The Others 03: The Demon You Know

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  The Demon You Know

  The Others Book 3

  Christine Warren

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  To my best girlfriends.

  Delicate flowers, each and every one.

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  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  The demon called Rule shifted restlessly in the plush leather club chair in the library of Vircolac and struggled not to look as impatient as he felt. Judging by the grin on Rafael De Santos's face, he was failing miserably.

  "Believe me," the Felix said, swirling a brandy snifter in one elegant hand, "it's not that I don't sympathize with your predicament. I do. Completely. It's just that after the past six weeks it is so refreshing to be listening to someone else's problems for a change.”

  "Your problems were of your own making. Had you truly wished to remain hidden from the humans, I am sure you could have found a way.”

  Rule knew the accusation was unfair, but he wasn't in the mood to play fair. He wasn't in the mood to play at all. Not after relating the story he'd just spent the better part of an hour telling to his host in the mortal world.

  It was one thing to fight a war when your focus was on surviving from day to day, on doing what had to be done. It was quite another to hear yourself explain it to an outsider in all its hideousness. And Rule hadn't been feeling exactly chipper to begin with.

  He'd just spent close to a year tracking down a reliable informant to keep him apprised of the activities of the fiend Uzkiel. Five days ago, the informant had disappeared along with Rule's best chance of discovering exactly how said fiend planned to launch a full-scale war against the rest of the Below and the Watch, the demon police force that kept its kind in check. Rule felt entitled to his bad attitude.

  De Santos shook his head. "I wish it had been that simple. But progress is unavoidable, my friend. Especially the kind we most wish to avoid.”

  "How comforting you are," Rule muttered.

  "Ah, but you didn't come here for comfort, did you?" As head of the Council of Others, De Santos had a special talent for perception. Or maybe he had risen to head of the Council because of that perception. Either way, it was a quality Rule recognized and grudgingly respected. "We have not seen you Above in the past year, in spite of our reassurances that you would always be welcome among us. Your assistance in the matter of Dionnu and his minions will not be forgotten anytime soon.”

  Rule shrugged off the thanks. He hadn't helped defeat the Faerie king out of the goodness of his heart, so he didn't need praise for it. It had been just another part of his job. "I have been busy with my own concerns Below. You and the Lupines seemed to have your situation well in hand.”

  "So, what is it that has finally brought you back to us?”

  Draining his own brandy without so much as a blink, Rule debated for a moment how best to tell the other man his news without causing undue alarm. Too bad there wasn't such a way.

  "I... seem to be missing a fiend.”

  Unlike many Others, who tended to be a temperamental lot—shape-shifters especially—De Santos had earned a reputation during his life for his eerie calm in even the most stressful situations. For that reason, he didn't leap to his feet and shout his demand for an explanation, as much as Rule guessed he must be wanting to. Instead, he carefully crossed one ankle over the opposite knee and raised a dark eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?”

  The steel beneath the polite question made it impossible for Rule to mistake that calm for disinterest. The Felix was not happy with this news. Rule had not expected him to be. The last time fiends had been set loose in Manhattan, people had died, humans and Others alike. It had not made the head of the Council a happy werejaguar.

  "Not one you need to be terribly concerned with," Rule clarified before he had another battle on his hands. "It is a minor fiend with few powers and fewer brain cells. Not terribly evil and not terribly ambitious. It only concerns me because I have been using it to gather information on the activities of the fiends I am worried about. We have reason to believe a sect of fiends may be planning some kind of attack on Infernium, so I can't afford to lose the information this small fiend has been able to supply me.”

  De Santos looked only vaguely reassured, not that he likely cared all that much whether the largest of the cities Below stood or fell. "And you think that this fiend might have come up Above? I thought you were going to make sure that didn't happen after the last time.”

  The demon gave his host a bland stare. "And how easy do you find it securing your own borders? Mundane or magical.”

  "Point taken. Still, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to help you in locating this fiend. Manhattan is a large place, figuratively speaking, and if the creature has a brain in its head, I would think it would be keeping a low profile and staying out of places where it might run into one of my people.”

  "Like I said, it is not very smart.”

  De Santos smiled. "Ah, yes. Well, certainly I will keep my eyes and ears open and let you know if I hear anything. But if I were you, I would not wait by my telephone, as it were.”

  "I do not plan to," Rule said, setting aside his empty glass and pushing to his feet. "I had mostly intended to visit you as a courtesy, since I had entered your territory uninvited, but I decided it could not hurt to apprise you of the situation just in case some information happened to knock on your front door and present itself to you.”

  The Felix rose as well and offered his hand. "You would be the first to know, my friend. But what are your plans in the meantime?”

