Must Love Hellhounds

Geoff came in beside Maggie and raised his arms. His gun.

Oh, Jesus.

“No!” Maggie launched herself at him-too late.

He fired. Katherine’s cheek opened up; blood spit across the wall beside her. She staggered, fell.

Maggie’s weight knocked him to the side. He caught his footing, caught her with his free hand.

“Maggie! What the bloody…” He stopped, and his brow furrowed. “What are you seeing?”

She looked back at the stairs. Katherine stared at them, her gaze clouded with death. Crimson soaked into the cream-carpeted stair pillowing her head.

Coldly, Geoff aimed again. “My sister’s eyesight isn’t that good, Maggie.”

And the wound on her cheek was healing.

The tricking, lying bastard. Maggie clenched her teeth and opened fire.

The demon lifted his head, the ragged wound opening with his grin. But he didn’t stay Katherine and let them shoot him full of holes.

And knowing that a demon couldn’t hurt them didn’t make him any less terrifying when he shape-shifted.

The change was instantaneous.

If Geoff was looking through the demon’s eyes, he wouldn’t see the scales that covered the massive body, the glistening fangs, the ebony horns that curled back over his head. Hands became claws.

But it was the knees that made Maggie want to sink whimpering to the floor and curl into a ball. They were just the wrong way. Like a goat’s hind legs, but she couldn’t look at them without imagining her own knees snapping backward.

Maggie instinctively stepped back as the leathery wings snapped open and air gusted over her face. Her heart jumped into her throat as the taloned wing tips slammed into the stair-well walls, forming a barrier.

The message was clear: The demon couldn’t harm them. But it didn’t have to let them pass, either.

Where the hell was Sir Pup?

Geoff’s gun clicked. Out of ammunition. And Maggie almost screamed as something brushed by her leg.

A dog. Golden retriever. Wearing a guide harness.

Oh, thank God.

“Yours, Mr. Blake?” The demon’s grin spread wide over his fangs. A sword appeared in his hands. “Foolish. The Rules do not apply to animals-”

Sir Pup shifted as he leapt. Maggie grabbed Geoff’s arm and swung him around, dropping them both to the ground.

She looked, but couldn’t follow what happened. The demon crashed through a wall. A painting thumped to the floor beside Geoff’s head, then tipped over them. The house shook. Sir Pup yelped, once, and the echoing growl that followed it turned her blood to ice.

Geoff squeezed her hand. Maggie pushed at the heavy frame. Beside them, a ripped piece of wing bled onto the floor.

“If Sir Pup uses his teeth,” Maggie began, then shrank back as something huge rushed by them-demon or hellhound, she couldn’t be sure. The floor trembled.

Geoff pushed her tighter against the wall, shielding her with his body as she finished, “If Sir Pup bites him, his venom gets into the demon. Paralyzes him.”

Paralyzes him was said into sudden, deathly silence.

Maggie sat up, and her hand flew to her mouth.

The once beautifully decorated house was destroyed. Plaster and drywall gaped open, exposing the walls’ support posts like wooden bones. Carpeting had been shredded. There was blood… everywhere. On the furniture, the floors, the walls. Her stomach roiled.

“Bugger me,” Geoff whispered beside her.

A shadow darkened the dining room wall. A shadow, Maggie realized, with three heads.

With his left head, Sir Pup dragged the demon beside him, knocking chairs out of his blooded path. He was limping, Maggie saw. Limping and bleeding.

The demon had the stump of a right arm and a bite taken out of his torso. And he was still alive.

She swallowed down the bile that rose and held back her shudder. “Hold him here, Sir Pup,” she said. “We’re going to get Katherine.”

Geoff went up the stairs ahead of her. The door was locked. He slammed his shoulder against it, and it splintered open.

Katherine stood on the other side, holding the heavy antique lamp like a baseball bat. Uninjured, but obviously scared out of her wits.

Maggie reloaded her gun through their hasty reunion.

They weren’t yet done.

Geoff dragged James inside while Maggie brought their rented vehicle to the house. Sir Pup could vanish the blood. They’d leave the broken mess.

Katherine found food in the kitchen and brought it out to the living room while they waited for James to wake up. Geoff’s sister didn’t kick the mutilated and paralyzed demon when she walked by him, stretched out motionlessly on the floor beside James. Which meant, Maggie thought, that Katherine was a better woman than she would have been.

Geoff spent twenty minutes on the phone with Ames-Beaumont. “Uncle Colin has canceled his and Savi’s flight,” he told them. “And has scheduled ours for this evening.”

Maggie nodded. It’d be enough time. James was already stirring.

“And he wants to know what they were looking for,” Geoff said.

Katherine frowned. “I told you. Dragon blood.” She looked at Maggie. “They said it was something that your congressman had. That he’d kept it since the war of the heavens, intending it for a time when it could be used. Now that your demon is dead, he wanted it.” She pointed at the demon. “It’s not much to speak of. A few drops trapped in a crystal rock.”

Maggie forced herself to look again at the demon’s missing arm, the wound in his side. How much power did a few drops have that the demon had gone through this?

“Do you know where it is, Kate?”

“Yes.” She flipped over a blood-spattered cushion on a sofa and sat. “And I’ll tell you where you can find it once we’ve reached San Francisco. You can hand it over to Uncle Colin, and he can give it over to the Guardians. If I don’t, I suppose I’ll soon be repeating this experience.”

Geoff’s face was grim. “And someone else will be forced into a demon’s service.”

It could have been me, Maggie thought. She sank into a shredded armchair and brought her legs up.

Langan would’ve known when he’d given James the assignment to kill Thomas Stafford that it couldn’t be completed. It might have even been plotted by both demons, so that they would have-if they needed one-a hold over a human who could carry out assassinations, who didn’t have to follow the Rules. It wouldn’t have been the first time Stafford had used a human to kill for him.

And knowing her psychological profile, they’d probably even predicted that she’d fake James’s death. But even if her resignation had surprised Langan, she had no doubt that her placement in Stafford ’s house had been his idea. He’d probably been the one to give Stafford that picture of her and James.

If the Guardians hadn’t slain Stafford, what might have happened? Would she, too, have found herself trapped in a bargain-forced to kidnap or kill to save her soul?

She laid her cheek against her knees and closed her eyes. But it hadn’t happened. Karma, luck, or maybe something else… She had escaped that fate, and ended up with Ames-Beaumont instead.

And Geoff.

Opening her eyes, she looked up and met his. They were slightly unfocused; they were never like that when he was looking through her. Her gaze moved to Katherine. His sister’s stare was as intense as Geoff’s could be.

She heard him say quietly, “Just a few more seconds, Kate.”

How wonderful to have family, Maggie thought.

Especially this one.