The Devil's Due (3 page)

Because of my uncomfortably eventful life, I never just strolled into my apartment as if it were a safe haven. Before I unlocked the door, I activated and armed my Taser. Once inside, I did a thorough room-to-room check before allowing myself to relax.

For a while, I’d tried the old trick of putting a length of string between the door and the frame when I went out. Supposedly, if that string was still in place when I returned, it meant no one had opened the door. The problem was I didn’t always remember to put it there, and any time I returned home and didn’t see the string my heart would go into overdrive and I’d conjure the image of hordes of demons invading my apartment. Even when the string was still right where I left it, I found I didn’t feel comfortable until I verified with my own two eyes that I was alone. I always felt vaguely silly when I’d finished my search, but that didn’t stop me from doing it.

Satisfied that there were no bogeymen waiting to kill me, I plopped down on the sofa, grabbed the remote, and tried to turn on the TV. Nothing happened. I’d forgotten the batteries were dead—I’d meant to stop by the store and buy some on my way home.

I was just mustering the enthusiasm to stand up and turn the TV on by hand when a sudden pain stabbed through my eye.

“Ow! Shit!” I pressed at the space between my eye and my nose, where the pain was most intense, but it was gone before I even got my hand to my face.

Lately, this was the only communication I had with Lugh while I was conscious. For a while, during a period of intense stress, I’d been able to hear his voice in my head, but my subconscious had learned how to block him out. I actually preferred the pain in my eye to hearing his voice in my head, which made me feel like a Looney Tune.

“Do we have to do this
now
?” I complained, and Lugh answered with another stab. I grumbled some more, but figured I might as well get it over with.

Once, when the bad guys had been about to burn me at the stake, I’d voluntarily let Lugh take control of my body to save the day. It had taken a monumental effort, and though he’d ceded control back to me afterward, the experience had left me shaken to the core. Recently, when I’d desperately needed to let him in, I’d found myself unable to do it. Lugh had eventually managed to take control, but by then I very much didn’t want him to.

I’d been seriously pissed at him for taking control of my body without my permission, and he’d promised me he’d never do it again—on one condition: that I learn how to let him in voluntarily when the situation warranted.

To that end, I dutifully tried once a night to let myself cede control to him. So far, I hadn’t succeeded, and I had a sinking feeling that wasn’t going to change. I’m a control freak by nature, and letting a demon—even one as benevolent as Lugh—take control of my body was my worst nightmare come true.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to relax enough to have a hope, however slim, of success. My muscles remained tight, and I was twitchy enough to have trouble keeping my eyes closed, so I got up and turned out all the lights, then reclined on my uncomfortable couch in hopes that that would be more relaxing.

I was still tense, and I noticed I was grinding my teeth. I huffed out a deep breath, then started on the litany of relaxation exercises Lugh had taught me. As usual, my mind kept running on its damn gerbil wheel, analyzing my body’s responses instead of letting go and drifting like it was supposed to. I thought I felt a pulse of frustration that wasn’t my own, but it was hard to be sure.

I tried my best for a half hour, but I didn’t even manage to get myself relaxed, much less let Lugh take control. He gave me another stab of pain when I gave up, but he had to sense how pointless it would have been to keep trying, so he let me be after that.

I didn’t go to bed until well after midnight, not because I wasn’t tired, but because I knew Lugh was going to have some words for me tonight and I wanted to put it off as long as possible. It was only when I almost nodded off on the couch that I decided it was time to face the music. If I was going to fall asleep and dream of Lugh, I’d rather do it in the comfort of my bed.

Sure enough, the moment I lost consciousness, I awakened in Lugh’s imaginary living room. I found myself reclining into the butter-soft embrace of a leather sofa, my bare feet propped in Lugh’s lap as he sat facing me on the matching ottoman.

I opened my mouth to protest the intimacy of the position, but at the same instant, he ran a strong, warm thumb up the center of my right foot. The pressure was just right, and I bit my tongue to suppress a moan as my toes curled in pleasure.

Lugh’s hair was unbound tonight, the long, raven’s wing tresses partially hiding his face, but I saw one corner of his mouth turn up with satisfied amusement. The bastard always knows exactly what buttons to push.

Before I could get pissy about it, he cupped my foot in both hands, using his thumbs to search out each knot of tension and soothe it away. I decided that protesting something that felt this good was the height of stupidity, so I closed my eyes and let myself enjoy the sensations.

I was warm and mellow when he’d finished with my right foot, and I was practically putty in his hands when he’d finished the left. Then he slid his hands up my calf, kneading the muscles. It felt damn good, but I couldn’t help opening my eyes and seeing that the sweatpants I’d been wearing when the dream began had disappeared, and I was dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and panties.

My feet were still in his lap, so I instinctively jammed my heel into his crotch to discourage his now wandering hands. Of course, since his body was just an illusion, he wasn’t even slightly discouraged. In fact, he closed his thighs tightly around my foot, holding it in place and pressing his erection against it. I had to suppress a shudder. I’ve got big feet for a woman, and his hard-on stretched from my heel to my toes.

“Unless you’re auditioning for a role as a porn star, you might want to consider a more realistic size,” I quipped, though my voice came out breathless.

He laughed, a sound as delicious as the darkest chocolate. “The advantage of dreams is they are not slaves to reality.”

I tried to pull my trapped foot away, but I wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to. This was one of the reasons I hadn’t particularly wanted to see him tonight—his flirting was getting progressively more aggressive. And harder to resist.

“Will you knock it off, already? I’m not in the mood to play games.”

He regarded me intensely, cocking his head as he thought. Then he released my foot, and my sweatpants reappeared. “No, I suppose you’re not,” he conceded. Score one for me!

