Demon Hunter and Baby Read online

  Product description

  Her boss is a fairy, her ex-lover is a Knight Templar, and she spends her days fighting the demons that plague London’s streets. But what’s really complicating Aisling McKay’s life is being a single mother to a nine-month-old baby girl.

  Ever since the End Times, magic has been leaking into our world. Magic and demons, shadowy beings that possess humans’ bodies and destroy their souls. The Monastic Order of the Knights Templar have revealed themselves to the world as guardians and defenders of the veil between the demon world and ours. But the Templar Order is growing weaker, and the veil is starting to shred and tear. Often all that stands between humans and complete demonic possession are professional demon fighters, Hunters like Aisling McKay.

  Aisling already has enough to handle between her day job, her (very unplanned) baby daughter, Willow—and avoiding Kieran, Willow’s father and a Templar Knight. But now a new danger is abroad in London—and facing it will set Aisling on a collision course with the past she thought she’d escaped for good.

  Demon Hunter and Baby is the first of a planned series that will send Aisling on a desperate search back into her own past … and will lead her to long-buried truths that will shake the foundations of everything she believes. Truths that have the potential either to save or to utterly destroy the human world.

  Cover

  Copyright Page

  About Demon Hunter and Baby

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  Author Bio

  Table of Contents

  My grandfather used to say that humans created demons by labeling some forces of magic ‘evil’ and others ‘good.’ Sharks aren’t ‘evil’ for doing what sharks naturally do, even if one bites off your leg. Evil isn’t about action, it’s about choice.

  Maybe he was even right.

  But at the moment I wasn’t thinking about anything nearly that deep. I’d just woken up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, and I was thinking that I kind of wanted to drive an ice pick into my temple if I ever had the dream about Kieran again.

  Whatever demons are, I’m a Hunter, which means I fight them for a living. It also means that my subconscious should have plenty of other nightmare material to work with. I’d even take the old dream about my grandfather, just for a change.

  But no. My eyes were still stinging, and Kieran’s face was still printed on the backs of my eyelids. Copper-red hair and features that were all hard, strong angles. Blue eyes set under straight red brows. A scar that had faded to a fine white line on his cheekbone and the silver cross that marked him as a Knight Templar hanging on a leather thong at his throat.

  I’m sorry, I’d heard myself say in the dream. That was … my fault.

  Kieran had stood half-turned away from where I was sitting up in the tangled blankets on my bed. His hair had slipped out of its leather thong, and his shoulders were bare. But he’d turned at that, one side of his mouth tightening in a humorless smile. Your fault? Yes, right, I obviously complained the whole time. But then he’d shaken his head and turned away again. I’m a Templar, he’d said. I don’t know how to be anything else.

  Now I looked down at my arm, where the cut that had been angry and throbbing with a hexed wound in the dream was now healed to just a faint pink line. I couldn’t even tell myself it was just a dream.

  By reflex, my hand went to the sword under my pillow. But as far as I could see, all of the ward charms still glimmered with magic. I’d left the ward candles burning, like always, and I could see the windows and doors and the rest of the living room’s familiar shapes in the flickering glow. The dresser I’d painted blue to match the twisty-legged nightstand, old-fashioned rag rug on the hardwood floor. The bow window and old-fashioned enamel fireplace that had made me sign the lease on this apartment in the first place.

  The hammering of my pulse wasn’t quite so loud now. But my vision was blurred enough that I whacked my shin against the night table when I swung my legs out of bed.

  “God Da—” I clamped my mouth shut. “Darn. Darn it. Gosh darn.”

  At this point in my life, you’d have to blister paint with swearing before it makes me so much as raise an eyebrow. But I’d been trying to clean up my mouth lately.

  I rubbed my leg and blinked hard as I went to check the wards on the charms all strung across the doors and windows. Cowrie shells and iron crosses, Egyptian eyes of Horus, and stars of David.

  Even if our world is now filled with it, anyone who claims to know exactly how magic works is lying, pretty much. But since there’s never been a culture, anytime or anywhere, that didn’t believe in some kind of magic—even back in the days when only scraps of it filtered into our world—my grandfather always said we should learn the traditions of them all. Which was how I ended up with a dried seahorse from Italy sitting next to a statue of the goddess Hecate, which was next to a gold Saint Christopher medal. For whatever reason, they do all hold magic better than anything else I’ve found. I could see the magic of the wards now, like a pale white glimmer, around every one of the charms.

  I’d gotten all the way through to the iron Celtic cross on the bow window before the dream faded enough for me to realize that I hadn’t woken myself up after all. What had woken me was a baby’s wail from the other room.

  When I was growing up, there were always those jobs my grandfather went on alone, and by the time I was eight I knew it was pointless to argue. He’d ward whatever apartment or motel room was our home for that month and go off, sword on his back, whip coiled on his belt, hands spread out like a cat’s whiskers in front of him, seeing as well as most people’s eyes.

  I’d stay behind the wards, on whatever ugly couch was in the rented room. Eating jelly beans and poring over the comic books I’d bought with my cut of our earnings. They seemed so tame—domestic, even—compared to real life.

