Jane Kindred - Kindling The Darkness

Before it could make its escape, Lucy grabbed it by the wrist and pinned its hand to the cool wooden tabletop.

“Let go of me.” The eyes narrowed to reptilian slits with an unnerving clicking sound, like a muted camera shutter.

“You’re out of your element.”

The demon bristled, a reptilian reflex beneath the borrowed skin. “And you’re about to discover how far you are out of yours.”

Lucy smiled darkly. “You’d be surprised how far my element extends.” She’d been banking on the fact that the demon wouldn’t want to make a scene in the middle of a brightly lit coffeehouse with a small but decidedly human audience. She hadn’t counted on the demon’s desperation.

A hissing sound provided an instant’s warning before the demon spat, giving Lucy the chance to duck and dodge, narrowly missing a face full of demonic acid. Unfortunately, the evasive action also loosened her grip, and her quarry was off in a flash.

Lucy catapulted over the counter into the short-order kitchen in pursuit of the creature, startling a busboy and a tired cook. The demon flung the busboy across the kitchen as a distraction, but Lucy wasn’t here to pick hapless busboys up off the floor. She was here to stop a hell fugitive.

She leaped over him and followed the demon through the back door into the alley. It had given up its pretense of humanity, shedding its skin and leaving the corpse of the unfortunate woman it had been wearing in a heap among the trash bins as it dropped onto all fours and scuttled through a crack between two buildings.

Lucy spared a glance back up the alley to make sure she wasn’t observed before using the advantage of her own unnatural blood to scale the back of the building and race over the top. Inheriting some of Lucien’s curse came with a few perks. She leaped down onto the unlit street just in time to block the demon’s egress as it crept out. The demon reared up on its hind legs in surprise, poised for an attack, as Lucy drew her gun—she’d brought her favorite, the Nighthawk Custom Browning Hi Power 9 mm—and aimed between the thing’s inhuman eyes. The skin it had shed evidently wasn’t the corpse of a human after all, but a sort of shifter’s shell, as evidenced by the demon wriggling to redon the same form like a translucent skin coat, albeit a slightly fresher version. It was an obvious ploy to appeal to Lucy’s humanity. Always a mistake.

“Please.” The demon held its human-appearing hands in the air. “I have babies at home. I’m a single mom.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Appealing to her womanhood was an even bigger mistake. Lucy palmed the slide to chamber a round. “Hope you kissed them goodbye.”

Before she could pull the trigger, something barreled into her from her left, knocking the gun from her hands and her to the ground. Her Russian martial arts training kicked in automatically, and Lucy flipped over and onto her feet before her attacker could grab her, swiping his leg with a roundhouse kick from a crouch and incapacitating him with a one-two punch to the neck as he fell. When he hit the ground, Lucy leaped on top of him and dug her fist into the hair at his forehead to slam his head back onto the concrete. He managed to block her as she swung at his jaw simultaneously, trapping her arm inside his with an elbow jab toward her throat. They were deadlocked.

Lucy glared down at her attacker, sizing him up. A dark hood framed salt-and-pepper hair and a tightly compressed, disapproving mouth in a tan face offset by a sharp, muscular jaw. For a middle-aged man, he was in damn good shape. Not an ounce of fat on him.

“That was an escaped fugitive whose rescue you just came to, G.I. Joe. Thanks to you, a violent predator is in the wind.”

“From where I’m lying, you seem to be the violent predator.” He let go of her arm, and she let him yank his hair from her fingers. “I’d like to see your badge.”

Lucy snorted with derision and rose to collect her pistol from where it had spun against the corner of one of the buildings. “I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Maybe I’ll just make a citizen’s arrest, then.”

Lucy let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “I’d like to see you try.”

The demon’s rescuer rubbed the back of his head with a grimace as he got to his feet and observed her for a moment with a frown of mistrust. “Exactly what did that one-hundred-pound woman do that’s so dangerous?”

Lucy checked her clip. “Killed at least five people last week, for starters. I tracked her here from Flagstaff, where she left a trail of bodies. Two of them kids. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say she’s got an appetite for skin.”

Midlife G.I. Joe frowned and shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong girl. She’s been working at the Mine Café for a month. Hasn’t strayed beyond a ten-mile radius since she got here.”

“How would you know?”

“I make it my business to know when someone extra-human is in my neighborhood. And this one’s harmless.”

So he’d peeked beyond the veil. Lucy studied him. Seemed human. Didn’t necessarily mean he was. “My sources say you’re wrong.”

“Well, your sources are mistaken. I’m part of a neighborhood watch—of a sort—and I’m telling you this girl can’t be your perp.”

Lucy holstered the gun in her shoulder strap. “You think I’m law enforcement?”

“Not ordinary law enforcement, obviously. But yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Let’s just say I’m a private contractor. I track things that don’t belong in this plane. And I tracked an infernal flesh-eater here.”

His eyes had narrowed in a glower at the words private contractor .

“Maybe you tracked something here, but it wasn’t her.” He pulled up his hood as it began to drizzle, warm skin tone reduced to a craggy monochrome silhouette under the flickering sodium streetlight. “And we don’t need any private contractors stalking our citizens. The town of Jerome takes care of its own.”

“I don’t really care what you ‘need.’ There’s a killer on the loose, and I intend to take it down. Wherever it attempts to hide out.”

He glared down at her, trying to use his height to dominate. “If I see you in Jerome again, I’ll consider you hostile.”

Lucy gave him her best death stare through the now-pouring rain. “Why wait? You can consider me hostile right now.” She turned and strode away before he could form a retort, heading through the downpour back toward Main Street, where she’d parked her car.

As she wound down the two-lane highway, the beat of steady autumn rain against her windshield was already slowing, and the sun had made a dismal appearance through the dull steel of cloud cover in the five minutes it took to reach the bottom of Cleopatra Hill. The town of Clarkdale ahead of her was the first sign of civilization—if you could call it that—in the Verde Valley Basin. After that, the somewhat larger sprawling suburban town of Cottonwood laid claim to the title with a population of twelve thousand. Not that her current base, Sedona, was really any bigger, but it felt like a larger town with its hip vibe and nonstop stream of tourists who came for the metaphysical ambience and stayed for the real magic of sun and stream and stone.

After filling up at the Clarkdale Gas-N-Sip, Lucy headed for the restroom outside the convenience store, unwinding her knotted braid and separating the soaking hair into three dripping plaits as she rounded the building.

She sensed the presence in the bushes before it leaped, but there was only time enough to meet its force with a full frontal attack of her own. The creature snarled and went for her throat as she aimed for its solar plexus. She was taking a guess at where that was, but her left fist landed solidly while she followed up with a right to its jaw. Sharp teeth grazed her knuckles—luckily, she was immunized against lycanthropy—but the blow to its gut had slowed it down.