Summoner of Storms

  Summoner of Storms

  (SPECTR #6)

  Jordan L. Hawk

  Summoner of Storms (SPECTR #6) © 2014 Jordan L. Hawk

  ISBN: 978-1-941230-05-3

  All rights reserved.

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  Cover art © 2014 Jordan L. Hawk

  Image credits: © iStockphoto.com / NicolasMcComber

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Annetta Ribken

  Chapter 1

  Caleb opened his eyes and found himself alone in bed.

  Well, not alone. Not really. Alone wasn’t something he’d ever be again. He’d passed up the last chance to be rid of Gray, the entity who’d accidentally possessed him exactly forty-one days ago.

  The temporary roommate in his head had become permanent. Sharing the duplex. Co-signed on the home loan.

  “You are sometimes very strange,” Gray observed.

  Oh sure, you’re the 5,000 year old demon-eating vampire, but I’m the one who’s strange.

  So not alone, but also without the other body he’d expected to find. The rather fine body belonging to Special Agent John Starkweather, Strategic Paranormal Entity Control, aka SPECTR. Or maybe former special agent, given the events of the last twenty-four hours. The white sheets still held the musk of sweat and sex, mingled with the fading trace of John’s aftershave.

  “John left without us.” Disappointment, mingled with memories from the night before. John stretched out on the bed beneath them, his eyes an uncannily brilliant blue in Gray’s amped-up sight. His mouth on their cock. The way he’d tilted his head to one side in invitation when Gray asked to taste John’s blood...

  Caleb’s morning wood took on a new urgency. Would you stop? We’ve got other things to worry about right now besides sex.

  “Will we hunt demons?”

  It’s all about food or fucking with you, isn’t it? Caleb shook his head, but his lips curved in a smile. Damned drakul might have a two-track mind, but unlike a human, Caleb always knew exactly where he stood with Gray.

  “Mortals make things needlessly complicated.”

  Well, Gray had a point there.

  Caleb stretched and sat up. The room looked like a bed and breakfast, but was actually part of a mansion converted to a safe house by the Vigilant. Who the Vigilant were, he still didn’t know for certain, other than they opposed the government’s “all Non-Human Entities must die” policy. Not to mention SPECTR’s “let’s load demons into soldiers and try to control them, because what could possibly go wrong?” initiative.

  The sound of voices carried from somewhere below, the words indistinguishable even with his enhanced hearing. Caleb rolled out of bed and picked up his discarded sweatpants from last night. They were one-size-fits-all, which meant short enough to expose his ankles and baggy enough to ride dangerously low on his hips even with the drawstring pulled tight. One of the Vigilant who’d hosed him down the night before—after the battle, demon blood had covered him from head to toe—said his clothes would be cleaned and returned. Hoping to track them down, Caleb went to the bedroom door and opened it.

  A spirit ward lay just outside the door.

  Caleb stared at it, a sick twist in his stomach. What the hell?

  “It cannot hold us,” Gray pointed out.

  Yeah, I know. As did the Vigilant. They must have put it here as a sort of alarm, because they wanted to know the moment he started wandering the halls. Which, in turn, meant despite all their high-sounding words, they didn’t fully trust Caleb.

  No. They didn’t fully trust Gray.

  “Foolish.”

  Yeah. Except in ordinary circumstances, once the forty-day limit ended, NHEs generally took over their hosts and set about sowing major havoc and death. Tiffany had taken a huge risk, at least from her perspective, by allowing Gray’s possession to become permanent. Maybe not everyone in the Vigilant was entirely happy with her decision.

  Hell, could he really blame them? Sure, it sucked, but even he couldn’t really explain why Gray was different.

  “Because I am not a demon.”

  Whatever that even meant. “Demon” wasn’t even a real category, just a word left over from the days before anyone understood NHEs. Not to say anyone really understood them now. That had been one of the more disillusioning things about the last forty days, discovering even the experts didn’t have any real idea what they dealt with.