  Rule shrugged and let his hand drop to the hilt of the sword he'd set beside his chair during their meeting. "I'll do what a soldier of the Watch is trained to do. Find the fiend and eliminate it, before it has the chance to do the same to anyone else."

  CHAPTER ONE

  Abby Baker crouched in her hiding place between two parked cars and cursed the day she was born.

  Well, okay, she didn't curse the day she was born. She didn't curse at all. Good Catholic girls like her didn't do things like that. Not even when their current situations practically begged for a nice, juicy expletive.

  Considering that her main preoccupation of the moment had to do with staying alive and uninjured, getting upset with her own nativity wouldn't have made a lot of sense. Instead, she chewed on the remains of her right thumbnail and tried to decide who needed a good divine intervention more just now, her or Terry.

  To be honest, if Abby had been ready to take up cursing, it would make more sense for her to curse the day Terry Freeman had been born, since he was the one who'd gotten her into this mess. Or to curse the day she'd been stupid enough to agree to ac
company him into the middle of a riot.

  A swell in the volume of the chaos surrounding her had her peering out from behind a dented fender and into a normally quiet street in the Garment District. The glow of a burning vacant building made it no struggle to see what was going on, but Abby wasn't certain she could count that as a good thing. The fire department said they had the blaze contained, so it wasn't in danger of spreading, but that was about the only danger that had been contained in a five-block radius.

  Angry figures with angry voices filled the streets from about two blocks behind Abby to the small neighborhood square two blocks ahead. They were protesting the same thing people had been protesting all over the country for the last six weeks: the unbelievable, surreal, and highly disturbing knowledge that the things that go bump in the night were also going bump in the day. Quite possibly in the apartment next door.

  It was too freaky to be real, except for the fact that it was, and the entire world had seen the video footage to prove it. Less than two months ago, an international press conference carried live on all the major American networks, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Television Borneo, for all Abby knew, had revealed that vampires, witches, faeries, werewolves, werecats, werebears, and were-everythings didn't just exist, they voted. And on top of that, they had been secretly negotiating for the past two years to secure their civil rights with the human governments of the world.

  It had been the real-life equivalent of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast, and nothing on earth had been the same since. In fact, after all of this, news of an alien invasion would likely make the average New Yorker yawn and roll his eyes.

  Maybe her mother hadn't been exaggerating when she called her daughter's defection from their small town upstate to the big, bad city "Abby's descent into the fiery pit." Even if it had been meant as a joke.

  At the moment, it hit uncomfortably close to home.

  Right now, the neighborhood around her did look a bit like some distorted version of hell. Or at least of a war zone. Abby wouldn't have been a bit surprised to see a tank rolling down 7th Avenue tonight. In fact, she might even have welcomed it. Soldiers were supposed to help the civilian victims in armed conflicts, weren't they?

  The average protester on the streets around her may have started out armed with nothing more dangerous than poster board and a loud mouth—which was more than dangerous enough, thanks—but as night had descended on the city, tempers had shortened and Abby thought she spied more than one makeshift weapon in the crowd. The whole situation had degenerated into a seething mass of blunt-force trauma just waiting to happen.

  Abby's free hand rose to finger the small gold and garnet cross she wore around her neck, and she wondered for the millionth time in the last ten minutes how on earth she'd gotten herself into this situation.

  C'mon, Abby. This is my big break; I can feel it. You gotta help me.

  Terry's wheedling voice echoed in her head and answered her unvoiced question.

  Terry Wayne Freeman had been the instrument of her downfall, not because he was a tool of Satan, precisely; Terry was just really good at wheedling. The youngest of five kids growing up in Harlem with parents who worked around the clock to support them, he had developed a formidable charm against which even the strongest soul became powerless. He'd even put himself through his last two years of journalism classes at CUNY by running a three-card monte stand near Times Square.

  Abby liked to delude herself that it wasn't the wheedling that got her, though; it was the begging.

  Abby, please. Gus says I can take the old backup van and equipment if I can find someone to help me operate it. It's all like ten years out-of-date, but what the hell. Once he sees the tapes, it's not gonna matter. This is my chance. I'm sure of it.

  His big brown eyes had pleaded with her, and he'd squeezed her hand like she was the source of all salvation. Sheesh, did she have "sucker" tattooed on her forehead, or what?

  Please, Ab. You gotta help me. I'll owe you so big, I'll be doing you favors on the other side of the pearly gates. I swear it. If you'll just please, please, please help me out here.

  She was supposed to say no to that?

  "Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

  Was this really the right moment for a recitation of her grandmother's favorite passage from Corinthians? The "charity" Abby had felt toward a twenty-year-old kid with a Cronkite complex had landed her so close to those pearly gates he'd mentioned, she figured she could have given Saint Peter some fashion tips.