  And to block out the copper smell of blood and the screams in the wind, I’d debate: Batman or Superman? Captain America or Flash Gordon?

  I had no idea I should have been hoping for Captain Changes-Diapers-and-Takes-Out-the-Trash. Or at least Child-Support Man.

  Not that I’d given Kieran any chance at paying child support, to be fair.

  Willow was standing up in her crib, still wailing when I opened the door to her room. Her face was splotchy with tears under the wispy curls of reddish-gold hair, and her hands were clenched tight on the crib rail. She held her arms up to me and instantly sat down. She could pull herself up to standing now that she’d turned nine months, but only if she held on.

  “Hey, Willa-will.” I scooped her up and rested her sticky cheek against mine. “Sorry I didn’t hear you sooner.”

  We had three rooms. The living room where I slept, a bedroom, and a kitchen with an ancient gas stove and painted apple-green cabinets in between. Willow’s room was the closet-sized bedroom at the back. No window—that was the best thing, the important thing. The crown molding
all around the ceiling was pretty, too, even as gummy with fifty years’ worth of paint layers as it was.

  Willow batted my cheek with one fist, and I realized there were tears on my cheeks, too. “Shi— uh, sheep. Sheep. Um, baaa.”

  Okay, so it was a little lame, but I wasn’t going to have Willow growing up like me, learning to swear practically before she could talk.

  I’d gone to sleep in a gray T-shirt and an old pair of gym shorts. Willow stopped wailing, latched her teeth onto the shoulder of the T-shirt and did a pretty good impression of a terrier shaking a rat.

  I rubbed her back and then swiped at my eyes with my free hand. “Captain Takes-Away-Teething-Pain. Now there’s a superhero I could get into, am I right?”

  She was wearing the yellow fuzzy sleeper I’d put her to bed in, and through it I could feel her breathing slow from crying to hiccups to normal. “Yeah, you’re okay. I know, I know, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.”

  I fumbled through the diaper cream and powder and baby-wash bottles in the top drawer of her dresser until I found the teething drops and gave her a dose. Now what? I did this nightly. Willow was rubbing her eyes and yawning. I moved towards the crib. Instant wailing again.

  Just you plop Baby in the crib, luv, and tell her nighty-night. That’s what the last baby book I’d tried reading had said. The author called herself Auntie Violet, and called the reader ducky and luv every other word. Crikey, ducks, do you want her popping you in her kit bag when she goes off to college because she can’t put herself to sleep?

  I patted Willow’s back until the wails died to hiccups again.

  Life is strange. From the girl who sleeps with a sword, I know. But a year and a half ago, I would have said domestic was having more than mustard and olives in my kitchen. Actually, domestic was just plain having a kitchen.

  And if you’d told me I’d be taking advice from a woman who sounded like Dick Van Dyke doing his cockney accent in Mary Poppins?

  I’d have said I was glad I worked around other people who carried swords like mine, because the second I started thumbing through chapters with titles like Blimey, it’s a Binky, kill me and put me in a coffin. And I’d haunt you if you even thought about bringing me back.

  Then again—

  I took another step towards the crib. Willow did another terrier impression with my T-shirt and then gave me the you’ve got to be kidding me look that meant she was about to really start crying.

  I give up. As Auntie Violet would probably say if she were ever faced with an actual real-life baby.

  “Come on, Willow, you can help me finish checking the—”

  And then I stopped, my heart going dead in my chest. Through Willow’s door, I could see all the way through the kitchen and into the living room. Where there wasn’t a draft, not even a stray breath of air—I’d just made sure of that. But the iron crosses and the other charms all of a sudden shook and clattered together.

  And the next moment something—some thing out in the night—smashed, heavy and hard, against the apartment door.

  My hand—the one that wasn’t holding Willow—burned.

  Everyone at least agrees that magic can basically be used for three things: creation, protection, and destruction. And if you’re an adept—someone who can hold and manipulate the magic in our world—your particular skill, whatever it is, will slant towards one of those three.

  I can’t heal a wound or create much of anything to save my life. And I can’t cast protective wards as well as my grandfather did; that was his special thing. Still, I’ve got the ‘destruction’ part down pretty well. Which is useful as a Hunter.

  Now tendrils of magic that would have run down the blade of my sword if I’d still been holding it leaked from my fingertips. And I would have sworn I saw the hilt of my sword jerk and tremble from where I’d leaned it up against the wall. They say a Hunter’s weapons can start to echo the Hunter’s magic over time, and I’d had my sword—twenty-inch steel blade, hardwood grip with the druid rune for ash carved into the pommel—since I was ten.

  The ash rune is because that’s my name: Aisling—which you say Ash-linn—McKay.

  But sword or no, you can’t fight much of anything holding a baby in one arm. I had to hope the wards held. Because if something managed to come through the door, I had no idea how I was going to battle it and protect Willow, both.

  One second. Two. The ward charms rattled again, then stilled.

