Heart of the Demon (12 page)

She was probably right.

“Ex. Plain.” Nix crossed her arms and one booted foot began tapping on the carpet.

He figured if he drew this out any longer he’d end up with that boot up his ass, plus he didn’t ordinarily turn his teasing
into cruelty. “My test of loyalty to the rogue group is to kill your husband.”

“Well, that ain’t gonna happen.” She plopped down on the sofa and curled her legs beneath her. Her relaxed pose in no way
detracted from the fierceness still blazing from her eyes. “What did you tell them?”

“I said I’d do it. They know Caine and I had a run-in several months ago, and really, there’s no love lost between us.” When
Nix shot to her feet again, he hurriedly assured her, “I’m not going to, of course. But I have an idea how we can do this,
especially since I talked Liuz out of accepting Caine’s head as proof the deed was done.”

Nix went very still as only a vampire can do. “Son of a bitch.”

“There’s more,” he cautioned.

“Oh, hell, there always is.” She sighed and sat back down.

“The meetings that I’ve been to have taken place in the basement at Devil’s Domain.” He watched for her reaction to that bit
of news. Nix knew the owner, Byron Maldonado, a vampire and an old friend and former employer to her husband.

“Byron is mixed up in this?” Nix jumped to her feet once more and paced in front of the couch. “He and I will have to have
a talk about that.”

Finn tried to calm her down. “Be careful, Nix. We don’t want to blow our cover. For now I think we need to sit on this.”

“Now, Nix,” her mother said, “just because you think you’re some kind of big, badass vampire,” her face crinkled in disgust
for a quick moment, “you don’t have the right to take the leader of the city’s vampires to task.”

“Watch me.” Nix didn’t show any reaction to the look on her mother’s face that Finn was sure she’d seen. He knew she regretted
not having a close relationship with her mother, and now that she was part vampire she probably never would.

The front door opened and closed, and Lucifer walked into the living room. When he saw Finn, he shook his head. “I didn’t
see your bike parked out front. I suppose you came over the back wall again?”

“He did.” This from Betty, who got up and walked over to Lucifer. She placed a kiss on his cheek and wrapped her arms around
his waist.

Finn saw the wince that Nix tried to hide. Damn her mother. Why couldn’t she dole out some of the affection she reserved for
his father to her own damned daughter some time? As a child starved for one little sign of approval from his own parent, he
knew it wouldn’t take much.

Lucifer kissed Betty’s forehead and came with her into the room. They settled onto the sofa as he said, “Well, fill me in.
How’re things going?”

Finn brought him up to speed. By the time he got to the part about being asked to kill Caine, Lucifer’s eyes blazed with yellow
demon fire. “Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah, that’s the consensus around here,” Finn muttered. “Don’t worry. Instead of taking him Caine’s head, I told Liuz I’d
bring him his fangs.” He looked at Nix. “Caine is going to have to shed some blood, though.”

Her eyes narrowed again.

“He’s right,” Lucifer said. “Liuz will be able to smell whether it’s Tobias or not.”

“Fine. But he’s not shedding any more than he has to, so don’t go getting any ideas.” Nix shot Finn a warning glance. “How
do you propose to pull this off?”

“We’ll need a dead vamp brought to your house.” He had something else to figure out, too. Like how to make sure Liuz or one
of his shapeshifting buddies didn’t smell the underlying odor of the original owner of whatever fangs he tried to pass off
as Caine’s. He finally settled on bleach. It would clean most of the other vamp’s blood off and mask any remaining odor. Even
a small amount of Caine’s blood would provide enough of a scent to make a positive ID. “And we’ll need bleach,” he added.

“Bleach?” This from Betty.

Finn nodded. “I’ll need to soak the wooden stake and the fangs in bleach before coating them in Caine’s blood. The bleach
should obfuscate the scent enough that Stefan won’t be able to tell there’s another vamp’s scent underlying Caine’s.”

 “Tobias has a friend at the council morgue,” Nix said. “I think we can trust him to give us a dead vampire who’s similar
to Tobias in size. I’ll let you know.”

“It has to happen tonight.”

“What!” Nix hopped to her feet again. “Are you kidding me?”

He shook his head. “It’s a test. If I fail this, they’ll fail
me
.” He stared at her. “Can you and Tobias get that corpse?”

