Page 128 of Cold Curses

We stepped out of the vehicle, sniffed for demon magic. It was definitely present, but the wind had picked up, so it was hard to tell how much of the sourness was from current magic versus past bad acts.

The building, about sixty feet long and twenty feet high at the eaves, sat on a concrete pad. A security light was mounted on a tall pole a dozen feet away, and it cast a wide circle of light on the main door, which was situated in the middle of one end of the building. The structure looked well maintained; it didn’t show its twenty-plus years of age. No obvious rust, and the grass had been recently cut. Maybe, as with Hugo’s machine, there was some kind of maintenance contract.

There weren’t any windows and, with the front door closed, no way to tell if Black was in there. But if he was, he wasn’t actively doing magic.

“Keypad,” Connor whispered beside me. “Next to the door. The light is red, so it’s engaged.”

His eyesight was better than mine, which rankled for some reason. At least I got to take advantage of it, which was nearly as good.

“I don’t see any other way in,” I whispered, “unless the Packs have a secret skill of tunneling through concrete.”

Connor and Swift both shook their heads.

Brakes squealed nearby, and I was glad we’d stuck to theshadows of a tall hedge near the property line. We slunk back farther against it.

An older-model sedan with New York plates—probably “borrowed” from Dante—pulled into the gravel driveway.

The driver’s-side door opened, and a demon emerged. Ditto the front passenger door. Then a second vehicle pulled in behind the first, and four more demons climbed out.

One of the demons from the front car opened the back passenger door, and Jonathan Black stepped out. He wore a black suit, white button-down shirt, no tie. His hair had either been oiled back or was still damp from the shower he’d probably needed after what he’d done in the carriage house.

There’s your damned upstart, I thought, complete with minions who’ve probably been scared into doing his bidding by what he’d done to their friends.

Black went suddenly still, looked around, and glanced toward our tight knot.

“Check the perimeter,” he said, and pulled out his screen while his demons began to walk around the yard. One of them headed right for us.

Then I scented blood.

I snapped my gaze to the others, found Lulu wincing at a red welling on her finger.

One of us—the vampire one—should’ve been warned about the certain surprise presence of a certain ingestible substance.

Lulu’s magic was of the old eldritch variety, the type that needed blood for kindling. Usually, by the time we needed her magic, blood had already been shed. But not now, and not yet. Her lips moved as she whispered some bit of arcane magic, and used her blood-tipped finger to draw symbols in the air. The air felt momentarily thick, and then magic settled around us.

The demon who approached us was physically unique even bysupernatural standards. Nearly eight feet tall with skin the color of cranberries. No hair, and the irises around his slitted pupils were bright yellow. He looked stereotypically demonic, although that image was ruined by the very cheap cologne that surrounded him like a funky cloud. He patrolled to the end of the property next door, then began walking right toward us.

He stopped inches from Kieran and sniffed the air, nostrils flaring widely as he searched for some anomaly. That anomaly was, of course, the five of us.

To his credit, Kieran didn’t move, even though instinct probably would’ve had him putting space between them. I wondered if his heart was beating as wildly as mine.

Maybe we didn’t need to hunch there in the dark, hiding ourselves. The five of us to six demons gave us fine odds. But Black was a wild card. If he could stop a human’s heart without much effort, what might he do to us?

The demon ultimately passed, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. We waited until the majority followed Black into the building and closed the door. One stayed outside to guard the entrance.

A storm was drawing nearer, with sharp, daggerlike clouds moving swiftly toward us. And I didn’t think it was meteorological.

It was magical.

“Get ready,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Swift said quietly as magic permeated the air. “He’s doing something very big in there.”

“Ley lines,” Lulu said; her eyes had gone glassy. “He’s trying to do something with the ley lines.”

“Kill more demons?” Connor asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t tell. But the magic has that demon edge again.”