Dead Demon Walking (32 page)

I knew different. His sensitive demon
ears heard an unfamiliar click when he plugged in his coffeemaker.
His speed saved his life.

“
My coffeemaker. . .
?”

Larsen nodded.

I went to the counter and looked at
the back of the machine. The plug hung half out the electrical
outlet. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I would not have
heard a strange click. My first cup of the day would have been my
last.

Larsen handed me the outlet cover.
“You might want to put this back on.”

“
How did they get in?”
Royal asked.

Larsen pointed to the back door.
“Picked the lock.” He turned to me. “You’re security
stinks.”

Not the first time I heard that. Royal
liked to remind me of it, often. “I don’t have any.”

“
Exactly.”

I backed up a step and sank down on a
kitchen chair. I felt kind of weird, out of place in my own home. I
didn’t know what to do next, if anything.

Royal put one hand on Larsen’s
shoulder, the other on Mike’s. “Are you through here?” he
hinted.

“
Sure,” Mike said. “Tiff,
come down tomorrow morning. Larsen is using our office.”

I let my head sag on one side and made
a face. “Mike, I don’t know anything.”

Not yet, anyhow.

“
Come down
anyway.”

I grimaced and nodded. Mike and Larsen
left.

With detective and agent gone, Jack
and Mel converged on me, but I backed up to the hall where Royal
stood at the open front door. “They’re fine,” I told him.
“Hysterical, but fine.”

He didn’t look impressed.
How could two shades
not
be fine? It’s not as if intruders could hurt
them.

I went to him and leaned on his chest.
His arms clasped me. “You’re going to stay here, aren’t
you?”

“
I was thinking The Hilton.
They serve breakfast in bed.”

I hung back in his arms. “I’ll get you
break. . . . Yeah, and I hear it’s a real good breakfast
too.”

His smile lit his face while sunlight
coming through the door made his copper-gold hair glimmer as if
limned by water. “I can cook breakfast here. I’d like to stay, if
you have room for me in your bed.”

I felt a wee bit mushy.
“Always.”

Mike and Larsen stood in my front
yard; as they and assorted police officers looked on, Royal cupped
my face in his hands and we had a nice, long, passionate
smooch.

***

“
Two men, in the middle of
the night,” Mel babbled, hands flapping all over the
place.

I opened the backdoor for a very
displeased Mac, although it’s hard to tell with Mac, since
displeased is one of his favorite states of mind. “What did they
look like?”

“
It was dark,” from Jack.
“Night is like that, you know, dark.”

“
How do you know they were
men?”

“
They wore tight clothes.”
Mel paused thoughtfully, went on, “
Skin
tight.”

“
One went down to the
breaker box in the basement while the other fiddled in the kitchen
cupboard. Sounded like he used an electric saw,” Jack
said.

“
Sounded?”

“
It was.
I
watched,” said Mel,
“while Mr. Big and Bold stayed in the basement. As if an explosion
could hurt us. . . .”

Jack inspected his cuticles. “You
never know.”

I met Royal’s gaze with reluctance,
not wanting to see the expression in his dark-copper eyes. Now the
cops were gone, he would let his anger show.

He clenched his hands around mine so
strongly I thought my knuckles would pop. “Tell me.”

I repeated what Jack and Mel
said.

Some of the tension eased from his
body. He slumped and loosened the death-grip on my hands. “I don’t
know why I thought . . . Morté Tescién. They would not use
unsophisticated methods. They would be more direct.”

I dragged my eyes from his, seeing not
the kitchen but a cavern-like basement in Bel-Athaer, a headless
body, the demons streaming away, leaving Royal and me to escape,
but watching us with angry, smoldering eyes. Not all submitted to
the High House when it came down on Morté Tescién. Some went into
the hills. They were nothing more than bandits now.

I’d not forgotten them, but
time passing can lull you into a false sense of security. They
blamed me as much as Royal for Kien’s death. Royal thought they
finally came after us. Did we need to look over our shoulders in
two directions, for Gelpha
and
human assassins? Who in the human world wanted to
kill us?

Epilogue

Royal crouched at the wood-burning
stove as he expertly inserted another log and closed the
glass-fronted door. The dancing flames cast warm orange light over
his shoulders and made his hair bright as the sun. The scars on his
back stood out, smooth white seams on his pale-copper
skin.

We could do without the stove, but
he’d been dying to light it for days. I didn’t tell him I left the
windows open all day when we were out so the room would be nicely
chilled when we got home, giving him a reason to light a
fire.

He came back to the couch and settled
beside me. I rested my cheek in the

hollow of his shoulder, my arm over
his smooth, naked chest. He yawned.

“
Is my big bad demon
tired?”

“
Your big bad demon’s had
hardly a wink of sleep these two weeks.”

“
And whose fault is that?”
I said, all sympathy.

He forwent The Hilton’s comfort to
stay with me and remained when the Fire Marshall gave the okay for
him to return to his apartment a week ago. I didn’t cook him
breakfast. He took over my kitchen and my poor refrigerator wheezed
with the strain of trying to contain all the food he stuffed in
there. I was relieved to have him with me. Irrational, I know, but
I shied clear of electric outlet for days. I couldn’t touch the
appliances I keep in a cabinet because I don’t use them every day.
I tackled cans with a regular can opener instead of my electric
model. I heated my frozen waffles in the microwave instead of the
toaster. I even eyed my electric toothbrush with suspicion, even
though it’s always plugged in. Royal checked the place over and
tried to reassure me, but I needed time.

