Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Syke
I didn’t expect the human to use the summoning spell, let alone so quickly.
As I traveled through the shadows of the mortal plane, I had regrets.
I should have known she wouldn’t be able to resist. The lure of having a demon at your beck and call was strong, or the urge to know if I was full of shit and if smashing a teapot really would call me was hard to deny. She seemed like the curious type.
I’d barely appeared in the tiny studio apartment, still hidden in the unseen, when a disgruntled Allison also appeared.
Angels might be all sweetness and light most of the time, but being on the bad side of an angel was not a healthy place to be.
She seemed confused, ready for a fight, at least until her eyes fell on me.
She looked at me with a pissed off expression.
“The fuck, Syke? When did you tether me to a summoning spell?” she hissed.
I held up my hands before she singed off my eyebrows with holy fire. “I was going to tell you. I only did it yesterday, and you were out on a call, and I didn’t think she’d use it so fucking fast.”
I looked around the room and found Hailey immediately. She was pale and scared. Could she feel our presence?
Following her gaze, I realized her fear had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man breaking into her apartment. Well, apologies to the little human. She was less capable of surviving without Eric’s protection than I thought.
I dipped into the intruder’s mind, and what I found made me emit a deep growl.
Oh, this guy was definitely within my purview.
As he grinned and stepped into the room, I appeared behind him.
Hailey could see me, and probably Allison, but the guy was so focused on his prey that he didn’t realize he’d become the hunted.
“What are you doing here?” Hailey asked, her voice only wavering slightly despite the fear I felt coursing through her.
“Showing you what whores like you get when you lie down with animals. Maybe I’ll fuck the humanity back into you, or maybe I’ll take you out of the gene pool completely.” He pulled out a knife that must have been as long as his forearm. I bet he had a tiny little shriveled cock.
I was done listening to this disgusting piece of trash, so I looked at Allison. “You won’t be needed now.”
Allison hesitated because her calling was, and always would be, helping humanity, but something demons, and hell in general, knew was that occasionally humanity needed to be culled, and who better to do it than those who fed off negativity?
Nodding only once, Allison left. She’d make her peace with it however she could.
“Mmm, cleaning up the gene pool is looking really good right now,” I purred in the man’s ear.
When he spun in shock, his knife automatically came up.
The action seemed threatening enough for the paperwork I’d have to fill out if this got out.
I gripped the blade with my bare hand and tugged it from his grip, then I threw it to the side like it was useless.
The guy stumbled back. “A demon?” He gasped. “In the name of the lord, I compel you,” he exclaimed.
I laughed. “Compel me to what? Rip your intestines out through your mouth? Because that’s what I feel compelled to do right now.
” I froze him with a flick of my wrist. Looking past him at the girl, I met her wide, terrified eyes.
“Please cover your eyes and turn your back. Seeing this could do considerable damage to your retinas.” Like a good girl, she did exactly as I asked.
Looking back at the cretin in front of me, I smirked.
“Your lord would stand beside me as I rid you from this earth. I can see inside your depraved little brain, Graham Sawyer. I see what you intended. Your lord would dance on your ashes for even saying his name when your actions are so abhorrent.” I grinned, and it was an unpleasant expression.
I could tell by the way he paled even more. “Say hello to my boss for me.”
I turned the man to ash, and he scattered across the dingy brown carpet.
Ugh. I should have taken him outside first. “Do you have a vacuum? Sorry about the mess.”
The human uncovered her eyes and blinked at me. Hailey. Not the human.
She moved like she’d forgotten how knees worked, pulling a cheap vacuum out from the space between her fridge and the kitchen wall.
She handed it to me, and I couldn’t believe I’d been relegated to dust buster, though I guess I did make the mess, so by that logic, it was my responsibility to clean it up.
“So who was this… guy?” I asked, scraping the toe of my shoe through the ashes. “He seemed to really hate you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even know him. I only saw him for the first time today at work. He didn’t like that we were serving creatures before him. A bunch of construction workers put him in his place, and I guess he blamed me.” She shook her head. “I didn’t even know his name,” she whispered.
Ah, fuck. She was going into shock. I’d forgotten the human psyche was so fragile. “You’re going to have to come back to the center with me.”
She shook her head, and I could see her straightening her spine. She didn’t like being seen as weak. The emotion came off her in waves. Well, I didn’t really feel right leaving her here alone, so it was time for the second best skill in the demon’s arsenal—emotional manipulation.
“Not for you. Eric hasn’t been doing so well since you left. We were going to give it twelve more hours and see if you’d be willing to return.” Not untrue. The orc had regressed, but we’d decided that we’d up his contact therapy until the surrogate clan arrived.
The tension in Hailey’s shoulders eased just a touch.
She was glad for the excuse, an altruistic way to give into the screaming voice in her head that was begging for safety.
This little human had layers, and I wanted to slowly unpeel them—preferably in bed, but that was probably against the rules.
Being on this team had so many damn rules.
“Okay, for Eric.”
I resisted the urge to scoff. “Sure. You might need to pack a bag. I’ll seal your door again.”
She was dressed in little pajama shorts with puppies on them and a tight white tank.
She looked kind of cute, which wasn’t something I normally found attractive.
While she was packing up a bag, I cleaned up what remained of Graham Sawyer.
When I’d dived into his mind before his unnatural demise, I’d seen he’d been part of the growing anti-creature movement.
We’d become too lax, and we’d let them think they could push us around.
If they made the step from rhetoric to violence again, they’d soon see that they were worse than further down the food chain.
