“I can’t say. An illness perhaps?”
“I have an idea.” I stood and tested everything out to make sure I hadn’t twisted a knee or an ankle during the takedown. Relieved when everything worked as it should, I dusted off my hands. “Are you good here for a minute?”
Thom stood. “Where are you going?”
“I need something from the SUV.”
“Okay.” He retrieved the ubaste’s proboscis. “I’ll get started here.”
Cursing my stubborn refusal to carry the black phone, I jogged to the SUV and thumbed redial on my way back to Thom.
“You’re out of breath,” Wu observed. “What are you doing?”
“Jogging.” Not a total lie. “I hear it’s good for what ails you.”
Wu made a noise too dignified to pass as a real snort. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I imagined him sitting at his desk, elegant fingers steepled in anticipation, a hungry spider in his silvery web. “I have an ubaste on my hands, and it got me thinking.”
“How can you possibly think past the stench?”
Putting distance between myself and the corpse had done wonders for my cognitive abilities. “Does the NSB catalogue lower demons? Is there any way you could identify this particular one?”
“The NSB maintains records of each charun who is spayed or neutered.” A bitter note flavored his accent. “We all have files in the system. Photos, blood, and tissue samples.”
Ignoring his sharp response, I kept pressing. “So that’s a yes.”
“Yes.”
“Great.” I reached Thom, who eyed the phone with unease. “I’ll owe you a favor.”
He waited the span of a heartbeat. “I’m ready to call in my favor.”
I laughed. He didn’t. “You’re serious?”
“Have dinner with me, and I’ll get the information for you.”
“Dinner,” I echoed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I want to get to know you.” The silk in his voice caressed my ears. “We are partners, after all.”
“Not yet we aren’t.” I pinched my bottom lip in consideration. “Aren’t there fraternization laws in the NSB?”
“Charun are, at their core, primal beasts. Sterilized females no longer experience heats. They no longer throw off the scent to entice males. Without that call to mate, males are far less interested in sexual relationships. The impossibility of creating offspring withers the urge. So, no, there are no fraternization laws. There’s no point to them.”
The relief I expected to cascade through me never manifested. I hadn’t been sterilized. I hadn’t been outfitted with a demon-friendly IUD yet, either. The heat thing… yeah. I wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole.
“Fine.” I avoided eye contact with Thom. “I’ll have dinner with you.”
Wu was a gateway to the information we required. There was nothing for me to do but walk through it.
“Excellent.” His mood audibly improved. “Photograph the body, take hair and blood samples. I’ll text you the address of the lab we use. You can drop off the materials there for processing, and they’ll send them direct to me. I’ll call with the results once I have them.”
He ended the call and left me staring at the screen, wondering what kind of bargain I had just struck, but I couldn’t afford regrets. “What do we do with the ubaste?”
Thom would have overheard my conversation with Wu, so he knew we had to collect samples, but that still left us with a whole lot of butt-ugly demon we couldn’t leave out for humans to find.
“We employ a team for cleanups.” Thom didn’t elaborate on the specifics, and I didn’t ask. We had left the ubaste breathing, but I didn’t kid myself that it would remain in that condition. Any demon drawing attention to its species would be put down before humans got involved. “I’ll place the call once we’ve finished. Where does Wu want the samples taken?”
A text notification pinged, and I swiped my thumb over the icon. I read the address, re-read the address, and then I laughed.
Oh, yes, the NSB knew all about the White Horse lab. Wu had, after all, just directed me to them.
During our second trip to the lab, I let Thom do the honors. To further avoid any awkwardness with Veronica, I ducked low in my seat and used my phone as a shield to deflect her stare. With her nose pressed to the glass front door, she reminded me of a doggy in a pet shop window who just knew she would be chosen if only she performed the right combination of tricks.
Five demons already depended on me, and I wasn’t about to add another into the mix.
Rubbing my face with my hands, I hid in the blessed darkness of my cupped palms for a moment.
I’m a demon. A nightmare given substance. A plague upon humanity.
For the most part, I was adapting. Okay, adapting might be a strong word for putting one foot in front of the other, taking this new life one day at a time. But sometimes reality crept in on mouse feet then lowered the whammy and left me with my ears ringing.
Hunting the ubaste, confronting yet another alien breed, had been one of those times.
Desperate for a breather, I lowered the window, closed my eyes, and sucked in fresh air heavy with the scent of oncoming rain.
“Are you all right?”
A lesser woman might have squeaked at Thom’s voice so near her ear, but not I. I was developing a sixth sense where he was concerned, which maybe should have worried me. I glowered at him. “Keep that up, and I’ll buy a bell for you, mister.”
His left ear gave a decided twitch. “I’m no house cat.”
No, he was the back-alley brawler that kept the neighbors up all night yowling. “Are we done here?”
His eyebrows rose when he noticed my slump. “Are you hiding from Veronica?”
“No.” I hauled myself upright. “I was just getting comfortable.”
“She unsettles you,” he surmised.
“A touch, maybe.” The reverence thing bugged me a surprising amount.
“Most charun you’ll encounter share a similar worldview as their new human neighbors. Earth is their home. They want to protect their families and the lives they’ve carved out in this terrene, and they’re willing to coexist with mortals to do it. Recent events are stirring unrest within the charun populace. Two cadre have been spotted, and they know what that means.” He hesitated. “Those who thrive on chaos and darker things are more inclined to embrace your return.”
“I’m guessing Veronica falls into that category.”
“Yes.” He studied me. “Does knowing that make you see her differently?”
There was no way I was falling into that trap when I had just gotten the taste of foot out of my mouth.
“What she does to get by is her business as long as she doesn’t harm anyone in the process.” I had to imagine there must be a yin and yang happening where she could feed or indulge her desires without drawing the NSB down on her head. “When she crosses the line? That’s when it becomes my business.”
“Do you apply the same values to charun as you do humans? The same worth?”
“Yes.” I reached through the window to ruffle his hair, as shocked by the impulse as the fact I enjoyed the contact. Again, I wondered if the coterie bonds were to blame, if spending time with them had activated some strange magic, or if Thom’s animalistic nature trumped my usual aversion to touch. “I’ve spent enough time around you guys to know not all charun are evil or, you know, bent on world domination. Regardless of species, the vow I made when I pinned on my badge was to protect the innocent.”
For a long time after that, Thom stayed put, letting me pet him. And then he said, with no small promise, “I’m going to find a way to keep you.”
“I am not opposed to being kept.” A cramp in my arm ended the petting session, which, yeah, sounded dirty, but touch appeared to be a platonic requirement for Thom. Plus, he seemed onboard for Operation Luce Is A Real Girl, and I would take all the help I could get holding on to my identity. “So we’re done?”
All in all, my first day of demon hunting hadn’t been so bad.
“We’re done.” He circled the SUV and got in beside me. “Are you in a hurry to get home?”