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  Knowing he couldn’t avoid Damon’s call, he finally hit the talk button and pressed the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

  “Father O’Reilly called. Someone needs you,” Damon said without so much as a hello. Cold and straight-to-the-point, as always. He wasn’t one to fool around with pleasantries, especially where the Execution Underground was concerned.

  “What’s the address?” David asked.

  “South side of the city. Almost out in the suburbs.” Damon rattled off the info.

  David quickly committed the address to memory, pulled out the keys to the Super Glide and mounted his bike. “What’s the situation?”

  “A woman from O’Reilly’s parish called him,” Damon said. “She’s certain her husband is possessed by the devil. The Father heard her scream, and then there was a gurgling followed by...nothing.”

  “Poor old bastard was probably scared shitless.” David shoved back the bike’s kickstand with the heel of his boot and jammed his key into the ignition.

  “There’s a meeting tonight. Come here once you’re finished.”

  “Anything else?” David asked.

  Damon hesitated before he said, “You know I don’t agree with your theory that there are going to be more murders, but O’Reilly said to tell you the family had an infant.”

  “Shit.” Without another word, David hung up the phone.

  He turned the ignition key, and the engine rumbled to life. Within moments he was zooming through the streets, cutting in and out of traffic. He needed to get there—and fast.

  This night was going great. One dead body was bad enough, and now he had another possession and a bitchfest meeting to boot. Somehow he doubted things were going to get any better.

  He didn’t care what the other members of the Execution Underground said or that Damon didn’t support his theory; something big was about to go down with the demons in Rochester, and he was determined to find out what that was. It had been two weeks since the infant girl’s murder, and he’d been expecting more to come. Since he’d found the victim, Rochester’s demons had been quiet—way too quiet for his comfort. He’d never seen such a drop in demonic activity in all the years he’d been hunting. Since the decline in possessions, a feeling of dread had been slowly building inside him. Something in his gut told him these past two weeks had been the calm before the storm.

  Beyond the sheer horror of the baby’s death, something just wasn’t right about the situation. Demons rode humans like disposable cattle, but they didn’t kill them for sport. They used them for pleasure, to get their rocks off and escape the hellfire for a while, and if the human happened to die in the process of their twisted games, so be it. But they didn’t set out to kill normal humans, and there was no way a demon would have a good ol’ time possessing a sixth-month-old baby. The little girl’s death was more than collateral damage. Demons were sick dipshits to begin with, but it took a special kind of evil to kill an infant.

  Initially, he’d had no leads on the case. During an examination of the infant’s corpse, he’d found little indication of what type of demon had orchestrated the murder, let alone its motivation. Demons left messes behind them, but this one hadn’t. That set off more red warning flags than heroin track marks on a cheap hooker. Those warning signs told him one thing: something bad was about to go down. His best guess had been an Abyzu. The awful little shits were known for preying on infants, using their life force for energy and power. But Abyzu’s, who did set out to kill, weren’t common—at least not since the decline of so-called SIDS.

  The whole case was a mess. No evidence, no indication of what was to come, just a dreaded gut feeling things were about to become even messier.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES David reached the address. Shutting off the ignition and setting the kickstand, he parked his bike on the street several houses away. He quickly jogged toward the house, ignoring the shooting pain coursing through his leg.

  As he crept up the porch steps, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. His senses heightened, he listened for the sound of screams or yelling from behind the door. Nothing.

  He breathed deep, preparing himself, then froze. The smell of rotten eggs hit his nose, and he swore under his breath. David knew that smell.

  Sulfur.

  Without hesitation, he slammed into the front door with his full weight. It caved in after two hits from his two-hundred-plus-pound frame. Thank God for flimsy locks and no dead bolts. When his leg still functioned well, one kick would’ve done the trick. He frowned at that thought. As he stepped through the broken doorway, he pulled his gun and cocked the hammer, preparing to shoot. He was so ready to try out those new bullets. Holy-water-filled bullets wouldn’t kill a demon, but they would definitely slow it down for a few moments, and that was all he needed.

  He listened intently, trying to get a sense of where the demon was.

  After a quick scan of the ground floor, he called out, “Is anyone home?”

  An eerie silence answered. The quiet was too absolute. No sounds of talking or movement. His stomach dropped, and something inside told him he wasn’t searching for a demon anymore. He was searching for its victims. Its dead victims.

  He charged up the stairs. Agony seared through his leg as he climbed the steps faster than his pain-in-the-ass physical therapist would have approved of, but he wouldn’t allow that to hold him back. Not again. Three bedrooms to scan. Slowly he pushed open the door to the first and stepped inside. From the size and décor, definitely the master bedroom, probably where the wife, who’d called Father O’Reilly, and her husband slept. Unlike the rest of the pristinely organized room, the comforter and bedsheets lay in a twisted bundle, as if someone had shoved them off in a rush to jump out of bed. Otherwise, no signs of anything out of the ordinary. But there was no way he had the wrong house, not with the sulfur he smelled. Even old rotting Easter eggs that the kids hadn’t found for months didn’t smell that potent.

