Jenna Black: The Devil's Due

“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?

The demons had shown far too much interest in this kid’s life. My gut instinct said it would behoove me to find out why.

It was a Saturday, and Adam was on duty, so I wasn’t surprised not to hear from him. Whatever research he was planning to do on Tommy Brewster would no doubt be off the record, and he probably wouldn’t even get started on it until tomorrow. Even understanding this, I chafed at the delay. Of course, some of my impatience was probably due to my desperate desire to find an excuse to cancel my evening’s planned activity—dinner with Brian.

I’d barely spoken to him since he’d helped Lugh kill my father. He’d called a number of times, and I’d even picked up once or twice, but my emotions had been far too raw to handle an actual conversation. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I felt about him right now—though beneath whatever other layers of feelings existed, I had to admit that I still loved him.

Or at least still loved the man I’d thought I’d known. Only I was no longer entirely sure that man existed.

Until that dreadful night, I’d always thought of Brian as the quintessential Boy Scout: virtuous, kind, and law-abiding to a fault. Never would I have imagined him being party to my father’s grisly death, and it was the disillusionment, more than the act itself, that put me into such a tailspin of uncertainty.

When Brian had invited me to come to his apartment for dinner so we could talk things through, my first instinct had been to say no. I’m always one to follow my instincts, but Brian is a lawyer, and a good one at that, and whenever I allowed him to draw me into an argument—or “discussion,” as he called it—I invariably came out on the losing end. Which was how I’d ended up promising to show up at his apartment at seven o’clock tonight.

I’m not what you’d call a girly-girl, and it was completely unlike me to spend twenty minutes agonizing over what to wear, but I did it anyway—even though my wardrobe was severely limited since everything I’d owned had gone up in smoke. I knew I was procrastinating, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

I finally settled on a pair of tight, hip-hugging black jeans and a clingy, silk-knit green T-shirt that was a perfect complement to my red hair. It was—for me, at least—an understated kind of sexy. Not something that screamed “fuck me,” but not something that screamed “keep your hands off me,” either.

I finished the outfit off with a pair of black leather thong sandals with just enough heel to keep the hem of the jeans from dragging on the ground. After a final inspection in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of my bathroom door, I finally decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. I then looked at my watch and saw that I was already fifteen minutes late.

Cursing under my breath, I hurried to the door—but not before I’d double-checked my Taser to make sure its battery was fully charged. Brian’s apartment was only six blocks from my own. Maybe I should have driven, seeing as I was already late, but I covered those six blocks at a brisk walk instead.

By the time I got there, the thong on my sandals had rubbed blisters between my toes—they weren’t the best walking shoes in the world—and I was sure I’d chewed off all the lipstick on my lower lip. I took a couple of deep breaths to compose myself—like that had a chance of working—before I rang the bell.

I’d expected Brian to be annoyed. After all my dithering, I’d managed to be more than a half hour late, and I’d been too self-absorbed to even think about calling. But his only comment was a raised eyebrow as he opened the door wide enough to let me in. I swallowed hard as I crossed that threshold. I was a mature adult. Mature adults don’t run away from conflict like frightened little girls. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t such a mature adult.