  Well, maybe the Vigilant would have more answers. At least they’d left his clothes, neatly folded and stacked on the floor, beside the spirit ward. With a sigh, he stepped across the ward; it tingled across his skin. Caleb's ears popped, as if the pressure had changed around him. Whatever exorcist laid the ward knew he was up and around now.

  He dressed quickly in black jeans, dark gray tee, and black leather boots adorned with buckles and straps. And his long coat, elk leather dyed black, underlain with kevlar. Someone had done a quick repair job on the holes and rents left behind from his demon brawl the night before. Although it had been as much feast as fight.

  His teeth burned and his fingertips itched at the memory. You can’t be hungry after snacking on all those demons last night.

  “No. But if we came across one...” A predator’s logic; no telling if famine would follow feast. Better to eat while the eating was good.

  Fortunately, they weren’t likely to find any demons nearby, not with several exorcists under one roof. The thought didn’t cheer Gray, but Caleb didn’t care. He’d endured enough violence in the last couple of days, thank you very much.

  He followed the sound of voices downstairs. The air smelled of bacon, hash browns, toast, and coffee. The safe house had once been an old plantation-style home, complete with a huge dining room, an enormous table, big chandelier, and a sideboard laden with a wide variety of breakfast foods.

  All murmur of conversation stopped when Caleb stepped through the doorway. He halted, uncomfortable at having every single eye in the room turned his way. Most of the roughly dozen people there he recognized as Vigilant operatives from the night before.

  At the head of the table sat Tiffany Ward, SPECTR agent and Vigilant mole. He didn’t know what her status was in the Vigilant, precisely, except she’d commanded the assault on SPECTR’s Non-Human Entity Research Division last night. Supposedly, RD investigated the different types of NHEs, or worked on developing ways to exorcise them more easily. In reality, Assistant Director Graham Forsyth was using RD to stuff demons in soldiers and run experiments on how to control them.

  Which didn’t go down well with Indira Kaniyar, SPECTR District Chief and John’s boss, who now sat to Tiffany’s right. Kaniyar was a hard ass who frankly scared the shit out of Caleb, but she would never go along with the horrors Forsyth was cooking up. She, along with her pet empath Pittman, were now on the run from SPECTR along with the rest of them.

  John sat halfway down the table, a half-eaten bagel in front of him. Bags showed under his bloodshot eyes, and his dark hair had started to grow out of its normal clipped perfection. But at the sight of Caleb, a bright grin lit up his face. “Hey, babe. I saved you guys a chair.”

  Gray preened at the inclusion, like a satisfied cat. And yeah, it was thoughtful of John, but given the present company, Caleb would just as soon he’d skipped it. No need to remind everyone just what they had in their midst, after all.

  “Um, thanks,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the sideboard. “Just let me grab some breakfast.”

  “Well, hurry it up,” Tiffany snapped. As usual, she dressed in a tailored Italian suit
and skirt. Although her flawless makeup concealed most of the damage from lack of sleep, the way she slumped slightly in her chair, hands wrapped around her coffee cup, gave away her exhaustion. Had she rested at all last night? “We’ve been waiting on you to drag your ass out of bed. Thanks for keeping half the house awake with your kinky sexcapades, by the way.”

  “Speaking of which,” Kaniyar said, “you owe me twenty dollars.”

  John took a sip of his coffee. “I can’t believe you actually bet on whether I’d survive the night.”

  The heat building in Caleb’s cheeks drained away, and he scowled. “The hell, Tiffany? The spirit ward was bad enough, but this? If you think Gray is so damned dangerous, why did you let him stay with me?”

  Tiffany dug a twenty out of her wallet and passed it to Kaniyar. “Gray is dangerous,” she said. “That’s the point. I took a chance on you. The spirit ward was just a bit of reassurance for all concerned.”

  In other words, maybe some of the other Vigilant didn’t think she made the right choice. “And the bet?”

