Demons are Forever Read online

  Chapter Two

  “He’s escalating.”

  Lian Herrick watched the effect of the captain’s words on the roomful of men. They all looked somber, a few nodded, and one—the detective she’d noticed at the crime scene—well, he was still staring at her.

  She stared back, too used to men looking at her to be intimidated by it.

  He broke eye contact first and went back to studying the photos on the board behind the captain.

  “This is the fourth.” The captain tapped a map with red dots on it. “All in the Pleasure District. All Pleasure Pets. No pattern of houses—he’s hit a shifter place, a vamp place and two non-aligned houses.”

  She made a brief note. She knew non-aligned houses would service any client, regardless of their personal orientation. Some Pleasure Pets preferred vamps, others werewolves or miscellaneous shape shifters. Some just liked to fuck.

  And four of these Pleasure Pets would never fuck again. Lian forced away the images, the visions of blood and body parts that had crowded her brain and nearly made her sick at the crime scene. Her nostrils could still detect the scent of violent death even though she’d stayed at the doorway, fighting to hold on to her composure. And her breakfast. Something about that smell lingered.

  “What’s with the lady?”

  A sharp question broke the silence and she looked over to meet those oddly blue eyes, which had been fixed on her or flickering her way for most of this meeting.

  The captain sighed. “The lady is on loan from County.”

  “Oh goody.” Another detective grinned. “Can we keep her?”

  The captain lifted his head. “Dr. Herrick, why don’t you say hello to the apes in this zoo?”

  Lian put her notebook aside. “Thanks, Captain.” She stood, drawing herself up to her full five-foot-five inches. “I’m Dr. Lian Herrick. I consult for the County Medical Examiner’s office. I’m not here to interfere with your investigation, merely to help out in any way I can.”

  “I can think of a few ways, honey.”

  The voice from the back of the room brought guffaws and a couple of grins.

  “I’ll bet you can.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Sorry. I don’t do apes. They always have limp bananas.”

  General laughter greeted her response. As it usually did.

  “You consult? How?”

  Damn. He wasn’t going to let it go. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name, Detective.”

  “Shand. Buck Shand.”

  “Well, Detective Shand, I’ve had some experience with out of the ordinary crimes.”

  “How out of the ordinary?”

  She stared at him, noting the sharp cheekbones, the casually untidy hair and the shadow of a beard that would probably be black by the time the night rolled around. His gaze pierced her, shades of blue that varied like the ocean as clouds scudded across the skies above it.

  “Very out of the ordinary. Serial killers, to be precise.” She met his gaze with a slight lift of her chin. “As you know, we don’t get many serial killers anymore. AGs are much too adept in sensing and solving most murders these days. It’s why crime’s down so much and why you’re all eating pizza with your families at dinnertime instead of chasing the bad guys twenty-four-seven.”

  There were a few nods. One of the benefits of the new order of things was that crimes weren’t easily concealed anymore. DNA that contained a particular strain of elf, for example, led within hours to the perp.

  Everyone’s DNA was on file somewhere. Lian knew it, these cops knew it—so when something like this latest monster came along and avoided detection, it was her job to go find out why.

  “Really?” Detective Shand drawled the word into an insult. “Serial killers? A little thing like you?”

  Her eyes narrowed as she struggled with her temper. “Yeah. Good things come in small packages, Detective.” She glanced down at his crotch. “As I’m sure your girlfriends have told you.” She looked back up at him, meeting his eyes. “Oh, by the way? They lied.”

  Laughter echoed loudly through the room.

  “She’s got you, Buck.” A tall man stood and crossed the room to pick up Lian’s hand. “Welcome, Dr. Herrick. You’re an asset to the team.” He kissed it and brought a chorus of smacky lip noises from his peers. “I’m Cheney Fisher. If there’s anything I can do to help…” His eyebrows waggled at her.

  She grinned back. “I’ll make a note.” He was harmless. Charming, handsome, but harmless. Unlike the blue-eyed devil who still stared at her like he wanted to get inside her head. Or her pants. She couldn’t decide which.