“The alternative being that you make my husband a corpse?” She scowled.

“No.” Finn put his hands on his knees and pushed to his feet. “I wouldn’t.”

“Sure you wouldn’t,” she muttered. “You don’t like Tobias, why should killing him bother you?”

“Because Finn is not cold-blooded,” Lucifer said. His voice was low, but steel threaded through the softness. “Don’t mistake
his adeptness at his job as anything other than what it is: dealing out justice.”

Finn sent his father a look of gratitude. He’d been getting it from all sides lately, it seemed. It was nice to know his dad
was in his corner on this one. “When you have things in place, send me a text that dinner’s ready. I’ll head on over.”

Nix lifted her chin in acknowledgment. As Finn started toward the kitchen, her voice stopped him. “And Finn?”

He turned back toward her.

“Regardless of your protestations, I know you. If anything, anything at all, happens to my husband, you won’t live long enough
to celebrate it.”

More often than not he gave Nix a hard time, but he’d always had a healthy respect for her skills. Skills that were now enhanced
by virtue of her being half vampire. “I won’t let anything happen to him,” he said, hoping he could keep his promise.

He lifted a hand in farewell and left the house. When he climbed onto his bike, he caught movement from the corner of his
eye from the house next to the one he was parked in front of. He paused, leaning over his bike as if he were checking something,
and reached out with his senses. He couldn’t hear anything beyond normal night sounds, and when he tapped into his chameleon
abilities and took on the olfactory senses of a werewolf, he couldn’t smell much of anything beyond the gasoline in his bike
and the rubber and asphalt smell of the road. Except…

There was something vaguely feline in the air. Maybe Liuz had sent someone to tail him, to make sure he got the job done?
All they would know at this point was that he’d gone to his father’s house, and that Nix had been there. Which could be explained
away as a family thing he couldn’t get out of. For now, he wanted to see who was spying on him, and why.

He got off the bike and stood looking at it, giving whoever was hiding in the bushes time to relax. Then with a low grunt
he turned and sprinted toward the house. He heard the bushes rustle as the other person tried to get away from him, but Finn
was fast. Even faster when he took on the aspects of a catshifter himself.

Damn it. His shadow must have shifted, because the feline smell was stronger now. Finn chased him around several hedgerows
before he was able to dive down and grab—

A cat. A damned ordinary orange tabby who hung in his grasp like a spitting furball of fury. Even with shapeshifters the laws
of nature applied. A two-hundred-pound man could not downsize himself into a twenty-pound cat, no matter how hard he tried.
Some mass could be lost or even expanded upon, but not
that
much. Catshifters were always big cats—lions, tigers, pumas, and the sort.

The tabby landed a lucky swipe of claws across Finn’s inner forearm. He muttered an oath and dropped the cat, who growled
and then hissed at him one last time and darted away.

Finn walked back to his bike and drove home, wincing as the scratches on his forearm tensed and pulled with the use of the
hand gears. He’d never been fond of cats, and this solidified his dislike. Damned felines.

Once at home, he cleaned the scratch marks on his arm, though they were already healing. He wolfed down a couple of PB&Js,
then geared up. He cleaned his seldom-used Glock and placed it in the holster. Clipping it to his belt, he moved on to his
scabbard holding his short sword. It snuggled between his shoulder blades, the handle just where he could reach behind his
neck to grab it. He tucked two wooden stakes into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. One final piece of equipment—a
pair of pliers—and he was set. He sat down to wait.

Within an hour he received his text from Nix. Showtime.

Finn drove to Caine’s house, fairly certain this time that he was being followed. His every turn was matched by a black sedan
traveling a few cars behind.

The walkway to the house was well lit, making picking the lock on the front door like child’s play. As he let himself into
the darkened house he noticed all the curtains were drawn closed. He hesitated, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness. A
dead vamp, a silent pale slab in front of the sofa like a morbid coffee table, lay on the living room floor. While Tobias
and Nix stood without moving in a corner of the living room, Finn went about making it look like a struggle had taken place.
He knocked over a lamp and shoved the sofa across the room. Then he slammed one of the wooden stakes through the vamp’s heart.

