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It wasn’t that I felt no sympathy for Rasmus being hurt, because I did, but the first thing I thought of were his amazing abs. No man looks like that naturally past the age of twenty-five unless he works at it. Being in the military would explain his physical condition and maybe some other things.

When I realized he was going on with his story, I pushed away my memories to pay attention.

“One day I woke up in a hospital healing from a fight I couldn’t remember ever happening. There wasn’t a mark on my body, but I couldn’t remember anything. Two members of the demon hunter council came to see me. They said demons had attacked me and I’d barely escaped. They also offered me a job as a hunter. Jack helped me find a place to live and trained me.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Seven years.”

I left the obvious unsaid, but Conn, who was riding shotgun in the front, gazed over his shoulder at me. The math wasn’t lost on him either.

I stared out of the window. “Witching is just what I do and magick is like breathing to me. I never went looking for normal work. Magickal work like this job always finds me. I was making plans to break myself out of the cottage before ya showed up with yer offer.”

“But you would have been a fugitive.”

“Magickal authority and legal human authority are very different, Rasmus. Yer demon hunter council had no proper authority over me, and the human legal authorities in the state of Massachusetts have no records of my incarceration. The demon hunters operate covertly.”

“You are full of all kinds of conspiracy theories.”

I chuckled like he’d said the funniest thing ever. His ignorance of those he worked for was the real joke, but I changed the subject. “Ya also mentioned a wife. Do ya remember her?”

That question earned me another glare in the rearview mirror before he answered. “A sobbing woman ran out of my hospital room after the doctors announced I would never get my memories back. I never saw her again, and no one seems to remember her being there but me.”

“Well, that was certainly an odd turn of events after everything else,” Conn exclaimed.

Rasmus nodded. “Yes. The military refused to release my old personal information about my marriage because she allegedly divorced me. When I questioned the doctors, they said I imagined seeing a woman, but that she hadn’t been there. A couple years ago I finally gave up looking. The military declined all my requests and cited it as a matter of national security to keep my accident details a secret.”

Nodding, I settled into the backseat and into my own thoughts. I didn’t want Rasmus to feel like I was digging out of disbelief. Conn and Rasmus were back to making light-hearted conversation about nothing. I let the conversation stay there while I sunk into my own thoughts.

So what had I learned since I agreed to this crazy demon hunt?

Conn could laugh like his natural self even while in human form. That was the creepiest thing ever.

Jack had more money than he should have had. My daughter thought I was a criminal. And my mother thought I should be more concerned about keeping a good haircut than I was about my divorce.

I also learned Rasmus had great abs, lived in a soulless house, and had no memory of his demon encounter. I suspected Jack and the council were capitalizing on his misfortune, but that had yet to be proven.

The whole missing wife thing was crazy. What if someone was making sure she stayed away? Why had she given up on him?

This search was getting stranger every moment.

* * *

By the timewe got to Albany, it was close to six, and the sun was setting. Gas station and truck stop snacks had left me starving for actual food, but Conn said dinner would have to wait until after we talked to the demon caste here.

He would need to shift forms to do his searching and the darkness was helpful. His parting words to me were to watch for a strange dog to appear later.

Honestly? Any dog form Conn took was automatically strange.

He could also be a goat, a cow, and a horse to name a few other animals. His horse form was majestic, but he refused to take me for a trot around the field. He also refused to turn himself into a panda or a llama just because I thought they were cute. We had some fun times back when we first got to know each other. I was twenty-one and carrying Fiona. Baby hormones make a witch quite sassy.

We’d parked on what appeared to be a middle-class street by an abandoned chapel. The streetlamps were in working order and people were out walking their pets one last time before bed. Sure, the location was too cliché for words, but where would ya hide if ya were a creature from the Underdark? I’d have probably picked a church as well. Everyone else would look for angels in a place like this.

I’d never met an angelic being, but Ma was convinced they existed. Many strange magickal creatures lived in exotic places around the globe, but give me a fairy, a troll, or a leprechaun any day. I understood them better.

It was harder to find demons because they held human forms whenever they walked this plane of existence. Only the royal family held enough magick to shift into their original form up here.

Conn never bragged about being a royal, but he admitted to being a king the night we talked about Lilith. All I knew for certain was that he could take any form he wished. I had never seen another demon do the same. I figured it was part of his deal with The Dagda.