“Of course, I’m also not in the mood to be lectured, so if that’s your plan, you might as well give it up.” I sat up straight and put my feet flat on the floor.

The ottoman disappeared, replaced by an armchair that sat uncomfortably close to the sofa, crowding me. Lugh knew perfectly well how much I liked my personal space, but I decided it would take too much energy to protest.

“You need to learn how to let me in,” he said simply.

I scowled at him. “Yeah, I know. I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“No, you’re not.”

The nerve of some people! “I don’t know what else you expect me to do. I’ve tried every relaxation technique you’ve taught me. I just don’t know how to turn off my need to be in control.”

“You could do it if you truly wanted to, but you’re still fighting it.”

“I am not!” I sounded like a petulant child, but I couldn’t help it. I’d spent at least a half hour tonight trying with everything I had to let him in, and I’d done so every night for the last two weeks. I don’t think I’d ever tried that hard to do anything in my entire life.

Lugh crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair, looking stern. “I’ll grant that you’re spending time on the project, but your heart isn’t in it. You’re still afraid that if you let me in, I’ll never let you back in control.”

I swallowed the protest I’d been about to make, because I recognized the truth when I heard it. Trust had never been one of my strong suits, and what little I’d had had been whittled away by a series of betrayals that still left me reeling.

I stared down at my hands, because it was too hard to look into Lugh’s reproachful eyes. “The last time you were in control, you shut me out and killed my father.”

Being shut out of my own body had been the single most terrifying experience of my life. And considering my life, that was saying a lot. I’d been completely unaware of what was happening in the real world, my consciousness imprisoned in a deep, dark, claustrophobic oubliette. I’d like to think that him using my body to murder my father—at least, the man who’d raised me as his own for all my life, even though he wasn’t my biological father—was the worst part about that memory, but I know it’s not true.

“I did what was necessary under the circumstances,” he said softly.

“I know that.” My father had been possessed by a sociopathic demon who knew far too much to be allowed to return to the Demon Realm. He’d had to die, but despite my less-than-stellar relationship with him, there was no way I could have killed him. So my semi-ex-boyfriend, Brian, had held me down until Lugh fought his way to the surface. I had yet to forgive either one of them.

“Knowing it was necessary doesn’t help,” I said. Lugh suddenly appeared at my side on the sofa, and I jumped. “Can’t you just get up and walk from the chair to the sofa? Do you
have
to poof and startle me?”

Not surprisingly, he ignored my question. “We are inextricably tied to one another for the foreseeable future.”

“Yeah, like I needed that reminder.”

“If you can’t learn to trust me, we’ll both die.”

A bitter laugh escaped me. “That’s just great, Lugh. ‘Trust me or die.’ Words of wisdom that are guaranteed to put warm, fuzzy feelings in my heart.”

He made an incoherent sound of frustration. I expected him to argue some more. Instead, the dream dissolved, and I slept through to morning.

I didn’t know why Lugh had let me off so easy last night, but the whole encounter left me unsettled when I awoke. He wasn’t one to give up, and I had to wonder what he was planning now.

Of course, whatever he was planning, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him, so I told myself to quit thinking about it. To help me follow my own orders, I distracted myself by getting on the Internet and seeing what information I could scrape up on the Brewster family.

I wasn’t expecting to find anything particularly interesting, or even particularly relevant. All I really hoped was to keep my mind off Lugh. But I found a lot more than I bargained for.

Claudia Brewster was exactly what she looked like—an extremely successful career woman. She’d gotten an MBA from Harvard and had eventually brokered that into a position as vice president of a management consultant firm here in the city. Her husband, Devon Brewster III, was old money, and I could see no evidence that he’d ever worked for a living.

But that wasn’t what caught my interest. It turned out there was a hell of a lot about Tommy Brewster that Claudia had failed to mention. Starting with the fact that he wasn’t her biological son.

It appeared no one knew for sure who Tommy Brewster really was. When he was three years old, he was found at a horrific crime scene in Houston, where a rampaging demon had killed four people. A cop had heard the screams and come running. The demon had grabbed Tommy and was about to smash his head against a wall when the cop reached them. The cop had shot the demon in the head, killing its host and saving Tommy’s life.

The story got stranger from there. The police were unable to identify any of the four people who’d been slaughtered, though blood tests proved that two of them were Tommy’s parents. Tommy was too traumatized to tell the police anything except his first name. He’d gone into the foster care system and had eventually ended up with the Brewsters, who’d adopted him when he was ten, after he’d lived with them for several years.

The police weren’t idiots. They knew the demon who’d killed Tommy’s parents wasn’t dead—the only way to kill a demon is to burn its host alive—and they knew it was possible it would return to the Mortal Plain to finish the job it had started. When Tommy had gone into foster care, social services had been very careful to cover their tracks and make it impossible for the demon to locate him.

So, how did I learn all this information about him if it was such a secret? Because Tommy had posted the whole sordid story on his MySpace page, along with enough anti-demon invective to get his profile deleted if anyone bothered to complain about it.

It was possible the story was a load of shit. I’d looked up the stories about the slaughter, and there was no denying it had occurred, and that a small child had been found at the scene. That didn’t mean Tommy was that child. Still, if it was true, that would explain Tommy’s devotion to God’s Wrath.

I knew Adam would find out for sure if Tommy Brewster was who he said he was. And if his story turned out to be true, then his case became even more suspicious.

Who was the demon who’d slaughtered those four people and would have slaughtered Tommy if not for a policeman’s timely rescue? Why had the demon gone on such a rampage? And could it possibly be a coincidence that shortly after Tommy Brewster turned twenty-one—the age at which he could legally register to host a demon—he turned up possessed?