  Another five seconds dragged by. When I’d finished counting one hundred, I let out my breath in a rush that made my muscles feel momentarily weak and set the blade back in its corner. Then I sat down on the yellow-painted rocker next to Willow’s crib, holding her so tightly she gave a squawk of protest.

  “Sorry, Willow.” I rested my cheek against the top of her head.

  She looks nothing like me. I’m five-foot three and a hundred pounds. Brown hair—well, brown when I don’t dye it blue or pink or green—and brown eyes. And Willow has red hair and blue eyes, and you can see already she’s going to be tall. Just like Kieran.

  After I’d rocked with her awhile, her eyelids started to droop. But I couldn’t quite make myself put her back in the crib, so I just sat there, watching the wards on the windows and doors. Even though everything seemed—for now—to be quiet in our corner of New Cross, London, tonight.

  There’s also not a culture or society anywhere that doesn’t believe in evil—and evil beings that dance on the fringes of our world. They’ve been called a lot of things. Devils. Fiends. Unseelie. Djinn and Shaitan. Maybe for a while, humans could pretend that was all just folk tales and superstition. But even my grandfather wasn’t old enough to remember those days.

  Ever since the End Times, we call the evil beings that have flooded our world ‘demons.’

  And I know what you’re thinking: Demon Hunter and Baby? That has to be the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

  No one becomes a Hunter by learning to give up easily. But even I have to say there have been a lot of nights since that night with Kieran—the one that keeps coming back in my dreams—when it doesn’t sound like such a smart idea to me, either.

  When I opened my front door in the morning, an old man was pushing a cart down the street and calling, “Good luck charms for sale! Have a lucky day—just seventy pence!”

  It’s only about one percent of the population who are adepts, able to manipulate the magic that leaks in from the Otherworld. Objects that can absorb and store the magic are much more common—things like my ward charms, of course, but then there are rivers, lakes, trees, even certain herbs and types of wood that are all either naturally magical or can be easily infused with magic.

  There wasn’t even a flicker of magic about the goods this guy was selling, which meant that the charms would make nice paperweights and not much else. Any magic-infused substance has a kind of glimmer about it. It’s hard to describe beyond that, because magic basically just looks like magic. But if I had to find a comparison, I’d say that to an adept, the glimmer of magic looks like something between moonlight and heat waves rising off a bonfire: a faint, silvery shimmer in the air.

  I could have called the charm seller on it. But then he wasn’t absolutely guaranteeing anything with the charms—like protection—that would make them illegal. And you see that kind of thing in every big city, London or anywhere else: the fake magic peddled on the street next to the knockoff Gucci purses and faux Rolex watches.

  I shifted Willow so that I could lock my front door, and by the time I’d turned around, the charm seller was gone, disappeared around the street corner. The air was misty and chilly with the raw damp of autumn. Fallen leaves were bright, shiny wet patches of color on the ground. And Mrs. Bungard was standing on the pavement next to my car.

  Mrs. Bungard lives in the row house next to ours. She’s maybe sixty-five, with a lot of curly hair dyed canary-yellow, and on a good day her lipstick is even smeared in the general vicinity of her mouth. Today she was wearing a rhinestone tiara
, workman’s overalls, a faded chenille bathrobe over the overalls, and cowboy boots. Her outfits vary, but the cowboy boots are a constant.

  I waved. “Hi, Mrs. Bungard. I like the tiara.”

  “Hello, dear.” She touched the tiara and looked vaguely surprised. “Oh, this, yes. One must make an effort. I had my picture snapped by a photographer for the London Telegraph. The society pages, did I ever tell you that?”

  She shook her head. “But that wasn’t what I meant to tell you. I wanted to tell you—oh, that was it! You’ll never guess—the most exciting thing. An angel appeared to me. A real angel! Right in my living room.” Her faded blue eyes unfocused. “He was all golden. Golden as the sun. And his eyes glowed. He said he had come to speak to me.”

  In my head, I made a gun sign with thumb and forefinger and aimed it at my temple. Bang.

  Mrs. Bungard is also like the poster girl for those old ‘this is your brain on drugs’ commercials. Apparently she was one of those beehive-and-false-eyelashes types hanging on the lower rungs of the high-society, cocaine-snorting party scene in the ’70s. Now she remembers nothing. A month after I’d moved in, she’d tried to come in my front door so many times that I wrote her house number on an index card and pinned it on the outside of her coat. It helps maybe half the time. When she remembers to wear the coat.

  “Um, Mrs. Bungard? That wasn’t an angel. Remember?”

  Pale blue eyes blinked and refocused on mine. “Wasn’t he?”

  Whether we created demons or not, I’ll at least admit that if God made a Hell to hold all the nasties in the universe, He must have left the back gate open. And on bad days I sometimes feel like He looked at us humans afterwards and said, Wow, yeah, good luck with that, because if there are any actual angels to balance out the demons, I’ve never seen one.

  I didn’t want to scare Mrs. Bungard. Then again, I supposed even if I did, she’d have forgotten it ten minutes later. “No, he’s actually, uh, not a very good thing to have in your house. So if you see him again, don’t speak to him, just come and get me, okay?”