The Demon’s Obsession (Smoke Demon Mates #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

“Hey Williams, we’ve got a few more contraband books over here.”

The jittery video slid up when Williams straightened. He crossed the room to where a woman huddled in the corner. Another Council Task Force officer sorted through an upended pile of paperback books on the floor.

“I remember these.” Williams crouched, and the worn cover of a romance novel came into view. He snorted. “First-rate smut. These were huge before the crackdown. A bunch of horny women reading about getting ravished by smoke demons.”

He flipped the book over and aimed his scanner at its barcode. The scanner beeped and displayed several lines of data.

“This was banned by the Council fifteen years ago. You’re risking jail time to hold onto your precious filth?” He tossed the book back into the pile, and the woman flinched.

“Is that what you’re into? Demons? Does your husband know about your little smut stash?”

He tipped her chin up. She recoiled, keeping her eyes down even as she trembled with fear.

“Maybe we should call him at work. Let’s show him what you really want. Then you can explain why a human man isn’t good enough.”

Glass shattered in the distance.

The video slid away to the right. “What the hell was that?”

The other officer’s radio crackled with chatter. He pulled it off his waist and listened, then nudged the curtain open. “Shit. It’s her damned kid. Johnson already called the local precinct for backup.”

“Mira!” The woman ran toward the hallway, but the other officer shoved her back.

“Hey,” Williams barked. He snapped his fingers and pointed at her in warning as he crossed the room. “Stay put. Don’t make it worse.”

The interior of the house streaked by in the choppy video as Williams made his way down the hall and out into the front yard. It stabilized in time to show a teenage girl swinging an aluminum baseball bat into the windshield of the Task Force patrol car.

“ Jesus Christ. Is the precinct here, yet?”

“We’ve got her.”

A tall, cold-faced police officer caught the girl before she could escape through the yard. He spun her around and shoved her to the grass, holding her in place with a knee as his partner snapped cuffs around her wrists.

“Congratulations, kid,” Williams told her. “You just earned yourself a trip to youth detention.”

They dragged her upright, and she immediately kicked out at them with her feet. One of the officers caught her ankles, and the two carried her away as she bucked wildly in their arms.

“Fuck you,” she screamed.

Dominic paused the video on his phone, staring at Mira’s furious face.

“That’s the body cam footage you were looking for, right?” John asked him over his phone’s speaker.

“That’s the one,” Dominic murmured. He glanced out his car window at the silent city street, checking for movement in the weak, pre-dawn light.

“That recording is nearly a decade old. You’re lucky it wasn’t already wiped or sealed with her juvenile record. I also cleared the footage of your girl spray-painting anarchist bullshit on some bar’s wall last weekend, as promised.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, John,” Dominic replied carefully. “I got in a scuffle at that bar on Saturday. I’m just trying to keep it under wraps, that’s all.”

“Yeah? I’d be curious to know who you were fighting. I hear the women in that bar are pretty happy with their own company.”

Dominic straightened slowly, his mind blanking.

“Just kidding.”

He fell back against his seat, his heart racing. “Asshole.”

John chuckled. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think your girl swings that way, either.”

“You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

“Am I? Anyway, that was all I could do. We even, now?”

“Yeah.” Dominic stared at Mira’s face a moment longer before closing out of the video. “We’re even.”

“Thank fuck. It’s a little too expensive living in your pocket.”

He grinned. “I’ll see you around, John.”

“Good luck with whatever you’re mixed up in. You’re gonna need it.”

The car plunged into silence once more. Dominic settled back in his seat, and waited.

As the sun rose, the small stores on the Chicago street slowly stirred with signs of life. A coffee shop employee wrote the day’s specials on a sign. Next door, a grocer set out bins of vegetables.

An unmarked delivery truck pulled onto the narrow street and parked in front of an accountant’s office. Half a minute later it pulled away, leaving behind a small box.

The office’s door cracked open. An anxious-looking man glanced both ways down the street before he grabbed the package and disappeared inside once more.

All over the city, other custodians were collecting similar boxes, filled with the latest batch of banned books by the Council. The random selection of books would be unpacked and stored in locked rooms, hidden far from sight in basements and attics. The reimbursement received in return from the Council was enough to incentivize any custodian to keep their mouth shut, never question, and mind their own business.

To protect their distributed property, the Council gave a little metal box to every custodian that would invisibly shield the premises with an electric warding. It was harmless to humans, and designed to keep out one threat only.

Demons, like Dominic.

