The sweltering summer heat slammed into me the second I opened my car door. There was no breeze, despite the shimmering lake that sprawled out around the small, exclusive neighborhood. Even without the breeze, I could smell the rank scent of blood and savaged intestines, mingling with the oily body odor of the seven grossly overweight cops standing idly around a lumpy blue tarp that hid the corpse I'd come to check out from the swarms of flies. They had cordoned off the single road leading to the small strip of obscenely pricy homes, so no rubberneckers were gawking around and fucking up the scents.
Rick Walker, the Van Buren County Sheriff, waddled over to me and I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from giggling when the image of a penguin with the head of a pig and a sheriff's badge flashed through my head. There was no love between me and the greasy fuck dressed as a lawman. Walker was on the take from almost every major meth lab in the county and a pedophilia ring. Of course, very few people were privy to that information. Evil called to evil, and I was half daemon. I could smell the sleaze dripping off him. He, of course, was a Southern-fried Baptist and faggy half-daemons born out of wedlock to a witch ranked very low on his list of tolerance.
Walker stuck out a sweaty paw to me, which I ignored. In fact, I ignored him completely and shouldered past towards the six others clustered around what was probably the most grisly murder half of them had ever seen. Fairfield Bay was a small town, mostly full of white, middle-aged, and rich empty-nesters.
The deputy nodded to me by way of greeting, a perfunctory gesture. I was pretty sure his name started with a 'J'. James, Jordan, Jackass. Something like that, anyway. He was the most tolerable one of the pigs accompanying Walker today, which wasn't saying much, and to be fair, he wasn't as fat and greasy as the others. He didn't know Walker had his hands in every illicit pie in the county, and if he did, he'd probably flip shit. Despite his rank, he still smelled innocent and hopeful. He was like a puppy, no matter what sick shit happened, he still found a reason to keep going. In about twenty more years, he would put a bullet in his skull or a rope around his neck. I could smell that the same way I could smell Walker's nasty disposition.
I slid off my sunglasses, revealing my mismatched copper and green eyes, as one of the boys in blue tugged away the dusty tarp. The pigs all looked away, except Walker and myself. Walker didn't because he was a goddamn sociopath, and I had seen much worse than the maimed woman sprawled in a pool of drying blood. The sunbaked dirt had stripped most of the moisture from the blood, and turned into a sticky, iron-scented sludge. The flesh from her collarbones to her pelvis had been gnawed away, her ribs cracked apart, and her heart had been inexpertly dug out and probably consumed.
Eating hearts was mostly reserved for imps, but they were very neat and precise about it. A wendigo could have done this kind of damage, but the only thing left of the corpse would have been a few chewed bones. Vampires didn't eat flesh or kill their victims very often. Werewolves, aside from not living anywhere near the Ozarks, didn't eat humans.
I knelt on the tarp, carefully avoiding the tacky ooze, and sniffed at the body. One of the pigs gagged, stumbled a few feet away and vomited. Fuckin' rookie. I smiled darkly. I loved fucking with these guys. The best part was that they always came back. I was the best, at least in Arkansas, and it didn't matter how much they hated me.
Beneath the violent perfume of death was something else; the sulfuric taint of hellspawn. Unless I was mistaken, and I wasn't, the daemon that did this was a low-level sex daemon. It was probably female, but it was often difficult to tell with them. The weaker ones tended to either be hermaphrodites or could switch genders at will. The stronger ones sacrificed gender-swapping for more power.
I stood, brushing dust from my knees. "A lust daemon killed her, probably conjured by her boyfriend's wife." I didn't mention that, until quite recently, the dead woman had been pregnant. Her blood had been laced with pregnancy hormones and abortifacient chemicals. They'd figure it out eventually, and if I told them now they wouldn't work nearly as hard to find who had sent a daemon to kill her.
"The hell do'ya know she was screwin' some broad's husband, Kain?" Walker drawled in his nasal travesty of the English language.
"You know my methods, Watson," I quipped, watching confusion paint his fat, red face. Illiterate fuck. One of the other pigs made a choking noise that sounded like a stifled laugh, which I took to mean he, too, still read the classics. Or at least jerked off to Robert Downy Jr. and Jude Law. "Positive. You find the boyfriend, you find the lady who's responsible for this." I gestured at the fly-blown corpse. "Now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I'm out. Peace." I slid my sunglasses back on and strode back to my car. They didn't pay me well enough to stick around in this baking cesspool.
As I'd half-expected, the daemon who had snacked on the dead woman was sprawled in my passenger seat, shimmering slightly with the constant power it needed to remain invisible to the humans. At first glance, it appeared to be female, with wild blood-red hair that reached passed her waist and tits to make a porn star jealous. She smiled at me, batting pale lashes over star-studded obsidian eyes, and blew a bubble from the spearmint gum she'd pilfered from the glove box. I sighed and proceeded to ignore her until I was situated in the driver's seat and we were out of sight of the cops.
"Hmm, Rafael Kain. You're just as yummy as the incubi say," she simpered, then popped another bubble. She smelled like spent cigarettes and I wondered how fast I'd have to be going to break-check a daemon though the windshield.
"Nice to know I'm up to par, Gingersnap," I muttered. I was becoming increasingly less sure that the daemon sitting next to me was, in fact, female. She held herself more like a male, but that could have been because sex daemons fucked just about anything and she'd lost the ability to properly close her legs.
"Ooh, Gingersnap! I like that," (s)he giggled, resting a slim, manicured hand on my leg.
"Paws off, guttersnipe. I don't fuck sex daemons." I glared at the heavily rutted dirt road.
"Mind out of the sewer, Kain. I'm here to talk politics, not lay you." (S)he paused, tapping lightly on the door window. "Big things are happening in Hell. There's talk of over-throwing Lucy." Lucy was the less-than-affectionate pet name for Lucifer, who didn't really give half a fuck about his people. He was a seraph, not a daemon, after all, and he still pined after his first home.
"I don't play with other daemons."
"This isn't a game, Kain, and we aren't asking. You're a daemon, regardless of what your mother was. What happens in Hell, like it or not, affects you." (S)he fell silent for a moment. "When the rebellion comes, Lucy will lose. Even his fallen have turned against him."
"I still don't see what this has to do with me. I'm a stray. I do not mess with daemon politics." I ground out that last bit. I needed a drink, preferably one with a proof strong enough to knock a bull elephant on his ass.
"When my master sent me out to the conjurer, I was told to tell you this. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm not powerful enough to know anything more."
