LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      She was used to being followed. Sometimes she lost him. Sometimes she didn’t. It was those times she feared. Father Reynard wasn’t her enemy, but as she cut down the familiar side street that formed an alley between the auditorium and her apartment, she knew what he was to her was more complicated and more frightening than if he was something she could fight.

      The Savannah, Georgia, air was muggy in July, and her efforts to evade Reynard had left her damp with a sheen that was more humidity kissing her skin than sweat. But she didn’t pause to set down her cello case so she could mop her forehead with a lace hanky like a flustered Southern belle. Instead, tendrils of her thick chestnut hair curled around her face as strands loosened from the diamanté clips the salon had used when she’d been cool and collected and air-conditioned that morning, preparing for the afternoon’s performance.

      She heard his footfalls behind her. She knew his step. Others from his Order often hunted as well, but Reynard considered her his own.

      Her faltering steps had brought the sound of his relentless pursuit closer. A desperate instinct to run, to hide, rose up in her chest, squeezing her lungs so that she breathed more quickly than her current exertions required. It was fear, plain and simple and stark.

      Because there was no escape.

      The soft blanket of gloaming draped the city in a muted haze. The muggy haze had dimmed to purple with the setting of the Georgia sun. In the distance, she could hear the traffic and the hum of people on the sidewalks of the historic district preparing for ghost tours and streetlight-lit carriage rides. But here, on the leftover cobblestones of a distant time, she was alone...except for Father Reynard.

      His whistle began as it always did, with a lilting trio of notes that led into song. She recognized it as a Verdi piece she’d played that afternoon. Gooseflesh rose on her arms in spite of the oppressive heat from the summer day trapped in the narrow alley. The whistle meant he had her. It meant there must be a daemon nearby that she’d been drawn to. Her affinity had reliably led Father Reynard right where he most wanted to be. Again.

      She did stop then.

      Not giving up. Never that. She only paused to brace herself for what might be an ugly, dark and dangerous evening more from the violent monk who dogged her steps than the daemons he hunted. Although there was danger there, too. Certainly.

      She was trapped in the middle of a war that would never have a winning side.

      Katherine saw the daemon then. A woman. The glow of the horizon narrowly visible at the end of the alley cast her stiff form in stark relief. She stood poised for a fight. Her arms akimbo. Her knees slightly bent. It was going to be one of those times when the daemon didn’t go quietly. This was no hopeless soul longing to be sent back home. Katherine could see determination tense every muscle in the figure she faced.

      “A female. Good job, Katarina. It’s so important to banish these before they breed,” Father Reynard said as he came up behind her. She kept her focus on the daemon, but she was totally aware of Reynard’s movements. The same way she would be if she were a hiker who was suddenly forced to skirt a mountain ledge over a steep precipice. Her footing was just as precarious. One wrong move with the deadly daemon hunter and she might be dead herself. She could feel the suck of gravity as if she was on the ledge, inches from death. His steps were slow and steady. Not rushed. He was confident. His voice was already smug with success. She was the one who was in danger. She was the one who might slip and fall.

      Kat cringed at the utter contempt Reynard had for the daemon as a living, breathing creature, whether it was human or not. And at his total disregard for her and her disgust for his bloodthirsty quest.

      Kat fisted her hands, but the woman leaped before she could decide how best to give her a chance to flee. The alley was too wide, an access point for delivery trucks to service the buildings on either side. She dropped her cello case and jumped but had no chance to keep the hunter and his prey apart. Not when the prey was determined to get around her. Kat was pushed to the side. She slammed against solid brick, and all the air left her lungs in a painful rush.

      The daemon attacked Reynard with a fury Kat had never seen.

      He was the one with the drawn blade, but Kat was as much a weapon as the bloodstained blade in Reynard’s hand. She didn’t deserve to be bypassed. The daemon should have attacked her first.

      The sight of the deadly knife always repelled her. But it was Kat’s ability that had led Reynard and his weapon here. Like deadly magnets with a pull she couldn’t resist, daemons called and called to Katherine.

      She was inexorably drawn to daemons, and Father Reynard followed with crimson death across all their throats.

      “Stop,” Kat choked out as her own throat empathetically tightened—to the daemon or to Reynard or to the family gift she hadn’t asked to receive.

      It was too late. Grizzled and gray, Reynard had fifty years of experience in killing. An extension of his wiry, muscled arm, the long knife gleamed red in the last hurrah of sunset on the horizon. Then it dripped a much darker stain from the daemon’s blood. Kat shuddered and backed away.

      It was always the same.

      The body went up in flames, consumed from the inside out, eyes and mouth and the gaping wound across the daemon’s throat gone to glowing with an impossible heat of coals in a fiery furnace. It was the freed Brimstone that did it, an otherworldly fuel that flowed through a daemon’s veins. Reynard said it was a little bit of the hell dimension they took with them wherever they roamed.

      Kat always forced herself to watch until there were only curls of smoke where a daemon had been, but this time there was a sound discernible beneath Reynard’s triumphant chants.

      To the left, behind a Dumpster, there was a shuffle of rubbish and gravel. There was also a sob. A small face peeked from around the refuse container. As the embers died, Kat could see chubby wet cheeks and eyes widened in shock and fear.

      By then, the sun was gone and the sky was dark. It was only the glow of the daemon’s banishment that lit the scene. The light flickered and faded, but the daemon’s last dying illumination caused an eerie spotlight on the cowering child.

      This time, she wasn’t too slow to react. While Reynard was occupied with ritual, in those few seconds it took for him to finish with one daemon and turn his attention when he realized there was another, Kat was the one who leaped. She wouldn’t let the mother’s last light aid Reynard in his hunt.

      The child tried to get away. After all, Kat was part of his mother’s murder. Or so it seemed. So it felt. Regardless of what Reynard said about the daemons rematerializing in their own hellish dimension.

      Kat was faster than the child. He was young. No more than five. And the mother’s desperation had transferred itself to Kat’s arms and legs. In those moments,

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