To his smoke demon eyes, the air around the accountant’s office wavered slightly, like a heat mirage. Even from inside his car, he could hear the low-pitched hum the box emitted, akin to an electrical transformer. Standing close to it would raise the hairs on his arms. If he tried to go inside, the warding would activate and fry him like a high-powered electrical fence.

Yet, for every measure, there was a countermeasure, like any other security system. He had no issues walking into any warded buildings as he saw fit.

And only one person in the city knew that he wasn’t human.

Dominic drew in a slow breath, grounding himself. He set aside thoughts of the system intentionally hostile to his very existence, and found his inner calm.

A familiar scent caught his nose. He opened his eyes in time to catch a glimpse of an unmistakable backpack as its owner quickly turned the corner.

Dominic left his car immediately, and followed.

The skinny dark jeans beneath her leather jacket were torn at the knees, and shoved into combat boots. Her backpack bounced rhythmically off her distracting rump. He forced his eyes back up to her thick, inky mane of hair as he maintained his distance several feet behind her.

She always seemed to glance the other way, cross the street, or duck her head right when she passed within range of a surveillance camera or traffic cam. There was no luck to it. She knew her way around, and she was good.

When he turned the next corner in pursuit, Mira stood in the middle of the empty alley, glowering at him. “You’re terrible at stealth.”

“Maybe I want to be found.”

Dominic continued forward without stopping, and she backed up quickly, until she bumped the wall. She stepped to the side, and he followed, boxing her in.

She scowled. “We’re really doing this again?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. He braced his hands on either side of her. “We’re really doing this.”

Mira glanced up at the sky in exasperation, which briefly dragged his eyes down to the dusky, smooth skin of her neck. He drew in a deep breath, pulling her unique, beguiling scent into his lungs.

“When will you stop stalking me?”

“I’m not stalking you. I’m investigating.”

“What’s the difference?”

Dominic tapped the North American Council of Demon Entities Counter-Terrorism badge on his belt, and winked.

“That’s bullshit. You’ve been on me for months. Shouldn’t you move on to better leads?”

“You’re a very good lead, Mira. You’re the lead. Whenever you show up in a large crowd, shit’s almost guaranteed to go sideways.”

“It’s just coincidence.”

“That Demon Freedom Coalition demonstration on Lake Michigan?” Dominic ducked his head to meet her eyes when she glanced away. “That hijacked stage at the Jazz Festival—”

“You’ve got the wrong person.” Mira stared stoically down the deserted alley.

“Maybe you should be thanking me for wiping last weekend’s surveillance of you tagging that bar with DFC propaganda.”

That drew her attention immediately. “You did? Why?”

He grinned slowly, watching her stricken expression before she mastered it once more.

“You should go find whoever was behind that,” she amended, “so they can thank you instead.”

“You wanna keep playing this game? Fine. We’ll play.”

She searched his face. “If you think you have so much on me, why haven’t you turned me over?”

“Because you’re—”

Dominic checked his flare of possessive anger and reeled himself in. He continued more calmly, “You’re my lead. No one is taking you in but me.”

“Well, until then. It’s been fun.”

He moved back quickly before she could shove one of his arms away. She frowned at his reaction, then rolled her eyes once more and headed down the street.

“It’s not even seven in the morning,” he called after her. “You headed back to Phoebe’s? You’ve been over there a lot this week. I thought you two weren’t so cozy anymore.”

Mira stopped and spun around. “How the fuck would you know, Dominic?” Her voice was angry, but a flash of panic crossed her face.

Interesting.

Dominic tucked the clue away for later. “So you do remember my name. I figured you’d tossed my business card straight into the trash. Call me when you’re ready to start talking.”

“There’s nothing to say.” She continued out the alley, flipping him the bird over her shoulder.

Dominic drained his third cup of coffee and studied the map of Mira’s movements, based on local cell tower pings. They all converged in circles around one place.

Caroline’s Books.

The bookstore was named for Phoebe’s grandmother, the previous owner. He opened one of his saved surveillance feeds, and contemplated the bookstore’s dark storefront on the grainy video.

He’d long ago ruled out Phoebe as a potential DFC member. She was a custodian, and heavily dependent upon her monthly stipend for storing the Council’s seized books. The bookstore itself pulled in pennies.

All custodians were required to pass a security clearance. That meant Dominic had easy access to Phoebe’s history, all the way back to her childhood.

She was the polar opposite of Mira: shy, soft-spoken, and lawful to a fault. It was no wonder the two hadn’t moved in the same circles since high school.

Or at least, so he’d thought.