  The captain thumped on the table. “If you’ve all quite finished?”

  The noise in the room dropped off as the necessary light relief concluded. Lian understood. Something like this, a horror like this—well, there had to be a release somewhere. A mechanism for dealing with death. A way of putting it aside for just a few moments and remembering that everyone was human.

  In one way or another.

  “We have nothing from forensics. Just like the other ones. No hairs, fibers, blood that didn’t come from the vic, nothing.” The captain frowned. “This guy either cleans up after himself with amazing precision or he doesn’t exist.”

  Shand frowned. “He exists, all right.” His gaze drifted to the photographs in all their gory detail. “He feeds.”

  Lian sat up. “What do you mean, he feeds?”

  “Buck?” The captain looked at him. “Anything?”

  Shand shook his head. “Can’t see him, Cap. Can’t get a reading, a smell on him, nothing. It’s like you said, he doesn’t exist on any plane I can reach. But he’s there. He leaves a cold chill down my back. I sense—” He paused, like he was looking to explain the inexplicable.

  Which, thought Lian, he was.

  “I sense a hunger. A screaming, unsatisfied hunger.” Shand sighed. “That’s all I get. And I only got that from the latest crime scene.”

  “You weren’t at the previous ones?” She asked.

  “Nope. Vacation.”

  “And you’re a cognitive, right?” Lian made a note next to his name.

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “Hell, Buck’ll say whatever gets him into bed with his current girl, Doc. Don’t let him fool ya.”

  Hoots greeted the statement. Under cover of the general conversation, Shand leaned to her. “So what are you?”

  “Busy.” She scribbled something else in her notes.

  “C’mon. I showed you mine. You gotta show me yours. Fair’s fair.” His blue eyes were warm now, friendly.

  Lian wasn’t buying it. “I’m part Fae.”

  “Where’re your wings?”

  “At the dry cleaners. Now shut up. I’m trying to work here.” She deliberately turned a shoulder on him.

  The captain slammed his hand down. “Okay, assholes. We got ourselves a big fat nothing here. Four dead girls and not one thing to go on. Go out and get me something. Anything. Before we have to add more photos to this fucking wall.”

  It was a measure of the captain’s concern that he didn’t apologize to her for his language. She was glad he hadn’t. He’d accepted her onto the team. Which could not be said for Detective Buck Shand.

  His eyes were that flat blue again as she noticed his gaze. Gathering her things, she turned to leave only to find his hand beneath her arm. “How about a cup of coffee? You’ll need to find your way around this maze if you’re going to be here for the duration.”

  She eased away. “I’ll manage.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Doc. We’re all friends here.”

  Her skin rippled at his nearness, his scent. He was, perhaps, more than he seemed on the surface. Definitely a cognitive, possessed of a rare ability to sense that which existed on a different plane. There weren’t many cogs around. And Detective Buck Shand might well be a variety she hadn’t run across before.

  She was going to have to work with the guy, personal responses notwithstanding. So she shrugged. “
Sure. Why not?”

  ———

  He watched her ass as they carried cups of what passed for coffee to an empty table. She sure had a fine ass on her. Full, round, swinging in that particular way women have had for thousands upon thousands of years.

  It still had the same effect on Buck Shand that it probably had on the first caveman who’d noticed it and gotten a hard-on from the sight.

  Her jeans hugged her butt even though it was partially covered by her tidy black jacket. She’d caught the right blend between “one of the guys” and “professional consultant”. The running shoes were a nice touch. She didn’t care that she was short nor did she try to add height by wearing those ankle-shattering heels some women swore by.

  Hair the color of sunlight fell halfway down her back from the clip she’d stuck into it at the nape of her neck and he had to wonder what it was like falling free over her bare flesh.

  Hell, he was human. Sort of. As human as the next guy, anyway.

  Since the next guy was Cheney, that was a given.

  The three of them slipped into their seats. “So give, Doc.” Buck looked her straight in the eye. “What do you know? How are you supposed to help us?”

