Charlaine Harris - Must Love Hellhounds

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.

They made it simple for James.They sat him on the sofa and explained what would happen if he ever spoke a word about Ames-Beaumont’s family, or about what Geoff and Katherine could do.

They waited on the veranda while Sir Pup killed the demon in front of him.

When the hellhound was finished, Maggie cut through James’s handcuffs and let him go.

Maggie awoke in a familiar bed that wasn’t hers, with the most powerful vampire in the world glowering down at her.

She sat up, clutching royal blue satin to her chest. A chest that was, thank God, covered by the tank she wore beneath her uniform.

“Sir,” she said, and in the course of the word, tried desperately to remember how she’d ended up sleeping in his mansion.

She hadn’t fallen asleep on the plane. She did remember disembarking, and that her employer and Savi had met them at the airport. She’d said “Sir.” He’d said, “Good God, Winters. You’re bloody exhausted.”

That was the last she could recall. Which probably meant that Ames-Beaumont had given her a psychic shove and put her to sleep.

He sat on the edge of the bed, avoiding the sunlight streaming in through the eastern windows. When she’d first met him, she would have sworn the sun rose every morning purely out of hope it might shine on his face. There was beautiful, and then there was Colin Ames-Beaumont. He… glowed. Not physically, she knew, but psychically. The first weeks of her employment had been filled with humiliating leaps of her heart every time he’d entered the room she was in. Then she’d adjusted, the psychic effect had worn off, and she’d finally been able to look at him without catching her breath.