Immortal Hunter

The monster yelled in agony. “I’m on my own. I swear it. I possessed the hospital janitor, and I was riding him for some fun when I came across her. I knew what she was right away, so I decided to toy with her and possessed the doc. I wanted to say I was the demon to kill the last faerie on Earth.”

David met the demon’s eyes and assessed the worthless piece of filth. From its mild strength he could tell it was no head-honcho. Just another lowly bottom-feeder. Probably a Belial demon, if he were to wager a guess. A Belial would be dumb enough to go after someone as valuable as Allsún without orders from its superiors.

“Did you tell anyone else about her?”

The hell-spawn shook its head. “No, no one. You have my word. Just let me go.”

David scoffed. “Your word is worth less than a dead man’s ball sack. I know you demons chatter like gossiping schoolgirls with one another, so unless you can tell me something useful about the demon that murdered that poor infant girl two weeks ago, you’re taking a one-way trip back to hell.” David began to recite the ritual again, his words slow, deliberate.

The veins throughout the doctor’s body bulged again, and the demon shrieked. “Send me back to hell and I’ll tell every demon there about her!”

David froze. Rage filled him as he considered the demon’s words. He was so not in the mood to play around with this sulfurous piss-ant.

The demon grinned from ear to ear. “Looks like you’re just going to have to let me go, exorcist.”

David laughed. “In your dreams.” He punched the demon in the gut. The demon/doctor let out an audible “oof.”

He would exorcise the demonic piece of shit as painfully as possible. He reached for the chain around his neck, pulling the Star of David he always wore from underneath his shirt. He pressed it into the demon’s forehead as he mumbled the ancient words of the ritual.

The demon’s body seized. The screams that reverberated from its throat were anything but human. “For that, I’ll spread the word about the faerie and I’ll kill the doctor, too. He may need to breathe, but I don’t.”

The doctor’s chest quit moving as the demon intentionally stopped breathing, suffocating the body it wore. David quickened the pace of his chanting, mumbling the words as fast as he could. He prayed the doctor was able to fight somewhere in there, was able to force the demon to take a breath.

He was halfway through the ritual and still the doctor wasn’t breathing. Playing out all the possible scenarios in his mind, David calculated his next move. He was damned either way. If he exorcised the demon, he would be putting Allsún’s life in danger once again. Allowing the hell-spawn the opportunity to share the news of her existence was not an option—though for all he knew the others were aware of her existence already. Still, could he take the chance? His only other choice was to kill the demon for good, but that meant he would be killing the doctor, too.

His loyalties clashed—his duties as a hunter to protect the innocent, and the loyalty and devotion he felt for the woman who’d once been the love of his life, even if she no longer returned that love. David gritted his teeth.

Shit.

He shoved the Star of David harder against the demon’s forehead and recited Psalm 91 in Hebrew as fast as he could. Three times. That was all he needed. Just three recitations, and then the ritual would be finished. Allsún would want him to save the doctor if he could. He knew it, but how could he knowingly place her in danger again? And would the doctor already be dead by then anyway?

The demon gasped. The doctor’s face cleared for barely a second. His eyes flashed to their normal shade. The red disappeared as he fought against the demon. “Kill it! I don’t care if you kill me, too!”

For a moment David hesitated. Then, without thought, he plunged the blade into the doctor’s heart. The man’s body seized and shook beneath David’s hold. Blood gushed from the wound in thick spurts. The veins darkened beneath the doctor’s skin as the demon fought unsuccessfully to hang on to its existence. A pulse of energy emanated from the doctor’s body, a signal of the demon’s death. The doctor’s veins faded. The red of his irises transitioned into his normal brown color. His body went limp, but the light hadn’t left his eyes. He coughed up blood, the red liquid oozing down his chin and face.

He opened his mouth to speak. “H-he already told the others,” he rasped. “About...h-her.” The doctor’s body jerked one last feeble time before his eyes went dark, and the muscles in his face slackened.

Blood poured on to the cement as David lowered the doctor to the ground. He stared at the man’s limp form as guilt rushed through him. Shit. He’d wanted to save the doctor. Damn. In situations like this, he always knew it wasn’t his fault, and that he needed to get the job done, which he had. But it didn’t matter. He always blamed himself anyway. Damn it all. Following his first instinct, he clutched the Star of David at his neck and muttered the Mourner’s Kaddish. As the last words fell from his lips, he released his necklace and stepped away from the body.

CHAPTER TWO

THIRTY-SIX HOURS of torture wasn’t exactly easy on the body. Neither was waking up after nearly a month in a trauma-induced coma. Allsún O’Hare found that out the hard way. A pulse of energy shot through Allsún’s body, and she jolted upright, gasping for breath. Every inch of her body ached with a dull throbbing pain. The smell of too much sterilization and cleaning agents assaulted her nose. An incessant beeping sounded like a siren inside her head. She covered her ears as she stared at a white-washed room, her vision blurred.

Shite. Where in Morgana’s name was she? She blinked several times until her eyes cleared, then she took in the scene around her.

“Paging Nurse Robson to the labor and delivery unit,” a female voice echoed over nearby loud speakers. Labor and delivery? She knew there was no way in hell she was in labor and delivery, that was for sure. The last time she’d been there had been when... Oh, God.

Her head spun, and she clutched the sheets over her. Labor and delivery...that meant she was in a hospital, right? Her vision blurred again. Holy faerie dust. No. No hospitals. She hated hospitals. She needed to get out of here. Now.