  She avoided his gaze, her black eyes dropping to her notes. “I don’t know any more than you do right now. Probably less. You’ve worked the first three.”

  “Not personally, but I’m getting there.” He leaned back in his chair. “No evidence, just four bodies. The first ones were mild compared to this.”

  “How was this different? What made you link them and put one perp behind all the kills?” She met his gaze.

  Once again he was stabbed by those ink black eyes. It was odd, not knowing where the pupil left off and the iris began.

  “The lack of evidence.” Cheney filled in the gaps. “The first one—well, there’s always something that can be overlooked. It was a Pleasure Pet, a vamp house. And let’s face it, those places can get kinky sometimes. It got chalked up to sex gone really wrong or a girl wanting to cross over.” He frowned. “Can’t see why she’d want to do that, but it happens.”

  “Any vamp cops work the case?”

  Buck shook his head. “We don’t have any. You know the rules. It’s hard to solve a crime when the investigating officer licks up the clues.”

  Lian lifted an eyebrow. “There may be rules, Detective. But rules were made to be broken.”

  Cheney chuckled. “I like you.”

  “Thanks.” She waved the compliment away. “And the next two murders?”

  He watched her face as Cheney filled her in. Buck knew enough about them to do it himself, but he found he’d rather keep his gaze and his focus on her, instead of rattling off facts, dates and statistics.

  Cheney was better at that. Much better.

  “We got one in a shifter Pad. This time it was a bit more brutal. Throat cut, but the body wasn’t mutilated other than a few bite marks. Those weren’t even considered as evidence of anything other than sexual preference.”

  Lian nodded but said nothing.

  Buck didn’t make the mistake of underestimating her. There was a lot going on beneath that tranquil surface. Of that he was absolutely sure.

  “This unfortunate Pleasure Pet was involved in a spat with her boyfriend. Nasty too. It took a while before anyone stopped trying to find him, especially since he showed up in the werewolf database. He’d conveniently disappeared and only turned up a couple of days ago.”

  “He’s been eliminated as a suspect?”

  “Yeah. He was doing thirty days out of state for drug possession.” Cheney huffed out a breath. “By then, we’d had the third killing. It was in an all-comers Pad. No magical or sexual preference. Same sort of thing. Violent and messy. Throat cut, body messed around with, but still nothing on the scale of what we saw this morning.” He sighed. “Nothing’s ever been on the scale of what we saw this morning.”

  Lian tapped her short fingernails on the table and her black eyes seemed unfocussed for a few moments.

  Buck waited patiently. She was digesting information, processing it, working it out in that cute little head of hers.

  He blinked. Cute? Where the hell had that come from? She was anything but cute. She had eyes blacker than the night, a sharp mind and she came from the offices of the county at the request, he assumed, of some high-level asshole who hated the thought of a serial killer on the loose ruining his anti-crime re-election campaign.

  And she was hiding something.

  Buck was a cognitive. His little bit of the afterglow had stirred the portions of his brain that saw things differently, sensed things that others couldn’t begin to understand. He could easily peg an AG even without seeing their blue dotted ear. Give him five minutes with ’em and he knew what kind of AG they were.

  He could even read a bland’s mood now and again, if they were real worked up about something or horny as hell. He tried not to, since it got way too close to an invasion of privacy thing.

  With all these handy little qualifications and modifications to his brain at his disposal, he was still coming up empty handed when it came to Dr. Lian Herrick. She had the slanted almond eye shape that hinted at something Asian in her heritage. Her skin glowed warmly, so a vamp was out. They were cooler and paler in color. There wasn’t a giveaway little ridge down the back of her neck where her skin split on regular basis. Shape shifters probably didn’t even know it was there, but Buck did. It was all part of the job.

  She’d said she was a Fae. It was a good choice. Small and delicately boned, she could have been. Her ears weren’t pointed, but that didn’t matter very much, since Fae came in all shapes and sizes and varieties.

  Yes, she was definitely a Fae.

