it off?

She reached for the first bag, the one from her father, one of the three things she had to remind her that she’d ever had a father. He had left her with a threadbare red velvet bag, a single photo of a tall handsome man with mahogany-brown hair and hazel eyes just like hers, and a cold and bitter mother who had never gotten over the fact that he’d walked out on her and their two-year-old daughter, never to be seen or heard from again. At least, Vivien assumed that bitterness was the motivator for her mother’s behavior.

The sins of the fathers . . . Araminta had never forgiven the daughter.

Not that her mother didn’t love her. She did. In her own really special, controlling, eternally disappointed kind of way. And it wasn’t that Vivien didn’t love her mother. She did, in a thank-heaven-she-visits-only-three-times-a-year kind of way.

They got along fine over the phone. E-mail was even better.

Vivien ran her index finger along the worn velvet. With its contents of salt, red pepper, colored stones, and bones, the bag resembled a voodoo gris-gris. But the bones themselves were far older than the cloth. A puzzle. There were other things she’d found in the bag: hair, desiccated skin fragments. Definitely a charm bag of some sort. And her father had left it for her. The why of that nagged at her more and more of late.

Leaning forward, she studied the bones, let herself slide into the cool familiarity of anthropologist mode. Phalanges: finger bones. Very old. Human. Three of them, all from the same finger. There was a deep slash across the middle phalanx, as though a blade had hacked at it.

Each of the bags she had acquired through the years had similar contents. Different colored stones. Different bones: fragments of a twelfth rib; a second cervical vertebra broken into three pieces; a fragmented fifth lumbar vertebra; three cuneiforms from the right foot, two of which bore slashes from what appeared to be the same instrument that had marked the finger bone. All the bits and parts had come from the same person. A male.

Who? Why? How had his skeletal remains ended up scattered over the globe in little red velvet sacks?

And why did she keep stumbling across them?

She’d found one in a head shop on Queen Street years ago when she’d first moved to Toronto. It had been in the display window, a small red velvet bag sewn with red thread. She recalled how she’d stopped dead in her tracks, amazed, determined to buy the thing, because it was an exact match for the one her dad had left for her. Then she’d unearthed one in a shop in New Orleans—she’d been in town for a four-day conference. One in Paris—again, a conference. The shop owner had insisted that the bag came from an aristocrat, a confidante of Marie Antoinette, a woman who’d clutched the bag as she was guillotined. The story was gruesome. Maybe the shopkeeper had thought it would up the price.

Another from London from a tiny little store that had smelled like old books and rot. That bag had carried the dubious distinction of having been owned by a victim of Jack the Ripper. Supposedly.

The most recent bag had come to her just last week, in the mail, delivered in a plain brown paper package with no distinctive labels and no return address. Its arrival had creeped her out. She couldn’t think of anyone who knew she collected these bags, certainly no one who would send one to her anonymously.

Icy fingers skittered over her skin, and she shuddered, set down the bones, and rose to turn a slow circle. Not alone. Not alone. The certainty was so strong, but no one was there. The room spun, and Vivien steadied herself against the side of the table. Her eyes stung, and she felt an overwhelming fatigue, soul-deep, a frozen ache.

Pressing her fist against her forehead, she took a slow breath. Maybe she needed food. Her mother’s visits always decimated her appetite, and she’d barely eaten over the past couple days.. . .