Her vision spun again. Boy, was she feeling loopy or what? What the hell had they given her? She glanced down at her arm and saw an IV sticking out from the back of her hand. Her eyes followed the tubing up to a clear bag. She squinted at the small printed label on the side of it. Ativan. What kind of drug was that? Nothing she was familiar with from the humane shelter, that was for sure.

She flopped back on to the not-so-fluffy pillow propped behind her head. Why was she in the hospital anyway? Slowly her eyes drooped, as if the lids weighed more than her muscles could bear to handle. How had she gotten here? She...

The image of David’s handsome face flashed through her mind.

With a fresh round of determination, she sat upright in bed again. Though it felt as if she’d lost all muscle control in her hands, she pawed at the IV. She grasped at the tubing in desperation, until finally she ripped it from her hand. She let out a sharp yelp at the pain. A heavyset nurse walking by her room paused at the sound, then turned to see Allsún fiddling with the IV.

She hurried to Allsún’s bedside. Clara, as her badge read, sported platinum blond hair up to the two-inch roots at her scalp, which showed a dark, sharply contrasting brown—clearly her natural color. She smiled with lips that had a little too much burgundy lip liner and placed her hand on her hip. “Oh, no, you don’t. You have to leave that in, honey.”

Allsún shook her head. No way was she letting that human poison run into her veins for another second. Clara left her bedside for a moment, searching a nearby cabinet for supplies. Supplies she wouldn’t need. Scooting to the end of the bed, Allsún swung her legs over the edge. She dangled on the side of the hospital mattress until finally her tiny feet touched the cold, hard tiling of the floor. Still clutching the bed, she stepped forward. Her knees wobbled beneath her and...shite. She crumpled to the floor, her legs so weak she couldn’t even support herself. How was she supposed to escape like this?

At the sound of Allsún hitting the floor, Clar...Clarese?—Allsún’s mind went fuzzy. What was the nurse’s name again? Before Allsún could think about it much longer, the woman was at her side, hooking her under the arms and hauling her to her feet as if she weighed no more than a doll. Maybe she did weigh that little...she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

“All right, honey. Let’s get you back in bed, okay? We don’t want you falling again. I’m already going to have to fill out a nice big pile of paperwork just because of that little spill. So let’s take it easy, okay?” She eased Allsún back toward the bed.

Allsún planted her feet as firmly on the ground as she could. With every ounce of strength she had, she pulled against the woman’s hold. “No, I’mmm not ssstaying here,” she said, suddenly very aware of her slurred speech.

The nurse frowned. “I know you don’t want to, but you really need to lie down and rest.”

Allsún pulled against the nurse’s hold again, trying her hardest to make her voice sound firm. “No.”

The woman grabbed hold of Allsún’s left wrist, gentle but commanding. “You have to—”

“I said no.” Allsún wrenched her arm away from the nurse. She stumbled several steps sideways, away from the woman’s hold.

The nurse stepped toward her again. Her frown twisted into a look of frustration as she reached for Allsún. “Look, I only have so much patience. You need to—”

Allsún lifted her hand and made a throwing motion. A cloud of sparkling faerie dust emanated from her open palm, as if she’d thrown a handful of glitter straight into the nurse’s face. Immediately the woman crumpled to the floor. Her mouth gaped open as she fell into the best sleep she’d probably had in years.

Allsún blinked two times, the movement slow and sluggish from the weight still forcing down her eyelids. “Thass what you get for m...m...messing with a pi...pixie.” She was slurring worse than a college frat boy on a Saturday night.

Concentrating on keeping her balance, Allsún stumbled out of the room and into a long hallway. After what seemed like an eternity of thinking, she deduced that it had to be nighttime. The lights were dimmed, and no one was in sight. She inched down the hall for what seemed like hours before reaching the nurses’ station directly next to the elevators. Her escape.

A night nurse perched at her desk looked up from a mound of papers. “Miss, are you all right?”

Allsún didn’t answer. She walked up to the desk, made a throwing motion with her hand, and watched the nurse slump onto the desktop with a thud in response to her natural faerie dust. She shuffled past the now-incapacitated woman toward the elevator.

Allsún jabbed the blurry elevator button three times until the doors finally opened. Using every ounce of brain power she could muster through her drug-induced haze, she selected the star button for what she hoped was the ground floor.

The elevator closed with a high-pitched ding. After four floors the elevator finally reached the bottom, and as fast as she could, she stumbled out and booked her way through the sliding glass doors of freedom.

When the doors opened, a huge burst of cold air hit Allsún straight in the face, sending a chill racing through her entire body. She wrapped her arms around her torso in a useless attempt to keep herself warm. She needed to get home before she got hypothermia. Her bare feet stung from the light layer of snow still coating Rochester’s streets. The prickling sensation helped clear her head, like what she imagined a sobering cold shower after a long night of way too much drinking would be like. Not that she would know for certain, since she’d never been the partying type. Not too much to celebrate when you’re spending your days chasing after...

Demons.

The scent of sulfur hit her nose as she passed by an empty alleyway. All at once her senses came alive, and she could feel the natural instinct in her Fae blood calling her. She turned in the direction her instinct indicated, the instinct that told her where demonic activity was, the instinct she hadn’t used in years. Not since that night...

Since then she’d found herself capable of ignoring the call. She knew that the city would remain safe without her. Though David couldn’t be everywhere at once, he was the only human she’d ever encountered who was capable of exorcising demons back to hell instead of just killing them. He could save the victims in a way that not even she could.