Chapter One
The acrid scent of demon blood tainted the crisp autumn air, drawing Blake DeWitt swiftly into the shadows behind the bakery on Chelsea Street. Once hidden there, he cut the engine of his Harley and strained to hear the scratch of curved claws on the pavement, the scrape and shuffle of a nightmare’s passage through the alley.
He’d been tracking the creature, or more accurately, following the wispy stirrings of power emanating from the artifact it carried, since midnight. The odd tang in the air was the first indication he’d had that he might not be the only one on the Gogmar’s trail.
DeWitt cursed the amateur demon hunters. They’d grown more troublesome and more numerous in the past year, probably in response to the sudden and disturbing proliferation of their chosen prey.
He glanced at his watch and mentally calculated the hours and minutes until sunrise. He had no desire to grapple with a human tonight, but with the cursed artifact on the move, he couldn’t waste any time. If the Witch’s Cabochon found refuge in the hands of a new demon queen, he faced an indefinite amount of time in the purgatory-like half-life that had become his existence.
Anxiety rising and mixing with the illicit thrill of the hunt, he tightened his gloved grip on the handlebars of his bike and watched the play of shadows against cold brick. After ten years in darkness, he craved sunlight more than most men craved food or sex. If he failed to retrieve the gem before this transfer was complete, he’d go mad waiting for another remote opportunity to free himself from the family curse.
Nothing could stop him tonight. He’d do whatever he had to in order to save his own life and the lives of his male heirs, and damn the consequences.
“Oh, damn. Not again.” Melodie McConnell knew it was going to be a bad night when the antlers fell off her moose.
It happened as she was sliding an aluminum tray out of the industrial refrigerator in the back of Gleason’s Gourmet Bakery, where she worked nights decorating designer cakes. One slight bump and the antlers she’d cast in melted sugar crumbled to shards, landing at the base of the chocolate-fondant-covered body of the creature she’d nicknamed Marty.
Marty had a date at the Amberville Moose Lodge’s Annual Initiation Dinner tomorrow night, and without antlers, he couldn’t be the guest of honor.
Right now, he looked more like a dark brown camel with an extra set of eyes where coconut sponge cake showed through the holes in his head. This latest setback left Melodie with six hours to recast his antlers in sun-yellow sugar and figure out how to keep them mounted long enough for the other Moose to ooh and ahh over him before he was eaten.
She had Marty’s tray balanced on one hand and was lifting her sneaker-clad foot to kick the fridge door shut when the phone rang, nearly scaring her out of her skin. Gleason’s had been a family-owned business for fifty years, and the back room still sported a black, rotary-dial single line that had been around since before Ma Bell had kittens. The old monster had a ring that could shatter glass. The sound echoed off all the newly installed stainless steel cabinets and countertops like machine-gun fire and always, always caught Mel by surprise.
Marty’s tray tipped, and his cocoa-dusted body shifted just enough to give her a minor coronary. With a yelp, she righted him, dashed the tray onto the counter at her workstation and jumped on the phone before the second ring could rattle her skull again.
“Gleason’s Gourmet Bakery. Melodie speaking. We’re closed right now, but I’d be happy to take your order and get back to you with pricing in the morning.” She chirped out the whole after-hours greeting without tripping over her tongue—a first. She would have patted herself on the back, but she was still busy picking pieces of antler from around Marty’s artfully folded moose knees.
A vaguely familiar voice croaked in her ear. “Mel? Cuff-cuff-cuff.”
Mel held the phone away from her ear for a second. “Calypso? Is that you?”
The froglike voice muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, it’s me,” then another bout of painful coughing exploded from the earpiece.
“Are you all right?” Obviously a dumb question, but what else do you say to someone who just reached out to hack up a lung in your ear? Calypso Smith, Gleason’s premiere cake designer, was supposed to be at work in ten minutes.
“Oh, I’m ok-k-kay, Mel. Asthma’s acting up. I’m on my nebulizer tonight cuff-cuff. I’m sorry to do this to you.”
“Cal, Arnie left half an hour ago.” Mel knew the difference between a phony cough and a real one, but their boss, Arnold Gleason, did not.
“Oh, cool.” Calypso’s slightly smoky voice returned to normal, and rather than continue coughing into the phone, she whispered, “Angelo’s in town. Will you cover for me?”
Melodie chucked a handful of antler shards in the trash and sighed. What could she say? The moose-rack rebuild was only a minor catastrophe in the overall scheme of things, and whatever designs Cal was working on could probably wait until tomorrow night. Mel just wished Calypso wasn’t going to waste her time with Angelo. Calypso’s deadbeat ex-husband was a mooch, but she loved the bum to distraction, even though he’d divorced her—twice. “Sure, hon. Do what you’ve gotta do.”
