A Demon in Waiting (Crimson Romance) (2 page)

His eyes rolled, even thinking it. He’d been born a skeptic, but it wasn’t until he was around twelve that he realized he lived in a cult.

They all really thought when they died, their spirits would join their family members on the other side and adhere themselves into one giant, shapeless, spiraling ball of energy. The bigger the ball, the more energy. The more energy, the more eternal swagger.

Or something.

John had once asked the leader what all that disembodied energy was good for. Did the energy blobs come through and do good deeds or were they just like jewelry? Something people strove for, but that had no actual purpose beyond exhibiting one’s wealth.

That question had earned him a backhand and a week on outhouse duty. Apparently, one should not question the leader, even if the leader was a certifiable lunatic — John had seen the certificate. The leader had it framed and hung it on the wall as evidence of the World Beyond’s treachery.

John had given some thought to running away numerous times in the past, but never figured out the logistics. Where would he go? Who would he reach out to? There was no one. His entire world had been right there in that compound.

And now, the world was his for the taking. Being a cambion didn’t sound that bad.

“Well, let’s go. I’ll get my toothbrush.”

Ariel Thomas drummed her fingers against her steering wheel and studied the mileage gauge in her dashboard. According to the little digital read-out, she’d been driving one hour and forty-seven minutes since her last stop. Her goal had been to drive four hours without stopping, but Arizona was so goddamned boring if she didn’t get out and walk soon she was going to drive herself into a ditch.

“Come on. Thirteen more minutes and you can find a nice little dive and get yourself a soda.”

She drummed her fingers some more.

“Or a cigarette.”

With an eye roll, she groaned. She hadn’t smoked in seven years. It’d been a habit she’d started the first week of college which quickly escalated to a pack-a-day vice. One night, while trying to sleep after chain-smoking several 100-length fags, she lay in her dorm bed, heart racing so hard and so fast she thought her chest would explode. It’d been the worst kind of wake-up call. By sophomore year, she’d quit completely, but the craving had never gone away. Especially not when she was making long drives and had nothing else to do with her hands besides steer.

“I should have flown,” she mumbled.

And she could have. The advertising agency she’d accepted an art director position with in North Carolina offered her a full relocation package. They even sent her a team of beefy men to pack up the contents of her sparse apartment and piled all her crap into a moving van. Her stuff was already several states ahead of her. She could have sent her car along, too, but the thought of boarding a plane made the components of her digestive system clench. It wasn’t so much the idea of flying that bothered her, but the taking off, the landing, and all the turbulent bits in between. So, instead of whispering, “We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die,” and shaking like a leaf all the way from Los Angeles to Wilmington, she chose driving.

Her dashboard trip computer beeped the two-hours-elapsed tone and she allowed herself a congratulatory fist-pump. It was nearing three
P.M.
— too early for dinner — but maybe she’d treat herself to just enough coffee to keep her going for another two hours and an extra-large bag of Skittles.

She lifted her foot a bit off the accelerator as she approached an off-ramp, furrowing her brow at a tall, lean figure walking the roadside with his thumb held out. He wasn’t even watching the road and had his back turned to oncoming traffic.

“Odd.”

She spared a glance at her rearview mirror as she turned off, and sucked in a little air. “Jesus.”

Put him in a banana hammock and drape him over a surfboard, and he’d be the perfect model for the last, oh,
five
advertising campaigns she’d worked on. But she’d never really been attracted to guys who looked like they smelled, and he had a tinge of that going on.

“Pity.”

She shook her head. As a young woman, her grandmother had always impressed on her to carefully guard her personal safety with every means she could. Even after she’d moved to college, Momma would call every night to ask, “Did you lock your doors? Are you wearing your cross?”

Ariel would assure her she had, and that she
was
, then they’d both sign off.

She was vigilant. She locked her car doors, even for short drives. She didn’t go to ATMs in the middle of the night. She didn’t pick up hitchhikers.

He faded from her view as she turned off into a rest station’s parking lot.

“Oh well.”