  He moved to the next bedroom, gun still drawn. He peeked inside: the room of a teenage boy. Sports memorabilia and a game system, but nothing unusual, just another messy bed. Turning toward the last room at the end of the hall, David stared at the open doorway. A shiver ran down his spine. Most people would have run in the other direction. It didn’t matter what dumbasses movies made the average citizen look like; in the real world, when people felt threatened, they ran, which honestly was the smartest thing to do. Instincts served a good purpose. But it was David’s job not to run.

  With a deep breath, he stepped inside. Immediately he lowered his gun. He was standing inside a baby’s nursery. He turned on the light and blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness. From the pale pink molding on the white-painted walls and the small onesies lying in a neatly folded pile on a changing table near the crib, he could tell the room was meant for a baby girl. His stomach twisted into knots.

  Not again. Dear God, not another baby.

  Adrenaline coursed through him, and he fought back panic. He needed to find her, find the whole family, but to do so he needed to stay calm, collected, no matter how much the situation primed him to leap into action.

  Where was this family? No signs of a struggle, yet they weren’t here, and the disarray of their beds in comparison to the rest of the immaculately clean house suggested they hadn’t planned on leaving. No, David could tell something had woken them and forced them out of their beds.

  Tucking his gun back into its holster at his hip, he limped over to the baby’s crib and peered inside. A single bloodied thumbprint dirtied the white-painted wood. Shit.

  As quickly as he could manage, he jogged down the stairs. There had to be something he’d missed. He stopped as he reached the bottom of the staircase. Light shone faintly underneath the door of what he’d initially thought was a closet. He wrenched the do
or open.

  Carpeted stairs descended down into a basement. Several drops of blood stained the tan carpeting. One painful step at a time, David negotiated the stairway. His heart thumped against his chest. The sound rang in his ears in the silence.

  Though he’d known as soon as he reached the porch steps that something was wrong, nothing could have prepared him for the sight before him. A large lump crawled into his throat as he surveyed the gore-covered scene. The basement looked as if someone had taken the contents of an entire blood bank and used them to set off an explosion with a messy homemade bomb. Blood soaked the walls, ceiling and floor, seeping into the carpeting.

  The whole family...slaughtered.

  David stood for several long moments, surveying the scene. There was something not right about this on so many levels. Demons were assholes, and they loved to use humans and leave them for dead, but this? The carnage in front of him made the victims Robert had left in his wake look as if they’d died in their sleep. But the lingering smell of sulfur mixed with the overpowering odor of freshly spilled blood told David he wasn’t imagining things. This was demons’ work.

  If someone had told him that a demon had murdered an entire family in cold blood, he wouldn’t have believed it. He scanned each of the family members. The mother lay slumped against the corner of the far wall, her throat slit. Blood covered the front of her nightgown. Her mouth remained open, and her lifeless eyes stared upward to where her attacker would have stood. The cell phone she must have used to call Father O’Reilly sat a foot away from her outreached hand, the screen covered in cracks like spiderwebs.

  Across from the wife, her husband lay facedown on the floor, the murder weapon still clutched in his hand after he’d slit his own throat. The wife had been right. From the looks of the scene, the demon had possessed her husband, who’d murdered her and their children before he’d turned the knife on himself.

  A sharp pang of sadness hit David in the heart at the sight of the couple’s teenage son. A gaping hole in the middle of his chest showed the brutality of what the demon had done to him. The sulfur-sucking monster had slung the kid’s intestines around his corpse as if they were nothing more than sausage links. This had to be the most sickening scene he had ever laid eyes on, and he had seen some seriously messed-up shit during the year he’d served in the Brooklyn division.

  The next thought that came to his mind made him cringe. Where was the baby?

  Cautiously, David rounded the staircase to another section of the basement. His stomach flipped. Bile rose in his throat and burned his esophagus. He ran to the nearest trash bin and hurled the contents of his stomach into the small plastic bag. He didn’t have a weak stomach by any stretch of the imagination, but even he couldn’t handle the sight of what had been done to the once beautiful infant girl. He blinked back tears on the family’s behalf.

  A dangerous mixture of sadness and pure unadulterated rage rushed through him. He would find the demonic piece of shit that did this. He would find the bastard and painfully torture it for days, weeks, until it was begging to be put out of its misery. Then he would do more than send it back to hell, where it had the potential to crawl its way out again decades later. He would find some sort of spell, some ritual, something to ensure it was tortured in the most painful way possible for the rest of eternity.

  David stood in the middle of the basement amidst the dead bodies and the lingering smell of sulfur mixed with the metallic scent of the family’s blood. With robotic movements, he removed his phone and snapped photos of the crime scene for HQ to process and analyze. One step at a time.

  He would get the job done, just like he always did, and each time he emerged as a stronger, better hunter...and less of a human being. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to handle seeing something like this and still function. And that was exactly the problem: he could.

