Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)(29)

The demon was dead.

“You could have asked me if I was finished,” I complained, staring down at the oozing green lump of grotesque flesh.

“You were.”

“Can I look now?” Jupe peered from behind the open car door. When his father didn’t answer, Jupe took that as a yes and sprang to our side. “Gross! Oh my God!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be looking at this,” I said.

“You’ve got to be joking. This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

“Jupe—” Lon said in an exhausted voice.

“I mean, I’m glad you’re okay, Cady. You are okay, aren’t you?” He reached out to touch my cheek. I winced and drew back, then gingerly patted my face. When I brought my fingers back down, they were red with blood.

“Did you fall?” Lon asked, gently turning me toward the headlights for a better look.

“No. Glass from my side window. Or the air bag. I’m not sure.”

He tilted my chin and inspected my face. “Just a few cuts. Nothing major.”

“How did you find me?”

He pulled out my deflector charm from his jacket pocket and held it out to me. “Jupe found this in the dining room— looks like the clasp is broken. We were going to try to catch you before you got too far, then we heard the wreck. Sound carries up here.”

I took the charm from him, fisting it with a sigh and cursing my bad luck. “But how did you get in front of me?”

“There’s a side road that’s faster than the main one. Not so many twists.”

“I wish you had told me that when I came up here,” I grumbled.

“So, who is this Riley Cooper? She sent a Pareba demon after you. That’s nothing to ignore.”

“Someone from the Luxe Order, I’m assuming. You’ve read about this kind of demon?”

“Sure. See all those lesions on his back?” Lon broke the triangle and nudged the green corpse with the toe of his lowtop sneaker. “He’s a host demon. He carries insect babies on his back that he sends out—”

“As scouts, yes. My guardian told me. I saw an image of them attacking before the Pareba appeared.”

“You have a guardian angel?” Jupe asked, pushing his wet spiral curls out of his eyes. He looked like a drowned rat with his hair all flattened out on top.

“More like a guardian spirit. Priya. We’d been linked together since I was sixteen.” Not only had I lost Priya, but I’d lost my only connection to my parents. Raw emotion caught me by surprise. I blinked several times and shook it off.

“We need to move the body,” Lon said. “His Æthyr energy could be tracked. Not likely, but we shouldn’t take chances. How bad is your car?”

“Huh? I dunno, pretty bad, I think. Wrapped around a tree a couple of loops up the road.”

“Why don’t you stay with us tonight? We’ll call a tow in the morning.”

“No. I’ve got to work on …” I tossed a wary look toward Jupe. He’d seen more than I would’ve preferred already. “… what you gave me earlier and I’ve got to feed Mr. Piggy.”

“You’re being hunted. It’s not safe,” he argued.

“My house is heavily warded. I’m safer there than here.”

Jupe snorted. “I doubt that. My dad put up a gigantic protective circle around the house last spring,” he said proudly. “We used to have imp problems, but not anymore.”

Lon closed his eyes and flexed his jaw.

“You put up a ward? You … practice?” I asked, taken aback.

“Nothing major. I dabble.”

A strange tightness took root in my chest. Though he was the first demon I’d come across to do so, I could understand his wanting to study demons; for him it was like studying history. But a demon practicing magick? It just didn’t happen. Humans practiced magick, demons succumbed to it. At least, that’s what I’d always been taught. Granted, that rule was meant to apply to Æthyric demons, not Earthbounds. But I’d never once run across an Earthbound who practiced magick. Never. I don’t know why this shocked me so much, but it did.

And why didn’t he tell me earlier? If I was going to be honest with him, then he damn well better be with me. His face tightened, then I remembered his empathic abilities. “I’ll explain more later, okay?” he said in a low voice. I knew what he meant: not in front of Jupe. I swallowed and nodded.

“Let’s get this body in the back of the SUV. We can dump it in the ocean. There’s a private road on my property we can take—”

“I need to get my purse out of my car and call a cab—”

“—then after we dump the body, we’ll take you home,” he insisted.

I was too exhausted to protest.

11

I glanced at the clock on Lon’s dash. Almost 2 a.m. We were only a few blocks away from my house. Lon was quiet and thoughtful, eyes on the road and one hand draped over the top of the steering wheel. His hair and jacket were smudged with dried black blood; the two of us had weighted down the green Pareba demon with rocks and dumped him off a low cliff into the Pacific a few miles from Lon’s house. That was a new one for me; I’d never had to kill anything, nor get rid of a body. When I apologized to Lon for dragging him into this mess, all he said was, “Shit happens.”