I studied my hands, clenched together in my lap. Looking out the windows at the scenery flying by in a blur only added to the nausea I was trying to control. Looking at Nick left me all sorts of things. Even not looking at him wrecked me a little. In books, I'd read about a woman swooning over a man's musky scent, and all I could imagine was the stench of sweaty gym socks. But Nick smelled like the natural version of what Old Spice cologne tried to replicate. Something like soap and cinnamon and panty-melting pheromones.
If I squeezed hard enough, my middle knuckles turned white, but my little first knuckles got redder. Interesting. Just keep focusing on that.
"What?" Nick asked.
"What, what?" I replied like a dork.
"You 'hmmed.'"
"It's nothing." Not for all the money in the world would I have shared my thoughts just then. Oh, don't mind me. I'm just injuring my joints and observing the effects to distract myself from the urge to climb over the center console and ride you like a rodeo champion.
"Can you call Mx. Landry, please? See if they know what we're headed into."
Grateful for the distraction, I pulled my phone out and tapped the screen. Before I hit the call button, a question popped out of my mouth. "Is every night like this?"
He glanced at me, and I realized I was looking straight at him. A bead of sweat rolled from my hairline down the side of my face.
"No."
When no further reply seemed forthcoming, I pried my gaze away and went ahead with the phone call. Because I was working. And that's what people at work do. They do work stuff. Like phone calls. They do not, under any circumstances, proposition their boss. Or, at least, they're not supposed to. But it wasn't illegal, right? Ethically gray, for sure but—
Mx. Landry answered on their end with a brusque, "Where are you?"
"Put it on speaker, please," Nick said. After I hit the button, he answered for me. "We were at a crossroads. Nine miles southeast of town. We're already enroute."
"Who'd you sacrifice?" They sounded more curious than concerned. Then, "Did it work? You've got Sathanas?"
"No one, obviously, and yes, it worked fine. It wasn't Sathanas we were after. I'll brief you later." He did a crazy-ass Tokyo drift off the dirt onto the paved country highway. "What happened to Benji?"
"Her car broke down."
"Excuse me?" Nick's foot eased up on the accelerator and we slowed from an insane speed to something merely recklessly excessive.
"Car trouble," Mx. Landry said. "You know the kind. Leaves you stuck on the side of the road."
"Tell her to call Triple-A for fuck's sake. We're busy."
"Not that kind of car trouble. Triple-A won't cover it."
Nick growled. I don't mean, he grumbled in a low voice. I mean, he literally growled like a pit bull in a dogfight, deep and terrifying. Lighting flashed in the clear sky overhead.
All the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I pressed my thighs together and focused on not peeing myself.
In a soft, dangerous voice, he asked them to provide more details.
"She's not sure, but she thinks the car might be possessed."
"Tell her to exorcise it," he said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.
"She says she tried. No luck. It's not her first day, Nick. If she says she's in trouble, it's not because of a flat tire."
Blue sparks from his eyes flashed in the dark. "We'll be there in fifteen minutes."
I assumed the wave of his hand in my direction meant I should hang up. "Uh, thanks. Talk to you later, then," I said before tapping the red button.
Nick glanced at me again and I saw that twitchy eyebrow of his lifting a smidge higher.
"I didn't want to be rude," I explained.
He braked to slow to fifty and glanced in both directions before blowing through a stop sign and letting the needle drift upward again. "You're a strange girl. I find you continuously surprising."
"Thank you," I replied, for lack of any other response.
"You have a lot of big, unmanageable feelings. They leak out of you in bursts of tears and vomit and inappropriate laughter at the most inopportune moments."
My cheeks burned. "Yeah. So glad you noticed."
"I find your emotions..." He swallowed hard and his Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. "Yet, despite your big feelings, you carry on. You are brave."