  * * *

  EVERY FAE SENSE Allsún possessed blazed to life when the cabbie finally turned the corner on to the correct street. Immediately she knew they were in the right place, the exact house. Her Fae senses rang like a sounding school bell, alerting her that she had reached her destination. Peering out the front window of the cab, she eyed the broken-in front door. She leaned forward from the backseat. “Stop here,” she said to the driver.

  The cabbie had barely braked to a smooth stop before Allsún darted from the car, practically leaping from the vehicle. She burst into a full-on sprint toward the house as the cabbie drove away.

  Shite. Was she too late?

  As she neared the threshold, the rotten scent of sulfur assaulted her nose. She ran inside, hands up and prepared to blast any demons she encountered with a burst of faerie dust. The place reeked of demonic activity, and she could practically feel the power seeping out from the basement. Were the demons still down there?

  She padded lightly down the steps, careful not to make noise. Her stomach flipped as she reached the bottom of the stairs and took in the sight before her. She couldn’t even gasp, couldn’t yell, couldn’t scream, couldn’t cry. Her heart thumped against her ribs, and a wave of anxiety washed over her. She was in way over her head.

  She had seen demons do some horrific things in the years she had spent freelance hunting alongside David before he joined the Execution Underground, but nothing she had ever seen then remotely compared to the carnage that lay before her now.

  A shiver rushed down her spine at the thought of what kind of creature could have done this, and then she froze as a small click sounded from behind her. The click of a handgun’s hammer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DAVID HAD BEEN waiting all night to test these new bullets, and finally he was being given a chance. He held the Beretta steady, pointing it at the base of the woman’s skull. His voice came out in a low, aggressive rumble. “Don’t move.”

  She froze.

  He gave one slow deliberate nod as he told her, “Good. Now—slowly—raise your arms.”

  Moving carefully, she did as she was told and lifted her hands from her sides, fingers spread so he could see she had no weapons. Holding the Beretta in his right hand, he quickly used his left hand and frisked her, patting down the thin material covering her.

  “What’s your name?” He eyed her up and down.

  From behind, all he could see was her long curled brown hair. She wore a hospital johnny coat that opened in the back, exposing just the thinnest peek of a round, firm ass. Wait a second. He knew that gorgeous hair and that sweet behind all too well. What the—

  Her voice shook as she spoke. “David?”

  His heart came to a screeching halt before starting to thump double-time in his chest. The blood pounded in his head. He knew that voice, but...no. It couldn’t be.

  She shifted, and the robe moved ever so slightly to reveal a small orange freckle right above the curve of her butt. He knew that freckle. He had run his fingers over it so many times as they made love. Incredibly sexy and perfectly adorable all at the same time.

  It couldn’t be...but she was in a hospital gown.

  After a long moment, he finally managed to choke out her name. “Allsún?”

  She lowered her hands to her sides again and turned around.

  David’s eyes widened, and for a moment he forgot to breathe. He took in the familiar contours of her beautiful face. Large green eyes the color of the Irish countryside, full pink lips, high cheekbones and a small button nose that made him want to kiss every inch of her. Man, seeing her alive and well was a relief beyond anything he’d known before. She had lost weight in her already slender face and body during her time in the hospital, but aside from the minor detail, she was as perfect and divine in her beauty as she had always been when they were together. The kind of beauty most women envied. Allsún didn’t need makeup to enhance her looks. She had a natural aura about her, the kind that couldn’t be replicated.r />
  A wide grin spread across his face, and at the sight of her, all the horrors surrounding him melted away. His heart continued to pound. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. There she was, alive and healthy. Weeks had passed since he’d last seen her that way, and even then it had only been for a handful of minutes. It was hard to believe that five years had passed since they’d broken off their engagement. There were times when the wounds of her leaving still felt fresh. Hell, he would be lying to himself if he said he was anything but lonely without her around.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said.

  Allsún opened her mouth as if she wanted to speak, only to close it seconds later. She didn’t say a word. Instead, she ran.

  Shit.

  She bolted up the stairs faster than David would have thought possible. Throwing aside any concern for his injured leg, he raced up the steps after her. How the hell could she move so fast? She’d just come out of a trauma-induced coma, and she’d been drugged on top of it, for Pete’s sake. Then again, when didn’t Allsún surprise him? Hell, he sure as shit hadn’t expected her to show up in the middle of the crime scene, still in full patient garb. Only two hours ago he’d been sitting at her bedside while she rested peacefully.

  Though Allsún was fast and he was hurt, his legs were still significantly longer than hers. He reached her just as she was about to rush straight out the front door. Grabbing her from behind, he circled his arms around her waist, lifting her clean off the ground.

  She struggled against him, feet kicking wildly and hands shoving against his hold. “Let me go!” she shrieked.

  David hauled her back into the house, closing the broken door behind him.

  Allsún beat her fists against his grip, her words in rhythm with each blow. “Let. Me. Go.”

  David fought back a laugh. She was so tiny compared to him and always had been. Did she really think that would work? “Are you kidding me? You wake up from a coma after being tortured, then you show up at a crime scene littered with bodies, and you expect me to just let you run off?”