At least Melodie would get to hear about Cal’s romantic adventures tomorrow night. Calypso was the queen of kiss and tell, and given Mel’s own ex had only divorced her once and never bothered to come back searching for forgiveness, she got to live vicariously through her friend.
“Love ya, baby!” Cal made a smooching sound and hung up. Mel cradled the four-pound receiver and glared at Marty, who grinned foolishly with his shaved sugar-cube teeth.
“Don’t give me that look,” she warned him, shaking a sliver of antler. “She’s a big girl. I can’t tell her what to do.”
The rest of Marty’s cleanup went well, and in no time his little moose head was ready for re-crowning.
Melodie had just dumped a pound of sugar into a double boiler and adjusted the flame beneath it when all hell broke loose in the alley behind the store. Trash cans rattled, and something thumped around by the Dumpsters.
“Damn cats and raccoons.” She swiped her hands on her apron and grabbed the broomstick Arnie used to keep the local fauna out of his trash. Making as much racket as she could, she flipped on the back light and opened the rear door. The stray cats usually scattered fast enough, but the raccoons seemed to get braver every year. The last time she’d encountered one of the black-eyed bandits filching egg shells and fondant scraps, he’d given her what sounded like a dressing down for interrupting his dessert. Fortunately she didn’t speak racooneese or she’d have probably been insulted.
Just as she suspected, something had torn open a garbage bag and trailed some of the contents in a viscous mess down the side of the nearest Dumpster. Snorting sounds coming from the far side of the green metal bin suggested whatever it was had found something sumptuous in the trash and was chowing down. The thought of having to clean up the remains of a scavenger’s dinner didn’t leave Mel in a charitable mood, so she whacked the Dumpster with the broomstick. Two solid shots rattled the steel box and all the bones in her arms.
“Come on, move along, you little rat.”
The snuffling stopped abruptly as though whatever it was might be hoping she’d go away. Must be an opossum. Raccoons usually argued before waddling off like surly little winos, but didn’t opossums prefer to play dead?
She didn’t want to look, but if she went back inside, she’d have a bigger mess to clean up later. A whiff of something vile wafted through the alley then, and she knew she was in for it.
It had to be a skunk. The little stinkers were normally scarce on this side of town. They preferred the fast-food joints down on Main Street where they could gorge on all-beef patties and golden fries. Then, drunk on saturated fats, they’d play chicken with the end-of-rush-hour traffic and wind up perfuming the entire west end of town. On a warm night like this, the stench could linger until dawn.
While Mel debated with herself, the snuffling began again in earnest, coupled with an oddly pig-like squeal. That didn’t bode well. Curiosity and annoyance in equal parts drew her forward. She brandished the broom like a baseball bat, firm in her belief that there were no wild pigs in Amberville, Maryland.
She whacked the Dumpster again, and this time something horrible stood up and looked her in the eye.
The furry scavenger she’d expected turned out to be six feet tall, covered in lizard-green skin dotted with scaly pustules. He had a face like Clive Barker’s worst nightmare. Half a dozen fangs protruded haphazardly from a gash of a mouth, and the clawed hand he thrust at her looked like it had at least eight fingers.
Nonplussed, she did what any red-blooded, half-Irish divorcee with three older brothers would do. She jabbed him in the gonads with her broomstick and screamed from her diaphragm.
Creature Boy grunted and doubled over, which was the effect she’d been after, but she hadn’t counted on him losing his balance and lurching forward. She backed up fast, but the Dumpster blocked her escape, and she ended up pinned against the brick wall with him slobbering all over her green and white Gleason’s apron.
He seemed to be whimpering in pain or some other less wholesome emotion. Mel used the broomstick to shove him backward. Sad, rheumy eyes met hers in the amber light filtering down the alley from the tiny parking lot out back, and he clutched his stomach just above the spot where she’d nailed him.
“Oh, crap. You’re not going to hurl on me, are you?” She was about to bolt when he turned his scaly palms up as if to show her the crimson blood seeping from his middle.
His pumpkin-shaped head jerked to the side, and he glanced toward the parking lot, obviously afraid. That gave Melodie the sinking feeling something scarier than he was might be in pursuit. “Look, why don’t you just sit back down behind the Dumpster, and I’ll call 911?”
Ugly as he was, his blood looked very real. Could this be a frat prank gone sour? The kids from the U of M were always finding new and creative ways to humiliate one another, and this just smacked of a “costume party turned tragic” lead on the eleven o’clock news. Mel felt a minor pang of regret for having attempted to castrate him, and her guilt increased exponentially when he pressed something about the size of a cell phone into her hand.
The odd, oblong shape was smooth and cold and glowed faintly blue. It looked more like a giant sapphire than a phone, though. He muttered something unintelligible and tried to fold her fingers around the object. She slapped his crusty hands away. “Where did you get this?”