If I could have crawled under the seat and hidden from him, I would have. I dared a peek in his direction and saw he was grinning. "Every night is not like this. It is different because you are here." He gave me a beat or two to digest that before going on. "Demons twist the truth, but it's actually quite rare for one to tell a flat-out lie. Hunting of any kind is forbidden to me. There is no exception to that. It's why I stay in the office and don't chase skips."
He skidded onto a more populated road and got stuck behind someone doing a mere seven miles an hour over the limit. His thumbs drummed against the steering wheel. "The Organization believes that, if I start, I will not be able to stop until the hunt is complete."
"By complete you mean..."
"I mean until I've slaughtered my quarry. Or worse."
Worse. Right. Instead of wondering what that might entail, I asked, "Is The Organization right about that?"
He shrugged. "Maybe. At some times, I have more control than others." He passed the slow-poke and rocketed forward again.
My fingertips ached to brush along his stubbled jawline. I thought about how nice it would be to bite his perfect little earlobe. "I understand."
He laughed. His quiet joy filled the car. "There's no way you could, but, strangely, I believe you."
A minute or so of awkward silence hung between us before I latched onto the next topic of conversation. "So, tell me about possessed cars."
"Several types of spirits can possess inanimate objects. Some can also be trapped there against their will. You've heard spooky stories about cursed jewelry and whatnot?"
"Sure."
"That's how it happens. Some noncorporeal creature is bound, willingly or otherwise, to a bracelet or a lamp or a painting and their power effects anyone who touches it."
"So, someone cursed Benji's car?"
"Not necessarily. An object can become cursed for a number of reasons. Or maybe the spirit is there willingly."
"But why would a spirit do that to themself?"
He shrugged. "It happens more often than you'd expect."
Was this really the life I'd chosen for myself? I'd traded clogged toilets for possessed vehicles?
Then again, thinking of it that way made it seem way more logical. Clogged toilets were seriously disgusting.
I fiddled with the crucifix hanging around my wrist. "A week ago, I wouldn't have thought I'd face off with a demon. Let alone two in one night."
Nick's attention shifted to me again. "That's not normal. We might encounter a dozen demons in a year in this city. Two in one night is odd."
"Three, if you consider Sathanas is roaming around somewhere."
He flew down the entrance ramp onto I-92 without further comment and we saw a black Dodge Charger on the shoulder. Nick pulled the Lexus behind it, and we both got out. Something shifted in the scrubby bushes off the side of the road, and I made to jump back into the car before I realized it was Benji.
With an impressive interjection of profanity woven between the verbs and nouns she used, she explained that she'd been minding her own business when her radio went nuts and then her car pulled itself over and ejected her. She'd tried a basic Latin exorcism, but managed only to raise the scent of melting plastic, which led her to believe the spirit had fried something crucial in the car's wiring. She ended the angry rant by throwing a pebble at the Charger and telling Nick to stop staring at her or rip her pants off and have at it already.
Huh. It's not just me, then. Again, I wondered if he was an incubus. But did incubi have weird, murdery hunting urges? Or attract fire-loving vermin? How should I know? How long had it taken the people who work for Nick to sort out all the details?
Nick, looking supremely unaffected by Benji's tirade, walked a slow circle around the car. He rubbed the scruff on his chin with the backs of his fingers while he walked. "You performed the exorcism for tartareus?"
Benji crossed her arms over her substantial bosom. "It's not my first rodeo, Nick. I did tartareus and spiritus mortuorum."
"And you got no results whatsoever?"
"My gas cap blew off and landed somewhere in the bushes. That's what I was looking for when you showed up."
Nick waited until no traffic could be seen and then held his hands out toward the car and spoke in Latin. "Gloriosissime princeps militiae caelestis, Sancti Michaelis Archangeli; tuere nos in proelio hic angelicus spirilus qui viam sancti vitaret—"
"Angelic spirit?" Benji mumbled.
I turned to ask her what she was talking about, but the car blew up then and I found myself flying backward for an astonishing distance before slamming into a tree trunk.