He pulled the sharpened wood right back out again. “Do something with that,” he said in a low voice, and held out the stake
to Nix. Bits of tissue and congealed blood clung to the wood. She came forward and took the stake with two fingers and a thumb,
wrinkling her nose slightly. “You’re such a girl,” Finn muttered, keeping his voice barely above a whisper. Even if anyone
was lurking by the windows or door they wouldn’t be able to hear him, preternatural hearing included.

“Shut up.” Nix’s voice was just as quiet as his had been.

“Both of you shut up,” Caine whispered.

Finn couldn’t hold back a grin. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll have something else for you in a few seconds here.”

He pulled the pliers from his jacket pocket and expediently removed the fangs from the dead vamp, ignoring the crunch and
pop they made as they left the corpse’s gums. He looked at Nix and held out his hand. “Take these, too.” He pulled the other
stake from his pocket. “Clean the fangs and this stake with bleach. Let them soak a few minutes. You can dispose of that one,”
he said, pointing at the used piece of wood.

“They’ll be able to smell the bleach, right?” Her voice was as quiet as his.

“Sure they will.” He glanced over at Caine and then looked at Nix again. “But they’ll also be able to smell your husband’s
blood. I can explain away the bleach,” he added with a shrug.

As Nix left to take care of the fangs and wooden stakes, Finn settled himself on the floor by the corpse and looked at Caine,
who hadn’t moved a hair. “Did she tell you about where the meetings are being held?” Finn asked.

Caine gave an imperceptible nod. “She did.” His voice was so low Finn had to strain to hear. Caine went on, “When this is
all over, Byron Maldonado, Nix, and I will have a nice, long chat, don’t worry.”

“Do you think he’s involved?” Finn leaned back on one elbow.

“I don’t know.” Caine sounded troubled by that. “I think if there was a big enough payout for him, he might.”

“And that bothers you.”

“It does.” Caine took a step forward. Light from outside filtered around the curtains and streamed across his face. “If he’s
part of this rogue group, it means he’s sold out every bit of integrity I ever thought he had.”

Finn knew personal integrity meant a lot to Caine. “And what about Liuz?”

Caine’s face went still and hard like marble. Except a marble statue’s jaw didn’t flex like Caine’s was. His reddened eyes
met Finn’s. “I want to be there, at the end. I want him to die at my hands for what he did to Nix.”

Just then Nix walked back into the room. Finn got to his feet and took the stake and teeth from her. “I need some of your
blood,” he told Caine.

The vampire lifted his wrist to his mouth and raked his fangs across the veins. Blood, rich and wet in the semidarkness, streamed
down his arm. Without a word Finn handed him the stake, watching while Caine rolled it around, coating it in blood.

He took the stake and stared at it, watching a drop of blood fall off the sharp tip. “Ah.” He looked at Nix. “Could I trouble
you for a towel?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She walked off, soundless even in her irritation, and returned less than a minute later with a hand
towel and a washcloth. She handed him the towel. “For the stake,” she said.

He slipped the terry cloth–wrapped wood into the inner pocket of his leather jacket while Caine repeated the process with
the fangs. Nix gave him the washcloth, which he dropped the fangs into before folding it up and stuffing it into the back
pocket of his jeans. With a slight smile, he said to Caine, “You want to flick some of that my way?”

“Good idea.”

“Wait!” Nix said in a harsh whisper as Caine lifted his arm and flung it toward Finn a couple of times, flinging splatters
of blood onto his clothing.

“Just so you know,” she muttered, “I’m not cleaning this mess up.”

Finn felt a hot splash across his cheek. “Okay, okay. I think we’re good.” He reached up and swiped at the blood on his face.

“You could’ve smeared him with blood,” Nix said to her husband. “You didn’t have to fling it all over the place.” She huffed
a sigh. “Men.”

Finn reached inside his jacket and swiped his fingers against the towel that held the stake. He looked down at the corpse.
“Uh, you guys’ll take care of this one?”

Caine nodded. “We’ll put him in my clothes and disfigure his face so no one can tell it’s not me by looking at him. My friend
at the morgue will make sure this vamp gets tagged as me.”

“I’ll wait a few minutes until after you’ve gone, then I’ll call council dispatch to report my husband’s murder.” Nix stared
at Finn. “If you know what’s good for you, this is as close to actual death my husband will ever get.” Even though Finn could
tell she tried to add some lightness to the words, there was a protective edge to her tone. Anyone who wanted to get to Tobias
would have to get by her first.