  “Because only Starkweather would be crazy—or dumb—enough to fuck something that can rip through a solid iron door.” She made a face. “There’s just too many ways it could go wrong.”

  “Ew. And thanks for the fucking vote of confidence.”

  “Any time. Now would you please get some damn breakfast so we can start here?”

  He loaded up a plate with bagels and toast. Being vegetarian, he would have avoided the bacon even before Gray, but the drakul had a poor opinion of what he called carrion and cold blood.

  This from a creature who drank the blood of ghouls, which reeked like fucking corpses.

  “But they are alive,” Gray countered with what he obviously considered unassailable logic. “Whereas this has been dead for some time.”

  Can we just have breakfast without a discussion of what’s on other people’s plates? Christ.

  He took the chair beside John. Before tucking in to his breakfast, though, he leaned over and kissed the other man, a bit defiantly. Screw you, Tiffany.

  “I can’t sense him,” Pittman said.

  Caleb was no empath, but even he felt the mood of the room change. If it had been wary before, now it was on edge. Startled, he pulled away from John to find everyone staring at him in varying degrees of alarm.

  “Clarify,” Kaniyar ordered. Her sharp tone was no different than usual, but he thought her expression hardened slightly.

  Pittman looked the stereotype of an all-American football player: blond, big, and burly. But the bright green band around his upper arm marked him as an empath, able to sense emotions and know if someone lied. And right now, he didn’t seem happy at all.

  “It isn’t something a lower-level empath would necessarily twig to,” he said. “At least, not if there were other people around. I’ve never had a problem reading Mr. Jansen before. Now...he’s just not there.”

  “Well I am, asshole. Quit talking about me like I’m not,” Caleb snapped. Damn mind-fuckers.

  Kaniyar ignored Caleb’s protest. “What about last night? After the possession became permanent?”

  Pittman’s blue eyes fixed on Caleb, as if doing his damnedest to sense something. “I don’t know. With so many people and emotions so high, I couldn’t sort things out. But right now, it’s no different from any full-blown possession. I can’t sense Mr. Jansen’s emotions at all. As if he’s no longer human.”

  “Oh, fuck you!” Caleb shoved his chair back. After everything else, damned if he would sit here and let some toady of Kaniyar’s insult him. “I’m still human.”

  “Caleb, sit down.” John gripped his arm, tugging gently. “Please. No one’s accusing you of anything.”

  “He’s saying I’m not human. He’s accusing Gray of, what, tricking everyone into thinking I’m still in here?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Jansen, before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.” Kaniyar’s voice cracked like a whip. “If the drakul were manifesting, we’d know, even without the overtly physical signs.”

  “So what did you mean to imply?” Caleb asked the empath. The guy might not be able to feel Caleb’s emotions any more, but he’d figure them out from the glare Caleb gave him.

  “We don’t know what it implies,” John said patiently, still tugging on his sleeve. “Please. Sit down and let it go for now.”

  “Fine.” Caleb thumped back into his chair. Snatching up the butter knife, he did his best to take out his annoyance on the tub of margarine in front of him.

  John sighed but didn’t remark on it. Instead, he turned to Tiffany. “All right. Caleb is here. Now answer my questions.”

  Tiffany scowled at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about than giving you a history lesson, Starkweather. Starting with Forsyth’s army of demons and what the hell we’re going to do about them.”

  “No.” A little surprised at the sharpness of John’s tone, Caleb glanced from his bagel to his lover’s face. John wore an expression Caleb had never seen before: cold and angry. “I’m not discussing anything until I know exactly who I’m working with.”

  “You do know me—”

  “I knew Sean even better.” Bitterness twisted John’s words. And with good reason; he and Sean had been best friends for years. Right up until the moment Sean put a bullet in Caleb’s skull and sold them all out to Forsyth. “Cut the crap.”

  John and Tiffany stared at one another for a long moment. With a frustrated huff, Tiffany banged her coffee cup down onto the table. Coffee sloshed over her brown fingers, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Fine,” she said. “Have it your way. Her name was Papillon.”