  She must have been high on fumes from her correction fluid when she'd agreed to help Terry out. For pity's sake, she was a junior researcher. A glorified gofer! She had no business being in the same room as a TV camera, let alone pretending to operate one. She must have lost her mind.

  Abby Baker had always been the boring one, the girl voted Most Likely to Be Forgotten. The kind who gave the old-fashioned term "wallflower" a new lease on life. It wasn't that people disliked her; they just tended to…overlook her. Part of that had been due to the painful shyness she'd carried with her all through her school days, but part of it was just because she was infinitely overlookable. She had plain features, plain brown hair, and a plain, if slightly well-padded, body. The only unusual thing about her was her mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown, and those tended to make people too uncomfortable for them to dig much past the rest of her plain brown wrapper.

  Eventually, in college she'd learned to force herself past the shyness. She had friends, but they tended to be nearly as quiet as she was. None of them lived in the fast lane. Heck, she didn't think any of them had even made it to the highway; they tended to stick to the pedestrian walkways.

  So why in heaven's name had her life chosen this moment to start getting interesting?

  A tattoo of racing footsteps had Abby ducking back between the parked cars. She knew hiding wasn't helping her out of the situation those correction fluid fumes had landed her in, but that didn't mean she was ready to give up the strategy. Or to, you know, stop quaking in fear.

  She watched as several sets of boots ran past and groaned when she saw the military fatigues tucked into the tops of them. Apparently, the mayor had made good on his threat to call out the National Guard if the protesters got out of hand again. She couldn't fault the decision, only the timing of it. He should have gotten the situation in hand weeks ago, instead of letting it build to the flash point like this.

  She added it to the list of the politician's sins. Since the press had uncovered the fact that the mayor had known about the plan for a massive worldwide supernatural revelation at least a week before the general populace, the list had grown to epic proportions. Abby thought it might have been a good idea for him to have a plan in place from the beginning, just in case the public didn't deal well with the news of the millennium.

  That was just a theory, since she wasn't actually a politician or anything, but she didn't think it sounded unreasonable.

  The only thing that sounded unreasonable to her at the moment was spending the rest of the night crouched in the gutter between a couple of old clunkers. Not only did she feel ridiculous, but her legs had begun to cramp up on her too. Terry was still nowhere to be seen, but that didn't mean she couldn't find a way back to the news van and into her apartment in the quiet of Greenwich Village on her own. She was a big girl, twenty-seven, smart, single, and perfectly able to take care of herself. She could even do it without indulging in a self-pity party.

  Probably.

  Venturing another glance out into the street, Abby grimaced. The sight of the crowds of protesters and the sound of soldiers shouting as they tried to regain order failed to reassure her of her safety.

  She looked around a nearly bald tire and scanned the rows of parked vehicles for her getaway car. The van she and Terry had driven here sat at the curb about half a block away, waiting for the perfect escape, taunting her with its nearness. Fifty feet
away and it may as well have been fifty miles. At least three dozen very unhappy protesters, some of them brandishing their signposts like clubs, stood between her and it. Since she couldn't get to the stupid thing, she felt rather inclined to resent its existence.

  Somewhere in the neighborhood a wolf howled, and a moment later the sound of sirens added a distinctive wail to the established pandemonium.

  Abby grimaced. Just the trifecta they needed to round out the evening: police, ambulances, and a werewolf.

  Abby still couldn't get used to thinking the w word like that, with no hesitation and no "and Lon Chaney Jr. as" thoughts anywhere in sight. But considering it had only been six weeks since the Unveiling announcement, as it was being called, she figured she could cut herself a little slack.

  It wasn't every day that the whole fabric of a girl's reality shifted to admit the entire cast of the Sci-Fi Channel's October lineup. Thank God. Everything still had a bit of a surreal quality to it, as if this were all some sort of dream of a collective consciousness and in a while everyone would wake up and forget about vampires until Hollywood released a new John Carpenter movie or Anne Rice published a new book.

  It was only when things like a bit of cinder blew onto Abby's skin and singed her that she admitted this whole thing wasn't a dream and she could end up spending the night in a jail cell with the anti-Other protesters if she didn't get her butt in gear and into that van in the next ninety seconds.

  Muttering the Hail Mary under her breath, Abby yanked hard on the remains of her courage and duck-walked to the edge of her hiding place to survey the current situation.

  The main body of the crowd was still in the square about a block and a half up, but since the protest had devolved into chaos a couple of hours ago, rioters had been moving closer and closer to her concealment. She could hear groups of them chanting slogans the KKK would have been ashamed of, which was precisely the thing the crowd needed to shift the mood from tense to ugly. She felt the shift as clearly as if someone had just flipped off a light switch and plunged the neighborhood into darkness.