Angie Fox - The Last of the Demon Slayers

The jacket that he’d given to me. I ran my fingers down the coat and found gouged leather and bite marks. “You have to stop saving me.”

He laughed at that, which didn’t make sense at all.

The banshee would have been on me in a heartbeat and if I’d been without my switch stars, a fraction of a second slower, distracted in any way, Dimitri might be dead.

The creature bled mucus onto the ground as I tried to catch my breath. “I hate killing things.”

Before I’d come into my powers as a slayer, the worst thing I’d done was stomp a cockroach. Now I killed things all the time. In my defense, they were creatures who wanted to eat me or possess me. Still, it didn’t make it easy. The dead banshee reminded me a little of a smashed insect, leaking out its grape jelly insides.

What would happen if I had to kill my own father?

“I don’t think the six we killed tonight are the only ones,” he said, with a touch of resignation. “Someone knew we were coming and brought a small army here to take us out. Best I can figure, the original drop point was on the driveway out front, less than an hour before we pulled up.”

“You don’t think they just happened to migrate here?”

He scowled at the creature, broken and bloody on the pavement. “One, maybe. But six? No way. They tend to be loners.”

“And if you’re going to release six…”

“You’ll release a lot more,” Dimitri said, finishing my thought.

I sucked in a breath. I didn’t want to be running into any more of these things.

Dimitri rose to his feet. He stood shirtless in the glow of the porch light. His chest, well muscled but not overdone, gave him an air of understated sexiness.

He walked toward the beast and squatted over it. “Whoever did it isn’t used to working with banshees,” he said. “They didn’t realize how fast the creatures scatter.”

”And we have no idea who set these things loose?”

He shook his head. “That’s what I was hoping to learn by bringing this one to your Grandma.”

We stared down at the dead banshee.

“Wait.” I had to wonder. “Are they after the group, or are they after me?” The banshee had attacked me first, before Dimitri had gotten in the way. It had watched me, as if it were tracking me. And it had gone for the kill. If someone or some thing wanted the witches and their magic, it would need them alive.

Dimitri shook his head. “Either way, I don’t think we should wander far tonight.”

“Which means,” I said, my heart sinking to my toes, “we’re not going out.”

“I don’t think it would be smart,” he said, looking as sorry as I felt, “at least not tonight.”

“I know,” I said, feeling the cold of the night for the first time since we’d stepped outside.

We stood there a moment next to the dead banshee with nothing else to say.

I touched his chest. “We have to bandage that bite,” I said, his skin warm against my fingers. A swirl of black hair traced its way down his lower stomach toward a place I knew well.

Come on.” He ran a hand along my back. “Let’s get back inside. You can play Nurse Fix-it and then we’ll get something to eat.”

“Okay.” I slipped my hand into his. “But this is not a date.”

We sat across from each other in a booth at the back of the bar. My crown-shaped chicken tenders didn’t taste as good with banshee spit on my shoes and creature dust in the jar on the table in front of me.

But seeing as either one of us could have gotten killed tonight, I supposed we were holding our own.

Dimitri had been pure business as I’d bandaged him up, which had been bad enough. Worse, he’d found a new black shirt.

Rather than think about the attack or our failed first date, I reverted to the most basic of womanly complaints. “I wanted to look good for you tonight and now all of this,” I waved a hand at my hair, my ruined pants, heck I probably had a booger in my nose too. It was that kind of night.

If Dimitri was fazed, he didn’t show it. “Bob told me what happened.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?”

He paused for a second too long. “It’s really not, Lizzie.”

Right.

Dimitri shrugged his unbandaged shoulder. It was a nonchalant gesture, but I knew him too well. He was taking deep breaths and doing his best not to stare. “There’s nothing you can do to change it, so stop worrying.”

A flush crept up his neck.

Great. He was embarrassed to be seen with me. Here, in a bar full of witches. How much worse would it be when we were actually out in public?

What really killed me was that I wasn’t the type to worry about how I looked. I used to wear basic, sensible clothes. I went for tidy and presentable. Dependable. I didn’t waste time on this season’s “in” hairstyles or worry about the latest lipstick colors. Long ago, I decided the entire fashion industry was designed to make women feel insecure.

Yes, I admit it - it had felt good to slip into my first pair of leather pants. I felt powerful, sexy. But in the end, it was only a pair of pants. It didn’t change who I was.

So why did I care so much about this?

“I just wish I could do something,” I groaned.

I needed control.

And it would help if Dimitri stopped staring at my wild-child hair. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was turned on.

I found a rubber band in my pants pocket and used it to pull my hair back into a ponytail.

As much as I wanted things to be normal, we had bigger things to consider, like the dead banshee out back and exactly what kind of trouble my father had gotten himself into. Dear old dad showing up and the creature attacks had to be connected somehow.

Before tonight, we’d gone months without being ambushed. Of course we’d been hanging out at Dimitri’s villa in Greece. I tried to remember exactly why we’d insisted on coming back to the States. Oh yes, because I needed more than an idyllic life on the islands – sleeping in, sunbathing, watching the witches build small castles – literally – out of the black sand. The Red Skulls never could do anything halfway. Of course it had been hard to explain to the beach patrol.

Even that seemed like fun compared to this.

“Can we go back to Santorini?” I asked, stuffing the remains of my dinner into a Burger King bag.

Dimitri looked thoughtful. “Do you want to return?”

“No,” I answered on a sigh.

It was his destiny, not mine. I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged.

As much as I loved Dimitri, I couldn’t just take up the life of a griffin housewife. Not that we’d ever talked marriage. That was the problem with him – with us. Our past was fiery. Our present was toe-curling, but our future was anything but certain.

I couldn’t live in a griffin clan on Santorini. I’d tried. And I didn’t think he wanted to spend the rest of his life tearing around on the back of a Harley, hunting demons.

Who would?

Creely slapped both hands onto our table, rattling everything on it. “You got any beer cans?” She reached for my Diet Coke, and shook it. “Good enough.”

“Hey,” I protested, “I still have a little more in there.”

“I can fix that,” Creely said, drinking it in a swig.

“Gee, thanks.”

But she was already jogging back to Bob, Pirate and a group of witches who were building a beer can tower by the bar.

“You see what I put up with?” I was about to get up and get another soda when the ashes of the rope twitched in Grandma’s jar.

Holy Hades. “Look at that.”

The particles in the jar rolled over each other as if blown by an invisible wind. They twisted faster and faster until they shaped themselves into a paler version of the silver rope. One end poked against the glass, reminding me of a blind snake, arching and finding its way. It stretched up into thin air, as if looking for something, and then wound back around itself, forming a noose.