Amberville had one jewelry store, and the biggest stone they carried was a two-carat cubic zirconia. This looked…priceless. Not that Mel was any judge of jewels, being perpetually unable to afford any of her own.
“Look, why don’t you just—” The words “sit down” stuck in her throat when a solid ton of slimy flesh crashed against her again. She dropped the gem into the pocket of her apron and made a frantic grab for his shoulders.
Her knees buckled under his weight, and her well-honed panic instinct took over, bidding her to kick and scream at the same time for maximum effect.
Before he managed to flatten her completely, his whole body jerked once. A questioning sound escaped his lipless mouth, and he backed away. Or, at least it seemed like he backed away.
Free of the burden of his scaly carcass, Mel hauled herself up and confronted something worse than a costumed frat boy tossing his cookies. All six feet of him hung limp as a rag doll, like a big green puppet with its strings cut. He seemed to dangle in midair, and from the now much larger bloody spot in the middle of his belly protruded the gleaming silver tip of a sword.
Melodie gaped at the thing that had killed him.
Easily six-four, surfer-blond and poured into distressed denim and a well-worn white cotton T-shirt, Lancelot wore the smug expression of a quarterback who’d just made a game-winning touchdown.
With a clearly practiced move that showed off muscles sculpted at the gym, he shook Creature Boy’s corpse from his blade and cavalierly wiped the residual blood off on the body.
“Are you all right, miss?” he had the nerve to ask with a lopsided, somewhat self-effacing grin that begged the question, How cool am I?
Mel stuttered something that was supposed to sound like, “I think so,” then pointed her broom handle at the heap of suppurating flesh now stretched across the alley. “You killed him.”
“It,” he corrected as he slid his impressive weapon back into the long, black scabbard he wore attached to a wide leather belt which canted across his lean hips. “Gogmars are sexless. He’s not a he.”
Mel blinked. “Gogmars? Uh…well, this Gogmar took a jab to the groin like a guy.”
Lancelot shrugged and strode over to nudge the body with a steel-toed alligator boot. It might have been faux alligator, but in this light, Mel couldn’t be sure. “You probably hit him in his third heart. Gogmars have three in their thoraxes.”
The words “Gogmars” and “thoraxes” held little relevance for her, so Mel ignored them. More importantly, this “Gogmar” was now dead.
“But you killed him.” Mel just couldn’t get past that little detail. It didn’t matter what the guy was dressed up as, he was still dead.
Lancelot cocked a golden brow at her. “Of course. Otherwise he’d have torn you apart looking for food. Gogmars are a lot like bears. They’re very destructive when they’re hungry.” He held out a surprisingly well-manicured hand. “I’m Palmer Van Houten, demon hunter.”
“Melodie McConnell,” she replied automatically before her sense of self-preservation returned. She let his hand hang there, unshaken, while his introduction sank in. “You hunt demons? In Amberville?”
“Well, all over, really.”
Right. “You won’t mind, then, if I call the police?” She backed up, broom at the ready, and glanced at the body behind him. Fraternity prank gone bad, news at eleven flashed in her mind again. Or maybe Crazy Palmer liked to play Dungeons and Dragons for real and had run one of his buddies through on the roll of the dice.
Palmer favored Melodie with a weary glance. His eyes were dark, a little bit sparkly in the dim light, and might have been mesmerizing if she hadn’t just watched him impale someone. “The body won’t be here when the police arrive. Gogmars usually melt after death. It takes between fifteen and twenty minutes, and it can be kind of smelly. Baking soda helps with that. You might want to shake a box or two around out here.”
“Baking soda.”
“Yeah. Look.” He nodded to Creature Boy, who looked much more creature and much less boy at the moment.
“Eeew. Oh my God.” Green sludge had begun to ooze across the alley, seeping from beneath the corpse, which seemed to flatten out a bit as she watched in horrified fascination.
“Sometimes they leave a stain.”
It was times like this that Mel missed the good old days when a girl could simply swoon her way out of a difficult situation. Despite feeling a little light-headed and a lot queasy, though, she wasn’t about to lose consciousness. She had no hope of waking up snug in her bed to discover this had all been a dream.
She gave Palmer a skeptical once-over and decided that he was probably right. The body was almost completely—yech—liquefied now, and there didn’t seem to be a reason to call anyone, except maybe an industrial clean-up crew. She figured tomorrow would be soon enough to contact her HMO and get the name of a good psychotherapist in her plan. Right now, a dignified retreat seemed to be her best option.
“Well, Palmer, it was nice meeting you. Thanks for saving me. I’ve got to get back to work. And by the way, you have a little Gogmar on your T-shirt.”
He glanced at his chest, and while he was distracted, she bolted for the back door.
She’d have made it too, except she forgot she was still holding the broomstick, and it barred her hasty getaway. She turned to chuck it next to the Dumpster, and that’s when hell itself roared into the alley.