Mira had returned to Phoebe’s store every night that week. A few times, her older brother Tyler, a paramedic, also made an appearance. Like tonight.

Mira’s reaction from the morning still stuck with him. Panic, dismay, and most importantly, fear. Dominic considered himself an expert on all things Mira, but he was missing something. Something big. His gut told him he didn’t have long to piece it together.

At first, Mira had been just one of many potential players in a network of anti-government activities the Counter-Terrorism unit tracked. She’d been an errant thread in a tapestry of larger clues.

Yet somehow, he’d found he couldn’t stop following that thread. Couldn’t stop tugging on it, until Mira had become the center of his investigation.

Where she went, he went. Her neighborhood had become his. He was digging further and further into her past, greedy for the tiniest tidbits he could find.

Dominic leaned back, letting the waitress take his empty plate and pour him another coffee. Outside the all-night diner, he could just glimpse the bookstore down the alley across the wide boulevard.

It was well after midnight, and Tyler’s truck was still outside.

He shook his head, and stood. There were too many variables around Mira right now, and nothing new to be gleaned tonight.

He’d just returned to his car when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He fished it out, staring in surprise at the display.

A smile curved his mouth when he finally answered. “When I told you to call, I never expected it to be so soon.”

“Cut the crap, Dominic.”

His humor faded at the slight quaver in Mira’s voice. “What’s wrong?”

At first, only silence answered him. His sharp demon ears picked up her unsteady breaths, and the rapid, faint thump of her heartbeat through the phone.

He balanced the phone on his shoulder as he started the engine, making a U-turn toward the boulevard. “Mira, talk to me.”

His demand seemed to shake her out of her stupor. “I know you’re around. Come to Phoebe’s store. Right now.” The call ended.

Dominic flung the phone to the passenger seat while he waited impatiently for the traffic light to change. There were only three intersections between the diner and the bookstore, and he cursed every single one.

Demon blood.

The smell assaulted him the moment he stepped out of his car. He glanced up at the silent bookstore in alarm, searching its dark windows.

The building’s warding was still intact. He heard its faint hum, as well as distant voices when he approached the door. He slipped his hand into his pocket and clicked the button on the Council warding tester.

The black box in the storefront window flashed yellow. The hum vanished as the box rebooted for a diagnostics check.

Dominic opened the door slowly, so as not to set its bell tinkling. The air was saturated with demon blood. Too much. More blood loss than even a demon could survive.

Yet, the smell of death already hung in the air.

The street lamps cast faint light through the shop window, revealing chaos. A shattered computer monitor lay on the floor. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt at cleaning by shoving the scattered books to the side, and sweeping up bits of glass.

The sound of Mira’s voice drifted across the store, along with what must have been Phoebe’s. Dominic paused in the shadows, letting relief flow over him as he pulled himself back together.

He couldn’t be a demon. Not even now, as every instinct inside him attempted to claw free, demanding he take Mira away from whatever new fucking mess she’d landed in.

He was just a Counter-Terrorism agent. Nothing more. A human, who would only react to what his limited senses revealed.

Closing his eyes briefly, he finally rounded the corner. “Goddamn, Mira. Every time I think you can’t dig a deeper hole for yourself, you surprise me.”

Phoebe was in pajamas by the stairs, hugging a picture frame. Her thick, curly hair was a wild mess around her face. She showed clear signs of shock as she turned sluggishly in his direction.

Dominic drew up short at the body on the floor. He frowned, his demon senses warring with the sight of the man’s familiar face.

Mira stood beyond the corpse, her hands and clothes drenched in drying, glimmering demon blood. Blood that sure as hell didn’t belong to the demon on the floor. She took a long swig from a flask.

She didn’t react when he swiped it from her. Very little rum remained within, but he lifted it to his nose, if only to clear away the metallic scent of blood clouding his demon senses. “Cracked open the good stuff. That bad, huh?”

He tensed when he smelled the lingering traces of gunpowder clinging to the flask. A quick glance at Mira revealed the slight bulge of her leather jacket on one side.

Thankfully, the guy on the floor didn’t have a gunshot wound. That only made the blood covering Mira even more damning.

Dominic could feel his calm mask threatening to slip. A lethal amount of demon blood. A smoking gun. A trashed store, and her best friend frozen in nearly catatonic shock. And a prominent, easily recognizable corpse on the floor.

Mira had sprinted right through her mostly harmless anarchist chaos, and straight into the deep end of some serious shit.

She lifted her haunted eyes to his. “I need to get rid of this body.”