  * * *

  “It means ‘butterfly’ in French,” Tiffany said. “She was a placée in New Orleans in the early 1800s.”

  John frowned. Was Tiffany serious, or just jerking him around? “I don’t think we need to go back this far.”

  Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. “Do you want to know or not? Then shut up and let me tell you.”

  “Fine.” But if it turned out she was just screwing with him, he was out the door, with Caleb and Gray in tow. “What’s a placée?”

  Tiffany’s full lips pressed into a tight line. “At the time? A free woman of color, usually very light-skinned, kept as a mistress by a wealthy white ‘protector.’ Life was fucking hard, but these ladies were damned smart. A lot of them, Papillon included, had legal contracts ensuring they—and their children—got a regular allowance and whatever they needed to live on. They owned property, which was more than a lot of white women could say back then.”

  She gave him a challenging stare. Maybe she thought he intended to make some asshole remark about prostitution. “Got it. So she probably had some kind of education, too?”

  Tiffany seemed surprised. “Huh. Not as dumb as you look. She was a woman in two worlds, the one who’d go to communion with the other placées and listen to the priests remind everyone over and over that all contact with the spirit world was an abomination against God. Later she’d go to the local mambo’s house and speak to the lwa.”

  “NHEs,” John said.

  Tiffany’s eyes narrowed in displeasure. “Intermediaries between mortals and God. So yes, not human.”

  “Dangerous.” John shook his head. “And not just because she would’ve been in trouble if caught.”

  Tiffany scowled. “The idea all possessions are bad is imperialistic bullshit. Under controlled circumstances—”

  “Which is exactly what Forsyth is telling himself! Look how well that turned out.”

  The smell of scorching wood filled the air. Tiffany swore and yanked her hands back from the table, which now bore the imprint of her fingertips burned into it. “You don’t know shit. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Tiffany—”

  “John,” Caleb cut in. “Don’t be mad, but I’m kind of hoping Tiffany’s right.”

  Shit. He was an idiot. “Yeah, okay. I’m sorry.” He t
ouched the back of Caleb’s hand lightly. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I think Gray is no different than the NHEs Forsyth is controlling. I don’t. But summoning NHEs...I’ve seen it go wrong too many times.”

  “And I’ve seen it go right too many times,” Tiffany replied. “Anyway, the point is, Papillon knew a few things, but didn’t spend her life thinking about NHEs. Until the night a rougarou—a lycanthrope—attacked her. It would have killed her, except the drakul hunting it showed up. The drakul was in the body of someone she knew, someone who had died from yellow fever just a few days before. It saved her life.”

  Tiffany took a long sip from her coffee cup. “Papillon didn’t know what had happened, what she’d just seen. But the experience changed her. Awoke a curiosity, or a drive, whatever you want to call it. She went to the cemetery and her friend’s crypt. And she talked to what she found inside.”

  “Yes,” Gray said.

  Etheric energy suddenly flooded the room, along with the scent of ozone and petrichor. Startled, John turned to find Gray sitting beside him, eyes black as oil slicks. His long hair shivered and twisted in an unfelt breeze, the locks slithering over his shoulders like black snakes. Several of the Vigilant stirred in alarm, even though they’d fought beside him just a few hours ago.

  “What?” Tiffany asked.

  “Yes,” Gray repeated, in a voice almost like Caleb’s but underlain with a deep rumble of distant thunder. “I remember.”

  Chapter 2

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” one of the other Vigilant said, eyes going wide. John privately agreed with him.

  “I only recall because mortals seldom spoke to me,” Gray said. “Usually they came into tombs to cut off my head. Or pin me to the ground with stakes.”

  He said it as if it were perfectly normal, the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. John’s stomach turned over queasily at the thought of someone hurting Gray, even if he’d been in a dead body unable to experience pain at the time. “What did you tell her?”