A moment of fantasy never hurt anyone, so before debarking the car, she closed her eyes and let her mind stray. Why not do something risky for once? Something so out of character, even if she told her friends, they wouldn’t believe her. She giggled and grabbed her purse. “Yeah, me picking up a hitchhiker? I should go ahead and hand in my rape whistle for even thinking it.”

After plugging the gas nozzle into her tank and locking the lever in place, she left her car. Wandering the aisles of the store with a large hazelnut coffee, she knew she was really just stalling.

Maybe I should pee again.

She consulted her bladder. No pee there.

Get on with it, chick.

She sighed and approached the checkout, grabbing an armful of junk food on the way. It didn’t matter what it was. It was less for taste and more to have something to do with her hands while she drove. A little prickle of excitement coursed through her when she realized the peanuts she picked up were barbecue flavor, however. She loved novelty snack items. Having grown up near a little mom and pop gas station owned by a baby boomer, during her youth she became acquainted with all sorts of Southern delicacies. Nabs. Moon Pies. Lance honey buns. Jimbo Jumbo peanuts. She used to walk to the store after church on some Sundays when she had some change left over, and would come out with a big brown bag full of goodies. That’s exactly why the very first thing she’d installed in her cubicle desk’s drawer was a pile of junk.

She thought she felt a little tingle of happiness over the memory as she moved up the line, but her sinking gut told her it wasn’t that. It was her proximity alert. The fine hairs on her neck stood on end as someone walked behind her, and he had to be someone paying attention, otherwise he may have well have been a statue. She was so finely tuned in to strangers around her because of her granny’s frequent admonitions to be
aware
. Now, she couldn’t turn it off. Her friends had teased her about it. Called her paranoid.

Maybe I am.

All the same, she turned her head and caught a glimpse of the scruffy hitchhiker in her periphery.

No way. Maybe I’m just projecting.

She blinked several times to clear the film from her contact lenses, and turned her head to stare at him dead-on.

Yep. Same guy. He was in the process of switching his knapsack to his other shoulder as he trekked toward the restrooms. He didn’t disappear into the lavatory, however, but stopped at the water fountain and unclipped the aluminum bottle attached to his pack.

She watched, slack jawed, as he put his lips into the arcing stream of water.

Pretty.
He was like some expensive bauble in a jewelry store circular. Nice to ogle, but generally beyond her reach. But then again, he was a bum, so what did she know?

He set his backpack on the floor and as he twisted the lid off his water bottle, he turned, likely ensuring he wasn’t holding up the line. There wasn’t one. Everyone else in the store was
buying
their water.

His gaze landed on Ariel, and it was like the air had been vacuumed out of the room. She couldn’t remember how to breathe, nor did she have the good sense to look away. She understood, suddenly, how Medusa had managed to turn so many gaping idiots into stone.

He let go of the fountain handle and stood, grinning at her. A swath of sun-bleached blond hair fell over his eyes and as if he could hear her willing him to do so, he pushed it behind his ears. His expression said, “Better now?”

Yes, sir.

She offered a tiny smile and tore her gaze away. It was her turn to pay. She went through the motions of swiping her card and pressing the
Debit
button on the keypad, but her awareness of him never dimmed. Even as she meditated on the clerk’s repetitive motions — pick up item, bag item, pick up item, bag item — she could tell when the man walked past.

That same electric feeling from before settled into her, dancing down her spine and wracking her body with a shudder. She forced a hiss through her clenched teeth as she punched her debit card’s PIN into the machine.

All this solo driving must be making me delirious. Maybe I should call Momma. Would help to hear a familiar voice on the road.

Yes, she assured herself. That’s all it was. A little asphalt-induced insanity. Maybe he wasn’t even real. He was just a goddamned mirage. Had to be. No one else in the store had even turned their heads in his direction.

She picked up her coffee, grabbed her bag, and walked through the automatic doors. After twisting her gas cap back on and securing her snacks in the front passenger seat, she reconfigured her GPS software and headed toward the highway on-ramp.

