I shook my head. “Unfortunately, that’s not possible. As soon as you kill a demon, their body melts away. This one left a sticky patch of black blood before it boiled away into nothingness. It’s going to be difficult to identify off a description alone.”
Her shoulders drooped. “At least it’s dead.”
It wasn’t truly dead—demons just went back to the underworld. But I didn’t want to explain that to her at this point, given what she’d faced that night, so I just shrugged. I was beginning to suspect she had a knack for knowing when I was lying. Perhaps I had some kind of tell. I’d need to work on that.
Before I could step away, she grabbed my arm. “Will there be more?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“Where do they even come from?”
I drew a long breath and met her eyes. “They’re summoned from the hells. By sorcerers.”
27
Savannah
My life had become a living nightmare.
Being hunted by werewolves seemed like a much smaller problem now that I knew demons were coming for me. Demons summoned by sorcerers.
Could Casey and Aunt Laurel summon creatures like these?
Jaxson had warned me the LaSalles practiced the dark arts. Was this what he’d meant?
I leaned against a tree and took stock of my situation. In addition to being hunted by a variety of supernatural beings, I was pretty sure that I’d just alienated and pissed off everyone in the local werewolf pack, and now the cops wanted to throw me in jail for using wolfsbane. At least Jaxson was able to persuade the cops to let me go—though I could tell that had infuriated his pack. Sam wouldn’t even meet my eyes anymore.
The cab ride home was a dismal affair, and a black SUV full of werewolves followed me all the way back to the Indies.
Casey, as always, greeted me at the door. It was late. Had he been waiting?
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Jeez, Savannah, every time you show up, you look worse off than you did the time before. What happened now?’
I didn’t want Aunt Laurel to hear, so we headed upstairs. I explained everything while I sat at the tiny desk in my room and sketched the demon from the park to calm my nerves.
Casey rubbed his face with his palms. “That is fucking madness. You need to stay away from Laurent and his pack. He’s going to get you killed.”
I shook my head. “No. I have to put a stop to this. I can help.”
My cousin frowned. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Jaxson may hate you, but I know he’ll protect me—even after what I did to him tonight.”
Jaxson had killed a man in front of me. Just to protect me.
Casey gave a half laugh. “Yeah, well, you’re going to be working that one off for a while. Wolfsbaning the alpha. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you himself.”
I set my jaw. “You gave me the wolfsbane! I nearly got thrown in jail just for having it on me!”
“Yeah, sorry about that. But I gave you it to use on assailants. Not the Dockside alpha,” Casey said, chuckling. Clearly, the thought delighted him, but Casey hadn’t seen Jaxson in his wolf form, glaring back with blood dripping from his mouth.
I flipped my sketch of the demon around and shoved it toward my cousin. “Can you tell me what this is?” While the demon’s body had disappeared, its sinewy limbs and savage claws were going to be etched in my mind forever.
His eyes widened. “Holy shit, you’re good at drawing. This picture actually scares the bejeebers out of me. Unfortunately, I have no idea what this is.”
“Can you find out? You owe me.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a few manuals of demonology stashed around here somewhere. And I know people I could ask.”