They’d find they were almost at the bottom, but there were more peaceful creatures than demons, and they were doing what they could to defuse the movement before it came to bloodshed.
I didn’t mind a little bloodshed personally.
Walking to the bathroom, I tipped the ashes into the toilet. Flushing, I watched what remained of that human stain swirl around the toilet bowl and then down the drain, then I flushed again.
I should have bagged him up and given him to the low-level dealers below. I bet Graham would have enjoyed being snorted off some dirty toilet seat. I looked up and saw Hailey staring at the toilet, open mouthed, then she met my eyes in the mirror. “Did you just flush him?”
I grinned, and it was probably a little sharper than I intended. “A fitting end to a piece of shit.”
She sucked in another deep breath. Ah, maybe that was too far.
“I’ll just grab some toiletries, and I’ll be ready.
” She sounded steady and sure. Brave little toaster.
I stepped out of the bathroom, brushing past her because this place was made for gnomes and not anyone over three feet.
As my skin brushed hers, she shivered. I tensed, prepared for disgust in her aura, but instead, I found pure, unadulterated lust.
Well, wasn’t that just delicious? Did our stoic little human have a bad boy fetish?
“I need to use your phone. Mine never survives shadow travel,” I yelled at her.
“Go ahead,” she shouted back. I bypassed her passwords easily enough.
The lock screen held a picture of two young girls.
It looked to be a photo of a photo really.
One of the girls was older and had her arms around a toddler.
The older girl in the photo was definitely Hailey.
Who was the younger one? A sibling, perhaps?
A mystery for later. I called the Creature Crisis Hotline number, and Deuce answered the phone. The warlock was all business, which was good, because he always tended to fuck around. “Creature Crisis Hotline, how can I help?”
“I got a shampoo bottle stuck in my ass, can you come and help me extract it?”
“Uh, sir, it’s a federal offense to prank call,” he began, reading from the script we had for nuisance calls.
“Deuce, it’s Syke. I had to shadow walk, and now I need a ride. Can you get Otis to pick me up from Hailey Swoon’s apartment? He’ll know where it is.”
“You got a human girlfriend, Syke? How the mighty demon has fallen,” he teased. I hung up. Hopefully he’d pass the message on to Otis.
Five minutes later, Otis sent a message to Hailey’s phone that merely said, “5 out,” and nothing else. He wasn’t a great texter. Big ass bull fingers and touch screens didn’t really go hand in hand.
“Come on, we’ll wait downstairs,” I told Hailey, who was standing in the middle of her living room like she didn’t know what to do with herself.
As she stepped out of her apartment, I sealed it up for the second time in a week.
I kept her close as we walked down the stairs.
She was still pale, and I didn’t trust her not to faceplant down these disgusting concrete steps.
We made it to the bottom just as Otis turned up, his eyes full of questions. I tipped my head at the girl, opening the door so she could climb in. “I’ll explain later,” I murmured so only he’d hear.
He gave me a raised eyebrow. “Good to see you again so soon, Miss Swoon.”
She let out a choked little laugh. “It’s good to see you too, Otis, but I kind of wish it was without a potential assault and an actual murder.”
Otis’s head whipped toward me, and I winced. I cast a sour look at the human. That was what I got for rescuing her. She narced on me to my boss.
It was late at night, a time when most humans were in bed, but not the ones around Hailey Swoon’s apartment building. If anything, it seemed more active, but not in a way that was legal.
I knew Otis noticed the amount of crime in her neighborhood too.
He was far more of a hero than I was, his protective instincts on par with the most dominant of weres.
I had a suspicion that the human would not be returning to her apartment, but if this job taught us anything, it was that not everyone wanted to be saved.
Maybe the stubborn little human would be one of them.
Soon enough, we parked beneath the building, and I slid from the car. Otis walked around and opened her door, always the gentleman. “Did Syke tell you about Eric’s condition?”
She nodded. “It’s why he said I needed to come.”
Raising an eyebrow, Otis looked at me over her head. I just shrugged. “Regardless of his condition, we’ll give you your own room. You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, no obligation to the team or Eric.”
Swallowing hard, she nodded. “I’ll stay with Eric tonight. We’ll, uh, reassess in the morning.”
I noticed the dark circles under her eyes and the heaviness of her limbs.
We caught the elevator upstairs, and I grimaced at Allison’s inquisitive expression.
I was probably going to get my ass handed to me over this, but Allison, at her very core, was a softy.
It was literally encoded into her very being.
She’d forgive me, and it wasn’t like I was doing it for selfish purposes.
We headed back to the off-shift living quarters, shutting the heavy door between sections behind us. Hailey moved in the direction of Eric’s room like she was being dragged there by a magnet. If I tuned into her, I could almost see the mate bond pulling between them.
Ah, that explained the dark circles. I looked at Otis, but he seemed oblivious for once. I decided to keep my mouth shut. I was going to see how this all played out. I could sense Louis sleeping in his room at the end of the hall, but Ilyas was awake beside a fitfully dozing Eric.
He raised an eyebrow as Hailey pushed into the room, pulling off her oversized hoodie before climbing beneath the covers. Eric opened a single eye, his groggy, “Hailey,” quickly shushed by the woman herself.
She let out a soft sigh, then she fell into a sleepy oblivion, completely comfortable in a room of unfamiliar creatures. Maybe her subconscious was telling her something her conscious mind refused to believe.
The lightning that flashed in Ilyas’s pupils told me that he at least suspected the same as me. Things just got a lot easier for the orc, but a hell of a lot harder for the human.