  No, wait. He frowned. For a few seconds, he’d felt the calm and tranquil sensation that came with understanding one of his fellow AGs. But—it hadn’t come from him. His eyebrows drew together as he forced whatever it was out of his mind.

  Cheney hadn’t noticed anything and was continuing his conversation with the doc. She was poring over the notes, asking questions, jotting things down on that pad she carried with her.

  So what the hell just happened?

  Buck ran his hand over his face wearily. This fucking case was getting to him and it wasn’t even half-begun.

  “You okay, bud?” Cheney glanced at him.

  “Yeah.” He pointed at the gory stills of the crime scene. “It bothers me, this shit.”

  “No kidding. Bothers us all.”

  Lian glanced at him. “You sensed nothing at all? No odors? No—” She struggled for words. “No inkling of what might have done this?”

  Her eyes were expressionless, dark pools that a man could drown in. She was simply a consultant asking the right questions.

  Buck didn’t like it one bit.

  “No. Nothing. Cold, is all. An icy cold that was more brutal than anything I can remember. Describing it is like trying to tell you what yellow smells like. And…” He paused. There were those eyes. But he wasn’t sure if he was ready to talk about them yet. Not to her anyway.

  “And?” She caught him up on it.

  “Nothing. That was it. Just emptiness. Like the scene itself, empty of anything and everything that might have given us a lead.”

  “You had the wolf team check it out?” She turned to Cheney.

  “Yes. Once we figured there were connections, we had them at each of the scenes. Don’t know if they’ve done the latest one yet, but they didn’t pick up a damn thing. Just like Buck.”

  Buck nodded. “If there was anything there, they would have scented it.”

  “How many wolves you got here?” Lian lifted an eyebrow in query.

  “Enough.” He stared back at her. Cops who harbored a fuzzy critter in their genes weren’t thick on the ground, but often worth their weight in gold. In their human form they could smell a fart from twenty yards and identify the ass it came from.

  Of course, they had to take a few days off each month arou
nd the full moon. It was referred to as their “period”. Not in their presence, however, since they were mostly male. Several were as bad-tempered as the critters they became when the moon rose.

  Didn’t pay to piss off the wolf team. You could find a pile of something you didn’t want to deal with on your front doorstep if you did.

  “Well, I don’t see a correlation between the killings and the lunar cycle, so that lets out werewolves as suspects.”

  Buck nodded. “A wolf didn’t do this. It would have ripped the body, yes. But it would have eaten the bits it wanted, not messed with the rest of it.” And not left a breast neatly beside the torso or a perfect foot with a glittering toe-ring…

  Cheney pushed his chair back. “Well, I gotta go.” He glanced at the clock. “Shift’s up for me.”

  Lian blinked. “You’re going home?”

  “Yep.” He smiled. “I’ve been here for twelve hours already. I’m useless without a good night’s sleep. Plus I’ve got to relieve the babysitter.”

  “Oh.” She looked mildly puzzled. “Well, in that case, have a nice evening.”

  “Buck’ll be here for a while yet. He’ll take care of you.” Cheney brushed her shoulder and grinned at Buck. The message was unmistakable. She’s all yours, bud.

  “See ya.” Buck flicked a hand in the air, then scooted his chair closer to Lian, dragging his file with him on the pretext of sharing information.

  Her scent crept into his nostrils, something softly musky with a hint of strange flowers beneath. He barely managed to keep himself from scooting even closer and sniffing her neck. It was one fine womanly perfume, that was for sure.

  Lian casually shifted away from him, irritating him. “So where do we go from here?” She leaned back, putting even more space between them.

  “We talk to people. Check the desks at the Pleasure Pads to see if there’s a common denominator. Talk to the girls themselves. Some of them were working—perhaps they saw or heard something that might be important.” He smiled at her, putting a lot of warmth into his expression. “You know, like a clue?”

  She didn’t smile back. “Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. That much I’d figured out myself.”

  “How old are you?” Buck watched her face as she flashed him a startled look.