And I can’t forget if Royal were human
he would not have felt a slight resistance as he plugged his
coffeemaker in the outlet to make me a drink, or heard that tiny
click; could not have zipped out of there barely ahead of the
explosion.

Because the three floors of his
building are separate, self-contained units with no connecting
vents or inside stairwell, the shop and his bedroom escaped the
smoke and water damage, but his living space was uninhabitable.
Designed to destroy what - rather, who - stood close to the bomb,
the damage from the explosion wasn’t that bad. Smoke damage was
another matter.

I didn’t know disaster
cleanup is so complicated. Everything containing plastics is
tossed. Out went Royal’s home entertainment center. Oh dear. They
took every appliance in his kitchen, and of course the explosion
destroyed his cabinets. Royal no longer had a kitchen. When the
local team wanted to toss his giant Buddha and he had to explain it
is not plastic, but Asian lacquer-work, he politely dismissed them
and called in the team from San Diego.
They
shipped his precious Buddha, the
lacquer bar and his wall art to San Diego for professional
restoration. And the out-of-state team knew how to treat old
brickwork and antique fittings.

They stripped the space and took
everything salvageable away for cleaning. He paid them double the
rate to speed up their operation and get everything back to normal.
That meant letting them in the apartment at the crack of dawn and
closing up late at night, and when not there, he stayed with me. He
catnapped during the day, but I don’t think he slept at night. He
stayed awake, watching over me.

That had to end. His apartment was
back together again. He should go home and enjoy it.

He yawned again. I yawned with
him.

“
Are you sure about this?”
he asked.

This would be my first evening alone
in the house. “I’ll be fine.”

“
Because I can stay. I want
to.”

He wanted to stay for my
sake, because he feared those hit-men would come back and he would
not be here to protect me. But we had to try and get back to what
passed for normal lives. Surely he hankered for his own place, and
I know he’d had enough of Jack, Mel and me having cozy chats. I
would too, when I had to listen to my girlfriend go over her
adventures
for the third time.

I slithered around on the seat and
took his face between my palms, gazing in his serious copper eyes.
“I know you worry, and I worry about you, but we can’t be together
every minute of the day. We can’t let them have that kind of power
over us.”

Gareth suggested Royal and I live in
Bel-Athaer, in the High House, safe from human assassins. But,
spend an indefinite amount of time in protective custody? I would
rather take my chances here, in Clarion.

Royal put his hands over mine, leaned
in and kissed me, a gentle, loving kiss. Then he stroked my hair
away from my face, a depth of concern in his eyes.

He had been so gentle with me since
his return from Bel-Athaer. My cracked ribs could account for that
initially, but he still treated me like china which will break if
held too tight. Strangely, I also sensed a barely restrained
fierceness in his touch, as if held at bay with inhuman control. He
often seemed preoccupied, and sometimes I caught him watching me
with an expression I couldn’t fathom. The next second, he was all
smiles.

I thought our recent brushes with
death reminded us of our mortality, and what we could
lose.

***

Mac and I
strolled the Claverley Trail below the benches, an area of mossy
grass two-hundred-feet wide and five miles long. The place is a
mass of wild flowers in spring, but now fallen leaves littered
brown, dying grass. Unusual rock formations and small trees warped
by winter’s ferocity dot the area. Rock-face soars on the east
side, where the hike and bike trails begin. The ground drops
sharply on the west to a chain-link fence; below that are the roofs
of homes belonging to people who can afford to build on premium
plots this far up the mountainside.

A dirt and rock trail meanders back
and forth over the grass between trees and clusters of rock, and
you watch where you put your feet lest you trip or stub your toes.
But I don’t worry about that - Mac moves about as slowly as four
short legs and big paws can. There are too many tantalizing smells
and he wants to investigate every one. He also has to challenge
every other dog on the trail. He lets the small dogs off with a
snarled warning, but I have to hold him back from big dogs. I think
he has a Napoleon complex.

The trail is popular with those who
want to amble rather than hike, so I didn’t walk alone. I nodded,
said hi, wrestled Mac away from other dogs and apologized on his
behalf. I tried to admire the scenery.

I still felt vulnerable. A few people
in the vicinity are no deterrent to a marksman with a high-powered
rifle.

I pressed my left arm to my side to
feel the bulk and weight of my Ruger in its shoulder holster. I
watched Mac for any indication he heard or sensed something
hostile, other than the frequent, imaginary threats to his canine
superiority.

Why are you alone out
here, Tiff? Because you’re a damned, stubborn fool.

I clenched my teeth. I
would
not
turn
tail and run back home.
Think of something
else
.

So, naturally, my thoughts turned to
another unfathomable, unresolved subject.

I have a file on the Dark Cousins, but
not in a drawer or on the computer. It’s where it can never be read
by another, in my mind. I added what I recently learned to that
little cache of information.

“
History tells us we can
defeat the Dark Cousins . . . long ago we slew Dark Cousins . . .
on our own ground, when we massed against them.”
Why did they fight? What did they fight
over
?

I think Dark Cousins once
lived in Bel-Athaer. Gelpha forced them out. No. They made a pact.
Dark Cousins
agreed
to leave Bel-Athaer. Why? What could make creatures with their
superior strength and abilities capitulate?

Maybe they were outnumbered. Those
movies in which the lone warrior kills hundreds of adversaries -
don’t believe it. The most skilled fighters can be overcome by
sheer numbers, it’s happened countless times in world
history.

The Gelpha ousted the Cousins, yet
they still intimidate Gelpha. When Royal and I, Gia and Daven went
to the High House, the Cousins made hundreds of Gelpha in the great
hall back down, cowed by a look from their eyes.