“He’s just a mirage,” she told herself as she passed the gorgeous hobo on the service road. She couldn’t be sure at the speed she was going, but the grin he wore seemed far too knowing. Too prescient. He seemed to be daring her to stop. To
play
.

Odd.

“Okay, phone. Phone … where’s my phone. I just need to hear Momma’s voice. I need a reminder to be safe on the road.”

He was a dot in her rear-view mirror. A blond speck in blue jeans.

She thumbed Momma’s number into her keypad and shifted the phone to her left hand.

“If you’ve got my number, you know who I am. Tell me what you want. I might call you back. BEEP.”

Ariel blew a raspberry as she tossed the phone into the center console. She felt sick — a nagging, gnawing feeling in her gut like she always got when she travelled away from home for several days and thought she’d left the iron plugged in.

What did I forget?
Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel rhythmically as she itemized.
Got my wallet. Got my keys, obviously. Gas cap is on …

No, none of those things. It was more of an instinct like birds and fish got when they needed to travel home to their breeding grounds. It said, “Hey, you’re going the wrong way.” But, she wasn’t. She was certainly going east — toward North Carolina. Toward
home
, and away from the life she’d been making for the past four years.

Away from the ex-boyfriend who’d turned her into a laughingstock when the entire agency found out they’d been dating, because
certainly
she couldn’t have gotten that job based solely on talent, right? If a girl has tits and an okay face and maybe someone wants to date her, then she slept her way to her job. Didn’t matter how good her portfolio was.

No one at the agency said anything directly to her about it, but she knew they were all judging. Mocking. It was evident from their casual little slights when she sent company-wide emails and instead of getting legitimate feedback, people would say, “That’s so cute.” And worse, she was never included on new business pitches anymore. She did the same old grunt work, day in and day out.

Her boyfriend said she was just being sensitive. Then he’d laughed and told her the mock-up she’d done for a sunscreen ad was “sweet.” Not
sweet
in the slangy way, either. No. Her hard-ass, muscled lady beach volleyball player spiking the hell out of a ball was
sweet
.

Prick
. She growled and cranked the stereo volume up. She hated even thinking about it, but she’d been squashing it in too much, and how would she ever work through it if she didn’t think the story through once or twice?

A headhunter saw her portfolio online and emailed her on one of those “cute” days, and Ariel had to pinch herself to not beg the man to take her away. Not only had the recruiter pegged her for a gig that would allow her to drop the “junior” from her art director title, but she was going
home
. Or close to it, anyway. Her granny would be within an hour’s drive, and she’d be back to the Southern culture she knew so well. Southern comfort. Southern hospitality. Los Angeles had been sorely lacking in that.

When she told her ex she had put in her notice, his response had been something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s too bad. I’m going to have to get a studio artist to finish that suite, I guess.”

She’d just stared at him as he rubbed his chin, and when he didn’t
get
it — she told him to get the hell away from her cubicle. She also considered that their official break-up. He didn’t, judging by the way he’d shown up at her apartment later asking if she was ready to go out for dinner.

She put her foot on the brake and slung the car onto the next exit ramp.

“Fuck it. People are going to think I’m dumb, anyway, so let me do something that actually is for once.”

She looped all the way back around to the service station and got back on the highway.

The hitchhiker, still walking with his back to traffic, held out his thumb as if sensing her approach.

She pressed the brake and eased onto the shoulder ahead of him. “Dumb,” she said to her rear-view mirror as the mirage jogged up to meet her.

• • •

I can’t believe that worked.
John approached the brunette’s sedan and wriggled his knapsack off his back.

Gulielmus had told him he could sort of psychically lasso his targets if he got close enough, which would — if he’d done it right — instill in them a temporary compulsion to seek him out. Gulielmus hadn’t been very clear about how such a thing was accomplished, but John figured he’d try it on the first pretty lady he saw, not expecting anything to come of it. He’d just gotten close to the woman in the store and thought
I pick you
before moving away. When he saw her pass him on the ramp, he figured it hadn’t worked, but … there she was.